Cannot load an image from a remote url - ios

Question

I have tried many solutions for this problem before posting but somehow I didn't succeed.
I am using Xcode 6 and I am trying to add programmatically an image to my view. Everything is fine if I load an image beloging to the project, nothing works when I try to load an image resident on some remote server.
I have tried two different way:
1) using the libray SDWEBImage
UIImageView *imgg =[[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(30, 250, 300, 20)];
NSURL *imageURL = [NSURL URLWithString:beaconLogo];
[imgg sd_setImageWithURL:imageURL placeholderImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"placeholder.png"]];
[self.view addSubview:imgg];
where beaconLogo is a string containing the url of the remote image (when I debug I can see that it has the correct value).
I have imported
#import "uiimageview+webcache.h"
#import "SDWebImageDownloader.h"
not sure if those are the correct headers needed. Anyway, the image is not displayed
2) I tried by using the following code that I found in some answer here on stackoverflow
NSURL *imageURL = [NSURL URLWithString:beaconLogo];
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:imageURL];
UIImage *image = [UIImage imageWithData:imageData];
UIImageView *imgg =[[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(30, 250, 300, 20)];
imgg.image = image;
[self.view addSubview:imgg];
No image is displayed, however I can see that there is something bad going on, because if I debug, I can see that "image" is nil, this line
UIImage *image = [UIImage imageWithData:imageData];
doesn't seem to have the desider effect.
Where am I going wrong? Thanks in advance.