In the future, your doctor may prescribe you a videogame.
In a groundbreaking new study at the University of California, San Francisco, scientists found that older adults improved cognitive controls such as multitasking and the ability to sustain attention by playing a specially designed videogame - and that the effects can be long lasting.
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Chinese phone maker Xiaomi Inc. has become famous in China because of its blowout product releases, and Thursday's introduction of the company's new smartphone and smart television didn't disappoint.
Amid a carnival-like atmosphere, the phone company's devoted fans - some adorned with glow sticks - overflowed into the aisles as Xiaomi founder and Chief Executive Lei Jun described in detail the specs of the company's two new products to peals of applause.
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On immigration reform, this has been a slow summer for Congress. After reform passed the Senate in June, it languished in July. While Washington then went on recess, and now has shifted its focus to Syria, what has the rest of the world been up to on economic advancement?
Germany spent the summer rewriting 40 percent of its immigration laws, significantly easing the bureaucratic hurdles impeding talented, foreign-born engineers and professionals from contributing to the economy there. It will now be easier than ever for U.S.-educated graduate students to start new businesses ... in Germany.
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Pandora Media Inc. named Brian McAndrews, a former aQuantive and Microsoft Corp. executive, as its new chief executive and chairman, a move that comes six months after Joe Kennedy said he would be stepping down from the Internet-radio company's helm.
Shares jumped 2.8 percent to $21.99 after hours Wednesday.
McAndrews's appointment is effective immediately. Pandora said that in the search for a new CEO the board had sought a candidate who could build on the company's leading position in Internet radio and accelerate its fast-growing advertising business.
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The rapid shortening in the lifespan of a meme is apparent. It used to take months for a meme to run its course. Now, it's a good meme if it lasts a week.
- Cheezburger founder and CEO Ben Huh, to the Guardian's Adam Davidi
Linux continues to dominate data centers. IBM wants more of that action to take place on its hardware.
The computer giant on Tuesday plans to pledge that it will spend $1 billion over four or five years on Linux and related open-source technologies for use on its Power line of server systems, which is based on the internally developed chip technology of the same name.
IBM has long been one of the biggest backers of Linux. It made another celebrated $1 billion pledge in 2000 to support the technology as it was beginning to gain a foothold in businesses.
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Nielsen has long been a kingmaker in the TV industry. Its ratings data, which tracks viewership of shows, determines how advertisers shell out some $66 billion annually. But the company has been slow to adapt to new technologies and expand its reach to other media services, industry critics say. Now Nielsen is making some significant moves.
Next week Nielsen will announce plans to augment its TV ratings data with information on viewing on tablets and smartphones, meeting a major demand of media companies that say they aren't getting credit in the current system for viewing on mobile devices. The change won't take effect until next fall's TV season, however.
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A senior BlackBerry Ltd. executive who was in charge of the largely unsuccessful PlayBook tablet is leaving the company.
David J. Smith, an executive vice president in charge of mobile computing, has resigned for personal reasons, a BlackBerry spokesman said. The move happened within the past few weeks, said a person familiar with the matter.
The spokesman added that Mr. Smith "continues to come into work every day and is committed to working with BlackBerry through a proper transition."
Mr. Smith couldn't immediately be reached.
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Qualcomm Inc.'s fiscal third-quarter profit jumped 31 percent as the company reported strong growth in its sales of its wireless chips.
The company also raised the low end of its full-year revenue guidance and lifted its earnings view. It now expects per-share income of $4.48 to $4.56 on revenue of $24.3 billion to $25 billion. Qualcomm had previously projected earnings of $4.40 to $4.55 a share on revenue of $24 billion to $25 billion.
The San Diego-based chip maker has been one of the main beneficiaries of the growing popularity of smartphones, as it supplies wireless processors for a broad range of customers that include Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. and collects money from license payments tied to its technology.
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I can't believe Apple isn't moving faster to create a larger iPhone screen. Bring back Steve Jobs!
- Donald Trump, via Twitter. Note Dan Amira's RT asking "Who's gonna tell him?"
I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression [sic] amongst mankind ... To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.
- From the LinkedIn profile summary of Ross Ulbricht, who was arrested Tuesday as the alleged Silk Road mastermind "Dread Pirate Roberts"
HTC Corp. posted its first quarterly net loss since listing in 2002, as an expensive effort to revive its brand through its high-end HTC One smartphone has so far failed to boost sales.
As with former smartphone market leaders like Nokia Corp. and BlackBerry Ltd., HTC has found it difficult to hold its ground against fast-growing Samsung Electronics Co. and low-cost Chinese rivals. The Taiwanese smartphone maker previously warned it was expecting a loss for the third quarter due to high manufacturing and marketing costs for the HTC One while sales shrank.
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Computers seem to be replacing humans across many industries, and we're all getting very nervous.
But if you want some reason for optimism, visit your local supermarket. See that self-checkout machine? It doesn't hold a candle to the humans - and its deficiencies neatly illustrate the limits of computers' abilities to mimic human skills.
The human supermarket checker is superior to the self-checkout machine in almost every way. The human is faster. The human has a more pleasing, less buggy interface. The human doesn't expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn't on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper. Best of all, the human does all the work while I'm allowed to stand there and stupidly stare at my phone, which is my natural state of being.
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Beginning in 2005 and ending last summer, the computer systems of Nasdaq, OMX Group, J.C. Penney Co., Carrefour SA and around a dozen other companies were breached by hackers, resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey, who made the charges public on Thursday, called the case the largest hacking and data-breach scheme ever prosecuted in the U.S. in terms of the number of hacks and the amount of funds taken, the WSJ's Chad Bray reported. The investigation is continuing, prosecutors said.
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Activision Blizzard Inc. said it has reached an agreement to buy back nearly $6 billion worth of Vivendi SA's holding in the company, ending months of negotiations over the fate of the videogame giant.
Santa Monica, Calif.-based Activision said Thursday it will buy 429 million shares for about $13.60 per share, reducing Paris-based conglomerate Vivendi from being majority shareholder. Activision said it would fund the purchase with $1.2 billion in cash on hand from its domestic accounts and approximately $4.6 billion in debt financing from banks including J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
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There's certainly something to be said about the assumptions, say, Civilization builds into its simulations. Look at its winstates and what they value - technological progress, military conquest, economic superiority, and cultural domination. You don't win by eliminating hunger or poverty or by nuclear deproliferation or by having a particularly high standard of living. You get it for, for lack of a better way to phrase this, very American goals.
- Chris Franklin, from a post entitled "Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games"
Lists have been around since the 10 Commandments. It's a very natural way for people to organize information.
- BuzzFeed editorial director Jack Shepherd
Image copyright leungchopan
The problem is, most of the technology platforms marketers are using to accomplish this don't talk to each other.
What's more, many of the groups within the organization running these programs are just as siloed. This means that the things marketers learn about customers in one channel often don't translate into sound strategy decisions for other channels.
I'll give you an example. Today, if someone clicks on a display ad, reaches a landing page and fills out a form, the CRM or marketing automation system can capture that lead and track that it came from display advertising. What marketers can't yet do is take advantage of the information exchange in the opposite direction. What if they could use the rich information stored in the CRM system - such as how far along a prospect is in the sales pipeline - to make the display ad creative and messaging more relevant?
Marketing executives know they need to get their systems and people to talk to each other. In fact, a new study by Accenture Interactive, "Turbulence for the CMO," reveals that 70 percent of top CMOs think they have five years to fundamentally overhaul their companies' corporate marketing operating model to achieve competitive success. Big marketing technology companies know this too, and it is why companies like Salesforce, Oracle and Google are duking it out to own the customer data and CRM system. They want to be at the center of the value created by unlocking this marketing data and getting at an integrated view of a prospect or customer.
Think about how powerful it would be to serve up personalized Web content based on the ads someone has previously been exposed to, events they've attended, or when they've most recently engaged with a sales rep, or, to easily target email or display ads to just those people who engaged with a social campaign.
One company in particular has built a business around this very concept: Amazon. Amazon.com might very well be the most sophisticated marketer on the planet today, and if you spend a few minutes on their site looking at products, you'll notice that the follow-up emails you get, the next experience you have on the site and even the display ads you see will all be synched to your product searches and prior browsing history - all to help you convert. Amazon is far ahead of the pack, with very few keeping pace today.
As companies get better at integrating their marketing systems to more fully understand the customer journey - from first exposure to the brand to the last program that drove the sale, and every touchpoint in between - every marketing dollar spent becomes extremely efficient.
And it's a lot of dollars at stake. According to research by Outsell, B2B marketers alone will increase their advertising and marketing digital spend by almost 11 percent to $65.9B in 2013. Imagine the bottom-line impact when the performance of these investments improves by five percent or 10 percent - just by having the left hand talk to the right.
As companies use data to optimize their digital tactics - whether it's through better targeting, reaching people where they are consuming media or tying together all the pieces of the marketing funnel - they'll inevitably achieve a step-function in efficiency in terms of deploying marketing spend for impact. They can then cycle the additional revenue back into marketing, or R&D, or more salespeople.
And this is where Wall Street comes in. Wall Street should care about marketing data because companies that do the best job of tying together and leveraging marketing data will ultimately win and create outsized shareholder value.
So how can you tell if a company has a data-savvy CMO? Look for clear evidence of marketing integration.
It's actually pretty amazing how many large companies have yet to integrate their marketing tactics. Investors should be looking to see, for example, if a company has a Super Bowl TV spot that they're also using search ads and display ads to reinforce the Super Bowl message. The company should also be previewing the ad online to test customer response and drive viral awareness before the TV ad ever launches. Companies that only have a single spot and don't back it up (and there are lots of them!) aren't communicating effectively across the organization nor are they maximizing returns on invested capital. This is likely a good indicator that other programs are not well integrated either.
Another great way to test for marketing integration is simply the relevance of the ads you're seeing. If they are relevant, and improving over time, the company is likely making the right investments in marketing technology to be ready for the next 10 years of growth. If you still get the same untargeted direct mail piece that you throw away every week, there's cause to be concerned.
There are a lot of reasons to be bullish about the economy and the stock market over the next five to 10 years. Look no further than the innovation beginning to hit the CMO's office to help decide if you agree, and if so, how to find leaders to invest in.
Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo, is a serial technology entrepreneur, having founded or held senior positions at four venture-backed technology companies. Prior to Bizo, Russ led the marketing and product management teams at ZoomInfo, a business information search engine, where he sharpened his B2B marketing skill set and developed his love for business data.
Barnaby Jack, the hacker known for making an ATM literally spit out cash, died Thursday, days before he was set to show how to disable a pacemaker from 30 feet away at Black Hat, the large annual hacker conference. He was 36 years old.
Jack was the director of embedded security research at security firm IOActive. He had previously worked at a variety of security firms, including McAfee.
The San Francisco Medical Examiner's office confirmed the death Friday but didn't yet know the cause.
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