Says Doc Searls: "Tracking and “personalizing”—the current frontier of online advertising—probe the limits of tolerance. While harvesting mountains of data about individuals and signaling nothing obvious about their methods, tracking and personalizing together ditch one of the few noble virtues to which advertising at its best aspires: respect for the prospect’s privacy and integrity, which has long included a default assumption of anonymity."

Having a learning thermostat is good, but the Nest smart meter goes a step further: It helps consumers understand better how they consume energy, with plenty of data, visualization and insight.

This new PEW report covers how the internet, and data, is changing healthcare. This includes the quantified self, of course, but also goes beyond that and puts it into the larger context of healthcare.

Bad news for Facebook: General Motors decided to dial down advertising on Facebook after finding it has little impact on consumers' car purchases. If Facebook's customers don't trust in the platform's effectiveness, this could put quite a damper on the IPO due this Friday.

As body sensors become more and more ubiquitous, we see them integrated in more day to day products and in some highly specialized niches. In this case, we see a prototype for a shirt that's packed with sensors to monitor your body (heart rate and all) for further analysis. While for now this is aimed at elite athletes and other gym rats, we expect to see the technology trickle down to more consumer grade goods quite soon.

Japanese apparel producer UNIQLO shows how brands can add both value for, and touchpoints with, their customers. In this case, they built a gorgeous multi-platform wake up app that pulls in live ambient data to create customized wake up ring tones.

"The thing that I worry about a lot is how companies measure themselves. The analogy is that you can see light from a star that burned out a long time ago — it’s 100 light years away, and three years ago that star died." Autodesk CEO Carl Bass on leadership and the importance of evaluating if your big company is still innovating.

Wired Magazine's Thomas Goetz wrote a great piece on a topic that's very dear to us: How to spot the future? Must read.

The American Assembly at Columbia University compiled a report on media piracy, looking at emerging economies and how the economics of media piracy work in these markets, where piracy is the primary form of access to many kinds of digital goods. More importantly, the report explores what business opportunities can emerge at the low end of these media markets that could address several billion media consumers.

Author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow sheds light on the twisted logic connecting publishers, ebooks, DRM and user lock-in into certain ebook platforms.

"Seeing the facts on your computer screen makes them difficult to ignore." The Economist gives a solid overview of the Quantified Self, aimed at a mainstream, non-geeky audience. We read it like a reality check on the QS.

Martin Varsavsky's blog post on time management is overall quite an excellent read even for those who don't have a private jet. But in particular, the way he uses social media is quite interesting to see: "I use social media to take notes, like I have an idea for a business and I blog it, I share it, I work collectively with people, social media looks like a waste of time for others but it saves me time, I recruit on twitter, I brainstorm on Google+ or my blog, I work inside social media, get ideas, its a sanity check many times, crowdsourcing saves me time."

Our good friend and occasional collaborator Mike Arauz wrote a great piece on the Undercurrent blog - nice infographic included. If there's one company out there we really share an understanding with of what strategy is, it's Undercurrent. Must read.

No. 8 Bear Pond

More and more US households use broadband internet, but cut their TV subscriptions and switch to free broadcasts only. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that TV is over, but it certainly indicates that consumers use different channels to get their TV series shots.

Whatever happened to the vision of an internet roamed by Cyberflâneurs?

Leila Johnston and Chris Heathcote discuss the future of ... the future, and of advertising. As our notion of the future has become very much blurry compared to the 50s, their grasp of the current state of futurism is a must read. Along the way we learn that advertising can stay relevant, particularly if it fulfills a need beyond just advertising a product.

An alarming article about the human costs of our gadget lust. While we won't pretend that we'd stop buying gadgets anytime soon, this investigative piece is an urgent reminder that we should demand higher labor standards from Apple & Co.