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A daredevil leapt from a balloon more than 18 miles above the Earth today (July 25), moving one step closer to a so-called "space jump" that would set the record for the world's highest skydive. Austrian adventurer Felix Baumgartner stepped out of his custom-built capsule at an altitude of 96,640 feet (29,456 meters) above southeastern New Mexico, officials with Red Bull Stratos - the name of Baumgartner's mission - announced today.

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Between 2011 and 2012, the number of "mobile point-of-sale" terminals registered by businesses worldwide more than doubled, according to U.K. industry research firm Timetric. The newly released report doesn't see such a dramatic rate of uptake to continue year after year. But researchers do project that the percentage of checkout counters using mobile point-of-sale systems such as those offered by Square, ShopKeep, Intuit and PayPal will jump from fewer than one-fifth last year to nearly half by 2017.

Brands are already jumping on the Vine bandwagon

Yahoo, jumping on the photo filters bandwagon.

""The survey showed tablet owners 55 and older who watch TV and movies weekly on tablets jumped from 11% last year to 19% in 2012, while owners in the 45-54 range also saw large percentage gains (15% to 24%)," the company explained in their announcement. "While it may not make parents seem any cooler, older consumers more and more are adopting their kids' viewing habits," said Altman Vilandrie & Company Director Jonathan Hurd."

"The deal, which the airline announced on its website Wednesday, is a reference to Mitt Romney's much-lampooned "Binders full of women" remark during Tuesday night's debate. It hasn't even been 24 hours since the remark was made in the debate and already a "Binders Full of Women" Facebook Page has more than 300,000 fans, which is more than IBM has. Spirit has eagerly jumped on hot media stories in the past for quick punchlines. In 2011, the brand made light of Rep. Anthony Weiner's Twitter scandal with a "Wiener sale" and mocked Tiger Woods' domestic troubles before that with an "Eye of the Tiger" sale."

But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.

"How much time do you spend on Reddit?  If you're anything like the average Redditor, it's quite a bit!  Yesterday Reddit reported, via Twitter, that in August the average time spent per visit was 17:29 minutes.  The month also closed with a shipping 3.4 billion page views and 42.9 million uniques.  Impressive, eh? While the 17:29 minute figure is only a one second increase from 17:28 in July, the page views and uniques saw a significant jump.  In July Reddit reported 3.1 billion page views and 39.5 million users."

Mobile messaging application Viber has released version 2.2, introducing group messaging as well as improved call quality and several user interface enhancements. The company also said it has reached 90 million users, with users making over 1.5 billion minutes of calls each month. This is a jump of 20 million users in just over two months.

It seems in the extremely competitive coffee marketplace of Seoul, Korea, Dunkin' Donuts wasn't the first place people thought of for their cup of joe. In a bid to correct what is surely an oversight, the Double D created "Flavor Radio" and placed it on city buses. The device looked just like a normal air freshener, but inside lurked the alluring aroma of coffee. At key points during the ride, the air freshener would spill out the fragrance, coupled with a jingle for Dunkin' Donuts. Perhaps not coincidentally, often times commuters would find themselves at a stop that had a Dunkin' Donuts nearby. Oh, you clever mad men! While Dunkin' Donuts claims there are no plans to roll this out here in the States, I'll bet we see someone else using a version of "Flavor Radio" in the future. After all, the company claims visitors to its stores near bus stops rose 16% during the campaign, and overall coffee sales jumped by 29%. It seems the future of advertising includes anything interactive that will get our attention. Not even buses are safe.

In fact, interactive video ads that ran on Christmas Day 2011 resulted in engagement rates six times higher than Cyber Monday, according to Web video start-up Jivox. This coincided with serious growth in online Christmas Day sales, which IBM found jumped 16.4% year-over-year.

Cheap mini-drones

Eat24 deleted their Facebook page, and they call it the "best marketing move" they made all year. 75% increase in app downloads Email open rates jumped from 20% to 40%