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The defense against the dark arts in the digital realm, Edward Snowden's emotive description of the benefits of encryption lay at the heart of his talk at the SXSW culture and technology conference in Texas earlier this week.
It is hard to believe that it was exactly 25 years today that Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the World Wide Web (www). The web has become so much a necessity of our personal and professional lives it is almost hard to imagine how we managed without it.
The video ad is one that's been with us for a long time, before even the Web got started, but as video ads became big business-and how!--so too did interest in getting a piece of the action spark up. Few websites could command the kind of sheer raw numbers that television could, but for those venues, the idea that television-marketing budgets could hit the Web was still a bit of an upward climb. Facebook, meanwhile, is one such venue, and its new video advertising product has only recently released, with an eye toward getting in on the bigger-budgeted advertiser.
If you are an executive providing linear video entertainment services, and head a public company, one thing you don't want to say is that a major shift in how video entertainment gets delivered could harm the existing video subscription business.
It was only a few weeks ago, back in mid-February, when Google valued a new company known as Renaissance Learning at $1 billion, and subsequently invested $40 million in the company's operations. That's a valuation that proved almost eerily accurate as a second company, Hellman & Friedman, put a valuation of $1.1 billion on the company, and then promptly paid up, buying the company.
We use the word evil with Google largely because when Google first started they seemed to want to be the anti-Microsoft and in the heads of the founders, much of what Microsoft did was Evil. Then once they went public, they seemed to go down a list of things that Microsoft was alleged to have done and use it like a to-do list. In their latest move, they have moved to block anyone that wants to put Android and Windows on the same system - which is something Microsoft, to my knowledge, never did (granted they didn't have to since such efforts invariably sucked) but this suggests
The value of crowdfunding by now is quite clear; it's brought a host of devices, games, movies, and more that otherwise wouldn't exist out into the field. But there are other uses for the crowd as well, and Colorado's DigitalGlobe Inc. is looking to turn to the crowd in order to find the Malaysian Airlines jet that went missing just last Saturday. How the company is set to do it, however, is even more exciting.
On April 3, 1973, the first public call to a cell phone was made by Motorola engineer Marty Cooper. But it took 40 more years for the cell phone to make its way into mainstream pop culture when it came to being portrayed in entertainment. But as 2014 gets underway in earnest, you'll notice that mobility-as-plotline has really come into its own, with SMS messaging in particular gaining status as almost a character unto itself. And no wonder-texting has reached unprecedented usage levels, across all demographics-signaling its usefulness not just as a pop culture icon, but also as a medium for marketing and an anchor for future carrier services. That's especially important as the WhatsApps of the world look to cannibalize SMS going forward.
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