Social Analytics Tools That Don’t Suck

Adobe has made a major improvement to their Marketing Cloud analytics software with the addition of a new product.

Called Adobe Social, the new program provides users with a socially predictive publishing toolkit and full integration with social networks like Foursquare and LinkedIn. Adobe Social enables marketers to key-in to conversations on their brand while giving them the option to directly engage customers through targeted campaigns.

Social has seven core functions, including listening, publishing, advertising, moderating, social app building, analytics, and governance. To add to the feature list, brands who can successfully leverage Adobe’s Social will also receive the predictive publishing feature, which is able to predict the number of Tweets or Facebook posts that will reference an ad before it’s published.

Updates to the Marketing Cloud and Adobe Social should begin rolling out later today.

Not Your Ordinary Street Market

Grand Street, the tech marketplace known for supplying unique and often crowd-funded tech products, has come out of beta today.

The New York City-based company had previously used an invite-only system, but now allows everyone to browse the e-store. Unlike most shops, Grand Street thoroughly tests every item to ensure quality before putting it up for sale.

Some of the items sold include Romo, an affordable telepresence robot, PowerPot, a smartphone charger that uses excess heat from a kettle to supply the power, and Touchfire, a keyboard overlay for your iPad.

To celebrate today’s launch from the beta phase, the team at Grand Street will be offering what they call the “Grand Street Collection”, a group of eleven of their most popular items that will be available for purchase at any time, compared to the usual batch ordering of other products.

Interested customers can start shopping the market today on the website or on their new Android app.

Smart Scalpels?

Researchers from London’s Imperial College have developed a new smart-scalpel with the unique ability to identify the type of tissue that it’s cutting.

When body tissue is cut by a modern electronic scalpel, or RF Knife, the cells of the body emit vapors. By analyzing these vapors in real time, the new iKnife is able to distinguish between cancerous and healthy tissue.

The device should speed-up the process of cancer removal, as previous operations could require up to thirty minutes just to determine if specific parts of the body were cancerous or not. The smart-knife could even prevent the need for follow-up surgeries by making it possible to remove cancer cells that may have otherwise gone undetected.

In other medical developments, there’s a new tool available that could help patients combat diabetes. The new method uses an injectable sponge made from crab and shrimp shells to control blood sugar.

The spongy material forms a tiny matrix in the bloodstream that holds medication, and when a rise in blood sugar occurs, the matrix loosens to release the drug.

Though the sponge is currently being used on diabetics, it is believed that future versions could be used to release anticancer drugs when tumors are detected, effectively making the sponge a type of cancer vaccine.

Nokia – More Like No-Job Anymore!

The new quarterly financials are out for Nokia, and the loss of over $150 Million in revenue means the Finnish cellphone giant will have to cut jobs.

According to the report, the company will start with the worldwide mobile division, where up to 440 jobs will be lost. Not all the news is bad though, a record breaking 7.4 million Lumia smartphones were sold last quarter.

Nokia’s Windows Phones outsold the total amount of BlackBerry phones sold during the same time.

A Camera That Can Follow The Motion To Your Ocean

Motion tracking typically requires the movement of a camera to properly record a moving object.

That could all change, thanks to the team of Japanese engineers who have developed a method where a single camera and a system of mirrors can accurately track objects in motion.

The mirrors have a much smaller inertia than cameras, so they can track incredibly fast objects. The mirrors can be used on virtually any camera – even high-end models, which allows the system to deliver quality shots for most moving objects. The technique is completely reversible, so putting a projector in place of the camera creates the ability to display moving images on moving objects.

This technology could have major implications for advertising with examples like a dynamically projected logo displayed on the back of professional tennis players.

This Is Why You Always Carry The One…

For a short period of time, Chris Reynolds was the richest man in the world. In fact, more than one million times richer than Bill Gates.

By mistake, the PR Executive had ninety-two quadrillion dollars erroneously credited to his PayPal account. He noticed the error when PayPal emailed him his account summary. By the time he logged onto his account, PayPal had corrected the mistake.

The money may be gone, but he retains the bragging rights. He can tell his grandchildren honestly, “Once upon a time, I was the richest man in the world, and I had more money than anyone had ever had before me, and more than anyone has ever had since.”

And that’s all we have for today’s news. If you want to keep up with these and more stories, be sure to join us every weekday morning at 8:30am Central on NewsDesk with Kristin Feledy.

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