• Google dreams up free taxi rides to stores – SmartPlanet

  Wow… Interesting implications also (aside from data/ algorithms) for online v. “irl” shopping/ consumption/ commerce.
  QUOTE
  …would it be worth it for businesses to subsidize the trips of individual customers? That’s exactly what Google has invented, an algorithm that determines “the cost of transportation and the potential profit from a completed transaction using a number of real-time calculations.” According to the patent, it would determine that using information like the customer’s location, the customer’s route to the store and most likely form of transportation needed to get there, and the price competitors are willing to pay to get customers in their stores.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: google big_data algorithm retail commerce irl

• Gentrification isn’t bad for the poor – Quartz

  Well, debates about gentrification aside, it’s clear that SF certainly did NOT build enough housing to accommodate the influx of new residents. (Note: in the article, the paragraph below is studded with links to sources.)
  QUOTE
  Gentrification, the term of art for an influx of new residents into an urban neighborhood that typically drives up rents, is controversial in many wealthy cities. It’s often blamed for driving out poorer residents. But when researchers try to prove it, facts are hard to find. Any number of outlets have reported on studies by Columbia University’s Lance Freeman and researchers at the University of Colorado and Duke University who find that gentrification doesn’t drive out a rising neighborhood’s former residents. It even stands to benefit them financially.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: gentrification quartz san_francisco rents housing affordability

• Evgeny Morozov’s response to Sascha Lobo : More political interference! – Medien – FAZ

  Excellent piece from Morozov.
  QUOTE
  …as everything becomes interconnected – with tiny sensors and modems – “the Internet” will literally be everywhere. But if one accepts the thesis that the “Internet” is just a never-ending exercise in purification, whereby domains that were previously contentious and political are converted into uncontroversial technological domains that are supposed to behave in accordance with the out-of-control logic of the “Internet”– it’s not so hard to see what awaits us: the end of politics altogether, as the only remaining reason for regulating this newly “interconnected world” would be to promote “innovation” (a nice euphemism for the business interests of Silicon Valley) rather than an ambitious social and political agenda. When “the Internet” is everywhere, politics is nowhere.
  (…)
  …the only way to promote alternative uses of ebooks or search engines or social networks in ways that would not depend too heavily on the seemingly free services offered by Silicon Valley is by developing a new industrial policy that would inject billions of dollars into public information infrastructure. And we don’t want that infrastructure to be managed by the same oligopolies only with European names; it has to be run in a decentralized and civic manner, with citizens owning their own data from the start. It’s not digital optimism that we must cultivate – rather, it’s optimism in public institutions and a renewed faith in politics. Not exactly a very popular messages during the times of austerity.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: politics democracy internet evgeny_morozov faz

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 02|2|14 at 4:02 pm. Filed under: links.

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