Yahoo’s 2014 Top Searches: Ebola Overshadowed Celebrities!

People used Yahoo this year to get the scoop on celebrities and tech products, but it was a deadly disease that elicited the highest volume of searches.

Revealing its Year in Review for 2014, Yahoo cited the Ebola virus as the most-searched item of the year as the disease ravaged several African countries and turned up in isolated cases in the US and Europe. Minecraft, a popular video game whose developer was bought by Microsoft in September, came in at No. 2.

Trendy celebrities dominated the list as usual, with Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lawrence, Kaley Cuoco, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus and Jennifer Aniston all making their way onto Yahoo’s top 10. The Disney film “Frozen” was No. 7 among the top searches.
Apple’s new iPhone 6 squeezed onto the list in the No. 9 spot. The iPhone has been among the most-searched terms on Yahoo in four of the past five years, the company said.

“Each year, we see some recurring archetypes such as the female musical ingenue,” Yahoo Web Trends expert Vera Chan said in an email. “This year, that person was Ariana Grande — a former Nickelodeon star whose Billboard success made her number three on this year’s top searches. There’s also usually a cultural mood (‘Frozen,’ which also made our obsessions list), a social media promotion (Kim Kardashian and her ‘Break the Internet’), political or social disasters or concerns (Number one Ebola), and finally technological advances.”

While Yahoo users were searching for Ebola and Kim Kardashian, Yahoo itself was searching for more traffic and renewed stature. In November, Yahoo became the default search engine for Firefox, displacing Google in the process. Yahoo’s new default status in Firefox, which owns around 13 percent of the desktop browser market according to Net Applications, is a big coup for the search engine.

The more traffic a search engine generates, the more opportunities that advertisers have to display their ads. The more that people respond to such ads, the more the search engine can prove itself a viable and profitable platform for advertisers.

“At Yahoo, we believe deeply in search — it’s an area of investment and opportunity for us,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in a blog post at the time. “This partnership helps to expand our reach in search and gives us an opportunity to work even more closely with Mozilla to find ways to innovate in search, communications and digital content.”

Tech users were also busy tapping into Yahoo this year.

The iPhone 6 captured the top spot among tech searches, followed by the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4 smartphones. Sports camera GoPro came in fourth, Apple’s iPad Mini came in fifth and Microsoft’s Xbox One came in sixth. Rounding out the list were the Amazon Kindle, Sony’s PlayStation 4, Apple’s iPad Air and Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3.

People also used Yahoo to stay abreast of the latest items in the news by searching for information on the death of actor and comedian Robin Williams, the 2014 elections, the leaked photos of popular celebrities, the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

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Jawbone announces UP3 and UP MOVE!

Jawbone has announced two new fitness trackers, the entry-level UP MOVE and the top of the line UP3.

The UP3 is a fitness band that incorporates a wide range of sensors, including a tri-axis accelerometer, bioimpedence sensors, and skin and ambient temperature sensors. The sensors allow the band to track your heartbeat continuously throughout the day.

The UP3 also includes advanced sleep trackers, and the band tracks your sleep patterns and gives suggestions to improve it. New algorithms also allow the band to identify your workouts based on your activity and classify them. All of this information is collected in the UP App on your smartphone, with a new Smart Coach feature that tracks your activities, heart rate and sleep and gives suggestions for improvements.

The new UP3 has a durable anodized aluminum body that is water resistant up to 10 meters and can provide up to 7 days of battery life. The UP3 will be available later this year from Apple Stores and Best Buy in black for $179.99.

If you want something cheaper there is the new UP MOVE. The UP MOVE is a wearable that you can clip on anywhere and tracks your activity during the day and prompts you to be more active through the app. The device has a basic display that lights up through the surface with simple iconography. It also tracks your sleep and gives suggestions to improve. The app lets you set step goals and you can compete with your friends to improve your step count.

The UP MOVE uses a simple replaceable watch battery that lasts for six months, so you don’t have to worry about charging it. It will be available in five colors and is priced at just $49.99 with $14.99 extra for the wrist strap.

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Meet Microsoft Band, Microsoft’s $200, fitness-focused smartwatch

Wednesday night Microsoft confirmed what we all expected—that it too, has a smartwatch that it wants you to wear 24/7, for work and for play, called the Microsoft Band.

Looking as much like a hospital bracelet as anything else, the $200 Microsoft Band features a rectangular, 320 x106 TFT display that hovers over your wrist. Sensors—a continuous optical heart monitor, GPS, UV sensor, and more—track your activity while on the move and at rest, and send the data to what Microsoft calls the Intelligence Engine, aka Cortana’s little brother. The Band is then designed to work with third-party apps developers, including MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, and Starbucks—which has developed a “payment” app of sorts.

In all, Microsoft is calling the Band its flagship device of Microsoft Health, a reboot of sorts for a health initiative it tried to establish with products like HealthVault. If you choose, you can store the data the Band collects in HealthVault and share it with your medical provider. Otherwise, Microsoft sees the Band, and Health, as a new way to collect data about you that it can use to improve your day.

How? Initially, Microsoft sees the Intelligence Engine as supplying suggestions on how long to recover from a workout, for example. Over time, the Engine will apparently be able to comment on whether eating breakfast will make you run faster and more effectively. It’s unclear how the Engine will feed data into Cortana, but she’s there: you’ll be able to ask Microsoft’s digital assistant to add calendar entries, for example, or dictate a text. And, of course, the Band will notify you about upcoming appointments, as your Windows Phone already does.

“Imagine you’ve set the goal that you want to get fit and lose weight as part of your exercise routine,” Zulfi Alam, general manager  of Personal Devices at Microsoft, said in a statement. “Based on your burn rate and exercise over one week, we will soon be able to auto-suggest a customized workout plan for you. As you follow that plan – or if you don’t follow the plan – our technology will continue to adjust to give you the best outward-looking plan, like a real coach would do.”

Why this matters: A number of fitness bands already track your activity, even sleep. Fewer still, though, deliver messages calendar invites. And, barely any smartwatches beyond the Big Three—Apple, Google, and now Microsoft—provide any intelligence that helps you anticipate and plan your day. Microsoft’s Intelligence Engine and Cortana appear to be the pair of intelligent technologies that Microsoft hopes will inspire you to plunk down $200, rather than opt for the aesthetics of the Apple Watch or Google’s ecosystem.

Open to all

But Band isn’t Microsoft exclusive: apps will allow it to work with Apple iPhones (the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6, 6 Plus running iOS 7.1 or later), Android (4.3 or 4.4) and Windows Phones (with the Windows Phone 8.1 Update). Those apps leaked out earlier on Wednesday.

Microsoft promises that the Band will last about 48 hours on a single charge, with functions like GPS lowering that somewhat. It will charge in about an hour and a half. Unfortunately, it’s not waterproof, so swimmers will have to look elsewhere. But it will repel “splashes” and will work from 14 degrees up through 104 degrees.

Specifically, the Band will include an optical heart rate sensor, a 3-axis gyrometer, GPS, ambient light sensor, skin temperature sensor, an ultraviolet light sensor, a galvanic skin sensor, and a capacitive sensor. The watch will monitor your heart rate 24/7, and assess whether you’ve been sleeping well.

The band will record data without a data connection, then beam it your phone via Bluetooth. It won’t make calls, but it will flash messages, emails, and even Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. And, of course, there’s a microphone, to trigger Cortana. There’s no speaker, however, so Cortana’s information will be passed along via the screen.

For that matter, Microsoft seems to want you to wear the Band with the screen hovering over the inside of your wrist. Whether that’s a limitation of the sensors or a design aesthetic remains to be seen.

Naturally, Microsoft hopes that the Band itself will become a platform, with third-party app developers coming together to add to its own capabilities. In addition to the Starbucks app—you can tell the Band to display your Starbucks card info, which can be scanned—Microsoft has struck partnerships with MyFitnessPal, MapMyFitness, RunKeeper, and Gold’s Gym. Gold’s even will construct custom workouts, which Microsoft hopes the Band will be able to adapt as it learns more about you.

All in all, you’ll find a lot of crossover between the features the Band offers and what other fitness bands and smartwatches offer. But the $200 Band is also available now, in three different sizes to fit different wrists. Microsoft also seems to be taking a page from Google in that it’s promising that the Band will improve over time, specifically as it learns more about you.

With the Microsoft Band, Microsoft appears to want to play seriously in the health market, while also providing a tool for your workday. It remains to be seen, however, whether Microsoft will leverage its other technologies—its Xbox game console comes to mind—to enhance its capabilities further. On paper, however, the Band certainly appears to be in the lead pack of smartwatches.

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Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease!

Google’s ambition to cure death is beginning to take shape in a new product from its Google X division. Andrew Conrad, the head of the company’s life sciences division, today announced the details of an effort that would use nanotechnology to identify signs of disease. The project would employ tiny magnetic nanoparticles, said to be one-thousandth the width of a red blood cell, to bind themselves to various molecules and identify them as trouble spots.

Google’s nanotechnology project, which would also involve a wearable magnetic device that tracks the particles, is said to be at least five years off, according to an accompanying report in the Wall Street Journal. The company is still figuring out how many nanoparticles are necessary to identify markers of disease, and scientists will have to develop coatings for the particles that will let them bind to targeted cells. One idea is to deliver the nanoparticles via a pill that you would swallow.

FUNDAMENTALLY, OUR FOE IS DEATH.

More than 100 Googlers are now working on the project. “We’re trying to stave off death by preventing disease,” Conrad said on stage at WSJD Live. “Fundamentally, our foe is death. Our foe is unnecessary death. Because we have the technology to intervene, and we should expend more energy and effort on it.”

Nanoparticles inside the body will be subject to heavier regulation than a device that uses them outside the body. Google will have to prove to the FDA that their method is safe and effective in large, controlled clinical trials. To do that, they will first have to determine a dose of nanoparticles for use, which the company has not yet done.

The idea behind using nanoparticles to catch cancer and other illnesses is pretty simple. Cancer cells often express proteins or sugars not found on healthy cells; a nanoparticle with a coating that binds cancer-only cells could be a useful tool for diagnosing the disease. There are two barriers here: the first is our knowledge of cancer-specific proteins or sugars; the second is finding out what coatings they would bind to.

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Google reveals smart contact lens prototype designed to aid diabetics!

Google unveils a contact lens that monitors glucose levels in tears, something millions of diabetics currently have to draw their own blood to check

The lenses use a minuscule glucose sensor and a wireless transmitter to help those among the world’s 382m diabetics who need insulin keep a close watch on their blood sugar and adjust their dose.

The prototype, which Google says will take at least five years to reach consumers, is one of several medical devices being designed by companies to make glucose monitoring for diabetic patients more convenient and less invasive than the traditional blood-drawing finger pricks.

“We’re testing a smart contact lens that we built that measures the glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and a miniaturised glucose sensor,” explained the Google X project leader for the smart contact lens, Brian Otis.

The device, which looks like a typical contact lens, contains two twinkling glitter-specks that are loaded with tens of thousands of miniaturised transistors and is ringed with a hair-thin antenna.

“We’ve had to work really hard to develop tiny, low-powered electronics that operate on low levels of energy and really small glucose sensors,” Mr Otis said at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.