- Google Searches Beyond AdWords
Personalized and interactive advertising experiences are becoming a lot more important than just simple banner ads.
Would you follow your favorite basketball player’s shoes on Facebook or Twitter? That’s right: the player’s shoes, connected to the Web and posting status updates live from the basketball court. Bizarre as it sounds, this could happen in the not-so-distant future of digital advertising and marketing, if some of the ideas conceived by Google’s latest advertising experiment, Art Copy & Code, take flight.
- In the Developing World, MOOCs Start to Get Real
Putting free U.S. college courses online is only the first step to filling higher education needs around the world.
As online education platforms like Coursera, edX, and Udacity burst onto the scene over the past year, backers have talked up their potential to democratize higher education in the countries that have had the least access (see “The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years”). These ambitions are now moving closer to reality, as more people begin to experiment with their setup, although significant challenges remain.
- Smartphones Are Eating the World
Smartphones have created a bridge between two previously separate industries—wireless networks and personal computing. For Internet firms and device makers, this means access to the world’s largest network of people. As can be seen above, the wireless telephone business is large compared to personal computing. In 2012, the world’s mobile operators did $1.2 trillion in business and served around 3.2 billion people, versus perhaps 1.7 billion people who used PCs to access the Internet. By comparison, the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple, and the entire global PC industry was $590 billion. Online advertising, the main driver of the consumer Internet, generated only $89 billion in revenue.
- Unintentional Interfaces: Google Reader's Censorship-Busting Power Will Be Hard to Replicate
Google’s brand name made Reader work in Iranians’ favor.
Journalists and other professional nerds are angry that Google is snuffing out its moribund RSS software, Reader. But as Quartz’s Zach Seward points out, plain old normal folks in Iran used Reader quite a bit to get around internet censorship. And those users won’t be helped by the Reader clones popping up in its wake, because Google Reader’s unintended power as an anti-censorship interface flows from its “Google” pedigree, not its “Reader” functionality.
- MRI Scans Reveal Distinct Brain Injuries After Concussion
Sorting concussion patients based on internal brain injury could help doctors identify those with more severe cases.
Brain scans may be able to detect two distinct kinds of brain injury in patients who have suffered a mild head injury or concussion, say researchers from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Differentiating between the two may help doctors better treat patients.
- The Meaning of the Google Glass Backlash
Has a product ever provoked as much hostility before even hitting the market as Google’s geek specs are generating? There’s something special about the eyes.
Almost 10 years ago I spent a day in Toronto with computer scientist Steve Mann to understand why he strapped a PC to his body and wore a camera and a monitor over one eye. He argued that it was the optimal method of using a computer, which meant that eventually everyone would want to do it. That prospect unnerved me, because being with Mann was difficult. He seemed distracted by whatever was over his eye—or at the very least, I worried that he was paying more attention to it than to me. Whether it was the best way to interact with a computer seemed like the wrong question; it was certainly a suboptimal way to interact with a fellow human being. It struck me as fundamentally rude to put something in front of your eye but not let the other person see it—the equivalent of whispering a secret in front of someone else.
- Reining in Geoengineering Researchers
A Science article suggests a framework for monitoring research on how to cool the earth.
Efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide aren’t working, so some researchers think we may need to resort to spraying reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere to shade the earth and cool it off a little. The problem is we don’t know much about what that might do to the ozone layer or precipitation, among other things. And we don’t have laws to regulate geoengineering research to make sure someone doesn’t do something stupid, like doing a large scale test before we understand the impact of the aerosols, at least on a small scale, on atmospheric chemistry..
- Chronicle of the Smart Watch Foretold: A 37-Year History
A human-computer interaction luminary rifles through his massive electronics collection to prove today’s hottest gadget isn’t so new after all.
Digest powered by RSS Digest