Laura Ruane:

Health app developers initially focused on consumer diet and exercise, said Brian Dolan, editor of Boston-based MobiHealthNews.com, which tracks advances in mobile health and medical technology. “Now we’re seeing them look into more serious health conditions where there’s a real need for innovation.”
Glen Stream, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, sees an “explosion” of mobile medical apps, and gives the trend a qualified endorsement. He’s an “iPhone guy” who uses about 20 medical or health-oriented apps.

Daina Reed:

A trained eye can tell when a logo is really thought deep about or just whipped up without much thought. The type of logo that seems to require the least effort is when the type choice is not customized or easily recognizable. This is usually accompanied by a recognizable picture combined with arrows, swooshes, or other distracting elements- trying to depict WHAT a business does/is, not WHO a business is.

A logo of this standard is easily procured at sites like 99 Designs where logo design happens without any brand discovery on the designer’s behalf. The logos are dictated and picked based on if the client likes it or not, but no professional advisement is dispensed. Many of the logos are half-baked recycled concepts that designers scrap up to make a quick buck. A logo produced this way might very well resemble many others. The public is becoming increasingly aware and able to recognize when a logo looks like it’s from 99 Designs. While it is possible to get a good logo there, the chance it will be a great logo are drastically reduced.

The Economist:

Two of his rules of business, in particular, are rarely found in books on entrepreneurship. One is that, rather than being the pioneer, it is often better to be second with a new idea—as he was in launching KB Home, which became his first Fortune 500 firm, selling houses that were cheaper because they had no basement, a controversial idea at the time copied from a firm in another state. (“The second guy can just charge along the path the first guy has marked, avoiding the rough patches where he stumbled.”)

The Economist:

Wiretaps, which have increased almost tenfold since data was first reported in 1969, are only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. In 2011 federal and state courts approved a total of 2,732 wiretaps; but government agencies made over 1.3m requests for data to mobile-phone companies. That figure includes wiretaps and pen/traps, but it also includes requests for stored text messages, device locations and tower dumps, which reveal the presence of everyone—suspects and not—within range of a particular mobile-phone tower at a particular time. Most of these requests require no warrants at all. Sometimes all it takes is a subpoena from a prosecutor.

Internet companies have also seen a sharp rise in requests from law-enforcement agencies for information about their users. Between July and December 2010 Google received 4,601 requests; in the same period last year that number jumped to 6,321. Among the things that Google is typically asked for are account information and location data. Twitter, a microblogging service, received 679 requests from American authorities for information about users in the first half of this year, which is more than it got in all of 2011. The firm says it complied with three-quarters of these requests, though it does not say whether it handed over all or simply a fraction of the information requested in each case. Google, which says it complied with 93% of the requests from American officials in its most recent reporting period, is similarly vague about what it coughs up.

Dan Chung:

2012 has been the year that smartphones have started to dominate the world of still photography. Kodak has fallen apart, the cheap digital camera market is in decline, Facebook has offered $1 billion for Instagram. How would a smartphone camera in the hands of a professional photographer perform during this year’s biggest sporting event?

Charles Murray:

The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.

“Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole” is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements “earned success.” Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.

Evgeny Morozov:

The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms. With their never-ending talk of Twitter revolutions and the like, techno-globalists such as Khanna have a bright future ahead of them.

John Torinus:

Health care inflation in the Milwaukee area has dropped from double-digit to single-digit percentages, and there’s no big mystery why.

There is a thundering stampede in the private sector toward real reforms of the failed business model for the delivery of health care. It’s reform from the bottom up versus mandates from the mandarins in Washington D.C. It’s all about pragmatic solutions to the root cause problem: costs that have screamed upward for four decades.

The telling statistics are spelled out in the 10th rendition of HCTrends, an analysis put together by Pewaukee-based Benefits Services Group that probes Milwaukee area health care delivery. The increases in 2012 are expected to be in the 5% to 7% range, compared to a high point of 17% in 2004 and 8% to 10% in 2011. That’s huge progress.