The Raspberry Pi computer – how a bright British idea took flight; Cambridge scientists thought their £30 computer might find 1,000 customers. Two years on, they have shipped 2.5m units

The Raspberry Pi computer – how a bright British idea took flight

Cambridge scientists thought their £30 computer might find 1,000 customers. Two years on, they have shipped 2.5m units

Shane Hickey

The Guardian, Sunday 9 March 2014 22.31 GMT

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Google, Facebook, Amazon: algorithms will soon rule our lives so we’d better understand how they work

Google, Facebook, Amazon: algorithms will soon rule our lives so we’d better understand how they work

By Jamie Bartlett Tech business Last updated: March 23rd, 2014

One of the most interesting announcements in last week’s Budget – well, for me at least, as someone who has no savings and doesn’t play bingo or drink much – was the new Alan Turing Institute: £220 million of government support will be invested into “big data and algorithm” research. Read more of this post

Indian start-ups tap into mobile payments technology

March 24, 2014 3:55 am

Indian start-ups tap into mobile payments technology

By Sarah Mishkin in San Francisco and James Crabtree in Mumbai

Good luck finding a local store or delivery person in India who accepts anything but cash. Even in a nation of 1.2bn, fewer than 1m retailers are set up to take a credit card. Read more of this post

Nasdaq rethinks Amazon cloud partnership

March 23, 2014 5:36 pm

Nasdaq rethinks FinQloud partnership with Amazon

By Arash Massoudi in New York and Barney Jopson in Washington

Nasdaq is re-evaluating a venture based on Amazon’s cloud computing services after a landmark partnership to offer back-office data storage to banks and brokers failed to gain traction with customers. Read more of this post

‘Cord-Nevers’: Why Comcast Would Consider a Deal With Apple

Mar 24, 2014

‘Cord-Nevers’: Why Comcast Would Consider a Deal With Apple

SHALINI RAMACHANDRAN

On Monday, the Journal reported that Apple is talking to ComcastCMCSA +0.60%about a new streaming-television service that would be powered through an AppleAAPL +1.19% set-top box and would get special treatment to bypass congestion on the Web.

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Why Trade Bonds When You Can Trade Ads? Web Ads, Sold on Computerized Exchanges, Bring Wall Streeters Into the Fray

Why Trade Bonds When You Can Trade Ads?

Web Ads, Sold on Computerized Exchanges, Bring Wall Streeters Into the Fray

WILLIAM LAUNDER

March 24, 2014 3:37 p.m. ET

For many on Wall Street, landing an executive-level job at an established hedge fund would be a crowning career move. Until, that is, they get a chance to go into advertising. Read more of this post

Google Deal With Luxottica Will Bring Glass to Ray-Ban, Oakley

Google Deal With Luxottica Will Bring Glass to Ray-Ban, Oakley

ROLFE WINKLER

March 24,2014

With Luxottica’s help, Google hopes to use style to overcome consumer doubts about Glass. Astro Teller, who oversees Glass among other projects at Google X, the company’s innovation lab, said it is a “very large Read more of this post

Disney to buy YouTube network Maker Studios for $500 million; “Short-form online video is growing at an astonishing pace and with Maker Studios, Disney will now be at the center of this dynamic industry”

Disney to buy YouTube network Maker Studios for $500 million

Mon, Mar 24 2014

By Ronald Grover

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Walt Disney Co has agreed to buy Maker Studios, one of YouTube’s largest networks, for $500 million, a deal that makes Disney a major online video distributor and should help draw more teens into the Disney entertainment empire. Read more of this post

How a deal with Comcast could force Apple to cede tight control over its products

How a deal with Comcast could force Apple to cede tight control over its products

By Brian Fung, Updated: March 24 at 11:44 am

Years after a cryptic claim by Steve Jobs that he’d “finally cracked” the TV business — a statement that’s led nowhere so far — Apple’s trying its hand at television again, this time with a streaming entertainment service that’s reportedly launching with the help of Comcast. Read more of this post

Candy Crush: Play it again; The makers of the mobile game insist a secret sauce justifies their multibillion dollar valuation

March 23, 2014 3:02 pm

Candy Crush: Play it again

By Tim Bradshaw and Richard Milne

The makers of the mobile game insist a secret sauce justifies their multibillion dollar valuation

On a sunny spring morning in San Francisco, thousands of gamer geeks huddle together in a dark room, all fretting over when to deploy the lollipop hammer. Read more of this post

Firms Find Ways to Cut Big-Data Costs; Facebook-Inspired Designs Are Helping Some Companies Build Data Centers On the Cheap

Firms Find Ways to Cut Big-Data Costs

Facebook-Inspired Designs Are Helping Some Companies Build Data Centers On the Cheap

RACHAEL KING

March 23, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET

Hardware costs can add up quickly in the era of big data.

As large companies collect, analyze and store increasing quantities of information, the expense of adding servers, hard drives and other equipment is threatening to crimp their big-data plans. Indeed, hardware sales related to corporate-data projects are expected to more than double to $15.7 billion in 2017 from $7.16 billion last year, according to Wikibon, a Marlborough, Mass., research organization. Read more of this post

The Data Companies Wish They Had; They Know a Lot About Customers, but They’d Like to Know Even More

The Data Companies Wish They Had

They Know a Lot About Customers, but They’d Like to Know Even More

MAX TAVES

Updated March 23, 2014 4:36 p.m. ET

FOR SOME companies, big data isn’t quite big enough yet.

These firms already collect loads of information about their customers and suppliers—but that has only whet their appetites for even more. Some retailers want to see what customers buy from other stores, for instance, while health providers want a real-time rundown on their patients’ vital stats to get an early warning about potential health problems. Read more of this post

Promoting Brands in Real Time With Social Media; Advertisers Watch What’s Trending-and Craft Content to Match

Promoting Brands in Real Time With Social Media

Advertisers Watch What’s Trending—and Craft Content to Match

GEORGIA WELLS

Updated March 23, 2014 7:22 p.m. ET

A still from a video posted by General Electric on Twitter’s Vine app, showing how color moves through liquid. The video has been liked by more than 227,000 viewers, spreading awareness of the GE brand.General Electric  Read more of this post

How Consumers Are Using Big Data; New apps help people find the cheapest flights, improve their diets, become better drivers

How Consumers Are Using Big Data

New apps help people find the cheapest flights, improve their diets, become better drivers

LORA KOLODNY  Read more of this post

Big Data Enters the Classroom; Technological Advances and Privacy Concerns Clash

Big Data Enters the Classroom

Technological Advances and Privacy Concerns Clash

LISA FLEISHER

March 23, 2014 4:35 p.m. ET

With the shift to computerized testing, tablets in the classroom and digitized personal records, schools are collecting more data than ever on how children are doing. Read more of this post

A ‘Crisis’ in Online Ads: One-Third of Traffic Is Bogus; As Digital Advertising Climbs Toward $50 Billion This Year, Marketers Battle Fraudulent Visitors

A ‘Crisis’ in Online Ads: One-Third of Traffic Is Bogus

As Digital Advertising Climbs Toward $50 Billion This Year, Marketers Battle Fraudulent Visitors

SUZANNE VRANICA

March 23, 2014 6:47 p.m. ET

Billions of dollars are flowing into online advertising. But marketers also are confronting an uncomfortable reality: rampant fraud.

About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group.

So-called bot traffic cheats advertisers because marketers typically pay for ads whenever they are loaded in response to users visiting Web pages—regardless of whether the users are actual people.

The fraudsters erect sites with phony traffic and collect payments from advertisers through the middlemen who aggregate space across many sites and resell the space for most Web publishers. The identities of the fraudsters are murky, and they often operate from far-flung places such as Eastern Europe, security experts say.

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Spreadsheets and Global Mayhem; Researchers in several countries are designing mathematical models to predict atrocities and war

Spreadsheets and Global Mayhem

By SOMINI SENGUPTAMARCH 22, 2014

IN this age of fine-grained prediction, a variety of algorithms hover around us all the time to divine what we might buy, whom we might mate with, and whom we are likely to vote for at election time. Now social scientists are using some of these same tools to predict when we are likely to do horrible things to one another. Read more of this post

Jony Ive ‘Is A Much More Controversial Figure’ Inside Apple Than People Realize, Says Apple Author

Jony Ive ‘Is A Much More Controversial Figure’ Inside Apple Than People Realize, Says Apple Author

JAY YAROW TECH  MAR. 22, 2014, 8:03 PM

When Steve Jobs died, he left a gaping hole at the top of Apple.

No matter what you want to believe about Apple, there is no denying that Jobs was the keystone that held Apple together. It was his vision for what consumers would want that led the company’s success for 14 years. Read more of this post

Autodesk has found new life with the maker revolution. (It just took a while)

Autodesk has found new life with the maker revolution. (It just took a while)
BY JAMES ROBINSON
ON MARCH 19, 2014
Autodesk CEO Carl Bass first saw a 3D printer in the mid-1980s. He was the head of his own computer graphics company then and was invited down to a factory to check one out. He expected to walk into a full industrial warehouse and instead found an empty space with a 3D printer the size of a soda machine whirring away in the middle. Read more of this post

HelloSign: The startup that doesn’t want to revolutionize the world; HelloSign offers a mundane enterprise task – legal document signing online; had a new feature that no one in the world would care about – integration with Google Docs

HelloSign: The startup that doesn’t want to revolutionize the world
BY CARMEL DEAMICIS
ON MARCH 21, 2014
The perfect storm of a boring pitch came together in my inbox the other day. A startup calledHelloSign that offers a mundane enterprise task — legal document signing online — had a new feature that no one in the world would care about — integration with Google Docs. It’s the sort of pitch reporters find themselves falling asleep halfway through reading, hitting the delete button with their nose as they pass out on their laptops. Read more of this post

“Netflix for LEGOs” is an awesome idea. But can it scale?

“Netflix for LEGOs” is an awesome idea. But can it scale?
BY DAVID HOLMES
ON MARCH 21, 2014
Today some big news came out from one of the most brilliant “Netflix for X” experiments I’ve ever seen: Netflix for LEGOs.
The company is called Pley (formerly PleyGo) and it just announced a $6.75 million Series A round led by Allegro Venture Partners. (Fortune reported the news yesterday). Since launching last April, the company says it’s sold over 15,000 subscriptions and shipped more than 75,000 sets. Read more of this post

Why Apple should make its own TV shows, just like Netflix

Why Apple should make its own TV shows, just like Netflix
By John McDuling @jmcduling 2 hours ago
Netflix is doing it. So is Sony. And Yahoo. Even Amazon is getting in on the act. Microsoft has been doing it for years. Acquiring or producing exclusive content, that is.
Now, as it confronts slowing growth in the sales of its devices, maybe it’s something Apple should consider as well. Read more of this post

Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?

Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?
BY GEORGE PACKERFEBRUARY 17, 2014
In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandwich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.” Construction by Ian Wright. Read more of this post

Adios, 3-to-5 day money transfers; Ripple Labs is building a fast, global money transfer and exchange infrastructure — and taking a few pages from the book of bitcoin

Adios, 3-to-5 day money transfers
March 21, 2014: 3:10 PM ET
Ripple Labs is building a fast, global money transfer and exchange infrastructure — and taking a few pages from the book of bitcoin.
By David Z. Morris
FORTUNE — On March 18th, the National Automated Clearing House Association declared that it was leading the way towards same-day transaction settlements through the ACH system, which is used in the majority of U.S. interbank transfers, credit card payments, and a growing percentage of bill payments. Anyone who has ever conducted a transfer through an institution using ACH will welcome the initiative – most ACH transfers still take 3-5 days, not including weekends, even between major U.S. banks. Read more of this post

The Best Enterprise Software Companies And CEOs To Work For In 2014

Louis Columbus, Contributor
3/18/2014 @ 9:34PM |16,404 views
The Best Enterprise Software Companies And CEOs To Work For In 2014
Every year Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) publishes their annual list of theGlobal 100 software leaders. The study’s home page provides key take-awaysand a link to the full study, which you can download for free here. PWC strives to create a fair and impartial index of the world’s most successful software companies, and it’s an excellent read. Read more of this post