Pope Francis will be using the photo-sharing site under the name @Franciscus, Latin for Francis. This marks the latest initiative in new media by the Holy Father, who already has more than 25 million followers on Twitter in nine different languages.

Over the years, the Catholic church under Pope Francis has been enthusiastic about using the internet to engage with a global audience. “Instagram will help recount the Papacy through images, to enable all those who wish to accompany and know more about Pope Francis’ pontificate to encounter his gestures of tenderness and mercy”, said Msgr. Dario E. Viganò, prefect of the Secretariat for Communications. “We will choose photographs from the Photographic Service of L’Osservatore Romano, selecting certain details. In this way we can show those aspects of closeness and inclusion that Pope Francis lives every day”.

Msgr. Viganò noted that the Instagram account will be inaugurated during the Year of Mercy, not by chance. The Jubilee thus enters into social media in a very concrete and natural way. The social media department of the Secretariat for Communications will be responsible for the management of the Pope’s Instagram account, which will post not only photos but also short videos.

The date for the pontiff’s debut on the celebrity-dominated social medium was chosen by the 79-year-old himself as it marks the third anniversary of his inauguration as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

The move represents the latest plank of a Vatican social media strategy designed to ensure Francis’s message reaches a maximum number of believers and non-believers across the world with particular focus on the younger generation.

Francis is already a major player on Twitter. Under the @Pontifex handle he tweets in nine languages, including Latin, with the English account followed by nearly nine million people and the Spanish one by more than 11 million.

Deloitte, which was appointed as  joint administrators to Powa Technologies Group on 22nd February, has announced that 74 people from the beleaguered company’s UK head office have been made redundant.

The firm, which was appointed as joint administrators last month – said that it would “continue to search for a buyer for all or parts of the business”, but “regrettably it has not been possible to continue running the company at its current capacity”.

Problems at the mobile payments firm came to a head in January when reports emerged that it wasn’t able to pay all its staff when new funding streams could not be agreed. Shortly after its biggest investor, Wellington Management, called in its outstanding loans and Deloitte were appointed. According to reports from the Financial Times, lawyers acting for the administrators have asked ex-Powa employees to avoid sharing any intellectual property with its former management.

The company, valued at over £1.8 billion, was announcing new contracts as recently as January 2016 but Business Insider reported that many of its 1,800 clients had actually failed to sign contracts.

Powa Technologies was founded in 2007 by ecommerce entrepreneur Dan Wagner and its head office is at Heron Tower in the City of London. It had three main produce lines: PowaWeb, which built online shops for retailers; PowaPOS, which built a mobile card reader to rival the likes of Square; and PowaTag, an app the would let consumers buy things by scanning QR code, print adverts, and audio of TV ads. A recent release about a deal with The Otto Group described PowaTag as “a future-proof and multi-dimensional platform that is capable of adapting to changing consumer habits.” The most recent solution used visual recognition technology, which allows consumers to go from hovering their smartphone camera over printed material to a completed purchase within a few seconds, all using pre-saved transaction data.

Business Intelligence in a Networked World,

Data Analytics and Sentiment Analysis as Sources of Business Intelligence,

and Transforming and Innovating with Disruptive Technologies

are three co-located conferences that will be held by UNICOM in London, on April 14.

Have a look at the events’ programmes, topics and speakers.

You are also invited to register for the following free-to-attend webinars:

Business Intelligence and Disruptive Technologies – Fact or Fiction
Date: 23 March 2016, Wednesday | Time: 12.00 GMT
Presenter: Prof. Clive Holtham, Cass Business School, City University London
 

An Introduction to Most Common Cyber Security Challenges and Threats
Date: 1 April 2016, Friday | Time: 12.00 BST
Presenter: Jean Lehmann,CEO and founder, Cybercapital hq

Visual Analytics: Making Sense of Big Data
Date: 27 April 2016, Wednesday | Time: 12.30 BST
Presenter: Kai Xu, Associate Professor in Data Analytics, Middlesex University