Twitter Hikes Its Promoted Trend Prices Again, to $200,000 a Day

Peter Kafka on the bull trend for Twitter Promoted Trends:

Twitter’s newest price hike went into effect earlier this year, and represents a 33 percent increase over the $150,000 rate the company was asking for in 2012. And it’s up 150 percent from the $80,000 a day it was getting for the ads back when it launched them in 2010.

It’s definitely a positive sign that Twitter is able to command increasingly-higher prices for Promoted Trends, but I’m still not sold.

From their perspective, any revenue is better than no revenue, and at the very least it’s heading in the right direction. But I have to believe that Twitter will have to find another solid revenue stream beyond a Promoted Trend to command real respect from plenty of doubters on the business model.

IBM’s Game Show Winning Watson Computer Goes to Work Treating Cancer

Arik Hesseldahl:

During what I’ll loosely call its training period, Watson has to date “read” some 600,000 documents of medical evidence, two million pages of specialty medical journals and clinical trials focusing on oncology or the treatment of cancer. The point of all this is to be able to answer complicated questions, based on evidence, about the treatments of cancer.

Watson conquered Jeopardy!. Now, time to set sights on a much bigger challenge: cancer. 

[Google] announced on Friday that there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education around the world. Just three months ago, there were 1,000 schools, showing an impressive adoption rate so far.

Google announces that 2,000 schools now use Chromebooks, up 100% in three months

Chromebooks will continue to dominate education, and the low pricepoint is a huge reason why.

Super Bowl plans to handle 30,000 Wi-Fi users at once—and sniff out “rogue devices”

That’s why wireless security doesn’t stop when the game starts; the Superdome will use spectral analysis equipment to detect interference. “We’re always monitoring the network. So we have a plan in place if there is an interfering signal to identify that and remediate that problem,” Stewart said.

In last year’s Super Bowl, 12,946 attendees were on the stadium WiFi: They downloaded over 225 GB and uploaded 145 GB.

Let’s just say the NFL is ready this year.

Facebook's "Articles Related To" May Signal A News Shift

Josh Constine highlights an interesting opportunity for Facebook and their “Articles Related To” feature — a personalized newspaper.

Social Readers continue to pop up, but serve up random content at times based on your social graph’s reading preferences. For Facebook, it makes sense to bring the content together and aggregate the most popular content from your newsfeed.

It’s too early to say if a news discovery initiative would overtake popular newsreading apps like Flipboard or Zite, but it’s certainly worth monitoring. Facebook hasn’t exactly been successful in driving engagement on startup-inspired apps (Snapchat/Poke, Places/Foursquare).

The paper, published in the journal Building and the Environment, found that classroom design could be attributed to a 25% impact, positive or negative, on a student’s progress over the course of an academic year. The difference between the best- and worst-designed classrooms covered in the study? A full year’s worth of academic progress.
Study Shows How Classroom Design Affects Student Learning

Source: fastcodesign.com

The product’s potential is undeniable: Socially speaking, Graph Search is a friend finder, a dating service, and even a way to learn things about friends and family that you never thought to ask. But there’s almost an uncanny valley we’re approaching of knowing too much about a stranger, and whether that information becomes repulsive or liberating will come completely down to a few pieces of design.
Facebook’s Graph Search Could Make Us Closer … Or Creeped Out

Source: fastcodesign.com