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it has said that its second-largest market outside its home country is Brazil, where it has about 29m users. On Monday, it announced that it has 9m users in Germany and has previously said that it has more than 14m users in the UK

Analysts only just started releasing their estimates last year, suggesting the app could generate between $1.2bn and $2bn in sales in 2016

Instagram’s monthly active user base could reach up to 520m by the end of 2016.

Instagram launched an advertising format that allowed marketers to include links to their products and websites. The so-called “carousel adverts” allow a brand to display several images at once and use a “learn more” button to lead consumers to its own sit

the company had no immediate plans to introduce a “Buy” button, similar to the one that Facebook has been trialling. Retailers want the group to introduce functions that will allow users to purchase products seen through the app

Instagram is attractive to advertisers partly because of its popularity with hard-to-reach teenagers.

A lobbying push by big technology groups, including Facebook, helped to water down the proposed ban. National governments will now be able to reduce the age at which personal data may be used to 13

During the task, some of the children instinctively used gestures — making rabbit ears when they knew shape mattered, or moving their palms from facing up to turning sideways when they were sorting by the teddy bear’s orientation — to guide themselves.

Earlier work showed that older children were better able to learn math if taught to use gestures while doing so. And they often found the right answer physically — for example, by making movements to signify the numbers that needed to be kept together to add correctly — before finding it verbally

The toddlers’ gestures could be interpreted as a glimpse of their brains at work, as they figure out how to exert the cognitive control necessary to complete their tasks.

What’s more, she found that this effect had a stronger effect on successful performance than age — a powerful finding given that children’s skills improve rapidly with age during this stage of development.

That has implications for improving the way we communicate and think, and could help to address developmental disorders associated with cognitive control issues, such as autism

The Concorde failed for a lot of reasons, not least of which the fact that it was very, very expensive. So far, hundreds of people  have shelled out $250,000 to take a quick suborbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, but are they going to be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to save 12 hours flying halfway around the world?

Harford argues that much can be done to make public space safe for children. “I would like to see pedestrian-friendly crossings more frequently on streets. I would like to see the streets be more kid-oriented with wider sidewalks, as well as a more coherent attitude amongst people on the street to be watching out for kids.”

in “real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn – if they learn it at all – the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Ronda Howard, a Vancouver senior city planner, notes that when there are greater incentives for people to walk in their neighbourhoods, there are more eyes on the street: thus the streets become safer.

Despite the challenges facing parents raising children in the city, different social networks can augment child involvement in public space. Harford says that strong social ties help increase her son’s autonomy in Vancouver

When we actively engage with others who are different from us, we have the opportunity to become more sophisticated and tolerant citizens. When we get to know the diverse members of our communities, we create social networks that make our cities safer and more enjoyable. Public spaces are integral to making this happen. These spaces are an antidote to the inward gaze of individualism. We need to reclaim public space and work to expand its boundaries. It’s time for us to leave the house of the self in the background, and go outside

“The way kids talk and communicate is very different from how adults do, both in terms of how they use language and the fundamental frequencies that come out of their throats,

But as he points out, the way today’s children use technology will likely dictate the tech landscape for decades to come. If you can get kids hooked on speech technology young, they’ll stay with it forever.

Kids don’t want to ask a monkey character in a game what the weather will be on Tuesday. They want to sing him a song or ask him about life in the zoo.

While ToyTalk uses existing third party technology for its raw speech recognition, it works with those partners to develop better recognition models using ToyTalk’s own data. Now, ToyTalk has a trove of some 20 million children’s utterances, which Jacob believes is the largest database of kids conversation in the world

“Virtual assistants are awesome when they can answer every question. In our case, it’s the opposite,” Jacob says. “I have to know a lot of things that I’m not able to answer, and redirect the conversation to something that is within character.”

And Jacob says some toy companies are already testing PullString to power apps based on existing characters.

this technology could give kids a whole new way to play that falls somewhere in between the playground and the imaginary friend. “I think at some deep level if we succeed, we’ll inspire the imagination of kids to talk about things they might not otherwise talk about,”

Stae is starting with a compliance and payment platform for the sharing economy. Stae wants to create an API that would let Airbnb seamlessly pay (for example) $.75 to the city for a one night stay

Boston is the first partner city to test the platform.

"Given that so many of today's moviegoers are passionate about preserving the purity of watching movies undisturbed in our theatres, there is no specific timeframe as to when we might introduce such a test, if ever,"

Hoddick said he wants to develop three additional films this year, then eight in 2017 and then 12 a year after that

The Barco Escape costs exhibitors $100,000 with an additional fee per movie.

there are currently 21 Barco Escape theaters in the world — 16 in the United States, two each in Europe and China, and one in Mexico.

the plan is to have more than 100 by the end of this year, and 1,000 within three to five years. Oh, and they want an additional 1,000 just in China, soon to be the world’s biggest movie market — and one where Imax is in the process of opening hundreds of its own screens

Hoddick said while Barco Escape is only for 2D films at this point, he imagines it’s only a matter of time before 3D comes to the platform

it’s currently about 4 percent more expensive to produce a movie for Barco Escape, because the work has to happen in post-production, Hoddick said new cameras from manufacturers including Sony that can film in the 7:1 aspect ratio necessary for the medium will slash costs significantly

the theater will soon install a camera-based surveillance system to analyze demographics and customize which “lobby dominations” go live — think superhero trailers going up when a crew of high school kids walks in

It appears to be designed to serve as a tool for rights holders to intervene against illegal file sharing by the use of peer-to-peer technology and web sites

“It is still an open question whether the rights holders will be able to use the legislation as a tool against copyright infringements that employ different technology, such as cloud-based storage and sharing of infringing material.

“Ultimately, new technology can reveal desires that already exist on a deep level in society,” says Rafman of the works, which pull from and amplify the seductive forces of video games and cinema. “This desire to escape completely into another dimension has existed for a long time.”

Virtual reality’s recent resurgence in prominence begins with Oculus and its visionary 23-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey. In 2012, the then-18-year-old with an affinity for retooling defunct ’90s VR headsets took a hacked-together model to Kickstarter with a funding goal of $250,000. A month later, over 10,000 individuals contributed $2.4 million to the campaign for what was at the time mainly aimed at being a gaming peripheral. Two years later, Facebook wrote a check to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion

“This is not a drill. It’s real. It’s a moment,” says Michael Naimark, Google’s first resident virtual reality artist (like Char Davies, he’s listed as a pioneer of VR on Wikipedia). “And the arts community can play a huge role in propagation.

Throughout art history, art has reflected the prevalent social relations of the time. It makes sense, then, that the most relative and innovative art forms being produced today would mirror our reality—one defined by a perceived sense of agency in a world filled with invisible algorithms and clicks baited to us by past clicks. The internet spoils us with infinite choice: opportunities to invent our personas, refashion our self-brands, optimize our lives, and enhance our experience. But with mega-corporations quietly holding the joystick, can we really self-determine our destiny?

We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.

So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain

married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married

As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.

Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all

The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.

The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.

Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*

And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.

This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,

Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.

What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.

challenging as Millennials can be to manage – managers cannot shrink from embracing them and their attitudes. After all, as he points out, they and the generation following on from them will account for more than half the workforce within 10 years.

Among the Millennials’ attributes are a willingness to collaborate, a tendency to do extensive research before making a decision and an eagerness to network.

The research by Accenture referred to above mentions the need for organizations to adapt to the increasing numbers of women in management positions.

businesses need to ensure they are adapting their strategies to recruit, reward and retain these talented and valued leaders.” Then there is the matter of businesses becoming genuinely ethnically diverse

This process can take anywhere from 30 minutes for a small item, up to overnight (e.g. 6 6 to 8 hours) for a larger toy

TONO also

“As high-speed internet capacity has become normal and often included in mobile subscriptions, illegal download and use of music has decreased,”

“The new legislation is in my opinion not sufficiently technology neutral, as it is clearly designed to serve as a tool to prevent P2P file sharing and not, for example, illegal streaming services, which may become a problem in the years to come.”

Digikey is a vast store of virtually anything and everything that goes on printed circuit boards, from humble resistors to mighty CPUs

Digikey also provides technical data and marketing materials for everything they offer

most components can now be ordered in reels, even if the order quantity is very small

The idea is to allow manufacturers to create parts delivery schedules and thus achieve that coveted just-in-time production.

Extrapolating into the future, I see a world where compact SMT machines automatically order electronic parts from Digikey.

This budding movement to bring the manufacturing back home is not restricted to America alone. Across the globe in Russia, the government has started to eliminate tariffs on electronic components and simultaneously created significant barriers to using imported goods in government projects. The trend is clear, and countries big and small are beginning to follow suit.

Even if film distributors were to reject the conventional wisdom of windowing, those windows are jealously guarded by their respective sectors.  The theatrical exhibition window is particularly so

announced in September 2014 that they would distribute a sequel to the 2000 hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon simultaneously via Netflix and IMAX theaters worldwide, movie theater chains swiftly circled the wagons and announced a boycott of the Weinsteins’ film.

“value of ownership for the consumer” is a euphemism for “consumer willingness-to-pay.”  The longer a consumer must wait before they can watch a movie on their Netflix subscription, the likelier that consumer is to pay for a DVD

numerous industries have attempted to insulate themselves from disruption by persuading lawmakers to prescribe their exclusive industrial role in public laws, including auto dealers and beer distributors

windowing has been widely criticized as contributing to piracy, and “leaving money on the table.”  Empirical evidence bears that out.  Content producers are not unaware of this data; their calculus is that the revenues attributable to aggressive windowing (and avoiding friction with their distributors) exceed losses associated with piracy.

Windowing alienates consumers and arguably undermines respect for copyright in countries that receive content late

In the content distribution example, compensation might involve repayment for government resources expended on attributable piracy, perhaps based on a user-fee model that various government agencies already have.  If the windowed release distribution model generated more revenue than the costs it incurs, it would continue, taxpayers would be made whole, and the externality would be “internalized.”

And if they don’t want to work with you because you’re ‘too old,’ perhaps you don’t want to work with them either,” she said.

Mumbai built the now-famous “Sealink” bridge to divert traffic away from the gridlock of the city and along its coast

There’s still the issue to develop a longer-term plan rather than chaotic management of cities. There may still be the issue of resources, where are the resources going to come from? Maybe companies can help by helping to create business which would generate economic resources.”

Globalisation has meant urbanisation, and by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities. What should we do to survive and thrive in this brave new world?

You cannot attract highly educated people and become a knowledge centre if you have a lousy environment

This is how things get interesting for the RealiSM project: the prototype works as an integrated video recording, editing, and playback system – all working hand in hand to generate what they call reality substitution. A custom-built camera rig, consisting of 18 high-definition cameras which are pointed in all directions, seamlessly shoots a 360-degree spherical imagery that is stitched together in all three dimensions of space. These 18 high-def cameras are paired with 4 omnidirectional microphones, able to pick up sound from all directions relative to the prototype. The 3D spherical video capture is then processed and is rendered by a custom-built HMD that also features a front camera to orient the user’s presence in both the virtual and outside environments.

Aside from the usage focus of the prototype in the medical field, it is also seen as a potential tool for bringing immersive, real-time teleconferencing – bridging the gap caused by time zone issues between the two ends of the communication medium; and also to enhance entertainment experiences – particularly in games – by introducing extremely immersive and true-to-life visuals and audio experiences.

even in the absence of information about the character’s past.

The age of 8 has been identified as a watershed at which children become measurably more likely to act out aggressions after watching violent behavior on television

. The children recognize that in the real world it’s impossible to fly without a plane or to be born with skin that deflects bullets. 

By age 10 or 11, children will make fairly complex judgments about characters’ motivations and they regularly distinguish between justified and unjustified violence

One study also found that if you ask children between the ages of eight and ten who they most want to be like, they are far more likely to cite superhero type characters than everyday folks like their parents.

but conflict play continues to provide a unique transitional space for children to explore and express their own tensions

We also aim to develop conflict play scenarios where children can experience the benefits of cooperation. With the fate of the world (or even the entire universe) hanging in the balance, children must learn how to build teams, trust in others and work together towards common goals. In those pretend situations, developing social skills may be the only way to overcome the lords of evil!