Author: Dr. Donna Murdoch

Adult Learners. Lifelong Learning and Relevancy. Opinions are my own.
Digital Puglishing, Donna Murdoch

App Memoir Commits Your Digital History to Memory

From MIT Tech Review: The app comes at a time when we’re collecting ever more personal data with every social-network update, location check-in, and photo posting—a mound that will only grow as we make more use of mobile devices and wearable tech like smart watches and Google Glass. Yet most of us aren’t taking advantage of this information, Hoffman argues, so Memoir, which rolled out two months ago, does it for you by wrangling photos from your phone and connected social networks, as well as status updates and location check-ins. It also uses clever tricks to call up these old memories on the basis of where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re with.

via App Memoir Commits Your Digital History to Memory | MIT Technology Review.

Digital Literacy, Donna Murdoch

Why Pushing People to Code Will Widen the Gap Between Rich and Poor

Interesting opinion from Wired:  Nearly every part of our lives is influenced by code. It’s the infrastructure that makes our digital technologies operate — the software that’s changing our world in innumerable ways — and knowing how to code opens up a new world of opportunities. Some would even argue it’s a prerequisite in our increasingly algorithmic existence.

via Why Pushing People to Code Will Widen the Gap Between Rich and Poor | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

Donna Murdoch, Misc, Tech Hardware

Tech Time Warp of the Week: 30 Years of Apple Ads, 1984 to the Present

Wired: In these ads, Apple represents youth, innovation, and, yes, extreme coolness. And its inherent hipness is typically pitted against the old, the uncool, the pathetic, and the downright evil. First, the enemy was IBM, but as Big Blue lost its mojo in the world of desktop computing, Apple shifted its attention to that evil empire in the Pacific Northwest: Microsoft. In a way, these ads chart the changing landscape in the tech world over last thirty years — though we certainly see everything through Apple-colored glasses.

via Tech Time Warp of the Week: 30 Years of Apple Ads, 1984 to the Present | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Digital Puglishing, Donna Murdoch

Why Traffic Is Digital Marketing’s Foundational Metric

From Mashable: If you take the retail marketing adage “location, location, location,” and translate it to digital, the result would be visit rate, or traffic. In the physical world, it\’s possible to pay premium rent to get your product in front of lots of people, but on the web, garnering traffic is a bit more nuanced. The medium requires strategies that are focused on targeted audiences rather than the general public, not because products are narrow, but because methods of measuring efficacy enable marketers to see more success this way.

via Why Traffic Is Digital Marketing’s Foundational Metric.

Donna Murdoch, Future, Tech Hardware

Inside Google’s Driverless Car : The New Yorker

Burkhard Bilger via The New Yorker:  The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction: this year’s model of last century’s make. It belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs and rocket ships, transporter beams and cities beneath the sea, of a predicted future still well beyond our technology.

via Burkhard Bilger: Inside Google’s Driverless Car : The New Yorker.

Donna Murdoch, Future, Tech Hardware

The Battle For The Connected Home Is Heating Up

From TechCrunch – With the emergence of connected devices, the entire home is being reinvented as a data product, opening great opportunities to entrepreneurs.  A whole new generation of startups is rushing in. Nest, with its beautifully-designed home products, has become the poster child for this phenomenon, but many others are producing exciting new connected devices and platforms, at an outstanding pace.

via The Battle For The Connected Home Is Heating Up | TechCrunch.

Donna Murdoch, Misc

15 Productive Things To Do Online When You Have 15 Minutes To Kill

From MakeUseOf – “We cannot capture time. I think we can snatch it for…a small amount of time. It’s human nature to focus on large blocks of time, and ignore the value of the minutes and seconds that pass by unnoticed. We put a value to the time spent on a large project. We store the fortnight of a great vacation in our memories. But we don’t remember the time spent stuck in a traffic jam or that spent on catching up on gossip at the water cooler. Can we use some of those “lost” minutes and seconds and put some value in them?”

via 15 Productive Things To Do Online When You Have 15 Minutes To Kill.