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"While at least Life-magazine-killer TV has served as a platform for the creation of some great artworks (HBO's "The Wire," created by newspaperman-turned-TV-auteur David Simon, comes to mind) and inspired the creation of new art forms (see the upcoming Smithsonian retrospective of the work of "father of video art" Nam June Paik), it's hard to imagine what of lasting value hot web-native media brands like Gawker and BuzzFeed are contributing to visual culture and art history. Which brings me to an email I got last Wednesday from Gawker promoting its "top story" of Dec. 5., titled "The 13 Most Powerful Images of Naked Celebrities of 2012," which quickly racked up more than a million page views. It was a sequel to a Gawker post from the previous day titled "The 19 Most Powerful Images of 2012," which was mostly a shameless, edited-down rip-off of a BuzzFeed post titled "The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2012," consisting of intense wire-service photojournalism from Reuters, the AP, Getty and others, which derive most of their support from old-school print-centric publications around the world. Gawker's excuse for its act of, uh, curation: "Who has time to scroll through 45 pictures?""

"It's Even Pin-Worthy On fan sites for the books the Audis are mentioned, and Pinterest pages dedicated to "50 Shades" have pinned images of the cars. The Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, one of the cities where much of the books take place, even created a promotion to bait consumers inspired by the books that includes waterfront accommodations, champagne and a demo drive of an Audi through a partnership with a local car dealership. While that sort of attention's been great for the brand, the real potential lies in the possibility of Audi being written into the forthcoming film version of "50 Shades of Grey." A couple years ago, Volvo milked its tie-in with the tween vampire saga "Twilight", creating a viral-video campaign by EuroRSCG and promotional giveaways."

"In the opening passage of Do Machines Make History (1967), Robert Heilbroner argues that technology has a direct bearing on the human drama of history-but it does not make all of history. The challenge he identifies is whether something systematic can be said about the matter. In this piece, I briefly evaluate the degree to which technological change shapes historical change. I leave discussion on reasons why technologies change for other debates-instead focusing on the effects of technology, irrespective of their determinants. I suggest that while historical change depends on more than just technology, technology plays an unignorable role. Technology expands the range of actions for history-makers, exerts political influence (whether reflecting or independent of the intent of its makers), and can invite a cascade of further technological change."

But if we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that traditional media are now only in charge of part of the story. There is a paucity of facts and an excess of processing power because everyone with a keyboard is theoretically a creator and distributor of content. Most of those efforts begin from behind a firmly established battle line, then row backward to find the facts that they need. Was that a dark spot on the back of George Zimmerman's head in the grainy police video, or evidence of a beat-down? We retweet and "like" what we agree with and dismiss the rest. As if the overheated cable news debate weren't enough, social media are fueling the story with misinformation, along with incendiary calls to action. There is a Twitter account called "@killzimmerman" that suggested George Zimmerman needed to be "shot dead in the street." On Twitter, the movie director Spike Lee passed on what he thought was Mr. Zimmerman's address, but it was wrong and an elderly couple was forced to flee from their home. And what if Mr. Lee had gotten it right? (Mr. Lee has since apologized and reached a settlement with the couple.)

""Adidas received the largest week-over-week percent change (+354%), according to Bluefin. "This could be due to the number of ad airings they had this week - 123 airings of 3 creatives - vs last week, when they only had 23 ad airings," they further explained. "114 of the airings this week were of the new Adidas Basketball D Rose commercial," leveraging a celeb for social TV chatter. Here's further commentary from Bluefin and the commercial chart. The top 3 most tweeted-about brands were Subway (5.5K), the movie Paranormal Activity 4 (4.4K), and Adidas (4.3K). As we already know, celebrity figures help build social TV buzz, and sports is no exception. 63.4% of the comments about Adidas mentioned the D Rose commercial. Here's one example tweet. You may have noticed that Old Navy, the #1 brand on last week's chart, isn't on this list at all. As mentioned in last week's post, Old Navy had run two musically-themed creatives a total of 394 times. This week, Old Navy only ran one creative, but it aired a whopping 625 times. The big drop in conversation may be due to "ad-wear," when viewers get tired of seeing the same commercial over and over. Also, the Old Navy commercial that ran this week featured musician Justin Guarini. The bulk of last week's conversation was actually about the other commercial, featuring the Backstreet Boys. Subway was not tracked last week, so there is no week-over-week percent change."

Only three news sites - CNN, Yahoo News and The New York Times - out of 22 appeared to use high levels of ad targeting, according to a Pew Research Center study. In these cases, 45 percent or more of the ads were different from one user to the next. Another three news sites - CBS, USA Today, and MSNBC - exhibited moderate levels of targeting where between 29 percent and 40 percent of the ads were different across users. Sites with low levels or no apparent targeting included FoxNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, Time.com, and Newsweek.com. When researchers revisited the sites in January, they found that two - latimes.com and theatlantic.com - showed slightly higher levels of ad targeting. "By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook," the study found.

"News and magazine apps are a segment where the momentum is likely to shift towards the Web within the next two to three years," noted senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. "Since news and media content already account for a large share of smartphone usage and are likely to play an even bigger role in later adopters' usage, changes in this segment alone will make subscribers on average download fewer native apps." The next wave of smartphone owners in mature markets like the U.S., Western Europe and Asia will download fewer apps than the first one-third of mobile consumers who bought smartphones, according to the report on mobile app storefronts. At the same time, ABI expects that in the games and utilities categories, the mobile Web will probably never catch up with native apps, due to the difficulty in matching the user experience. ABI's outlook on the future of apps appears at odds with a separate report released Tuesday by Strategy Analytics, which maintains that the emergence of HTML5 won't put much of a dent in the app economy. Instead, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to harness the best of native and open standards.

"Sam Glassenberg, CEO of Funtactix, which develops social games for major motion pictures like The Hunger Games, said the in-game ad market presents both huge opportunities and new risks for brands and agencies. He cited statistics from NPD and said that there are almost 200 million online gamers out there who play games for an average of 13 hours a week. Yet, the majority of ad spend still goes to TV or banner ads and only a fraction to games, he noted. "How are we going to close that gap?" he asked. The discussion was organized by SponsorPay, a Berlin-based engagement advertising company whose application rewards users that watch an ad with virtual currency and other goodies. SponsorPay is one of a handful of companies out there including SocialVibe, Flurry and WildTangent seeking to help games developers monetize their product and brand advertisers engage consumers with such ads. Games entrepreneur Wilson Kriegel, formerly with Zynga, addressed this potential by discussing his involvement with mega-hit Draw Something, an online drawing game developed at his former company OMGPop, which Zynga acquired in March. The game allows people to draw things and share them with their friends. Since its launch early in 2012, it has seen over 90 million installs, 10 billion drawings created and was a top trending topic on Twitter.  Companies including McDonald's, Disney and Sprint have incorporated their ads into the game. Kriegel said that ad features including in-game banners, game features and in-game call to actions seen a clickthrough rate of 1 percent to 10 percent-unheard of in an industry where average CTRs are 0.7 percent."

"Of the 30 brands that have signed on thus far, only five will be running campaigns in the U.S. Twentieth Century Fox, one of two global launch advertisers, will promote its upcoming film Life of Pi with ads in the Xbox Video app, Xbox companion mobile and tablet app SmartGlass app and the Casual Games app, which spans Xbox and Microsoft's desktop and mobile operating systems. And next month the other global launch advertiser, Nissan, will run ads in the Bing and Xbox Music apps. Though it seems the in-app ads are initially only slated to run within Microsoft's own apps, the company said several publishers-such as The Associated Press, Bonnier Corporation, Photobucket, Slacker Radio and The Tribune Company-have agreed to run the units. In announcing the roster of initial advertisers, Microsoft also put out some stats regarding consumer perception of the ad units. The most encouraging stat found that the ads scored a 92 percent in ad recall, but the other numbers suggest brands may prefer consumers forget their ads. Only 39 percent of respondents said they're happy to see advertising within Windows 8, and only 33 percent agreed that advertising on Windows 8 improved their opinion of a brand."

"Here at TechCrunch, we've heard Twitter is reaching out to TV producers and showrunners to find out ways that it can further integrate with the TV experience. That could mean Twitter-based voting, in the case of some competitive reality shows. It could also mean introducing interactive elements in scripted shows that viewers could use to unlock new content or web experiences. For what it's worth, Twitter is hiring for a role just like this: One of the positions listed on its jobs site is a "Manager of TV Relationships" position based in Los Angeles. The purpose of the job is to act as a "Twitter ambassador/evangelist to TV celebrities," getting them to tweet more during their own shows and just in general. But the goal also to work with high-profile showrunners and producers to find ways to integrate Twitter into their programming. One listed responsibility is to "manage and execute a volume of creative content plays with TV talent, such as live tweeting of shows, talent Q&As, and other creative uses of Twitter.""

"Big Is Beautiful As smartphone screens get larger, companies have found some success with ads such as "takeovers" that briefly fill all or most of a device's screen. San Francisco app company Fotopedia sells such ads on its iPhone and iPad apps, which let people flip through high-quality photographs of Paris, national parks or wild animals. Marketers including National Geographic and travel websites Jetsetter and Expedia Inc. EXPE -0.23% pay roughly $1 to $1.50 for each user who clicks an ad, which fill a full screen. Like fashion ads in a luxury magazine, the Fotopedia ads appear every 10 "pages" or so of the app. As many as 18% of people who see an ad click on it, said Christophe Daligault, Fotopedia's senior vice president of global operations. On the Web, it isn't unusual for just 1% of people shown an ad to interact with it, marketers said. Still, big ads should be used sparingly, some marketers said. Craig Bierley, director of General Motors Co.'s GM -0.84% Buick advertising, said the auto maker tends to limit takeover ads to major product introductions because otherwise "people might find it annoying.""

The remote control must die; but what's next? One company at the apex of that question is Philips, which, unbeknownst to many onlookers, already makes remote controls for an array of TV makers, set-top box vendors and pay-TV operators like BSkyB. Philips now offers its own Wiimote-like gesture stick to screen makers like HP; (NYSE: HPQ) a motion-sensitive, qwerty-equipped uWand; candybars with integrated laptop trackpads and, yes, plain 'ol candybars for internet TV operators who still want them. All of this means the TV input segment is about to embark upon the same kind of innovative period of disruption and competing standards that the TV space is now wrestling with and which the internet itself before it first unleashed.

The advert, which will have a two-week trial, will use a high-definition camera to scan hundreds of thousands of passers-by. It will guess their gender based on the distance between their eyes, the width of their nose, length of the jawline and shape of their cheekbones. With a built-in computer, touchscreen and sound, it will be 90 per cent accurate, its designers say. "We're not giving men and boys the choice to see the full ad on this occasion - so they get a glimpse of what it's like to have basic choices taken away," said Marie Staunton, Plan UK's chief executive.

"McDonalds beacon case study (retail) 26 McDonald's franchises in Columbus, Georgia tested out iBeacon technology with its customers. Over the four week trial, the franchises were pushing special deals for McChicken Sandwiches and 10 piece Chicken McNuggets. The iBeacon powered promotions pushed McChicken Sandwich sales up 8 percent and Chicken McNugget sales up 7.5 percent. Based on the initial results of the pilot it looks as though McDonald's will continue to explore the technology for an additional 263 retail stores in the southeast. "Everyone is looking at their phones, millennials especially, and that's where we've decided to engage," Jack Pezold, a McDonald's franchisee of 40 years, said in a statement. Spotless beacon case study (enterprise) Spotless is an Australian owned and managed provider of integrated facilities management services. In 2014, Spotless partnered with Lighthouse to build and deploy a custom workforce management solution with the goal of reducing litigation claims in the commercial cleaning service line. The solution allowed Spotless to understand when cleaning KPI's are missed in real-time and produce employee location reports that can be used as legal defense against slip and fall litigation claims in shopping malls. Spotless has also been able to optimise their workforce and reduce operating costs by analyzing Lighthouse powered heat mapping of employee movements. The solution has been so successful that Spotless are extending the capability across other service lines including facilities management, security and maintenance. Read the full case study here. Pause Fest beacon case study (events) Pause Fest is Australia's premier digital event, aimed at supporting and showcasing the best in creative and tech from Australia and all over the world. In 2015, Pause Fest partnered with Lighthouse to deploy a network of beacons that delivered proximity based content and experiences to attendees, while enabling real-time event analyt

A pair of startling statistics was presented at the opening of the session: 16% of the U.S. population is currently Latino, while only 1% of U.S. marketing dollars are targeted toward reaching that population. Agencies share some of the blame for marketers' dropping the ball in the Hispanic marketing arena, said Lance Rios, founder of Hispanic social media platform Being Latino. He said that agencies frequently ignore requests for meetings to simply introduce his platform and explain how marketers might benefit from its use.

"Almost as many Americans (236.5 million) watched TV on their phones during the second quarter of 2012, as watched it on a conventional TV set (283.3 million), albeit for much shorter durations. While the average American spends nearly 145 hours per month watching TV on a traditional TV, Nielsen didn't even report the average time they spend watching on their phones. But mobile subscribers watching video on their phones -- a smaller sub-segment of about 37 million Americans -- spend an average of five hours and 20 minutes watching TV on their phones each month, an increase of 31 minutes over the second quarter of 2011."

"The site has three themes: Timeless Tiffany includes the story of Tiffany, including its diamond heritage, major milestones, masterpieces, drawings from the Tiffany Archives and a virtual hall of fame that showcases vintage ads and images of jewelry from every fashion era from the Gilded Age to the present day; Tiffany Insider, a gallery of images and videos that Tiffany says "captures the excitement and creativity behind photo shoots, dressing stars in Tiffany diamonds and unveiling windows that invite the imagination to dream of elegant new worlds"; and Tiffany In Style, which covers events and introduces designs in jewelry and accessories, along with advertising images and videos."

"Sony has announced that it will be launching the first 4K video distribution service for consumers, giving 4K TV buyers their first real source of content. We don't have much information about the service, but it will be launching in the US this summer, both potentially creating a 4K market and giving Sony an edge. It's something Sony originally tried with 3D, trying to handle all facets of the feature from content creation to distribution and playback. "We intend to expand the world of 4K content from beyond the cinema to TV dramas and commercials," Sony's Kaz Hirai said during the conference at CES. Sony has already announced a series of remastered 4K Blu-rays, and as with 3D, the company is trying to sell studios on the benefits of 4K. Meanwhile, it's announced the first-ever 4K OLED prototype TV and new models of its consumer-ready 4K TVs. In the US, though, super high-def digital distribution could be hampered by ISPs, which aren't likely to look kindly on the stress this will cause their pipes."

In terms of what activities internet users are engaging in on mobile vs. desktop, in Q1 2013 Experian Marketing Services found that US mobile internet users spent the greatest percentage of their mobile web time using email, a 23% share of time spent vs. only 5% of time spent on desktop. Social networking came in second on mobile, garnering 15% of time spent. Travel also occupied a greater share of time on the mobile internet (9%) compared with the desktop (1%).

"According to the study, which surveyed nearly 10,000 U.S. adults, around half of whom owned some sort of mobile device, a full 64 percent of tablets owners and 62prcent of smart phone owners said they used their devices for news at least one per week, meaning that one third of adults in the United States get some kind of news on a tablet or phone on a weekly basis, if not more frequently."