Felix Salmon:

The big unanswered question, then, is not whether native has disruptive potential — it clearly does. Rather, it’s whether native will ever be able to truly scale. Native is growth-constrained on two fronts, and that means that if you’re betting on industry-changing disruption, you’re making a risky bet. The first constraint is creative. Native is hard work. Rice talks about how Virgin Mobile has to come up with “several posts a week” when its running a BuzzFeed campaign, and his article is illustrated with a photo of a “creative strategy meeting” where I count 19 people in frame, plus untold others out of it. The amount of human time and effort that goes into a native campaign is enormous, continuous, and it doesn’t decrease much once the campaign is up and running. You can’t just run the same banner a billion times: the marginal daily cost of native campaigns is vastly greater than the marginal daily cost of buying banners.

Eugene Kaspersky:

Here we are, April, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, checking out the Tolbachik volcano erupting – on a long-weekend trip. It’s a long way to go for a long weekend, but for me and crew – it sure was worth it.

Straight to the (lava) chase…

Down fields of freshly cooled (black) lava here flow crackling (bright red) liquid lava streams around 10 meters (30 feet) in width. Sometimes the lava flows get blocked, forming red hot lava lakes. The lava is stodgy, viscous, cloggy, plodding and… awesome! Sometimes it comes up against large rocky growths and finds itself new channels to creep along. Other times it hides under an outer shell that has cooled, and then appears again out of its ‘tunnel’ on to the surface. The meandering red snakes of lava are really quite creepy (he, hey!) – how they form waterfalls here, form islands of black there… Then the red stuff rolls down further, where it thickens and congeals into freaky little hills, which themselves slowly continue to move down further, nudged on by new flows of lava.

The scene is just hypnotic; especially at night when the incandescent lava and red hot rocks are much brighter. Mostly black by day, at night the lava fields are crisscrossed with bright red rivers and studded with similarly bright red spots.

:

Only 20 percent of American consumers’ time on mobile devices is spent on the web. A massive majority, 80 percent, is spent in apps: games, news, productivity, utility, and social networking apps.

Turns out, it’s an app world, after all.

According to app analytics firm Flurry, which tracks app usage on a staggering 300,000 apps on over a billion active mobile devices, we spend an average of 158 minutes each and every day on our smartphones and tablets. Two hours and seven minutes of that is in an app, and only 31 minutes is in a browser, surfing the old-school web.

A big chunk of that 158 minutes is taken up with games — 32 percent — but it’s almost shocking to see how much time a single app and a single company eats up. Eighteen percent of all the time that Americans spend on their phones is spent in the Facebook app, a figure that by itself dwarfs all other social networking apps.

Evgeny Morozov:

Let’s give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function “will be included in people’s brains” so that “when you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information”.

Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page’s utopian project is not a distant dream. In reality, the implant does not have be connected to our brains. We carry it in our pockets – it’s called a smartphone.

So long as Google can interpret – and predict – our intentions, Mr Page’s vision of a continuous and frictionless information supply could be fulfilled. However, to realise this vision, Google needs a wealth of data about us. Knowing what we search for helps – but so does knowing about our movements, our surroundings, our daily routines and our favourite cat videos.

Larry Lessig:

We Americans are disgusted with our government. We ranked fixing “corruption in Washington” number 2 on Gallup’s poll of top presidential priorities in 2012. Yet Washington doesn’t seem to care. Neither President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney even mentioned “corruption” as an issue that their administration would address. And it will take a lot more work by us to get them to pay attention.

The first step, however, is to figure out how best to talk about the problem. People say the problem is “money in politics.” That we need to “get money out.” That “money is not speech.” That “corporations are not people.”

These are slogans, and they’re quite effective at rallying at least some of us to the cause. But as slogans, they’re likely to turn off most to the right of America’s center. And in any case, they don’t quite capture what’s gone wrong with our political system today. They therefore don’t point us to a plausible solution to the problem of our political system today.

So in my TED talk, I created Lesterland: Imagine a country like the United States, with just as many “Lesters” as the United States (about 150,000 out of a population of more than 300 million, or about 0.05%). And imagine those Lesters have a very special power: Each election cycle has two elections. In one, the general election, all citizens get to vote. In the other, the “Lester election,” only “Lesters” get to vote.

James Hamilton:

“Peak oil is dead,” Rob Wile declared last week. Colin Sullivan says it has “gone the way of the Flat Earth Society”, writing

Those behind the theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long since dismissed as dried up.

These comments inspired me to revisit some of the predictions made in 2005 that received a lot of attention at the time, and take a look at what’s actually happened since then.

Here’s how Boone Pickens saw the world in a speech given May 3, 2005:

Jason Dortier:

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) are recruiting a million participants to join a decade long heart health study. The enabling factor? Smartphones. It’s a great example of information technology bleeding into other fields and speeding their progress. If all goes to plan, the UCSF study (dubbed Health eHeart) will be the broadest such study ever completed.

In comparison, the much lauded Framingham Heart Study, initiated in 1948, recruited and studied 15,000 participants over three generations. The Framingham study outlined today’s familiar set of heart risks that doctors use to evaluate patients and prescribe lifestyle changes—high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, smoking, obesity, diabetes, stress, and physical inactivity.

The discovery and subsequent mediation of these risk factors is largely credited with a 75% decline in mortality rates due to heart-related disease in the last half century. See Dr. Hans Diehl discuss how heart disease was shown to be more of a lifestyle illness than a genetic illness by World War II and the Framingham study below:

:

If you thought personalized advertising based on your Facebook status updates, Gmail content or online browsing behavior was creepy, just you wait. The era of genetic-based advertising is coming, and it could be just as profitable.

“Today, it’s such a niche market, but there’s tremendous growth opportunities there,” said geneticist Michael Schatz of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “In the endgame, it’s certain [genetics is] going to become one of the factors that big retailers would consider, but I think that’s pretty far off.”

Maybe not so far off.

Minneapolis-based startup Miinome is already building a platform that will help consumers control what offers they get from retailers based on their genetic makeup, and to possibly cash in on the value of their DNA by selling the data back to marketers and researchers.

“We believe we can make your genetic information useful every day, not just when you’re sick,” said Miinome CEO Paul Saarinen. “We’re the first member-controlled, portable human genomics marketplace.” Through an open API, Miinome will combine genetic and environmental data mined from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and run that through their proprietary algorithm to come up with a profile of you that’s richer than anything that exists on the internet today.

A beautiful morning at Laodicea on the Lycus.