The Future of Social Networking is the Surveillance State

Last time I wrote about the social panopticon , I was being tongue in cheek. But today I don my tinfoil hat for real to bring you the Danger Room story of Recorded Future, a company being funded by a CIA research branch and Google to mine publicly available data (including social networking data) for event prediction.

Straight Outta Minority Report: New Recorded Future Product Predicts Future Events?

On Wednesday, The Danger Room blogger Noah Shachtman profiled a young information services company called Recorded Future , which monitors the web in real time and, to be perfectly honest, sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi film. Recorded Future uses a collection of futuristic-sounding analytical tools like a temporal analytics engine and sentiment analysis to find the ...

Bookies still punting on a Labor victory

THE GOOD MONEY Forget the polls - it's a bookie in a sharp hat with a pencil behind his ear who can best predict the future. Punters currently have Labor the favourite, with Gillard's chances of winning at 72 per cent and Abbott's chances at 28 per cent.

Immune Design Pockets $32M, InDi Nails $10M, SonoSite Looks Inside My Carotids, & More Seattle-Area Life Sciences News

This week, we saw more than the usual number of venture deals on the Seattle life sciences beat. Maybe the VCs needed to tie up some loose ends before unplugging in the month of August. -Seattle-based Immune Design snagged the big round of the week, a full $32 million Series B deal that included ProQuest Investments, ...

Financial Focus Update to annual budget of interest

Weekly Market Recap "The economy is still struggling; too many Americans are still out of work; and the Nation's long-term fiscal trajectory is unsustainable, threatening future prosperity," according to the Mid-Session Review submitted by the White House last week.