On March 13, Bill Gates pronounced that "natural user interfaces" (facial and voice recognition) will be integrated with our daily lives within 10 years. While many of us already realized this, Gates has now put his signature on the prediction. 

People who have faced one of several common government-related problems in the past two years are more likely to consult the internet than other sources, including experts and family members.  In a national phone survey, respondents were asked whether they had encountered 10 possible problems in the previous two years, all of which had a potential connection to the government or government-provided information.

comScore, Inc., today released an update of holiday season e-commerce spending for the first 57 days of the 2007 holiday season (November 1 – December 27). Nearly $28 billion has been spent online during the season-to-date, marking a 19-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year.

Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.  Fueled by new technologies, websites, and social network domains such as Facebook and MySpace, large numbers of teens share and create materials online. 

We know all about user-generated content, masses of users contributing to burgeoning Web corpus. It’s a manifestation of Web 2.0, the participatory Net, which companies like Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), Fox (MySpace), etc. are feasting on. In parallel, users are contributing a potentially far more lucrative Web currency–metadata about themselves. It’s the currency that will help Facebook grow into its $15 billion valuation. In addition, users are also contributing structured (meta) data about data, which will help the semantic Web to flower.