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"Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream."

""On both ends of the spectrum, this middle piece is taking away browsing from the iPhone and the tablet," Adobe Digital Index principal analyst Tamara Gaffney tells WIRED."

"The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."

"Granovetter found, for instance, that people were nearly three times as likely to have found their job through a "personal contact" than through an advertisement, headhunter or other "formal means." In other words, success is largely about who you know, not what you learned in school or how you searched on Monster.com."

"The question is not just whether MOOCs are going to disrupt traditional education, but how. Is it just about lower costs and access? Is it really going to be a Napster-like moment with entrenched "Teamsters in tweed" worried about the erosion of their research, publishing, and teaching?"

putting the ATF's problems with tracing guns aside, it could still help agents track you down a lot faster than they could before - along with finding out everything else about you.

"The book draws upon a healthy mix of psychological research isolating specific tactics for induce happiness ("happiness hacks") alongside practical examples of those tactics utilized in both traditional and "serious" game design. The net result? A list of 14 "fixes" that can help readers improve their lives through play."

"Elbakyan's civil disobedience has forced the issue on behalf of a society that continues to allow the knowledge it creates to be locked away from the public that pays for it. And it has the potential to disrupt academic publishing forever."

Imodesty thrives on Facebook and Twitter because they enable what social scientists call self-enhancement - the human tendency to oversell ourselves.

"Honan has updated his tale and posted it on Wired where he goes through the seemingly innocent processes used to eventually wipe out his laptop hard drive, erase his digital identity, and essentially break the trust we all place in the cloud."

""We're going to transfer power without any kind of wires," says Dr Hall, now Chief Technology Officer at WiTricity -- a start-up developing wireless "resonance" technology. "But, we're not actually putting electricity in the air. What we're doing is putting a magnetic field in the air.""

The company, founded in 2006, uses an ultra-low electrical current to charge very thin durable coatings (made of a proprietary substance that can be applied to "almost any surface of any size") on a standard touchscreen. This creates a small attractive force to finger skin that can be modulated; sensations such as texture, edges and vibrations can be felt by the user.

"What those parents likely don't realize is that the same neural mechanisms that make kids sponges for Mandarin likely also make them highly receptive to computer languages. Kindergartners cannot become C++ ninjas, but they can certainly start to develop the skills that will eventually cement lifelong fluency in code."

Red wasn't particularly interested in IPOs or the latest tech fetish, even though she was always exceptionally proud of her students and their accomplishments. She knew that technology was a means to an end - and that the end was people.

"A new version of Foursquare began to roll out this fall, offering the kind of "passive notifications" Crowley had always dreamed of, and last week, with the release of a new app for iPhone and iPad, it reached out to an even wider audience. "

"With the Illum, Lytro is targeting a more specialized market. In addition to the 8X (30 - 250mm) zoom lens, it has a constant f/2.0 aperture, 1/4000 shutter, and a four-inch backside touchscreen display. According to the company, the new sensor can capture 40 million light rays (Lytro doesn't list megapixels) to the original's 11 million. Its desktop processing software works with traditional products, like Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom. Photographers can use the camera's software to refocus pictures after the fact, generate 3-D images, adjust the depth of field, and create tilt shifts. It will be available in July for $1,500."

"nternet service providers-Comcast, in particular-have been started to flex their muscle. Transit provider Level 3 says that, as it sends traffic into their networks, the big U.S. ISPs are letting some of its routers overload with data. And amidst these bottlenecks, Comcast is exploring ways of selling its own CDN services that can help companies increase delivery speeds."

"Moving beyond improving career prospects, the conversation then turned repeatedly to the idea that literacy means more than using digital technology as a means of consuming things other people make. Digital literacy, Smith said, also is about "how to make it do what you want." Or as Geshner put it: "Are you an iPad or are you a laptop? An iPad is designed for consumption." Literacy, as he described it, means moving beyond a passive relationship with technology. "When you get down to coding, you're creating your own tools.""

"A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing.""