Facebook is in the process of rolling out a sweeping series of changes to the way users can control their profiles and content-sharing on the massive social network. Among other things, the changes allow users to selectively share status updates or content with certain groups of friends, just as Google+ introduced the idea of Circles, which allow users of that network to segregate the people they follow into specific groups. These kinds of features are seen by many as a positive step for privacy — but will they make people less likely to share what they are doing with the public at large? And how will that affect the social web [Source]?
Monthly Archive for August, 2011
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The Gulf economies of the Middle East are forming partnerships with other emerging markets, redefining the ancient trade routes that once linked East and West.
The rise of emerging markets in the global economy has sparked a great deal of discussion, particularly in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis. The implications are often framed in terms of the potential impact on the economies of the U.S. and Europe — for instance, business leaders discuss whether emerging nations’ consumers might be interested in purchasing American products, or whether European telecom operators can counter stagnation in their own markets by investing in new mobile networks in Asia.
But a closer look reveals a separate trend that could shift the economic focus away from the West. Emerging markets are building deep, well-traveled networks among themselves in a way that harks back to the original “silk road,” the network of trade routes between East Asia, the Middle East, and southern Europe, some dating to prehistoric times and others to the reign of Alexander the Great. Most of these routes were central to world commerce until about 1400 AD, when European ships began to dominate international trade [Source].
Autonomy excels at analyzing the vast amounts of “unstructured data” being produced every day.
News broke today that HP, the world’s biggest manufacturer of personal computers, had offered to acquire the British software company Autonomy. While the latter is hardly a household name, it gets close to $1 billion in revenue each year from software that can turn huge volumes of images, text, and video into useful statistics and insights for businesses.
Acquiring that technology will enable HP to expand its business software products, and put it in a good position to exploit a trend dubbed “big data.” Businesses are increasingly interested in finding ways to distill meaning from the growing piles of digital information, from tweets to video, flowing through our lives at work and at home [Source].
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