3 minutes estimated reading time
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
Consumer behaviour
Generation Mooch? Why 20-somethings have a hard time paying for content — paidContent – media‘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
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 News – One 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