Anssi Vanjoki (Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia) presents about user interface. a decent short film in the middle which demonstrates how a handheld device can be much more than a “phone”.

When are the people going to “say no?”

In 2006, Google announced that they would use in-built computer microphones to listen in on user’s background noise, be it television, music or radio – and then direct advertising at them based on their preferences.

original paul watson

PS, the first video is a hoax.

The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News will become the first major metropolitan newspapers in the U.S. to end daily home delivery, the papers announced Tuesday.

“We’re fighting for our survival,” said David Hunke, publisher of the Free Press and CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership, a joint operating agreement between the two papers. “We think its time to take a geometric leap forward in what we’ve known as newspapers.”

Beginning sometime in the first three months of 2009, the two newspapers will provide home delivery on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays only, Hunke said during a news conference in Detroit, Michigan. Papers will be on newsstands every day, and the papers’ online offerings will be expanded, he said.

“The dynamics of delivering information to audiences has changed forever due to technology,” Hunke said in a statement on the plan.

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Search engine giant Google launched a new tool on Tuesday that will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic.

Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.

“We’ve discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity,” Google said in a statement.

“What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was,” Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview.

it looks like google is lining up for that easy defense money contract…you don’t mention “surveillance” in today’s society without knowing you can make a buck.

your flu isn’t even your own private issue now! Seems to me that the big pharms must love this google concept…nothing like more visual data that leads to quarantine and vaccinations.

EARLY WARNING

“One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data,” Finelli said.

“The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used … as early warning signal for flu activity.”

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