Hospital spies & other news

3 minutes estimated reading time

Hospital spies

Hospital Spies on Your Purchases to Spot Bad Habits – Bloomberg – hospital spies presents an interesting privacy dilemma and they aren’t even using social data yet. We need to start thinking defensively about content and other aspects of our lives in terms of operational security. Hospital spies are likely to be the least of our worries in the future.

Adult entertainment

The porn industry is putting skin back in the game | Quartz – looks rather like the music industry: merchandise, custom products (like the way iTunes atomised the album), experiential – drinking venues and live performance – live cams

Consumer behaviour

[The Futures Company:] Ageing in Asia: Myth #3 – interesting changes in divorce statistics

Design

Why Cooper Hewitt is giving away its new bespoke typeface | Quartz – a must-download font

Making Flexible Wood Using a Laser Cutter | Hackaday – really interesting project

Artifact: Oakley Eyeshades | Uncrate – love these, its a pity Luxxotica have ruined innovation at Oakley

FMCG

How the Sweetener Industry Sugar-Coats Science | Mother Jones – this is starting to look like the tobacco lobby

Legal

The case that might cripple Facebook – The Washington Post – and a lot of other US web services

Foul!!! Sony Orders Google to Censor The World Cup | TorrentFreak – Sony apparently oversteps marks with DMCA takedown claims

Luxury

42% of all luxury hotel reviews authored by Chinese travellers. | Resonance China – this is insane

Marketing

How brands hijacked Luis Suarez’s World Cup bite | Marketing Interactive – nice summary of the news jacking activity on social media

Fighting Back–the Right Way | In from the cold – interesting PR response example

Bioischanged – handy for keeping track of influencers

Media

Android TV hands-on: Google makes a new play for the living room | The Verge – if at first you don’t succeed try, try again. What hasn’t been shown so far is a use case beyond an Apple TV type service – a remade version of the DVD player. If companies can come up with a killer app in lean back media then things may change

Tumblr Promoted Posts and Yahoo Ads: What You Could Be Missing | Simply Measured – some interesting case studies on Tumblr, would be interested in seeing how brands got ROI

Inside AdWords: More Insights about Quality Score and the AdWords Auction – interesting update

Twitter, SMG release first results from Social TV Lab | blog.smvgroup.com – really?

As Weather Channel Blows Yahoo Off Apple’s Upcoming iOS 8, App Storms Ahead for Mayer | Re/code – adds a stick to beat management team with, needs to be careful about stocks default app

Online

2014 Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet | Constant Contact Blogs – this is really useful

Google Drops Profile Photos, Google+ Circle Count From Authorship In Search Results | SearchEngineLand – makes the organic links look less clickable, presumably there will be some rationale about improving ad click through instead

Technorati Quietly Killed its Blog Index in May | TheNextWeb – not terribly surprising, but definitely marks the end of an era

Terror Organizations’ Search Optimization Problem Is Our Problem Too | Motherboard – interested to see if this was a deliberate Google decision or whether it’s search algorithm really struggled with the changing context around ISIS? If so, then there maybe a couple of guys in a dorm room somewhere ready to disrupt Searchzilla

Retailing

Muji opens flagship store on Tmall | WantChinaTimes – shows continued power of Alibaba

Technology

The vacuum tube strikes back: NASA’s tiny 460GHz vacuum transistor that could one day replace silicon FETs | ExtremeTech – looking forward to having that McIntosh Labs sound from my iPhone in years to come

Microsoft Makes Bet Quantum Computing Is Next Breakthrough – NYTimes.com – as Moore’s law is running out of head space and mobile computing has matured. More related content here.

IBM Discovers Wonder Polymers | GEEK – this looks really interesting

Web of no web

New sensors will scoop up data in Chicago – chicagotribune.com – interesting smarter city initiative but one has to wonder about what privacy advocates will think?

Here’s What The Amazon Fire Phone’s Crazy 3D Head Tracking Looks Like | TechCrunch – really nice (useful) implementation of animated GIFs over video. The interesting thing about the Amazon approach is that stereoscopic vision isn’t required to appreciate it