Internet Use/New Technologies
20 February 2013
Any two Web pages are separated by just 19 clicks, study finds PC World
Any two pages among the estimated 14 billion on the Web are connected by 19 clicks or less, according to a new study of the make up of the Internet.
19 February 2013
Weapons made with 3-D printers could test gun-control efforts Washington Post
Twenty minutes into his State of the Union address last week, President Obama entered the realm of uber-geekery -- three-dimensional printing. The magical devices capable of printing prosthetics, violins and even aircraft parts have the potential, the president said, "to revolutionize the way we make almost everything."
Google's Flu Snafu and the Reliability of Web Data GigaOM
The Web is full of data -- much of it meaningful -- but there's some question as to how much we should actually rely on it. The latest evidence comes at Google's expense, with some researchers questioning the validity of Google's Flu Trends algorithm. They say the service, which estimates the number of flu cases around the world by analyzing trends on Google's search engine, vastly overestimated this year's season in the U.S. compared with more traditional methods of measuring flu cases.
Quitters Never Win: The Costs of Leaving Social Media The Atlantic
Forget Lolcats. If we quit using sites like Facebook, we'll miss opportunities for self-expression, personal growth, learning, support, and civic exchange.
On the Fast Track to Routine 3-D Printing New York Times
Will the future be printed in 3-D? At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.
16 February 2013
Alcatel-Lucent Unveils World's Most Powerful Broadband Infrastructure Businessweek
... The future won't necessarily be slow, however. Last week, Alcatel-Lucent and France Télécom-Orange announced they had successfully deployed the world's most powerful broadband infrastructure, an optical-link, 400 gigabits-per-second line between Paris and Lyon. The first users will be French researchers in need of blazing-fast Internet access. Businesses and consumers will come online later.
15 February 2013
Skype calls now equivalent to one-third of global phone traffic Ars Technica
New research from TeleGeography, a telecom market analysis firm, shows that worldwide Skype usage is now equivalent to over one-third of all international phone traffic -- a record level.
08 February 2013
Staying Private on the New Facebook New York Times
Facebook is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your indiscretions.
06 February 2013
Deloitte 2013 Tech Trends report: Leveraging the five postdigital forces affecting business: cloud, mobile, social, analytics and cyber
Deloitte released in Australia today (1 February), its 4th Annual 2013 Tech Trends Report Elements of Postdigital, which highlights the top 10 enabling and disrupting technology trends that we anticipate will have a significant impact for the CIO in the future.
Global ecommerce sales topped $US1t in 2012 The Australian
Global internet retail sales topped $US1 trillion ($962bn) for the first time in 2012 with the United States holding the top spot but China rising fast, a market research firm has said.
Survey: Most Americans take breaks from Facebook CNN
Facebook follows you everywhere. It's on phones and computers, at work and home, and in the news. So it's understandable that people might need a little rest from the social network.
Anger Directed at Applebee's Is More Likely to Hurt Than Help Workers The Atlantic
Admit it. The Web campaign against Applebee's is getting gratuitous. It all began when a St. Louis pastor who dined there got upset at the tip added to her bill. "I give God 10 percent," she wrote on her receipt. "Why do you get 18 percent?" Waitresses were understandably offended and amused, and one uploaded a photo of the receipt to the Internet, where it went viral, causing the customer to be harassed after Internet sleuths deciphered her signature and identity.
03 February 2013
Internet capacity: New data flows highlight the relative decline of the West The Economist
Global internet traffic continues to soar, according to new data from TeleGeography, a research firm (see chart). Over the past five years the amount of active capacity on subsea cables has grown threefold, the fastest spurt since the internet went mainstream more than a decade ago. Then, the majority of traffic flowed between America and Europe. Now trans-Atlantic bandwidth accounts for only a quarter of the capacity in use. The fastest growing region for traffic is Asia.
02 February 2013
'Native ads' on Web can blur line between news and advertising Washington Post
Newspapers have their advertorials. TV has its infomercials. Social media have sponsored tweets and paid-for Facebook posts. Now, the newest wave of online marketing -- so-called "native ads" -- is pushing even further across the lines that separate news content from advertising.
01 February 2013
Users increasingly turn to Internet to buy drugs - EU report Reuters
Virtually any kind of illegal drug can be bought on the Internet and delivered by post to users who no longer need to make direct contact with dealers, an EU study published on Thursday said.
31 January 2013
Facebook mobile users surpass desktop users for first time; 1.06b monthly active users CNN
For the first time, the number of active daily visitors checking Facebook on mobile devices is higher than the number of people checking the social network on the Web. Overall, the company says there are 1.06 billion active Facebook users in the world. Of those, 618 million of them are visiting daily and 157 million are doing it from mobile devices.
30 January 2013
Even Facebook Must Change: Transforming Into a Mobile Business Means Teaching New Skills, New Products Wall Street Journal
To reclaim its status as a $100 billion company, Facebook Inc. is re-engineering itself into a mobile business.
Google's Eric Schmidt: drone wars, virtual kidnaps and privacy for kids The Guardian
Google's chairman has sketched out a future world in which cyberterrorists are targeted by government drone strikes, online identities are taken hostage and held for ransom, and parents explain online privacy to their children long before the subject of sex.
29 January 2013
Why the Internet works and how to break it by Vinton G Cerf Economic Times
If the internet was a person, it would be beginning to feel its age this year as it gets into its 30s, with a mid-life crisis looming. As it happens, the internet has never looked better: it's faster, bigger, better and richer than it was in its 20s.
What Twitter Really Looks Like The Atlantic
I just watched the West Coast wake up. On Twitter. I did it by watching the lights come on on Tweetping, which visualizes Twitter activity in real time, on a global scale.
28 January 2013
The Financial Times looks to a glowing online future The Observer
Digital First, for newspapers, means prioritising what you put on the web and letting print trail in behind. If you believe in fast-track transition from page to screen, this is probably your road to the future. And now the Financial Times has made digital its first response. Editor Lionel Barber has been to Silicon Valley and seen what must be done: "Our competitors are harnessing technology to revolutionise the news business through aggregation, personalisation and social media. Mobile alone now accounts for 25% of all the FT's traffic. It would be reckless to stand still."
Only the digital dies: The newest technologies look most likely to vanish; the oldest may always be with us The Economist
The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, the more modest goal of the carbon-paperless office is within the reach of mankind? Carbon paper allows two copies of a document to be made at once. Nowadays, a couple of keystrokes can do the same thing with a lot less fuss.
27 January 2013
UK addiction soars as online gambling hits £2bn mark Independent on Sunday
As the online business business approaches the £2bn mark and bookies seek to lure in new punters, the number of Britons at risk of becoming addicted is growing rapidly.
New Zealand: The Internet's Petri Dish Businessweek
... Last year, for example, LinkedIn wanted to test its Endorsements product, which lets users check a box to recommend each other, on a small audience before rolling it out as a full-fledged service to all of its users. Because of the nature of Endorsements, though, LinkedIn could not simply let 1 percent or 2 percent of its worldwide users try out the product. There would be a small amount of people endorsing their contacts and confusing the rest of LinkedIn's audience who could not access the new tool. "So we decided to trial it in New Zealand," says Kevin Scott, the senior vice president in charge of engineering at LinkedIn.
Smart networks: coming soon to a home near you by Rudolf Van der Berg of the OECD's Science, Technology and Industry Directorate OECD Insights
In 2017 a household with two teenagers will have 25 Internet connected devices. In 2022 this will rise to 50, compared with only 10 today. In households in the OECD alone there will be 14 billion connected devices, up from 1.7 billion today and this doesn't take into account everything outside the household and outside the OECD. All this leads to the smart world discussed in a new OECD publication, Building Blocks of Smart Networks.
