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Virtual View, one of Britain's first augmented reality apps for the property sector has raised $500,000 in funding.

The app allows property buyers to view 3D floor plans, galleries and video content by simply scanning an image.

Background in property

Investors in Virtual View include a number of high net worth individuals with backgrounds in the financial and property sectors.

Founder Dominic Versace worked as an estate agent for the past 20 years and saw the opportunity to offer agents more data on how buyers interact with brochures:

With the competition between estate agencies now greater than ever, property marketing has become increasingly important

Booming market in London

Britain's property market continues to be a seller's market with the London borough of Haringey recording 9.5% month-on-month price increases for asking prices in March.

Virtual View's clients Fine & Country, Campsie, Orchard & Shipman, Newman, Jackson Stops and Harrods.

In the future they hope to attract agents specialising in overseas buyers, who often buy properties without seeing them in person.
Virtual View is available for download on iOS and Android.

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Virtual View raises $500k to expand augmented reality for Britain's booming property sector - UKTN (UK Tech News)

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Virtual View, one of Britain's first augmented reality apps for the property sector has raised $500,000 in funding. The app allows property buyers to view 3D floor plans, galleries and video content by simply scanning an image. Background in property Investors in Virtual View include a number of high net worth individuals with backgrounds in ...

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Real-time Advertising spend increased 80% in 2013

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Real-time Advertising spend increased 80% in 2013

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Real-time advertising spend increased 80% in the UK in 2013 and now accounts for 14% of the display market, according to data included in a new infographic.
Last year real-time ad revenue in the UK reached €204m, compared to €82m in France and €113m in Germany.

The graphic also highlights the growth of premium real-time display and video inventory, as well as the variety of brand formats available.

Econsultancy recently published a Real-Time Marketing Report in association with Monetate, which is based on a survey of almost 900 client-side and agency respondents.

The report focuses on a range of channels alongside real-time display advertising, revealing that although most respondents recognise the importance of delivering winning experiences to their customers in a near instantaneous manner, marketers are finding real-time marketing to be full of challenges.

Some 85% of respondents said it is fundamental to their future business success to provide experiences that are responsive to customers based on real-time behaviours.

Furthermore, those that are currently implementing real-time marketing reported a 26% uplift in their conversion rate on average.

For an in-depth look at the real-time marketing industry download the Econsultancy report, but please also enjoy this fine infographic from Infectious Media...

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Real-time advertising spend increased 80% in 2013: infographic

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Real-time advertising spend increased 80% in the UK in 2013 and now accounts for 14% of the display market, according to data included in a new infographic. Last year real-time ad revenue in the UK reached €204m, compared to €82m in France and €113m in Germany.

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#nomakeupselfie raises £2m in donations not even a Cancer Research UK campaign

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#nomakeupselfie raises £2m in donations not even a Cancer Research UK campaign

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Cancer Research UK: #nomakeupselfie trend raises £2m for the charity

On Tuesday, women started posting pictures of themselves on Facebook wearing no makeup, with the hashtag #breastcancerawareness and #nomakeupselfie.

Within hours, the trend had been picked up and started to spread, although it was met with criticism and ridicule along the way - some men and women had started posting parody pictures of themselves in full-faces of make-up.

Despite this, people have raised more than £2m for Cancer Research alone. The charity posted messages on its Facebook page stating, "Thousands of you are posting #cancerawareness #nomakeupselfie pictures and many have asked if the campaign is ours. It's not, but we love that people want to get involved!"

The statement appeared alongside a picture of one of Cancer Research's staff holding up a sign, saying: "We *heart* your #nomakupselfie! If you want to help #beatcancersooner text BEAT to 70099 to donate £3."

Carolan Davidge, director of communications at Cancer Research UK said: "Thanks to people choosing to donate to us as part of the #nomakeupselfie trend, we've been overwhelmed with donations and support in the past 48 hours.

"We've raised over £2m so far, and the #nomakeupselfie is still going strong. T

"The trend isn't something Cancer Research UK started, so it's been fantastic to see so many people getting involved and wanting to use their selfie to raise money for our life-saving research."

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Cancer Research UK receives £2m donations despite not starting #nomakeupselfie trend

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On Tuesday, women started posting pictures of themselves on Facebook wearing no makeup, with the hashtag #breastcancerawareness and #nomakeupselfie. Within hours, the trend had been picked up and started to spread, although it was met with criticism and ridicule along the way - some men and women had started posting parody pictures of themselves in full-faces of make-up.

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New Chipotle campaign in the UK and new 22-video short series 'Farmed and Dangerous 

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New Chipotle campaign in the UK and new 22-video short series 'Farmed and Dangerous 

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Chipotle: Mother is the creative agency for the brand's first UK campaign

The print and poster ads show pictures of Chipotle's food along with instructions on how to pronounce the brand's name. The ads also feature the strapline "delicious however you say it".

The campaign will appear in London - where Chipotle has six restaurants - in the coming weeks.

Chipotle appointed Mother earlier this year. The agency is tasked with building Chipotle's brand in the UK and supporting its European business.

Sara Tate, managing director at Mother, said: "Chipotle is the perfect Mother client: creatively brave with a keen conscience and a big heart. Working with brands like this is what we live for.

"Partnering with Chipotle at this stage of their business growth is hugely exciting and we're proud to be working with such a values-driven client."

This is not the first time that Mother and Chipotle have worked together. In 2004, the restaurant hired the agency's New York office to work on its advertising, but the relationship lasted only two years.

Chipotle churned through four different shops in the US between 2004 and 2009, before abandoning the idea of working with advertising agencies altogether in 2011.

Since then, Chipotle in the US has paired with Creative Artists Agency to make short, music-led films, including one featuring the country singer Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's The Scientist, which won the first branded content Grand Prix at Cannes in 2012.

More recently, Chipotle backed an online TV series on Hulu called Farmed and Dangerous. The comedy show did not contain any obvious branding, but the plot focused on farming practices, which Chipotle is vocal about in its marketing.

For a full review of 'Farmed and Dangerous' click here.

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Chipotle helps the British with pronunciation in first UK campaign

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The print and poster ads show pictures of Chipotle's food along with instructions on how to pronounce the brand's name. The ads also feature the strapline "delicious however you say it". The campaign will appear in London - where Chipotle has six restaurants - in the coming weeks.

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96% of consumers find video useful when buying online

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96% of consumers find video useful when buying online

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Nearly three quarters of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service if they can watch a video explaining it beforehand.

This research comes from a new study by Animoto, designed to explore how online video impacts consumer decisions and drives brand engagement for small businesses.

I discussed the power of video embedded landing pages a few months ago in 10 excellent video-embedded landing pages.

Video is one of the best and most persuasive of all visual tools as it's capable of delivering large amounts of information quickly and succinctly. Especially if it's about a new service or product.

Videos also increase the length of a visitor's stay. If you feature your own face, or the face of an employee in a video, a visitor is more likely to trust you. Videos can help strengthen your online presence, and videos can also help you rank higher in SERPs.

What types of videos do customers watch the most?

Ben Davis looked at the best examples of instructional videos for small businesses in his post 10 startup explainer videos I actually enjoyed.

The best types of instructional videos are the ones where the message is delivered clearly and succinctly, but also in a manner that either humorous, inventive or engaging.

The best of these videos aren't necessarily high-budget and beautifully shot. All it takes is a little charm and personality to be a winner.

Click the example below for an example of amateur instructional videos that work brilliantly.

I don't care about lawn-care, but my goodness, after watching the following video I suddenly care. I care a lot. I don't even have a lawn! It's the sheer passion, knowledge and charm of Paul Stoltzfus, the owner of this USA lawn care business that keeps you hooked.

Online video watching habits

94% of consumers watched a video online last week

76% of smartphone owners watch videos at least once per week from their phones

40% of 18-24 year-olds watch videos more than 10 times per week.

With the huge rise in the number of people watching videos on smartphones, thanks to better devices and faster connectivity, it's important to host your videos on a site that is already mobile optimised, such as YouTube or Vimeo. The link van be directly embedded on your landing or product page.

Uploading the video to YouTube also means having access to a social network that outperforms outperforms Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter for user attention and retention. With an average time of 3m49s spent on Youtube and 5.13 pages viewed per visit.

I'm sure you've already watched the Dollar Shave Club video numerous times, but it really is the perfect storm of entertaining delivery, humour, brand awareness, product description and advertising.

For more on YouTube strategy check out YouTube strategy for brands and Further advice on YouTube strategy for brands.

The impact of video on sales

58% of consumers consider companies that produce video content to be more trustworthy.

71% of consumers say that videos lead to a positive impression of a company.

77% of consumers consider companies that create online video as more engaged with customers.

Just take a look at GoPro's dazzling YouTube strategy.

The major success in GoPro's content marketing strategy is the way it so naturally and effortlessly marries its content to its product. It's an obvious fit. The rigorous testing of GoPro's technology through the most breath-taking displays of human bravery, captured by the very camera that's being marketed.

Users who respond to a brand's content will naturally gravitate to that brand in other channels and areas of commerce.
For more stats from Animoto's research check out the infographic here.

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96% of consumers find video useful when buying online

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Nearly three quarters of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service if they can watch a video explaining it beforehand. This research comes from a new study by Animoto, designed to explore how online video impacts consumer decisions and drives brand engagement for small businesses.

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Not sure where this fits in - is this something for Domino's to be concerned with?

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Online fast food ordering veteran Just Eat, which lets hungry web users in 13 global markets order a food delivery from a range of local takeaways, is preparing to float on the London Stock Exchange.

It's aiming to raise £100 million from the IPO, with an expected valuation in the range of £700 million to £900 million, according the .

Earlier this month, Just Eat acquired EPOS maker Meal2Go with the intention of selling its specialist restaurant electronic point of sale tech to its takeaway partners as another string to its bow to encourage them to sign up to its ordering platform.

More acquisitions are likely on the cards for Just Eat, with CEO David Buttress telling the FT the company is looking to expand through "potential acquisitions".

Just Eat, which was founded in Denmark back in 2001 but is headquartered in London, has made a swathe of acquisitions over the years - including Spain's SinDelantal (in 2012), London's Urbanbite (in 2011) and Canada's GrubCanada (also in 2011), to name three.

In a document announcing its intention to IPO, Just Eat said today its largest markets are the U.K., Denmark, France, Canada, Ireland and Spain. It also noted that its platform processes almost 900 real-time orders per minute at peak times in the U.K.

Detailing its financial performance in 2013, Just Eat said it generated revenue of £96.8 million and underlying EBITDA of £14.1 million - representing growth of 61.9% and 518.0%, respectively, compared to 2012.

Within its "more established markets" of the U.K. and Denmark, last year Just Eat generated combined revenue of £80.4 million and underlying EBITDA of £30.2 million - representing growth of 57.3% and 69.9%, respectively vs 2012.

It said this performance highlights the potential of its scalable business model in markets where it has "clearly established leading positions and sufficient scale". It added that it will therefore be using money raised from the IPO to develop "less mature and new markets" to pursue further growth.

Just Eat flagged up what it called its "modest" delivery market penetration in the majority of its existing markets (20% in the UK; 49% in Denmark; <10% in other jurisdictions) as evidence of significant opportunity for further growth across its geographic footprint.

Another growth strategy for Just Eat is food order collection - meaning users of its platform will be able to place food orders for self-collection not just for delivery - with the company describing collection as a "largely untapped and significant opportunity".

"We believe collection will become a growing part of our business," Buttress told the FT. He also said Just Eat would be broadening the range of restaurants that customers can order from, branching out from the smaller takeaway groups that current dominate its service to add higher-quality eateries. "We want to give consumers the full choice of restaurants," he said.

Just Eat's IPO intention announcement document also flags up the apparent added value its platform offers takeaway businesses, specifically noting that online orders increase order yield by an average of 30% vs traditional telephone orders.

The company said the next step on the road to its IPO will be the publication of a Prospectus in the "coming weeks". It's expecting the IPO to be completed during April 2014.

Just Eat has also appointed two new independent non-exec directors to its board in preparation for the IPO - named by the FT as Andrew Griffith, chief financial officer of BSkyB, and Gwyn Burr, a former customer services director at Asda - with a third non-exec director set to be appointed shortly.

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Just Eat Preps IPO In London, Aiming To Raise £100M

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Online fast food ordering veteran Just Eat, which lets hungry web users in 13 global markets order a food delivery from a range of local takeaways, is preparing to float on the London Stock Exchange. It's aiming to raise £100 million from the IPO, with an expected valuation in the range of £700 million to £900 million, according the .

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Now this is literally mobile-first: Burberry have used Instagram to announce the launch of a new fragrance campaign featuring Cara Delevingne and Kate Moss. Say goodbye to the press release, and hello to the instantly-sharable-photo-release.

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Now this is literally mobile-first: Burberry have used Instagram to announce the launch of a new fragrance campaign featuring Cara Delevingne and Kate Moss. Say goodbye to the press release, and hello to the instantly-sharable-photo-release.

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Useful?

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It's the second year of operation for TechStars London and the accelerator has just named the 11 companies in its 2014 cohort - which this year come from eight different countries including the U.S., Estonia, Germany, Spain, Israel, Ireland, South Korea and the UK.

Last year's debut TechStars London cohort included several fintech companies but our favourite, OP3Nvoice, played in the search sphere - offering APIs that make voice and video data searchable by translating its audio to text.

TechStars London's Jon Bradford said applications to this year's program numbered around 1,500 - pushing up on the ~1,300 received last year, continuing to demonstrate the global pull of the TechStars brand.

Companies gaining a place on the 2014 program include several that have attracted funding already. Five of the 11 have already raised $4 million in total. The cohort also includes two previously successful entrepreneurs. And the entire cohort already comprises more than 50 staff in total. Not all of whom are coming to London for the three-month bootcamp, obviously. TechStars said it had to get 13 prospective entrepreneur visas ahead of the program's kick off.

Bradford said the 2014 line-up "really challenges" people's perceptions of the kind of companies that participate in an accelerator. "Experienced entrepreneurs are much more pragmatic and recognise what they know and what they don't," he told TechCrunch when asked what more established startups are seeking to get out of the accelerator process.

"Teams with funding and product benefit hugely from TechStars," he added. "It allows them to concentrate on building their business without the need for raising funding. They can use the program to accelerate customer traction and engagement through the network we expose them to."

What of last year's TechStars cohort? IPTVbeat, which does real-time analytics for TV viewing habits, has since raised $2m in seed funding, according to Bradford.

He adds that there are a number of others "who are looking at chunky term sheets at the moment".

The full list of TechStars' 2014 London teams follows below. Demo Day for the teams will take place in London on June 20.

Avuba (Germany) is fixing banking by building a mobile first bank service.

Eat In My Seat (U.K./U.S.) allows you to skip the queue at venues by ordering directly to your seat.

eRated (Israel) lets you use one reputation score in a world of marketplaces.

Good Audience (U.S.) increases your reach and gets your brand, product or service in front of over 400 million active social media users.

Lingvist (Estonia) is an adaptive language learning tool that significantly reduces the time needed to learn a new language.

Magnific (U.K.) connects readers, writers and curators for a more personalised reading experience.

Proximus (Spain) is an analytics engine that examines the behaviour of consumers using innovative indoor geolocation technology.

Pubble (Ireland) uses everywhere your customers live online to build an active community on your website.

Smile Family (Korea) is a mobile community for mums.

Spatch (U.S.) is a new decentralized communication protocol built on top of email.

Zzish (U.K.) helps developers make education apps more engaging and effective.

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TechStars London Unveils Its 2014 Teams -- Five Of The 11 Have Already Raised $4M In Total

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It's the second year of operation for TechStars London and the accelerator has just named the 11 companies in its 2014 cohort - which this year come from eight different countries including the U.S., Estonia, Germany, Spain, Israel, Ireland, South Korea and the UK.

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AOL ON - launches premium video in the UK 

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AOL ON - launches premium video in the UK 

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Too little too late in the world of video content?

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Today AOL UK launches its ' AOL On ' Network in the UK. This is a premium video syndication platform that includes both curated and original content. The UK is the first market outside of North America for AOL On. A dedicated app will be available in the UK in Apple Store and Google Play in early April.

The platform has 750,000 pieces of video. UK content providers at launch include Endemol beyond, Channel 4 News, ITN, Scripps Networks International, MyMovies, Zoom. In and Parentchannel.tv. Little Dot Studios will be providing clips from UK reality shows such as Supernanny and Embarrassing Bodies.

AOL On UK covers news, entertainment, style and tech, and this is distributed through a network of publishers including Trinity Mirror, Telegraph Media Group, TalkTalk, Local World, Videojug and TVGuide.co.uk.

AOL's owned and operated destinations, The Huffington Post UK, AOL, Parentdish, MyDaily and - of course - TechCrunch, are also part of network.

In the US, AOL On hit the number one spot in comScore's video category with four billion ad streams, and a billion content streams, in part down to the use of original programming with celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and Nicole Richie.

AOL On is an extension of Be On (end-to-end video platform for brands) and its video trading platform Adap.tv.

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AOL Launches Premium Video In UK, With Mainstream Partners Like Endemol, ITN

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Today AOL UK launches its 'AOL On' Network in the UK. This is a premium video syndication platform that includes both curated and original content. The UK is the first market outside of North America for AOL On. The AOL On app will be available in the UK in the Apple App and Google Play stores in e...

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It's barely been a year since it launched...

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Twitter just announced that it will be removing its #Music app from the App Store "later this afternoon." For those who have already downloaded it, the app will stop working on April 18.

#Music's disappearance is no surprise. After a high-profile launch early last year, the app's popularity waned, and by the fall it was regarded as a failure, with both AllThingsD and The New York Times reporting on its likely demise.

With the app, Twitter aimed to highlight music that was trending on the service. In hindsight, however, it suffered from being a largely passive consumption experience, and from its isolation from the context of Twitter's broader conversations.

Plus, if you ask me, the hashtag in the name always looked pretty silly.

While the #Music app is being shut down, Twitter says it will "continue to experiment with new ways to bring you great content based on the music activity we see every day on Twitter."

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Twitter #Music To Be Pulled From App Store Today, Will Shut Down Completely On April 18

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Twitter just announced that it will be removing its #Music app from the App Store "later this afternoon." For those who have already downloaded it, the app will stop working on April 18. #Music's disappearance is no surprise.

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Indie band Vulfpeck have very cleverly 'gamed' Spotify, by releasing Sleepify, a totally silent 8-hour album into Spotify to accompany an 8-hour sleep cycle. They're going to use the proceeds of their royalties on it to fund a tour. And Spotify seem to playing along too. Good on them.

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Indie band Vulfpeck have very cleverly 'gamed' Spotify, by releasing Sleepify, a totally silent 8-hour album into Spotify to accompany an 8-hour sleep cycle. They're going to use the proceeds of their royalties on it to fund a tour. And Spotify seem to playing along too. Good on them.

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Will Ahmed is the Founder and CEO at WHOOP, a company that has developed next generation wearable technology for optimizing human performance. Today, WHOOP works with professional athletes in every sports league.

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Spotify Stunt Pays For Band's Tour With A Silent Album - PSFK

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Will Ahmed is the Founder and CEO at WHOOP, a company that has developed next generation wearable technology for optimizing human performance. Today, WHOOP works with professional athletes in every sports league.

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Flappy Bird coming back to the App store

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Flappy Bird coming back to the App store

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Not that exciting, I've never played it anyhow, but thought I'd share.

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I hope you enjoyed your life over the past month and a half; Flappy Bird is coming back to the App Store after its removal earlier this year, according to the game's developer Dong Nguyen. Gawker spotted the dev's tweeted response to a question about whether or not it would ever return, which is an unequivocal "Yes."

As you can see, Nguyen doesn't give a timeline but does say it won't be "soon," which suggests possibly there's some additional development going into the game, or at least some kind of preparatory action so that Nguyen can deal with the life upheaval that's bound to follow. Nguyen left the door open for a Flappy Bird return in his extended Rolling Stone profile, but this confirms the bird won't stay grounded forever.

I've already got the game on my phone, and I didn't even try to sell it on eBay for tens of thousands of dollars, so I'm not sweating it, but this is good (bad?) news for people who haven't yet tasted sweet pixelated feather.
Image credit: Bryce Durbin.

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Yes, Flappy Bird Will Return To The App Store

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I hope you enjoyed your life over the past month and a half; Flappy Bird is coming back to the App Store after its removal earlier this year, according to the game's developer Dong Nguyen. Gawker spotted the dev's tweeted response to a question about whether or not it would ever return, which is an unequivocal "Yes."

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Nate Silver, who shot to fame during the 2012 US presidential election, has launched his own data journalism start-up, FiveThirtyEight. And his launch manifesto is spells out in compelling detail how data will come to define journalism in the near future.

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Nate Silver, who shot to fame during the 2012 US presidential election, has launched his own data journalism start-up, FiveThirtyEight. And his launch manifesto is spells out in compelling detail how data will come to define journalism in the near future.

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FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization. Let me explain what we mean by that, and why we think the intersection of data and journalism is so important.

If you're a casual reader of FiveThirtyEight, you may associate us with election forecasting, and in particular with the 2012 presidential election, when our election model "called" 50 out of 50 states right.

Certainly we had a good night. But this was and remains a tremendously overrated accomplishment. Other forecasters, using broadly similar methods, performed just as well or nearly as well, correctly predicting the outcome in 48 or 49 or 50 states. It wasn't all that hard to figure out that President Obama, ahead in the overwhelming majority of nonpartisan polls in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Iowa and Wisconsin, was the favorite to win them, and was therefore the favorite to win the Electoral College.

Instead, our forecasts stood out in comparison to others in the mainstream media. Commentators as prestigious as George F. Will and Michael Barone predicted not just a Mitt Romney win, but a Romney sweep in most or all of the swing states. Meanwhile, some news reporters defaulted to characterizing the races as "toss-ups" when the evidence suggested otherwise.

The other reason I say our election forecasts were overrated is because they didn't represent the totality, or even the most important part, of our journalism at FiveThirtyEight. We also covered topics ranging from the increasing acceptance of gay marriage to the election of the new pope, along with subjects in sports, science, lifestyle and economics. Relatively little of this coverage entailed making predictions. Instead, it usually involved more preliminary steps in the data journalism process: collecting data, organizing data, exploring data for meaningful relationships, and so forth. Data journalists have the potential to add value in each of these ways, just as other types of journalists can add value by gathering evidence and writing stories.

The breadth of our coverage will be much clearer at this new version of FiveThirtyEight, which is launching Monday under the auspices of ESPN. We've expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas - politics, economics, science, life and sports.

Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we'll have interactive graphics and features. Within a couple of months we'll launch a podcast, and we'll be collaborating with ESPN Films and Grantland to produce original documentary films. You'll find us on television and radio, and on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We'll share data and code on Github.

Our logo depicts a fox (we call him Fox No. 9) as an allusion to a phrase originally attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." We take a pluralistic approach and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways.

By no means do we think that everything can be broken down into a formula or equation. On the contrary, one of our roles will be to critique incautious uses of statistics when they arise elsewhere in news coverage. At other times, we'll explore ways that consumers can use data to their advantage and level the playing field against corporations and governments.

Our methods are not meant to replace "traditional" or conventional journalism. We have the utmost admiration for journalists who gather original information and report original stories. Our staff includes alumni from traditional news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Washington Post (along with others from digital news organizations, blogs and from outside journalism entirely).

Still, I would never have launched FiveThirtyEight in 2008, and I would not have chosen to broaden its coverage so extensively now, unless I thought there were some need for it in the marketplace. Conventional news organizations on the whole are lacking in data journalism skills, in my view. Some of this is a matter of self-selection. Students who enter college with the intent to major in journalism or communications have above-average test scores in reading and writing, but below-average scores in mathematics. Furthermore, young people with strong math skills will normally have more alternatives to journalism when they embark upon their careers and may enter other fields.

This is problematic. The news media, as much as it's been maligned, still plays a central a role in disseminating knowledge. More than 80 percent of American adults spend at least some time with the news each day. (By comparison, about 25 percent of Americans of all ages are enrolled in educational programs.)

Meanwhile, almost everything from our sporting events to our love lives now leaves behind a data trail. Much of this data is available freely or cheaply. There is no lack of interest in exploring and exploiting it: Google searches for terms like "big data" and "data analytics" have grown at exponential rates, almost as quickly as the quantity of data itself has grown.

And yet, as I describe in my book, "big data" has not yet translated into widespread gains in economic conditions, human welfare or technological growth. Some individual companies and industries, and some branches of science, have employed data in constructive ways. But "Moneyball" stories are more the exception than the rule.

Journalism is far from the whole problem. Science, government, academia and the private sector also have struggled to find the signal in the noise. But journalism is our chosen profession. There is both a need for more data journalism and an opportunity to build a business out of it.

That opportunity has required us to think deeply about the strengths and weaknesses of conventional approaches to journalism. One of our first attempts came in the form of a two-dimensional chart, which I shared several weeks ago with Jack Dickey of Time magazine. The chart posits a distinction between quantitative versus qualitative approaches on the one hand and rigorous versus anecdotal approaches on the other.

The point is that data journalism isn't just about using numbers as opposed to words. To be clear, our approach at FiveThirtyEight will be quantitative - there will be plenty of numbers at this site. But using numbers is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce good works of journalism.

Indeed, as more human behaviors are being measured, the line between the quantitative and the qualitative has blurred. I admire Brian Burke, who led the U.S. men's hockey team on an Olympic run in 2010 and who has been an outspoken advocate for gay-rights causes in sports. But Burke said something on the hockey analytics panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last month that I took issue with. He expressed concern that statistics couldn't measure a hockey player's perseverance. For instance, he asked, would one of his forwards retain control of the puck when Zdeno Chara, the Boston Bruins' intimidating 6'9″ defenseman, was bearing down on him?

The thing is, this is something you could measure. You could watch video of all Bruins games and record how often different forwards kept control of the puck. Soon, the NHL may install motion-tracking cameras in its arenas, as other sports leagues have done, creating a record of each player's x- and y-coordinates throughout the game and making this data collection process much easier.

I would ask a lot of questions of this data if I had it. For instance:

Is it smart for a player to keep control of the puck when Chara (or a similarly gifted defensemen) has him in his sights? Might the player yield fewer turnovers if he passed the puck instead?

Would measuring a player's perseverance give us meaningful information beyond what is reflected in "box score" statistics, such as goals, assists and plus-minus?

Do players who persevere under threat match those who are regarded as "tough" or as having lot of "heart" by coaches, scouts and commentators? If not, is the metric flawed, or are the coaches biased?

The quality of hockey statistics is fairly poor compared to those for baseball or basketball, so I can understand Burke's skepticism. But often, general managers and CEOs and op-ed columnists use the lack of data as an excuse to avoid having to examine their premises.

At other times, commentators cite statistics even as they decry their uselessness. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote a blog post on the eve of the 2012 election that critiqued those of us who were "too busy looking at data on paper instead of what's in front of us." Instead, "all the vibrations" were right for a Romney victory, she wrote.

Among other things, Noonan cited the number of Romney yard signs, and the number of people at his rallies, as evidence that he was bound to win. But these "vibrations" are, in fact, quantifiable. You could hire a team of stringers to drive around randomly selected neighborhoods in swing states and count the yard signs. And news accounts routinely estimate the number of attendees at political rallies. Noonan could have formulated a testable hypothesis: Do yard signs predict election outcomes better than polls do?

The problem is not the failure to cite quantitative evidence. It's doing so in a way that can be anecdotal and ad-hoc, rather than rigorous and empirical, and failing to ask the right questions of the data.

In contrast, plenty of journalistic methods are rigorous without being quantitative. Investigative reporting, which synthesizes multiple threads of evidence to find the truth behind a story, would fall into this category. Explanatory journalism, including the new ventures launched by Ezra Klein at Vox Media and David Leonhardt at The New York Times, will often do so. Masterful works of history and biography, from Robert Caro to Richard Ben Cramer, also belong here.

However, I acknowledge some problems with the chart and its two-dimensional conception of journalism. For one, in its aversion to anecdotal evidence, this analysis is too dismissive of the important role that journalists play in uncovering new information.

You may have heard the phrase the plural of anecdote is not data. It turns out that this is a misquote. The original aphorism, by the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was just the opposite: The plural of anecdote is data.

Wolfinger's formulation makes sense: Data does not have a virgin birth. It comes to us from somewhere. Someone set up a procedure to collect and record it. Sometimes this person is a scientist, but she also could be a journalist.

Take, for example, endorsements made by elected officials (say, senators and governors) during the presidential nomination process. Headlines such as "Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer endorses Mitt Romney" might seem like just the sort of slow-news-day story that journalists make too much of. Indeed, any single endorsement is unlikely to make much difference. It turns out, however, that the sum total of these endorsements has quite a bit of predictive power. A team of political scientists, in their book "The Party Decides," found that intra-party endorsements often out-predict the polls in the nomination process, especially in the early going.

So perhaps we should think more carefully about the process by which anecdote is transformed into data and information. We might break it down into four rough steps:

The first step is the collection of data or evidence. For a traditional journalist, this is likely to involve some combination of interviewing, documentary research and first-person observation. But data journalists also have ways of collecting information, such as by commissioning polls, performing experiments or scraping data from websites.

The next step is organization. Traditional journalists have a well-established means of organizing information: They formulate a news story. The story might proceed chronologically, in order of importance (the inverted pyramid) or in some other fashion. Data journalists, meanwhile, can organize information by running descriptive statistics on it, by placing it into a relational database or by building a data visualization from it. Whether or not a picture is worth a thousand words, there is value in these approaches both as additional modes of storytelling and as foundations for further analysis.

The third step is explanation. In journalistic terms, this might mean going beyond the who, what, where and when questions to those of why and how. In traditional journalism, stories of this nature are sometimes referred to as "news analysis" or "explanatory journalism." Data journalists, again, have their own set of techniques - principally running various types of statistical tests to look for relationships in the data.

Let's pause here for a moment. Up through the first two steps, traditional journalists looked very good. The original reporting they do is tremendously valuable. Besides, most of us learn by metaphors and stories. So traditional journalism's method of organizing information into stories has a lot of appeal when news happens.

By the third stage, however, traditional journalism has begun to produce uneven results - at least in my view. Take the best-selling book "Double Down" by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. It contains a lot of original and extremely valuable reporting on the 2012 campaign. Its prose style doesn't match mine, but it's a crisp and compelling read. But Halperin and Heilemann largely fail at explaining how Barack Obama won re-election, or why the campaign unfolded as it did.

For example, they cite three factors they say were responsible for Mitt Romney's decline in the polls in early mid-September: the comparatively inferior Republican convention, Romney's response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and Romney's gaffe-filled trip to London. In fact, only one of these events had any real effect on the polls: the conventions, which often swing polls in one direction or another. (This does not require any advanced analysis - it's obvious by looking at the polls immediately before and after each event.)

Explanation is more difficult than description, especially if one demands some understanding of causality. It's something every field struggles with; there are lots and lots of wrongheaded statistical analyses, for instance.

Still, there are some handicaps that conventional journalism faces when it seeks to move beyond reporting on the news to explaining it. One problem is the notion of "objectivity" as it's applied in traditional newsrooms, where it's often taken to be synonymous with neutrality or nonpartisanship. I prefer the scientific definition of objectivity, where it means something closer to the truth beyond our (inherently subjective) perceptions. Leave that aside for now, however. The journalistic notion of objectivity, however flawed, at least creates some standard by which facts are introduced and presented to readers.

But while individual facts are rigorously scrutinized and checked for accuracy in traditional newsrooms, attempts to infer causality sometimes are not, even when they are eminently falsifiable. (The increased speed of the news-gathering process no doubt makes this problem worse.) Instead, while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of "objective" journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of "opinion journalism." My disdain for opinion journalism (such as in the form of op-ed columns) is well established, but my chief problem with it is that it doesn't seem to abide by the standards of either journalistic or scientific objectivity. Sometimes it doesn't seem to abide by any standard at all.

A more data-centric approach is perhaps most helpful, however, when it comes to the fourth step, generalization.

Suppose you did have a credible explanation of why the 2012 election, or the 2014 Super Bowl, or the War of 1812, unfolded as it did. How much does this tell you about how elections or football games or wars play out in general, under circumstances that are similar in some ways but different in other ways?

These are hard questions. No matter how well you understand a discrete event, it can be difficult to tell how much of it was unique to the circumstances, and how many of its lessons are generalizable into principles. But data journalism at least has some coherent methods of generalization. They are borrowed from the scientific method. Generalization is a fundamental concern of science, and it's achieved by verifying hypotheses through predictions or repeated experiments.

As my book describes, predictions in the sciences (especially the social sciences) are often fairly poor. They usually get better after repeated trials and iterations. But they require a lot of work. One of our sports journalists, Benjamin Morris, suggests that you have almost no hope of beating Las Vegas unless you've spent at least 100 hours studying the betting line in question. I can imagine a few exceptions, but it's a wise rule of thumb.

By contrast, in conventional journalism, predictions are often treated as a parlor game, involving little effort and less accountability. (A variety of studies on the predictions made by McLaughlin Group panelists, for instance, find that they are no more accurate than random guesses.) Predictions are usually outsourced to opinion journalists, who may have less subject-matter knowledge than reporters do.

To reiterate: It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. But one of the potential advantages of data journalism is that it generalizes better than traditional approaches, particularly as data sets increase in scale to become larger and more complex. Let me explain this by means of a metaphor.

The books in my office - I have about 500 - are arranged by color. It's quite aesthetically pleasing. It's not all that convenient, however, when I have to track down a book. I have to remember its color, or I have to scan through every row and column of the shelf. The color-coding system is perhaps a little better as an organizational method than shelving the books at random, but not a lot better. Still, with 500 books, it's a manageable problem. In the worst case, I might spend a few minutes looking for a book. I'm willing to make that trade in exchange for having a prettier bookshelf.

But what if instead of having 500 books, I had 50,000, or 50 million? At that point, I'd need a more rigorous approach toward classifying the books - alphabetical order, or the Dewey decimal system, or whatever else. Otherwise, I might spend hours trying to find my copy of "What It Takes."

The point is that there's a trade-off between vividness and scalability. Narrative accounts of individual news events can be informative and pleasurable to read, and they can have a lot of intrinsic value whether or not they reveal some larger truth. But it can be extraordinarily hard to make generalizations about news events unless you stop to classify their most essential details according to some numbering or ordering system, turning anecdote into data.

By implication, one of the challenges that FiveThirtyEight faces is figuring out how to make data journalism vivid and accessible to a broad audience without sacrificing rigor and accuracy. We have several strategies for this; understanding which ones will work is going to require some experimentation.

One problem with the four-stage process I outlined above is that it implies these steps proceed in a linear fashion, when that isn't always the case. Often, a failure of prediction or explanation will compel you to retreat to an earlier stage and collect more data or organize it in a better way. By contrast, the most problematic news stories are often those that leap ahead in the process, drawing grand conclusions from thin evidence.

We're not planning to abandon the story form at FiveThirtyEight. In fact, sometimes our stories will highlight individual cases, anecdotes. When we provide these examples, however, we want to be sure that we've contextualized them in the right way. Sometimes it can be extraordinarily valuable to explore an outlier in some detail. But the premise of the story should be to explain why the outlier is an outlier, rather than indicating some broader trend. To classify these stories appropriately, we'll have to do a lot of work in the background before we publish them.

All of this takes time. That's why we've elected to sacrifice something else as opposed to accuracy or accessibility. The sacrifice is speed - we're rarely going to be the first organization to break news or to comment on a story. We've hired an extraordinary team of editors, led by Mike Wilson. In contrast to our writers, our editors largely do not have quantitative backgrounds. Instead, they will serve as the first (and second and third) line of defense to ensure that our coverage is both accurate and accessible. Where we do react more quickly, such as on DataLab, our blog-like product led by Mona Chalabi and Micah Cohen, we're going to label our analysis as work in progress.

We are going to screw some things up. We hope our mistakes will be honest ones. We hope you'll gain insight and pleasure from our approach to the news and that you'll visit us from time to time. We hope to demonstrate the value of data journalism as a practical and sustainable proposition.

It's time for us to start making the news a little nerdier.

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FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization. Let me explain what we mean by that, and why we think the intersection of data and journalism is so important. If you're a casual reader of FiveThirtyEight, you may associate us with election forecasting, and in particular with the 2012 presidential election, when our election model "called" 50 out of 50 states right.

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wireWAX have made a TV episode full shoppable

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wireWAX have made a TV episode full shoppable

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I didn't even know Cougar Town was still on TV (Courtney Cox's income post-Friends/Scream) But this is quite an interesting use of wireWAX's tech

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wireWAX, which tags up online video with product tags so that users can buy starlight from the video, has signed a distribution deal with major US network TBS to launch a 'shoppable' episode of the hit comedy series, Cougar Town. The startup has raised undisclosed finance from London's Passion Capital. This is tbs's first use of wireWAX technology.

The characters in the episode attempt to decorate an apartment brands which Target holds in stock. Viewers are able to click or touch items of interest and purchase directly from Target.com from wireWAX's tags inside the video. This sort of thing has admittedly been done before, but it shows that this startup has been gaining traction from humble beginnings in the UK, when I saw it pitch some years ago at a coworking space in London's Shoreditch.

The platform has been offering shoppable video to the masses with brands like Nike, GE, NFL, Coach, and L'Oréal Paris USA.

You can see the full episode online here or to see a short Cougar Town clip with the technology, see here.

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Video Tagging Startup wireWAX Makes Cougar Town Episode Shoppable

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wireWAX, which tags up online video with product tags so that users can buy starlight from the video, has signed a distribution deal with major US network TBS to launch a 'shoppable' episode of the hit comedy series, Cougar Town. The startup has raised undisclosed finance from London&#8...

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Messaging apps are increasingly shaping our use of smartphones. Ted Livingstone provides an insider's view of how they will evolve, arguing that apps like WhatsApp have to move beyond being a 'free SMS' service into a platform for media sharing to occupy a sustainable place in users smartphone experiences.

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Messaging apps are increasingly shaping our use of smartphones. Ted Livingstone provides an insider's view of how they will evolve, arguing that apps like WhatsApp have to move beyond being a 'free SMS' service into a platform for media sharing to occupy a sustainable place in users smartphone experiences.

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Editor's note: Ted Livingston is the Founder and CEO of Kik, a mobile-first company with over 120 million registered users all over the world. Ted started working in mobile in 2007, while he was still studying at the University of Waterloo.

I was driving to a meeting in San Francisco when I got the message: "Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion." I pulled over and watched as messages started to stream in. Everyone had the same question: Is Facebook crazy? As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S., I gave them all the same answer: "No." In fact, we had expected something like this for quite some time. And as we've now seen with Tango's $280 million round, led by China's Alibaba Group, interest in this space clearly isn't going away anytime soon.

Messaging is a complex topic. It's also one of the most misunderstood sectors in tech today. What's the difference between WhatsApp and GChat? Why not just use SMS? Why did Facebook need to buy another messaging app just three years after it had bought Beluga? At the same time, however, messaging promises to be one of the highest-stakes battles in mobile, similar to what search was to the web or what productivity software was to the PC.

So what does messaging mean to mobile?

It's a question we at Kik have been thinking about for a long time. In fact, given that we launched in 2010, we've probably been thinking about it more than almost anyone else. Now, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg's latest purchase, the question seems to be on everyone's mind. So I thought I'd share with you what I've learned over the years. Grab a coffee, because this might take some time.

Advent of the mobile messenger

This story begins in 2007, when I was working at BlackBerry as one of more than a thousand interns hired each term. The iPhone hadn't launched yet, and data plans were so expensive that only Wall Street bankers could afford them. At RIM, however, we were all given BlackBerrys with full data plans. We used BBM like crazy. Thanks to MSN Messenger, we were already used to instant messaging - but somehow this was different. It was more immediate, more intimate.

With MSN, you'd always get people who would turn off their computers or leave them at their desks. But now the computer was always with you, always on, and always connected. For the first time, there was no such thing as offline.

Apps such as MSN, Facebook Messenger, and Skype have added mobile access over the years, but their desktop legacies live on: The "offline" setting is always a looming option. With WhatsApp, Kik or even SMS, on the other hand, the messaging communities are tied to the phones. By default, then, there is no such thing as offline - there's only online, all the time.

So if you're running five minutes late to meet your friend for coffee, you don't send them a GChat or a message through Skype. You send them a text. Why? Because you want to maximize the chance they get your message. Only a mobile-only community guarantees everyone will be online, all the time.

If BBM was the first mobile messenger, WhatsApp was the second. It was 2009 and I had just left RIM to build a "Spotify for BlackBerry." We planned to plug it into BBM to facilitate sharing. But towards the end of 2009, we realized the iPhone was actually going to be a thing, and that our music app needed to be on both BlackBerry and iPhone.

At about the same time, WhatsApp took off. It was basically BBM for iPhone users. Then it turned out they were planning to launch on BlackBerry as well. It was a killer idea. We went to RIM and asked them to launch BBM on iPhone. Not only did we need it for our music app, but we also thought it was the only way to compete with WhatsApp. RIM, however, needed BBM to sell BlackBerrys and chose not to take it cross-platform. We decided to take matters into our own hands and launch our own cross-platform messenger.

Fast forward four years and today the world is a very different place, with thousands of ways to message on a mobile phone. But when it comes to smartphone messengers, there are really only five messengers left in play: WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Kakao and Kik. Yes, there are voice apps like Tango and Viber, as well photo apps like Instagram and Snapchat, but when it comes to that base utility of saying "Be there in five," these are the ones that matter.

These five apps are quite similar, and only differentiate on one of three vectors: identity, region and platform.

Name and place

For me, the first mobile messenger was BBM, but for most people it was SMS - and SMS worked well. It was mobile only and pre-installed on every phone. The key question for companies in the messaging space was: How do you take users away from SMS? The most obvious answer: make it free.

It's easy for people in the U.S. to underestimate just how big a deal "free" is, because for most of us SMS is already free. Why would I use WhatsApp when I can just text? Because in most other countries around the world, texting is expensive.

That's why WhatsApp was compelling: it was SMS, but it cost nothing. There was just one catch: your friends needed to be on WhatsApp, as well.

As a result, WhatsApp spread like crazy. In Asia, some companies reacted quickly and were able to compete. In China, Tencent launched WeChat; in Japan, Naver (actually a Korean company) launched Line; and Kakao sprung up as a startup in South Korea to launch KakaoTalk. For the most part, though, WhatsApp consumed the world. Except the U.S.

Aside from not being free, SMS has another problem: you can't block people. For most people that's okay. But there are times when you would like people who encounter you on Instagram, Tumblr, or SoundCloud to get in touch with you privately. Posting your phone number on such services is out of the question, because then you open yourself up to all sorts of spam and calls from weirdoes. Once that happens, the only way to stop the unwanted contact is to get a new number.

We chose to base Kik accounts on usernames, so you don't have to hand out your phone number. As a result, we're now seeing people share their Kik usernames to facilitate connections across a variety of services, including social apps, gaming apps and fitness apps.

The companies behind some of these other apps have seen all this activity and tried to build their own messaging right into the product. Take, for instance, Instagram Direct or Twitter's Direct Messages. So far, those moves haven't really worked out. People don't want a messenger for each app they use - they want one messenger for all the apps they use.

Will consumers ever want more?

I remember being at RIM when they had a simple, singular vision for Blackberry: email on your phone. That was it. And it worked for a while. BlackBerry grew faster than everyone else and became bigger than everyone else. When the iPhone came out, we all laughed.

"Look at how bad the battery is!"

"Look how slow the email is!"

"All those apps! Who even wants apps? They just get in the way of email."

For a while, RIM was right. Smartphones were a big enough leap that consumers needed a simple value proposition like "email on your phone" in order to understand them. Soon, though, consumers came to understand email on your phone. Eventually, they would have a new question: "What else can I do on my phone?"

WhatsApp feels to be in a similar place right now. The company's simple "SMS but free" proposition is lighting the world on fire, but at some point will consumers find that offering mundane? Will they start to ask: "What else can I do with SMS?" We're about to find out.

Each of the four remaining messengers has a beachhead that WhatsApp can't touch. Line has Japan. KakaoTalk has South Korea. WeChat has China. Kik has cross-app chat. So none of us are going away. But we each want more than that. We're all hungry to win, hungry to find a way to take users away from WhatsApp. And each of us has settled on the same way to do it: by building a platform.

Platform: Simplicity with differentiation

A platform lets you maintain simplicity for people who only want messaging, while providing for those who want a little something more. Do you just want to chat with your friends? Okay, just do that. Oh, you want to play a game with your friends? Sure, try this. Want to shop for shoes with your friends now? How about this...

Platforms let us maintain the simplicity of a core messenger while also creating differentiation. On Kik, you can chat with your friends, play Words with Friends, and listen to music with them too. On KakaoTalk, you can sell digital items. On Line, you'll soon be able to create and sell your own stickers. Using WeChat in China, you can pay for taxis and coffees right from the app.

Once you add developers into the mix, an entirely new computing ecosystem will develop. Thanks to the enormous spread of smartphones and mobile Internet connections - we're looking at 5 billion mobile phone users by 2017 - it's an ecosystem that could surpass anything we've seen so far, including Windows and Facebook. This is where "messaging apps" are heading.

This platform play has long been the game plan for messengers like Kik whose platform is, uniquely, built in HTML5. We all started off as "SMS but free," but that meme is fast becoming "SMS but more." We've learned from BlackBerry taking too long to respond to the iPhone that, if the big shift does happen again, for WhatsApp it may well be too late.

Two key questions

We always knew messaging would be a valuable space, but somehow a $19 billion acquisition has made that all the more real. From here on out, there are only two questions that matter.

1. Will people ever want more from their messenger than just free SMS?

2. What's the best way to build a platform?

If the answer to the first question is "no," then WhatsApp has likely already won.

If the answer to the first question is "yes," then WhatsApp has likely already lost, and it will be up to the other four companies to fight it out.

Then you're left with the second question, which is the more interesting, and more lucrative, one. WhatsApp doesn't have an answer for question two, so the answer will have to come from somewhere else. For us at Kik, that's the really exciting part. That's the future of messaging.

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After WhatsApp: An Insider's View On What's Next In Messaging

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Editor's note: Ted Livingston is the Founder and CEO of Kik, a mobile-first company with over 120 million registered users all over the world. Ted started working in mobile in 2007, while he was still studying at the University of Waterloo.

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We are big fans of Millward-Brown's AdReaction - a beautifully presented compendium of multiscreen behaviour. For example, we now use smartphones, on average, 111 minutes each day, now more than the 97 minutes spent per day on PC's.

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We are big fans of Millward-Brown's AdReaction - a beautifully presented compendium of multiscreen behaviour. For example, we now use smartphones, on average, 111 minutes each day, now more than the 97 minutes spent per day on PC's.

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As we focus on mobile this week, Google is heading for a significant milestone: mobile devices will account for more than 50% of all paid ad clicks on Google by December 2015, according to analysis published by Marin.

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As we focus on mobile this week, Google is heading for a significant milestone: mobile devices will account for more than 50% of all paid ad clicks on Google by December 2015, according to analysis published by Marin.

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It's Mobile Week here at St. Martin's Lane, and we need a mobile news story to make this relevant somehow!

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It's Mobile Week here at St. Martin's Lane, and we need a mobile news story to make this relevant somehow!

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Entertainment providers will be watching the roll out of Popcorn Time with some anxiety. It brings the UX of Netflix together with pirated film downloads, making it easy for anyone to browse and plug into illegal film file-sharing.

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Entertainment providers will be watching the roll out of Popcorn Time with some anxiety. It brings the UX of Netflix together with pirated film downloads, making it easy for anyone to browse and plug into illegal film file-sharing.

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Media Companies: Your Nightmare Piracy Scenario has Arrived, And Its Called Popcorn Time

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Two years ago I said that the nightmare piracy scenario for the media industries would be when the pirates gave up trying to fight enforcement and turned their attentions to build great user experiences. Now with the arrival of Popcorn Time that scenario has come to pass.

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Finally, some news on wearables that makes us think they could go mainstream after all. Google has released Android Wear, which promises to reshape UX for wearables as we might actually want to wear them. The next step is to de-couple wearables from smartphones to make them independently 'smart' devices.

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Google is officially getting into wearables. The company has announced Android Wear, a version of the operating system designed specifically for wearable devices. To start with, the system is made for smartwatches, and Google is moving aggressively to make itself the key name in wearables.

The company has released two videos that show off what the watch interface will look like, and from what we've seen, it's very impressive. In addition, Motorola and LG have already revealed their first Android Wear smartwatches, which look more attractive than any smartwatches we've seen to date. Motorola's first device is featured in the picture above and the videos below.

There are several key features that have been announced. Of course, fitness is a key component. Google says that you'll be able to get "real-time speed, distance and time information on your wrist for your run, cycle or walk." Naturally, that means Google Maps will be built in so that you'll be able to get directions directly from your wrist.

The company will also be using Google Now in the watches. Automatic, passive reminders will be sent to users via their smartwatch. The watches will also connect with Android smartphones so that you'll be able to get all the notifications that you want from whatever apps you have installed on your phone.

You'll also be able to say "OK Google" to perform voice searches, à la Google Now. Lastly, the company is teasing multi-screen functionality from the smartwatches that use the operating system. As an example, Google says that you can use a voice command to cast a video to your Chromecast or get a certain song to play on your phone. It's not hard to imagine more exciting uses for this technology as Google works to get Android into more hardware around the world, such as the connected smarthomes and cars of the future.

Google is working to make sure these watches aren't hideous: Fossil and other "fashion brands" will apparently offer watches using the operating system later this year. The company says it is also already working with current Android partners like Asus, HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung on wearables. LG's first device with Android Wear will be called the G Watch, and it's being produced in collaboration with Google just like the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 before it. The device will be available in the second quarter of this year.

In many ways, Android Wear seems like it's built off of the work the company did on Google Glass. The operating system looks fairly similar to the interface used by the controversial wearable. It's possible that Google has transformed that work into something that's less polarizing.
We'll hear much more about Wear at Google I/O in June
Today's announcement follows comments from Android and Chrome chief Sundar Pichai at SXSW last week. He confirmed that the company was working on offering tools for developers and manufacturers to make Android better suited for devices such as smartwaches. In addition, Google recently purchased Nest, the makers of the Nest Learning Thermostat and the Protect smoke detector. It's still unclear what role Nest will be taking within the company.

Google isn't offering specific details on when we can expect to see more about Android Wear - or what other devices will use the system in the future - but a preview of the operating system is available now so that developers can make sure their app notifications will work with Wear.

We expect to hear much, much more about Android Wear at Google I/O from June 25th to 26th, which is just a couple of months away. Of particular interest is how Google plans to use Android Wear in other devices beyond smartwatches.
Update: Google informs us that the circular watch in the preview videos is Motorola's upcoming smartwatch. In addition, we've been told that LG will not be the first to ship an Android Wear smartwatch - it will be "one of the first." We regret the error.

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Google reveals Android Wear, an operating system for smartwatches

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Google is officially getting into wearables. The company has announced Android Wear, a version of the operating system designed specifically for wearable devices. To start with, the system is made for smartwatches, and Google is moving aggressively to make itself the key name in wearables.

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Is Facebook 'failing marketers'? Forrester have put out another provocative blog, claiming that reach rates of 6% or less mean that Facebook has become fundamentally less valuable for brands. And here's the counterpoint: that brands still haven't figured out to use Facebook properly.

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Is Facebook 'failing marketers'? Forrester have put out another provocative blog, claiming that reach rates of 6% or less mean that Facebook has become fundamentally less valuable for brands. And here's the counterpoint: that brands still haven't figured out to use Facebook properly.

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Pew have released a report on future of the Internet that is well worth a read. Their experts predict that the Internet will become like 'electricity' - invisible and embedded in our lives, doing both good and harm.

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Pew have released a report on future of the Internet that is well worth a read. Their experts predict that the Internet will become like 'electricity' - invisible and embedded in our lives, doing both good and harm.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Experts predict the Internet will become 'like electricity' - less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people's lives for good and ill

Summary: 15 Theses About the Digital Future

The world is moving rapidly towards ubiquitous connectivity that will further change how and where people associate, gather and share information, and consume media. A canvassing of 2,558 experts and technology builders about where we will stand by the year 2025 finds striking patterns in their predictions. The invited respondents were identified in previous research about the future of the Internet, from those identified by the Pew Research Center's Internet Project, and solicited through major technology-oriented listservs. They registered their answers online between November 25, 2013 and January 13, 2014.

In their responses, these experts foresee an ambient information environment where accessing the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it will flow through their lives "like electricity." They predict mobile, wearable, and embedded computing will be tied together in the Internet of Things, allowing people and their surroundings to tap into artificial intelligence-enhanced cloud-based information storage and sharing. As Dan Lynch, founder of Interop and former director of computing facilities at SRI International, wrote, "The most useful impact is the ability to connect people. From that, everything flows."

To a notable extent, the experts agree on the technology change that lies ahead, even as they disagree about its ramifications. Most believe there will be:

A global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.

"Augmented reality" enhancements to the real-world input that people perceive through the use of portable/wearable/implantable technologies.

Disruption of business models established in the 20th century (most notably impacting finance, entertainment, publishers of all sorts, and education).

Tagging, databasing, and intelligent analytical mapping of the physical and social realms.

These experts expect existing positive and negative trends to extend and expand in the next decade, revolutionizing most human interaction, especially affecting health, education, work, politics, economics, and entertainment. Most say they believe the results of that connectivity will be primarily positive. However, when asked to describe the good and bad aspects of the future they foresee, many of the experts can also clearly identify areas of concern, some of them extremely threatening. Heightened concerns over interpersonal ethics, surveillance, terror, and crime, may lead societies to question how best to establish security and trust while retaining civil liberties.

Overall, these expert predictions can be grouped into 15 identifiable theses about our digital future - eight of which we characterize as being hopeful, six as concerned, and another as a kind of neutral, sensible piece of advice that the choices that are made now will shape the future. Many involve similar views of the ways technology will change, but differ in their sense of the impact of those technical advances. They are listed below, numbered for the sake of convenience to readers navigating this document, not in a rank ordering.

More-hopeful theses

1) Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, noted, "Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own 'social networks,' which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation. More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The Internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible. It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do."

Joe Touch, director at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, predicted, "The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won't think about 'going online' or 'looking on the Internet' for something - we'll just be online, and just look."

2) The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity that fosters
more planetary relationships and less ignorance.

Bryan Alexander, senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, wrote, "It will be a world more integrated than ever before. We will see more planetary friendships, rivalries, romances, work teams, study groups, and collaborations."

Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina and founder of ibiblio.org, responded, "Television let us see the Global Village, but the Internet let us be actual Villagers."

Tim Bray, an active participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and technology industry veteran, noted, "I expect the miasma of myth and ignorance and conspiracy theory to recede to dark corners of the discourse of civilization, where nice people don't go. The change in the emotional landscape conferred by people being able to communicate very cheaply irrespective of geography is still only dimly understood."

3) The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior.

Patrick Tucker, author of The Naked Future: What Happens In a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?, wrote, "When the cost of collecting information on virtually every interaction falls to zero, the insights that we gain from our activity, in the context of the activity of others, will fundamentally change the way we relate to one another, to institutions, and with the future itself. We will become far more knowledgeable about the consequences of our actions; we will edit our behavior more quickly and intelligently."

Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, responded, "We'll have a picture of how someone has spent their time, the depth of their commitment to their hobbies, causes, friends, and family. This will change how we think about people, how we establish trust, how we negotiate change, failure, and success."

4) Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health.

Daren C. Brabham, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California, predicted, "We will grow accustomed to seeing the world through multiple data layers. This will change a lot of social practices, such as dating, job interviewing and professional networking, and gaming, as well as policing and espionage."

Aron Roberts, software developer at the University of California-Berkeley, said, "We may well see wearable devices and/or home and workplace sensors that can help us make ongoing lifestyle changes and provide early detection for disease risks, not just disease. We may literally be able to adjust both medications and lifestyle changes on a day-by-day basis or even an hour-by-hour basis, thus enormously magnifying the effectiveness of an ever more understaffed medical delivery system."

5) Political awareness and action will be facilitated and more peaceful change and public uprisings like the Arab Spring will emerge.

Rui Correia, director of Netday Namibia, a non-profit supporting innovations in information technology for education and development, wrote, "With mobile technologies and information-sharing apps becoming ubiquitous, we can expect some significant improvement in the awareness of otherwise illiterate and ill-informed rural populations to opportunities missed out by manipulative and corrupt governments. Like the Arab Spring, we can expect more and more uprisings to take place as people become more informed and able to communicate their concerns."

Nicole Ellison, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, predicted, "As more of the global population comes online, there will be increased awareness of the massive disparities in access to health care, clear water, education, food, and human rights."

6) The spread of the 'Ubernet' will diminish the meaning of borders, and new 'nations' of those with shared interests may emerge and exist beyond the capacity of current nation-states to control.

David Hughes, an Internet pioneer, who from 1972 worked in individual to/from digital telecommunications, responded, "All 7-plus billion humans on this planet will sooner or later be 'connected' to each other and fixed destinations, via the Uber(not Inter)net. That can lead to the diminished power over people's lives within nation-states. When every person on this planet can reach, and communicate two-way, with every other person on this planet, the power of nation-states to control every human inside its geographic boundaries may start to diminish."

JP Rangaswami, chief scientist for Salesforce.com, observed, "The problems that humanity now faces are problems that can't be contained by political borders or economic systems. Traditional structures of government and governance are therefore ill-equipped to create the sensors, the flows, the ability to recognize patterns, the ability to identify root causes, the ability to act on the insights gained, the ability to do any or all of this at speed, while working collaboratively across borders and time zones and sociopolitical systems and cultures. From climate change to disease control, from water conservation to nutrition, from the resolution of immune-system-weakness conditions to solving the growing obesity problem, the answer lies in what the Internet will be in decades to come. By 2025, we will have a good idea of its foundations."

7) The Internet will become 'the Internets' as access, systems, and principles are renegotiated

David Brin, author and futurist, responded, "There will be many Internets. Mesh networks will self-form and we'll deputize sub-selves to dwell in many places."

Sean Mead, senior director of strategy and analytics for Interbrand, predicted, "The Internet will generate several new related networks. Some will require verified identification to access, while others will promise increased privacy."

Ian Peter, pioneer Internet activist and Internet rights advocate, wrote, "The Internet will fragment. Global connectivity will continue to exist, but through a series of separate channels controlled by a series of separate protocols. Our use of separate channels for separate applications will be necessitated by security problems, cyber policy of nations and corporations, and our continued attempts to find better ways to do things."

8) An Internet-enabled revolution in education will spread more opportunities, with less money spent on real estate and teachers.

The biggest impact on the world will be universal access to all human knowledge. The smartest person in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plow in India or China. Enabling that person - and the millions like him or her - will have a profound impact on the development of the human race. Cheap mobile devices will be available worldwide, and educational tools like the Khan Academy will be available to everyone. This will have a huge impact on literacy and numeracy and will lead to a more informed and more educated world population. Hal Varian, chief economist for Google

A generally hopeful summary comes from Doc Searls, journalist and director of ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, observed, "Of course, there will be bad acting by some, taking advantage of organizational vulnerabilities and gaming systems in other ways. Organizations in the meantime will continue rationalizing negative externalities, such as we see today with pollution of the Internet's pathways by boundless wasted advertising messages, and bots working to game the same business. But ... civilization deals with bad acting through development of manners, norms, laws and regulations. Expect all of those to emerge and evolve over the coming years. But don't expect the Internet to go away ... Will the Internet make it possible for our entire civilization to collapse together, in one big awful heap? Possibly. But the Internet has already made it possible for us to use one of our unique graces - the ability to share knowledge - for good, and to a degree never before possible."

Less-hopeful theses

9) Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.

Oscar Gandy, an emeritus professor at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, explained, "We have to think seriously about the kinds of conflicts that will arise in response to the growing inequality enabled and amplified by means of networked transactions that benefit smaller and smaller segments of the global population. Social media will facilitate and amplify the feelings of loss and abuse. They will also facilitate the sharing of examples and instructions about how to challenge, resist, and/or punish what will increasingly come to be seen as unjust."

10) Abuses and abusers will 'evolve and scale.' Human nature isn't changing; there's laziness, bullying, stalking, stupidity, pornography, dirty tricks, crime, and those who practice them have new capacity to make life miserable for others.

Llewellyn Kriel, CEO and editor in chief of TopEditor International Media Services, predicted, "Everything - every thing - will be available online with price tags attached. Cyber-terrorism will become commonplace. Privacy and confidentiality of any and all personal will become a thing of the past. Online 'diseases' - mental, physical, social, addictions (psycho-cyber drugs) - will affect families and communities and spread willy-nilly across borders. The digital divide will grow and worsen beyond the control of nations or global organizations such as the UN. This will increasingly polarize the planet between haves and have-nots. Global companies will exploit this polarization. Digital criminal networks will become realities of the new frontiers. Terrorism, both by organizations and individuals, will be daily realities. The world will become less and less safe, and only personal skills and insights will protect individuals."

An antispam and security architect predicted, "There will be an erosion of privacy and the use of dirty-tricks social media will emerge more and more in election campaigns. Abusers evolve and scale far more than regular Internet users."

A retired management consultant to a large international corporation wrote, "There will be greater group-think, group-speak and mob mentality ... More uninformed individuals will influence others to the detriment of standard of living and effective government."

11) Pressured by these changes, governments and corporations will try to assert power - and at times succeed - as they invoke security and cultural norms.

Paul Babbitt, an associate professor at Southern Arkansas University, predicted, "Governments will become much more effective in using the Internet as an instrument of political and social control. That is, filters will be increasingly valuable and important, and effective and useful filters will be able to charge for their services. People will be more than happy to trade the free-wheeling aspect common to many Internet sites for more structured and regulated environments."

Anoop Ghanwani, a distinguished engineer at Dell, said, "Regulation will always stand in the way of anything significant happening."

12) People will continue - sometimes grudgingly - to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy; and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.

An anonymous respondent wrote, "Yes, the information we want will increasingly find its way to us, as networks learn to accurately predict our interests and weaknesses. But that will also tempt us to stop seeking out knowledge, narrowing our horizons, even as we delve evermore deep. The privacy premium may also be a factor: only the relatively well-off (and well-educated) will know how to preserve their privacy in 2025."

13) Humans and their current organizations may not respond quickly enough to challenges presented by complex networks.

Randy Kluver, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, responded, "The most neglected aspect of the impact is in the geopolitics of the Internet. There are very few experts focused on this, and yet the rise of digital media promises significant disruption to relations between and among states. Some of the really important dimensions include the development of transnational political actors/movements, the rise of the virtual state, the impact of digital diplomacy efforts, the role of information in undermining state privilege (think Wikileaks), and ... the development of cyber-conflict (in both symmetric and asymmetric forms)."

A librarian shared a quote from Albert Einstein: "It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity."

14) Most people are not yet noticing the profound changes today's communications networks are already bringing about; these networks will be even more disruptive in the future.

Nishant Shah, visiting professor at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University, Germany, observed, "It is going to systemically change our understandings of being human, being social, and being political. It is not merely a tool of enforcing existing systems; it is a structural change in the systems that we are used to. And this means that we are truly going through a paradigm shift - which is celebratory for what it brings, but it also produces great precariousness because existing structures lose meaning and valence, and hence, a new world order needs to be produced in order to accommodate for these new modes of being and operation. The greatest impact of the Internet is what we are already witnessing, but it is going to accelerate."

A summary of the less-hopeful theses comes from Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and infrastructure for British Telecom, who predicted, "The greatest impacts of the Internet will continue to be the side-effects that tower so high that we do not notice they are continuing to grow far above us: 1) More people will lose their grounding in the realities of life and work, instead considering those aspects of the world amenable to expression as information as if they were the whole world. 2) The scale of the interactions possible over the Internet will tempt more and more people into more interactions than they are capable of sustaining, which on average will continue to lead each interaction to be more superficial. 3) Given there is strong evidence that people are much more willing to commit petty crimes against people and organizations when they have no face-to-face interaction, the increasing proportion of human interactions mediated by the Internet will continue the trend toward less respect and less integrity in our relations."

Advice: Make good choices today

15) Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.'

Robert Cannon, Internet law and policy expert, wrote, "The Internet, automation, and robotics will disrupt the economy as we know it. How will we provide for the humans who can no longer earn money through labor? The opportunities are simply tremendous. Information, the ability to understand that information, and the ability to act on that information will be available ubiquitously ... Or we could become a 'brave new world' where the government (or corporate power) knows everything about everyone everywhere and every move can be foreseen, and society is taken over by the elite with control of the technology... The good news is that the technology that promises to turn our world on its head is also the technology with which we can build our new world. It offers an unbridled ability to collaborate, share, and interact. 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.' It is a very good time to start inventing the future."

Sonigitu Asibong Ekpe, a consultant with the AgeCare Foundation, a non-profit organization, observed, "The most significant impact of the Internet is getting us to imagine different paths that the future may take. These paths help us to be better prepared for long-term contingencies; by identifying key indicators, and amplifying signals of change, they help us ensure that our decisions along the way are flexible enough to accommodate change... That billions more people are poised to come online in the emerging economies seems certain. Yet much remains uncertain: from who will have access, how, when, and at what price to the Internet's role as an engine for innovation and the creation of commercial, social, and human value. As users, industry players, and policymakers, the interplay of decisions that we make today and in the near future will determine the evolution of the Internet and the shape it takes by 2025, in both intended and unintended ways. Regardless of how the future unfolds, the Internet will evolve in ways we can only begin to imagine. By allowing ourselves to explore and rehearse divergent and plausible futures for the Internet, not only do we prepare for any future, we can also help shape it for the better."

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Asked to predict the future of the internet and how technology/the Web will change over the next decade, hundreds of experts agree that trends now underway will make the internet more important even as it becomes less visible in daily life.