Business

Google+ Gets Big, New Upgrades for Hangouts and Photos. Business owners who count Google+ among their top social networks for marketing purposes have some new goodies to play with.

At an event today, Google unveiled several updated features for Google+ that are meant to improve Hangouts as well as photos and videos. Hangouts, which are used to privately or publicly video chat between friends or colleagues, are getting a number of upgrades: Location sharing and SMS support for Android. Users can now send a map of their current location instead of having to find and type an address. Also new is the ability to send and receive SMS (text messages) instead of having to switching between apps. The Android app and video calling features will be available in a few days, Google says. Future of Work.

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 2: Aggregation Is Not Curation. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

Ad men use brain scanners to probe our emotional response. The Mynd wireless EEG headset developed by NeuroFocus to read the brain's emotional responses to products.

Photograph: NeuroFocus The world's biggest companies have got a new way of convincing you to buy their products – by getting inside your head. Brands including Google, Facebook and ITV are turning to mind-reading technology to help them develop products and create adverts that people like. 10 Ways Big Data is Creating the Science Fiction Future. Three Technologies that Will Change the Way We Shop. "Innovation" is Vital for Future Economy - Neil deGrasse Tyson. Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education.

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.

I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious. 7 Disruptive Innovations That Turned Their Markets Upside Down [INFOGRAPHIC] Who are the movers, the shakers, the companies that affect profound change?

And what products do they bring to market that disrupt all others, making other companies completely re-think their strategies? Let's take a look at seven of those products whose competitors wish had never existed. That's what we'll find out with this infographic by professional networking site Focus.com. You'll see how 7 companies such as Skype, Netflix, Apple and Google rolled out products and services that approached their market in such a unique way that they changed everything. The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet. Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely.

In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it. One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. Tesco: Homeplus Subway Virtual Store (Movie) A Future of Synergists and Dot-Connectors for Enhanced Customer Experience. I am a synergist.

I love to work at the intersection and collision of ideas, disciplines, and departments. Of course, like anything, I have to practice this skill, and I hope to continue progressing in the synergizing of things. As Carol Dweck has taught me to say, “I am not yet the synergist that I will be!” I believe Howard Gardner that one of the five minds of the future is the “synthesizing mind.” So, I practice synthesizing and synergizing. The Future of Advertising. 4 payment industry predictions for 2012. With all the innovation in technology and business as well as new consumer behaviors, it’s sometimes difficult to separate what will shape the future of payments from what is just hype.

By closely examining “innovation clusters” — that intersection of new technology and consumer simplicity that signals that a payment innovation is ready for prime time, the picture can become a bit more clear. We see hundreds of great ideas, but only a few have the right combination to get traction and scale right now. With that in mind, here are a few predictions for the payments industry in 2012. Mobile payments continue to skyrocket We got a taste of mobile payments growth in 2011, and this growth will continue. Although scale is impressive, the true power of the connected mobile device lies in how dramatically it is changing consumer behavior and disrupting existing franchises. Don’t think that mobile devices will be your future identity? A fuller integration of the online and offline commerce worlds.