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shift toward what is now known as contextual computing

Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines, while not magnificently intuitive, feed you book and video recommendations based on your behavior and ratings. Facebook’s and Twitter’s valuations are premised on the notion that they can leverage knowledge of your acquaintances and interests to push out relevant content and market to you in more effective ways.

four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal.

The company now lets you find your photos both on Google+ and Google Search just by, well, searching for them.

this goes further than just serving you a list of all your photos; Google says it has now also started using computer vision and machine learning to understand what your query.

What’s amazing here is that these results are not being served based on tags, captions, or other ways to denote what is in a given photo. Google is analyzing the content of all your photos and deciding which ones are relevant to your query.

In the past decade, we have retrained our minds to google just about everything we want to know, according to new research by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” the researchers, who are based at Columbia University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard respectively, write in the July issue of Science.

When posed a question, people are primed to think of computers, and when they expect to have access to future information, they have lower rates of recall about the actual information and enhanced recall of where they can find the information.

Whether or not participants had been instructed to remember the information had no impact on recall. However, whether or not they believed the information would be available to them later had a negative impact.

For the Xbox to be able to turn on, identify who you are, and log in to your profile at a moment's notice--simply at the sound of the voice command "Xbox on"--it needs to do something a bit creepy: It has to be listening to what people are saying in your living room all the time.

Microsoft almost definitely is not recording, let alone uploading and archiving, every sound that happens in your living room 24-7-365. That said, the fact remains that there is a microphone in your home that's always live and connected to some super-smart computing devices--and a very distant server.

Expect Labs made a smartphone app called Mind Meld that demonstrates their listening tech expertise. Mind Meld can listen to the online conversation of a group of people, and detect what they are talking to such a high level of automatic detection of content and context that it can magically suggest online sources of information that might interest the group.

What matters is that they are even capable of viewing and collecting our personal, private data in this way. Why is it even possible that Verizon has this level of data to disclose? Why is it even possible that Apple can infer and cache our locations based on metadata? Why is it even possible that our emails can be skimmed for advertising opportunities? If we did not explicitly permit these things, then we have implicitly done so by choosing to go ahead and use the Internet this way either because the pros outweighed the cons. But now the cons are starting to add up.

we use the Internet as a sort of phantom extension of our own computers, putting things where they are accessible to us but we are not responsible for them. This was the so-called web 2.0: every personal computer and device, vastly more powerful and connected than ever before, yet acting as a thin client. Clearly, this is where we began to lose touch with reality.

How did we decide we were in control of the data we sent Google or Facebook? Why would we submit to such an obvious delusion? Does anyone really believe that these companies have our best interests in mind to any greater a degree than a dairy farmer and his cows? We submitted because they were the only option

Facebook has lost 10 million users in the US and seen no growth in monthly visitors in the UK over the past year

Research shows that the number of unique visitors to the Facebook website from computers, smartphones and tablets has fallen from 153m in March 2012 to 142m in March this year, having peaked at 158m last August.

1.11 billion monthly active users around the world, up 23% from a year ago. Mobile monthly active users were 751 million, up 54%. But much of the growth is coming from poorer nations, where advertising revenues are lower

two masks that can give you superhuman sight and hearing.

The first prototype covers the wearer's ears, mouth and nose and uses a directional microphone to give him the ability to hear an isolated sound in a noisy environment. For example, you could target a person in a crowd and clearly hear his words without the surrounding noise. The other prototype is worn over one's eyes. A camera captures video and sends it to a computer, which can apply a set of effects to it in real-time and send it back to the wearer. One can, for example, use it to see movement patterns, similar to the effects of long-exposure photography.

Sixty-nine percent of the heads of households in the U.S. play computer and video games. And 97% of young people — your emerging talent pool — play them

Endless sameness. People come to work and, without climactic events, do essentially the same thing every day forever — like a mountain climber who never sees a peak ahead.

Little sense of personal achievement. Most people lack sharply measured goals. They can work diligently every day but never have a significant success — or failure.

the truth is context is more powerful than personalisation in average search usage.

In my view we shouldn't go overboard with personalisation in search because serendipity is really valuable. We have explicit algorithms built into Google search so that personalisation does not take over your page.

You need as a user to get all points of view. I don't want anyone to only get just one point of view. So in my view it will get more relevant, but personalisation will not take over your search page.

Even as millennials (those born and raised around the turn of the century) enter college with far more exposure to computer and mobile technology than their parents ever did, professors are increasingly finding that their students' comfort zone is often limited to social media and Internet apps that don’t do much in the way of productivity

Even as millennials (those born and raised around the turn of the century) enter college with far more exposure to computer and mobile technology than their parents ever did, professors are increasingly finding that their students' comfort zone is often limited to social media and Internet apps that don’t do much in the way of productivity. One professor at the University of Notre Dame, for example, reports that many of his students don't even know how to navigate menus in productivity applications. 

most Millennials use technology for fun and games.

According to GWI, mobile access to social media sites actually overtook traditional PC access in Q4 of 2013, as 66 percent of users accessed their social networks by mobile compared to 64 percent by computer. However, microblogging sites — which include Twitter and Tumblr — are apparently best reserved for the tablet, dominating over both traditional computers and mobile for usage.

No matter what the device, Facebook remains top dog across the board overall – account ownership, active usage and visit frequency, across all regions — although it has seen minor decline as other social networks gain mindshare. The key winner in this year’s new class of social networks is Instagram: A nearly 25% rise in active users betwen Q2 and Q4 of 2013 bring the estimated total of active users on the website to more than 90 million. It’s also popular for the kids, too, as teens represent the dominant demographic on the site, with a 39 percent share of active users. According to GWI, the only other social networks that can boast teens as their dominant users are Youtube and Tumblr.

GWI’s data only indicates that Facebook’s teens shrank two percentage points, leaving a rough user estimate of 34.19 million

The embedding tool that the agency announced will give websites and social media users access to roughly 40 million images — out of a digital collection of 60 million — via a small snippet of computer code that is easily copied. It can be included to illustrate a blog post, for example, or a post to Twitter. (In the case of the images not included, Getty lacks the appropriate permissions, Mr. Peters said.)But, crucially, these users will not be making a copy of those images. Instead, the images will be stored on the agency’s computers; each embedded image will include a credit and a link back to the Getty Images website, where higher-quality versions will be available to license.

By aggregating personal data and preferences based on your check-ins, applications can begin to tailor suggestions for you, effectively driving decision-making and transactions. 

With Foursquare’s latest iOS update, the company is continuing its vision of telling you where to go next, not just where you are.

Foursquare is rolling out push notification recommendations and an application redesign that makes it easier for users to find out what’s happening around them.

Twitter has confirmed our scoop with the announcement of Tailored Audiences - its name for retargeted ads. Available globally to all advertisers via a slew of adtech startup partners, advertisers will be able to target recent visitors to their websites with retargeted Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Twitter’s users are on mobile. Seventy percent of its ad revenue already comes from the small screens, and it likely follows that a majority of engagement is on mobile, too.

retargeting happens like this. You visit a website, say a travel booking site, and look at a page for buying a flight to Hawaii. You chicken out at the last minute, don’t buy, and navigate away, but the site has dropped a cookie for that Hawaii flight page on your browser. Then, when you visit other sites or social networks that run retargeted ads, they detect that cookie, and the travel site can show you an ad saying “It’s cold in SF. Wouldn’t a vacation to Hawaii be nice?” to try to get you to pull the trigger and buy the flight it knows you were already interested in. But without cookies on mobile, you can’t retarget there… …unless you can tie the identity of a mobile user to what they do on the computer. And Twitter can. It’s one of the few hugely popular services that individuals access from multiple types of devices.

By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies

I'm not advocating anything; I'm merely probing and predicting trends. Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn't stop them, so why waste my time lamenting?

Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.

I have not created any new way of writing. All I'm doing is writing computer programs that mimic the way people write. Going back to the Elizabethan sonnets, Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries created the 14-line iambic pentameter poem, where the rhyming pattern was 'a-b, a-b, c-d, c-d, e-f, e-f g-g.' G-g being a couplet at the end. By line 9 there has to be a turn in the poem, so there has to be a phrase like 'yet' or 'but.' The first line is typically a question, which acts as a title. All of them are 10 syllables in each line... they have to go in the rhythm of that pattern. If you do an analysis of sonnets, you'll realize that about 10% of sonnets violate those rules. But they do it only in a very particular way. Even that formulation of violation is itself constrained... Once you have all of those rules you then write algorithms that mimic those rules. It's a very different kind of philosophy from artificial intelligence.

The methodologies are extremely old, just like the methodologies of writing haiku poetry are very old. An Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines - that is a line of code if you think of it that way. The code is constrained. So all genres, no matter what the genres are, are a form of constrained writing.

It’s all very well having wearable technology that lets you livestream yourself hang gliding. But if it has all the sex appeal of orthodontic headgear, it’s unlikely to catch on.

Arguably, success in wearable technology hinges on making people look and feel good as much as providing a functional service. Developers might be happy to fork vast sums for the privilege of being a Google Glass owner, but when the product goes to mass market, fashion, or at least some sort of coolness and covetability will be as critical as functionality.

Miki, like a number of teenagers whom BuzzFeed has interviewed, is using Facebook almost exclusively as a instant-messaging platform. “Messaging is pretty much the main reason I go on,” she says. “I don’t go scrolling through the News Feed.”

“I don’t post statuses anymore,” says another girl, a 14-year-old in the Bay Area, who nonetheless says she’s “addicted” to Facebook. She spends a cumulative four hours a day on the site. It is the first page she goes to when she turns on her computer, and the last one she checks at night before bed. “I don’t want to be that person you see with hundreds of [posts on] News Feeds,” she says.

Facebook’s pitch to investors depends largely on the News Feed and its app ecosystem, where ad placement possibilities are obvious. By contrast, instant messaging is a revenue black hole. If teenagers are an indicator of where Facebook users are headed — or if this is indicative of a larger trend — Facebook might be facing a serious problem.