There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
A year ago, investors hailed so-called F-commerce as the next big thing, speculating that the company had potential to threaten Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and PayPal Inc. Facebook is the most- visited website in the world. Some people thought that persuading visitors to shop would be easy, Mulpuru said.
This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago headquarters racing to complete Narwhal in time for the fall election season may be at work at one of the most important. If successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged citizen—the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the volunteer—into a single, unified political profile.
The world has became happier since 2007, while Hungarians have become the least happy nation of all, a new poll conducted by global research company Ipsos showed. The survey for What Makes You Happy Magazine finds that while eight in 10 (77%) citizens in 24 countries generally say they are ‘happy’ in their lives, one quarter (22%) report they are ‘very happy’—a key measure that identifies comparative depth and intensity of happiness among country citizens and the world.
It was over the last century, says Cain, that society began reshaping itself as an extrovert’s paradise—to the introvert’s demise. She explains that before the twentieth century, we lived in what historians called a “culture of character,” when you were expected to conduct yourself morally with quiet integrity. But when people starting flocking to the cities and working for big businesses the question became, how do I stand out in a crowd? We morphed into a “culture of personality,” which she says sparked a fascination with glittering movie stars, bubbly employees and outgoing leadership.
As Europe’s debt crisis continues to demand undivided attention, the patient that is Europe has revealed a new wound: Hungary, where a slow-burn political crisis has finally come to a head. In recent weeks the forint has nosedived, stocks plummeted and debt yields spiked as markets sent an overwhelmingly negative message in response to the government’s willingness to jeopardise a potential European Union-International Monetary Fund safety net.
