Recommended Reads on the Mobile Beat This Week
Foursquare CEO Steps Down as Valuation Plummets
This Wall Street Journal story details the struggles facing Foursquare, which started out as a hot location-sharing app in 2009 but is now facing lots of competition and hasn’t been able to transform into a profitable business. In addition to the leadership change, the company announced that it raised $45 million in new funding, which marks its second so-called “down round.”
Most People See Connected Devices as a Privacy Problem
A Fortune article discusses the results of a new Pew Research Center study about how Americans feel regarding privacy and information sharing.
Why Doesn’t Apple HealthKit Include Mental Health Tracking?
A Fast Company article explains why Apple’s health and fitness tracking service, HealthKit, doesn’t currently let users log mental-health data. One reason, according to this piece: there isn’t a lot of research finding a connection between mental health and data collected by your smartphone.
Data from Your Smartwatch Might Let Hackers Figure Out Your PIN Numbers
An article in Slate describes how a researcher at IT University of Copenhagen used deep learning to analyze accelerometer and gyroscope data in order to figure out a smartwatch wearer’s PIN number (spoiler: it seemed to work in some situations but still isn’t all that accurate).
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The US crackdown on Chinese economic espionage is a mess. We have the data to show it.
The US government’s China Initiative sought to protect national security. In the most comprehensive analysis of cases to date, MIT Technology Review reveals how far it has strayed from its goals.
Renewables are set to soar
The world will likely witness a wind and solar boom over the next five years, as costs decline and nations raise their climate ambitions.
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation
The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
We won’t know how bad omicron is for another month
Gene sequencing gave an early alert about the latest covid variant. But we'll only know if omicron is a problem by watching it spread.
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