The world at seven billion
Nov2011
The world’s population is expected to hit seven billion in the next few weeks. After growing very slowly for most of human history, the number of people on Earth has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Where do you fit into this story of human life? Fill in your date of birth to [...]
The digital economy
Oct2011
Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible — thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution. In 1850, a decade before the Civil War, the United States’ economy was small — it wasn’t much bigger than Italy’s. Forty years later, it was the largest economy in the world. What happened in-between [...]
Mobile accounts for 10% of e-commerce visits but converts at half the rate
Oct2011
Mobile is now driving an average of 10% of visits to e-commerce sites, but there is much work to be done to optimise conversion rates, according to a new study. The study by e-commerce agency Screen Pages looked at more than 1.5m visitors to 30 non-optimised websites, and found that conversion rates were an average of [...]
AIDS puzzle solved by computer gamers
Sep2011
Computer game skills could help save lives, and not just virtual ones. As fanciful as it may sound at first, gamers onFoldit, a crowdsourced, online protein folding simulator from the University of Washington,actually managed to solve a longstanding problem in AIDS research that has vexed scientists for more than a decade. And they did so [...]
The twelve attributes of a truly great place to work
Sep2011
More than 100 studies have now found that the most engaged employees — those who report they’re fully invested in their jobs and committed to their employers — are significantly more productive, drive higher customer satisfaction and outperform those who are less engaged. But only 20 per cent of employees around the world report that they’re [...]
Web surfing helps at work
Sep2011
Don’t feel guilty about browsing the Internet at work—turns out it may actually improve your performance. According to a new study, Web browsing can actually refresh tired workers and enhance their productivity, compared to other activities such as making personal calls, texts or emails, let alone working straight through with no rest at all. The [...]
Working on holiday: Your views on the ‘worliday’
Aug2011
Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times wrote last week about a vision of the future where people would get more holiday – and do odd bits of work from the beach or mountain peak, with the help of smartphones, Blackberries and laptops to make up for it. Readers responded to her proposal with hundreds of emails. [...]
The rise of the networked enterprise: web 2.0 finds its payday
Aug2011
McKinsey’s new survey research finds that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins. Every new technology has its skeptics. In the 1980s, many observers doubted that the broad use of information technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) to remake processes would pay off in productivity improvements—indeed, the economist Robert Solow [...]
What they know about us
Aug2011
Marketers are spying on Internet users — observing and remembering people’s clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people’s computers by the 50 most popular [...]
12 Ways to engage the “tech fast forward” family
Jul2011
Brand marketers, take note: There’s a new family segment called “Tech Fast Forward” (TFF) that represents new opportunities for the future. According to a just-released study by Ogilvy & Mather in partnership with Communispace, this emerging demographic is a household that uses more sophisticated technology than the average person and includes children ages 3 to [...]