Pew Internet:

For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project began systematically tracking smartphone adoption, a majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind. Our definition of a smartphone owner includes anyone who says “yes” to one—or both—of the following questions:

55% of cell phone owners say that their phone is a smartphone.
58% of cell phone owners say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform common to the U.S. market.1

Taken together, 61% of cell owners said yes to at least one of these questions and are classified as smartphone owners. Because 91% of the adult population now owns some kind of cell phone, that means that 56% of all American adults are now smartphone adopters. One third (35%) have some other kind of cell phone that is not a smartphone, and the remaining 9% of Americans do not own a cell phone at all.

Tim Bradshaw:

Tom Coates lives in a house that tweets. “Hey @tomcoates, I just noticed some movement in the sitting room. Is that you?” it posts to @houseofcoates when a motion sensor is activated in the British designer’s San Francisco home.

It’s not the sort of giant leap forward in technology that would have got Steve Jobs donning his polo neck for a big announcement. But, sometimes, it’s the quiet developments that creep up on us that end up changing our lives.

Coates, co-founder of a yet-to-launch start-up called Product Club, spent a few hundred dollars on Amazon to create a simple system that allows his house to tweet to him when certain “smart” devices are used. He likens its quotidian updates – about the temperature, lights switching on or whether his plant needs watering – to posts from a friend abroad. “You don’t care about everything they’re doing but it’s nice to have a sense that they are there,” he says, noting that it also functions as a cheap burglar alarm.

By Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone on November 22, 2011:

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’ ”