Google, Facebook Offer News Sites Lessons on Ad Targeting [Study]

Only three news sites – CNN, Yahoo News and The New York Times – out of 22 appeared to use high levels of ad targeting, according to a Pew Research Center study. In these cases, 45 percent or more of the ads were different from one user to the next. “By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook,” the study found. The study noted that Google had a strong advertising presence on news sites: A popular style of ad on these sites, accounting for 38% of all ads captured, is the sponsored link box-small boxed-in ads that usually have between three and...

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210,000 people face alcohol death risk, warn doctors

Failure to reform alcohol laws could lead to 210,000 preventable deaths in England and Wales in the next 20 years, doctors have warned. They are putting pressure on the government ahead of its “alcohol strategy” for both countries, expected in the coming months. Writing in The Lancet, doctors said the UK was at a “potential tipping point”. Prime Minister David Cameron has already vowed to tackle the “scandal” of drunkenness and alcohol abuse. The projected mortality figures come from Prof Ian Gilmore, a former president of the Royal College of Physicians, Dr Nick Sheron, from the National Institute for Health Research and members of the British Society of Gastroenterology. Their figure of 210,000 is a reduction from their previous estimate of 250,000 and represents their “worst-case...

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Alastair Campbell on drink: ‘I paid a heavy price’

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spokesman, examines the British middle class’s troubled relationship with alcohol and his own long and complicated history with drink. To read the headlines about Britain’s drink problem, you might think it is largely an issue of teenage binge-drinking in town centres up and down the country. You would be very wrong. Young people drinking too much is a problem. But it is not the biggest drink problem Britain faces. The real problem comes in the form of our hidden alcoholics. Back in my hard-drinking days I was one of them – professional, successful on the surface, with a good job, a steady relationship,...

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Sony Google TV NSZ-GS7 Coming to the UK

Google TV launched in the US back in 2010 now it’s the UK’s turn, with one of the first products to arrive being the Sony NSZ-GS7 Along with the Sony NSZ-GP9 network Blu-ray player, the Sony NSZ-GS7 Google TV set-top box will be among the first UK products featuring the search engine giant’s TV service ( we still don’t know when the LG Google TV will be arriving).  We were recently treated to a brief demo of the service but it’s only now that we’ve had the chance to get our hands on the box itself and the innovative remote at Sony’s HQ in Tokyo. The Google TV box can be connected to your...

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Latitude Leaderboard: Does Google Want to Be the New Foursquare?

Image via CrunchBase Google is expanding its reach across social media — first with Google+, now with Leaderboard, a new feature allowing users to earn points for checking in to a location via GoogleLatitude. Last week, Google launched an updated version of Google Maps for Android, equipped with the new feature similar to Foursquare. The company hasn’t officially said it wants to compete against Foursquare. Leaderboard’s addition to Google Latitude has been kept hush-hush. Google doesn’t even list Leaderboard as being a new feature on the Android Google Maps update. It only says it fixed bugs and has “improved battery performance...

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