Dominic Basulto

Texting while driving was only the tip of the iceberg. As smart phones, tablets and other mobile gadgets make it possible to interact with tiny little screens wherever we go, they are also creating endless new ways to distract us from the real business at hand. Often, Facebook is just the more tempting option - and that may have serious consequences for society.

With the 2012 presidential election season officially kicking off in Iowa on January 3, the focus has increasingly been on the state as a leading indicator of Middle America where rural and suburban voters value simplicity and authenticity over whiz-bang political posturing.

It’s not just the Mediterranean tier of countries – Tunisia, Libya, Egypt – that are experiencing stirrings of new life across Africa. Throughout the African continent, formerly moribund nations like Ethiopia are growing at near double-digit rates, while hopeful signs are emerging that Africa is finally throwing off its reliance on commodities and dictators to become the next major center of world economic growth.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. After the great social media boom of the past few years when it seemed like new digital media tools were shifting the American public from a “lean-back” to a “lean-forward” mentality in the way that they interact with content, it looks like the Couch Potato is back.

Researchers have found a way to shrink the size of the medical lab to the size of a microchip, using advances from nanotechnology to pave the way for radically new approaches to medical treatment and diagnosis.

The great promise of the Internet has always been the ability to create truly "frictionless" markets, where buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, are able to do business directly with one another. Fifteen years after Bill Gates first coined the term friction-free capitalism, a new generation of Internet companies are innovating to find ways of reducing friction within the Internet economy.

The old adage that the key to creativity is to view the world through the eyes of a child has never been more relevant. Ever since this summer's release of the phenomenally popular The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by Moonbot Studies - a company already dubbed the Pixar of the iPad generation - there has been a steady procession of innovation in the market for children’s publishing for the iPad.

Your whole life, reduced to a single number. That’s the goal of an increasing number of companies that are attempting to analyze specific aspects of your life and quantify certain behaviors with a single score. The best known of these companies is Klout, which promises to quantify your Twitter and Facebook behaviors into a single measure of "online influence."