Fast Company

When you walk around the offices of Twitter’s engineering department, located on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown San Francisco headquarters, you will see signs counting down the days until the World Cup.

More than 3.2 billion people watched at least a minute of the World Cup live in 2010. For Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, YouTube, and a host of regional social media sites from Brazil to Russia, the World Cup means engineers frantically working overtime to prevent outages and site overloads.

If you’re a college student in Buenos Aires or Chennai, you may have come across an unorthodox way of making extra money. Using your Android phone, an American corporation will pay you to stop by the supermarket on the way home; snap a picture of how much bread or tomatoes costs that day; and submit the price of those commodities into an elaborate data system.

California-based Premise, as they're called, uses this information as fodder for an unusual business model: getting inflation and commodity price data before governments do, sourced from regular people on the street. Using thousands of college students and other part-time workers, Premise gathers raw item prices from retailers and street markets worldwide.

The information Premise’s workers collect is used to help develop live inflation indexes and food security data for clients including hedge funds and government agencies.

According to Premise, the company is currently collecting economic data in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, Japan, and Australia. Premise is currently offering their indexes to corporations and financial service providers, to government agencies, and to marketing organizations. Of these, David Soloff, Premise’s CEO, feels government agencies have the biggest potential for licensing Premise’s indexes.

Network neutrality is one of business and government's biggest ongoing debates. But even though our lives are increasingly influenced and determined by online interactions, many people have no idea what the phrase means.

A recent Pew Research Center report put a point on how little the debate seems to be engaging the public. Out of the 203 articles that even mentioned net neutrality in 2014, 139 were in the same six papers. Twenty-five out of nearly 3,000 TV news programs discussed the issue. That's 0.8%.

The story's very different on Twitter, where nearly all the 650,000 tweets on the topic expressed support for an open Internet. Then again, Twitter's not even close to a representative sample of the US population.

A separate VentureBeat poll revealed similar findings. Of 714 people surveyed through Google, nearly 60% reported that they didn't even know enough about what net neutrality was. (And these are people already savvy enough to spend enough time on the Internet to take Google surveys.)

So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves journalists with more of a responsibility to report on tech stuff that isn't the sexiest app or most titillating group selfie.

But it's also a strong reminder: Some of the most important fights for public resources aren't made in front of the public. They're made in fluorescent-lit corporate conference rooms, on the least engaging parts of C-SPAN, or in tiny, esoteric debates that only circulate among a handful of people. And sometimes there's only mainstream news about them when it's too late.

With the Snowden revelations, we learned a lot more about how the government snoops into the lives of US citizens and how technology companies help them do it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's latest "Who Has Your Back?" report doesn't exactly reveal which companies are helping the NSA most. But it paints a picture of those companies that are taking the most action on privacy matters, and those that have more important things to worry about.

The report looks at the policies of 26 Internet companies -- from Internet service providers (ISPs) and email providers, to telecoms and blogging platforms -- across six categories "to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data." Nine companies -- Apple, Credo Mobile, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sonic, Twitter, and Yahoo -- gets stars in all categories. Twenty-three companies require a warrant. And 20 companies tell users about government requests. All the companies received at least one star.

A few companies stand out for their lack of policy. Snapchat only scores in one category ("publishing law enforcement guidelines"). "This is particularly troubling because Snapchat collects extremely sensitive user data, including potentially compromising photographs of users," the report says.

But AT&T and Comcast aren't much better. Neither require a warrant before allowing the NSA to view content, and neither tells users about government requests. And neither has sought to protect user rights by lobbying in Congress.

Matt Cutts, a senior member of Google's webspam team, announced in early 2014 that Google is working on a new version of their algorithm designed to help small businesses by pushing spammers and content mills into far less prominent search results.

But because algorithms aren't perfect and lack human editors, Google may have accidentally made search results from many small websites less prominent over time.

Netflix’s streaming service's chief product officer, Neil Hunt, hinted at what the Netflix of the Future might look like. "Our vision is, you won't see a grid and you won't see a sea of titles," said Hunt.

It won't be able to magically pick the perfect movie for you. But there is a "powerful possibility" that future versions will present viewers with just three or four manageable choices at a time.

An internal report obtained by BuzzFeed reveals that the New York Times is, by admission of its own employees, struggling to adapt to a digital publishing landscape.

The Times's "Innovation Report," commissioned by chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and conducted by his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger (a journalist at the paper), reveals a newsroom "falling behind" in the "art and science of getting our journalism to readers."

The Times "has watched readership fall significantly." "Not only is the audience on our website shrinking," notes the report, "but our audience on our smartphone apps has dipped, an extremely worrying sign on a growing platform." Per BuzzFeed, the Times is getting trounced by savvier online competitors like the Huffington Post, which are leveraging the Times' reporting to generate traffic.

According to late-night HBO comedian Bill Maher, there are only two ways a nincompoop in the House of Representatives could lose a seat. "You literally have to die or tweet a picture of your penis," he said.

In 2012, when congressional approval ratings dropped to what was then a record low of 10%, Americans somehow reelected 90% of their representatives that same year. But going into the 2014 midterm elections, Maher's strategy has changed. He isn't only using political angst for bits; he's using a segment of the show to try and directly influence a midterm race.

Maher's "Flip a District" project has already begun taking video and social media nominations of representatives his 4.2 million weekly viewers would like to see ousted. The left-leaning Maher has vowed to narrow down a 16-person bracket to one contender and do his best to drive a stake through his or her incumbency.

[Commentary] “Do you know how many great business ideas die in the bank parking lot?” a Colorado woman asked then-First Lady Hillary Clinton 20 years ago. The aspiring entrepreneur had just been turned down, again, for a credit line critical to her technology startup. Today, women still struggle to access the capital they need to spur economic development.

While women entrepreneurs are now understood to be an accelerator of global growth, their difficulty accessing capital is a pernicious global brake. The opportunity cost is profound, given that women’s economic impact is magnified by a "multiplier effect"; women are more likely than men to plough earnings back into their communities, fostering prosperity and stability.

[Ambassador Verveer is executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security and partner at Seneca Point Global, a global women strategy firm; Azzarelli is a partner at Seneca Point Global]

These countries have digitized governments that will put our Healthcare.gov problems to shame, fast broadband Internet speeds beyond comparison, and instead of hookup apps, you’ll see innovations in energy alternatives.

• Estonia: Estonians are the brains behind Skype and Kazaa, an early file-sharing program, and has one the fastest broadband Internet speeds in the world.
• South Korea: The South Korean government promotes its startup economy by pouring $2.7 billion in funding startups and offering tax breaks for big companies that invest in startups.
• Israel: The country boasts more startups per capita than any other country and currently has 70 companies listed on the Nasdaq, making it third only to the US and China on the stock exchange. Not bad for a population of 8.2 million.
• China: With its massive 1.3 billion strong population, entrepreneurs in China will be the ones who can identify unmet needs and use their resources to provide services and tools to meet those needs. Entrepreneurs outside of China can only dream of being able to fill gaps in this massive marketplace.