Ford:

Currently, SYNC AppLink allows users to seamlessly control over 60 smartphone mobile apps – on both iOS and Android platforms – using the car’s voice commands, enabling drivers to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Ford is the first automaker to offer an open developer program, www.developer.ford.com, to help keep customers connected inside the vehicle and will continue to add new SYNC-enabled smartphone apps to enhance the driving experience.
 Today, consumers continue to demand more personalized, simplified and integrated in-vehicle experiences. And, with consumers spending more time with digital media than with any other, Ford hopes to turn the connected vehicle into an intelligent vehicle, one that simplifies and personalizes the in-vehicle experience for the consumer.
 
 Beyond the in-car experience, Ford’s ultimate goal is to use connectivity and digital to transform every aspect of the ownership experience, and to build the foundation for future mobility initiatives. With the eventual proliferation of embedded telematics capabilities for Ford Motor Company’s SYNC system, as recently announced on Lincoln MKC, a newly aligned organization will manage connectivity across the entire enterprise.
 
 “SYNC launched a sort of connectivity arms race in the industry,” said Jim Farley, executive vice president, Global Marketing, Sales and Service and Lincoln. “The opportunity is much bigger than just in-car technology – it’s now about connecting the vehicle to a larger ecosystem leveraging ‘the Internet of things.’ We are creating a seamless and immersive experience for customers that begins with their first visit to our digital sites and continues throughout their ownership experience.”

Meanwhile, Google has apparently cut a deal with Audi for an in-car OS.

Daniel Thomas:

But how much information is potentially available on the average smartphone user? As an experiment, I decided to access my own data files from third parties to find out.
 
 The results were surprisingly revealing, showing my favourite lunch locations, sporting preferences and even the methods I use to get our newborn son to sleep at night.
 
 All companies in the EU will now give users data held on them on request, but the telecoms groups have come under particular scrutiny given how much information they hold is shared with government departments.
 
 Even a relatively superficial trawl of the data they hold can be used to compile an accurate log of movements and communications.
 
 A request to my mobile operator resulted in hundreds of pages of information, which would also be accessible to public sector bodies and civil servants under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 in the UK. The information included who I called, texted or emailed, as well as when and where I was when messages were received, but did not stretch to the content of these communications. The telecoms groups need to keep records for up to a year and will hand over details if requested by a government body with sufficient authority. Last year, public authorities submitted 570,135 requests for communications data.

Teresa Rivas:

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) reported mortgage application data for the week ending December 20, and purchase applications were down 3.5% week-over-week, following last week’s 6.1% drop, the lowest level since February 2012. The index is down about 11.5% year-over-year so far.
 
 Raymond James analyst Buck Horne expect that the disconnect between these figures and other more positive housing indicators are only likely to widen as time goes on, thanks in large part to the high prevalence of cash buyers in the market. Cash buyers are more active in the existing home market than the new home market, they write, a situation created in part by stringent underwriting standards, higher interest rates and price increases earlier this year, among other factors. Last month, 32% of existing home sales were all cash purchases.

Jonathan Laing:

It’s no secret that U.S. home prices have enjoyed a healthy rebound in 2013 after the nightmarish 33% drop over the previous five years that triggered an orgy of mortgage defaults and wealth destruction. These days, monthly home-price reports regularly show double-digit percentage jumps over the year-earlier period, whether it’s the 13.3% annual increase for September of the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Home Price Index or the 12.2% annual rise for October logged by CoreLogic’s home-price index.
 
 Yet, at least some observers question how much longer the home-price recovery can continue. A jump in mortgage rates along with the torrid increases in home prices have hurt transaction volume some. The market has been overly dependent on all-cash buyers such as vulture funds, which earlier this year accounted for about a third of all sales. What will happen when they have eaten their fill? Increasingly, the home-price growth will depend on conventional buyers, who must borrow from a mortgage-lending industry that is still imposing stringent lending standards on new mortgages.
 
 
 William Waitzman for Barron’s
 Still, after talking to various industry experts and analyzing disparate data, Barron’s thinks that home-price appreciation should continue for the next three years, albeit at a slower pace than the double-digit increases seen this year.

Experientia:

“What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.
 
 Instead, four new contenders for the crown have emerged: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp. This teaches us a number of important lessons about winning the app war.”

Michael Webber:

The Highway Trust Fund depends on federal fuel taxes for its finances. And those taxes have remained stuck for two decades at 18.4 and 24.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and diesel, respectively. State taxes tack on another 31.1 cents per gallon on average.
 
 Keep this fact in mind: There were about 260 million Americans in 1993 when the tax was last raised. Today there are over 315 million. And we travel more miles than we did two decades ago. That means the transportation infrastructure has to do more with less per-mile spending, adjusted for inflation. That’s why we see crumbling bridges on the news, outdated traffic-light patterns and clogged roads.
 
 And, as we move into cities and use mass transit we will drive less. As cars become more fuel efficient they require less gasoline. At the same time, alternatively fueled cars such as electric vehicles don’t pay gasoline taxes at all, and others, such as natural gas vehicles, pay a lower rate on average, so the current system subsidizes their use. That means our gasoline purchases — and our gas taxes — are declining, putting a strain on our trust fund.

Megan Woolhouse:

But it might be even harder for shoppers to stop themselves if they happen to use their iPad to peruse the wares of online retailers. New research out of Boston College indicates that consumers feel a deeper affinity for products they touch on a screen than those selected using a laptop touchpad or a mouse.
 
 When consumers participating in the study reached out and touched an image on a touchscreen, the experience nearly rivaled their feelings of touching merchandise in a brick-and-mortar store, according to the measure of satisfaction used in the study.
 
 “It’s kind of surprising how strong the effect is,” said S.Adam Brasel, a Boston College business professor and lead author of the study. “And we’re not necessarily aware it’s taking place.”
 
 This holiday season, shoppers appear more connected to their iPads and touchscreen phones than ever, helping to drive online sales to more than one-third of all holiday purchases, according to retail analysis firm NPD Group Inc.

Igal Zeifman:

Last March we published a study that showed the majority of website traffic (51%) was generated by non-human entities, 60% of which were clearly malicious. As we soon learned, these facts came as a surprise to many Internet users, for whom they served as a rare glimpse of “in between the lines” of Google Analytics.

Since then we were approached with numerous requests for an updated report. We were excited about the idea, but had to wait; first, to allow a significant interval between the data, and then for the implementation of new Client Classification features.

With all the pieces in place, we went on to collect the data for the 2013 report, which we’re presenting here today.

Jim Stingl:

You just can’t keep Paul Bialas and his cameras out of abandoned and crumbling brewery buildings.

A year after his photo book about Pabst came out, he’s back with another one featuring Schlitz, known for — say it with me — “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”

Like a vulture circling its lunch on the highway below, Bialas has an insatiable fascination with the history of these once-thriving Milwaukee giants and the carcasses left behind when the workers disappeared.

“I love it. Going in there gets me fired up, and few things do that. I wonder if I have just peaked and now I won’t have that feeling again. These two buildings — Pabst and Schlitz abandoned buildings — how do you top that?” he said.

The self-published “Schlitz Brewing Art” is available on Amazon; Bialas’ website, LakeCountryPhoto.com; and at local bookstores, including Best Place gift shop at the old Pabst site, Barnes & Noble, Books & Company and Boswell Book Company.

Just to be clear, Bialas had permission to photograph both brewery sites. It was easier at Schlitz, he said, because light poured in through the skylight atop the seven-story building that housed two brewhouses, two labs and a malt house.

Steven Poole

Loafing around can be an act of dissent against the ceaseless demands of capitalism.

Recently, I saw a man on the Tube wearing a Nike T-shirt with a slogan that read, in its entirety, “I’m doing work”. The idea that playing sport or doing exercise needs to be justified by calling it a species of work illustrates the colonisation of everyday life by the devotion to toil: an ideology that argues cunningly in favour of itself in the phrase “work ethic”.

We are everywhere enjoined to work harder, faster and for longer – not only in our jobs but also in our leisure time. The rationale for this frantic grind is one of the great unquestioned virtues of our age: “productivity”. The cult of productivity seems all-pervasive. Football coaches and commentators praise a player’s “work rate”, which is thought to compensate for a lack of skill. Geeks try to streamline their lives in and out of the office to get more done. People boast of being busy and exhausted and eagerly consume advice from the business-entertainment complex on how to “de-fry your burnt brain”, or engineer a more productive day by assenting to the horror of breakfast meetings.

A corporate guru will even teach you how to become a “master of extreme productivity”. (In these extreme times, extremity is always good; unless, perhaps, you are an extremist.) No one boasts of being unproductive, still less counterproductive. Into the iron gate of modernity have been wrought the words: “Productivity will set you free.”

Strategies to enhance the “productivity” of workers have been formalised since at least Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early-20th-century dream of “scientific management” through methods such as “time studies”. The latest wheeze is the Big Data field of “workforce science”, in which everything – patterns of emails, the length of telephone calls – may be measured and consigned to a comparative database to create a perfect management panopticon. It is tempting to suspect that the ambition thus to increase “worker productivity” is aimed at getting more work out of each employee for the same (or less) money.