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Sherpa

Startup Sherpa Bets Its Predictive Smartphone Assistant Can Best Google Now | MIT Technology Review – Sherpa is mobile assistant that performs searches on the web, takes notes, posts content to Facebook and stream music on command. The app had a big impact in Spanish speaking markets. It uses Android’s speech recognition API. Sherpa competes against Google voice search and provides an equivalent service to Siri on the iPhone.

Culture

DAFT PUNK | In the studio

Consumer behaviour

Generation Mooch? Why 20-somethings have a hard time paying for content — paidContentmedia‘s big challenge

Economics

Why Your Kid Can’t Get a Job – Forbes

Debt burden could grow to ‘unsustainable’ levels: IMF | Irish Examiner

BBC News – The Great British class calculator: What class are you? – nice exploration of the UK’s socio economic landscape

College Grads May Be Stuck In Low-Skill Jobs – this all feels very early 1990s all over again

BBC News – Should Britain let go of London?

The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures • The Register – freaky weather and precarious natural gas supplies. Time to go nuclear

Why Twenty-Somethings Aren’t Doomed to Be Poor (but Thirty-Somethings Might Be) – Atlantic Mobile

Finance

LINK – Statistics – interesting data points on ATM usage in UK

How to

3 Free SEO Tools for Identifying Target Keywords | Search Engine Journal

Hubspot-The Complete Guide to Global Social Media Marketing.pdf_微盘下载 – good download from CIC Data

Luxury

Mercedes-Benz introduces CLA 45 AMG model amid leaping dancers – Quartz

China: No Longer Largest Art Market | Sports and Culture Blog – this may have something to do with the way capital flight happens so may not count as a Chinese purchase

Vera Wang scraps $500 China try-on fee, knockoffs still flourish | Reuters

Marketing

White Paper: Why the Brand Idea Still Matters in the Age of Social Media | JWT Blog

Media

What Advertisers Think About Mobile – Business Insider

For Facebook Ads, How Targeted Is Too Targeted? – AllFacebook – friends aren’t necessarily like you

What You Need to Know About Pinterest Web Analytics | VML

WPP makes strategic investment in SFX Entertainment – WPP

Ad Agencies Frustrated As Yahoo Focuses Energy Elsewhere | Advertising Age

Online

Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Gives The Company A Social Advantage Over Apple | TechCrunch

Experian Hitwise report: UK online video exceeds one billion visits a month {client} – Dot Comms – Find out about the UK’s online video consumption in latest Experian Hitwise UK’s report

What’s Actually Wrong with Yahoo’s Purchase of Summly :: Hacking, Distributed

Apple’s broken promise: why doesn’t iCloud ‘just work’? | The Verge

Let’s Say FeedBurner Shuts Down… | CSS-Tricks

Facebook moves to defuse algorithm row – Brand Republic NewsOne industry source claimed the natural reach of posts it made on behalf of a brand with one of the biggest Facebook followings in the UK has dropped from 15% to 5% after the change to the EdgeRank algorithm

Retailing

Customers Flee Wal-Mart Empty Shelves for Target, Costco – Bloomberg – running stores too lean in staff has meant that shelves can’t be restocked in sufficient time to keep selling product

Security

Saudi Arabia “Threatens Skype Ban” – also messaging services

Schneier on Security: Our Internet Surveillance State

Software

Google Play risks destroying the market for premium apps on Android, believes Flexion Mobile – dramatic headline, but the dynamics described are not surprising

Chromium Blog: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project – expect a wider range of web testing for future mobile and desktop browsers

Gartner: Microsoft’s dominance of computing is over | T3 – I think Gartner is premature in its assumption. For instance, all computing platforms aren’t created equal in terms of value creation

Spanish Linux group files antitrust complaint against Microsoft • The Register

Wireless

iPhone data usage: Phablets seen as a fad | BGR

The Facebook Phone & The Triumph Of Native Apps Over HTML5 – ReadWrite

What, exactly, WiFiSLAM is, and why Apple acquired it – The Next Web

Apple’s first quarter of negative income growth since 2003 – Fortune – interesting analysis of the data