Laura Ruane:

Health app developers initially focused on consumer diet and exercise, said Brian Dolan, editor of Boston-based MobiHealthNews.com, which tracks advances in mobile health and medical technology. “Now we’re seeing them look into more serious health conditions where there’s a real need for innovation.”
Glen Stream, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, sees an “explosion” of mobile medical apps, and gives the trend a qualified endorsement. He’s an “iPhone guy” who uses about 20 medical or health-oriented apps.

Daina Reed:

A trained eye can tell when a logo is really thought deep about or just whipped up without much thought. The type of logo that seems to require the least effort is when the type choice is not customized or easily recognizable. This is usually accompanied by a recognizable picture combined with arrows, swooshes, or other distracting elements- trying to depict WHAT a business does/is, not WHO a business is.

A logo of this standard is easily procured at sites like 99 Designs where logo design happens without any brand discovery on the designer’s behalf. The logos are dictated and picked based on if the client likes it or not, but no professional advisement is dispensed. Many of the logos are half-baked recycled concepts that designers scrap up to make a quick buck. A logo produced this way might very well resemble many others. The public is becoming increasingly aware and able to recognize when a logo looks like it’s from 99 Designs. While it is possible to get a good logo there, the chance it will be a great logo are drastically reduced.

The Economist:

Two of his rules of business, in particular, are rarely found in books on entrepreneurship. One is that, rather than being the pioneer, it is often better to be second with a new idea—as he was in launching KB Home, which became his first Fortune 500 firm, selling houses that were cheaper because they had no basement, a controversial idea at the time copied from a firm in another state. (“The second guy can just charge along the path the first guy has marked, avoiding the rough patches where he stumbled.”)

The Economist:

Wiretaps, which have increased almost tenfold since data was first reported in 1969, are only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. In 2011 federal and state courts approved a total of 2,732 wiretaps; but government agencies made over 1.3m requests for data to mobile-phone companies. That figure includes wiretaps and pen/traps, but it also includes requests for stored text messages, device locations and tower dumps, which reveal the presence of everyone—suspects and not—within range of a particular mobile-phone tower at a particular time. Most of these requests require no warrants at all. Sometimes all it takes is a subpoena from a prosecutor.

Internet companies have also seen a sharp rise in requests from law-enforcement agencies for information about their users. Between July and December 2010 Google received 4,601 requests; in the same period last year that number jumped to 6,321. Among the things that Google is typically asked for are account information and location data. Twitter, a microblogging service, received 679 requests from American authorities for information about users in the first half of this year, which is more than it got in all of 2011. The firm says it complied with three-quarters of these requests, though it does not say whether it handed over all or simply a fraction of the information requested in each case. Google, which says it complied with 93% of the requests from American officials in its most recent reporting period, is similarly vague about what it coughs up.