CIS Focal Issue

"There's a certain class of content which is only going to come onto Facebook if there's a good way to compensate content owners for that,"

"We've recently rolled out the business model for this. We'll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners

To grasp the scope of change unraveling in content creation, which is increasingly fragmented, consider all the mobile apps on your smartphone.

says the move by Instagram is part of an ongoing initiative to add more e-commerce features to the platform, as well as more ways to display and interact with products

"Mobile commerce is definitely a space we are looking at closely.

Instagram has become increasingly more interested in advertising and has deployed a variety of new products and ad formats for advertisers.

Today, as part of its annual Hour of Code event, Code.org is launching a free online tutorial that prompts kids to build their own games, based on characters in the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

where they’ll learn to write code to design their own games featuring characters like R2-D2 ad C-3PO.

Of the 5 million students currently registered on Code.org, around 2 million are girls and around 2 million are black or Hispanic.

Today, YouTube is unveiling 360-degree virtual reality videos and a virtual movie theater for all YouTube videos, available to anyone with a Google Cardboard headset. The goal is to “democratize virtual reality” and “bring VR to everybody

social network is now seeing 8 billion daily video views. Facebook itself recently debuted 360 video. And the social networking giant owns Oculus,

But Facebook, its biggest competitor, is rapidly encroaching on YouTube’s turf.

Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), the division within the company dedicated to AI

some are new, like a working unsupervised learning model

The company has made substantial investment in artificial intelligence in the last few years

The self-flying drone is able to swiftly navigate obstacles

algorithm that allows the drone's software to build a map of the surrounding area in real time

Everyone is building drones these days, but nobody knows how to get them to stop running into things

The study of 350 children in a low-income, minority community suggests that an income-based "digital divide" is shrinking.

some parents might be using technology as a surrogate babysitter.

The older the children were, the more likely they were to have their own technology.

Scientists have created a new device that allows people to see through walls

it can "determine where you are, who you are, and even which hand you are moving

feature that allows the device to contact emergency services if a family member falls on the floor

. Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030

They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.

Morgan Stanley’s research shows that cars are driven just 4% of the time,5 which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of car ownership is nearly $9,000 per year.6

Recently, an app called Peeple got a whole lot of attention for trying to be the Yelp for Humans

But what would it be like if we lived in a world where everything you do is subject to a rating doled out by a combination of machines and other people?

Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com and the author of the book The Reputation Economy, talks on the episode about all the ways that brands and companies are already compiling your information into a profile that helps them make decisions about you. Linkedin, AirBnB, Uber, they’re all gathering what Fertik calls your “digital exhaust” to learn more about you

Across industries, disrupters are reinventing how the business works. Less obvious, and just as important, they are also reinventing what it is to be a company.

The rise of big financial institutions (that hold about 70% of the value of America’s stockmarkets) has further weakened the link between the people who nominally own companies and the companies themselves.

The number of companies listed on America’s stock exchanges has fallen by half since 1996, partly because of consolidation, but also because talented managers would sooner stay private.

Humanoid robots are now being introduced into nursing homes, and as therapists, for example. The new Hello Barbie toy will be a "friend" to children, holding conversations with young boys and girls. Robots are even getting married in Japan.

A perfect example of the backlash against human-like machines happened last Friday, when Adrian David Cheok and David Levy were forced to cancel their second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, set to be held in Malaysia next month.

The case of the cancelled conference is just the beginning of the kind of obstacles intellectuals and researchers may encounter in the pursuit of academic study of humanoid robotics—an increasingly controversial field as the line between fantasy and reality gets blurred

that allows people to play games with each other in real time using their hands, even if they aren't in the same room.

and down to simulate completely different worlds — outer space, under water and so on."

Tesla is rolling out version 7.0 of its software, and with it new autopilot features that allow the car to stay in its lane, change lanes, and parallel park itself.

the new Autosteer feature. This is designed specifically for highway driving, and when engaged keeps the car in its lane. When you need to change lanes, you flip your turn signal and the car will move over on its own when it determines it’s safe to do so.

That "hands-on" detail is an important one. CEO Elon Musk emphasizes that the update is a public beta. "We say keep your hands on the wheel because it’s very important to exercise caution at this early stage,"

It’s part of an experiment to see if technology can help with the daunting and seemingly Sisyphean tasks of a first time parent, to find out why a growing number of people are turning to gadgets to help with one of life's toughest jobs.

Attempting to simplify parenthood with gizmos and apps has perversely made it a lot more complicated. And as for peace of mind, forget it.

The concept of the “quantified baby” has been around for some time now, and there’s a large and growing market for smart infant products from anxious or diligent or curious new parents.

High-profile mobile money launches by Apple and Samsung may have caught the headlines

But it is the developments in payments systems in supposedly less developed nations in Africa and Asia that point the way to the probable future for wider mobile banking.

the reality remains that the mobile phone as a means of payment remains relatively niche even in developed markets.

The financial magazine has published its first ever list of top earners on the video platform, with the irrepressible Felix Kjellberg (better known as PewDiePie) heading the charts with pretax earnings of $12 million,

most of these individuals’ income comes from advertising such as sponsored videos and previews, although four of those on the list also have book deals, while a few even offer their own product lines.