Heads up: Honolulu’s phone ban

From The Economist

“Distracted walking” becomes illegal in Hawaii’s capital this week, enforced by fines of up to $99. With one of the highest pedestrian-fatality rates in the country, it is the first big American city to prohibit pedestrians from crossing the road while looking at phones or other gadgets. Pedestrian fatalities in America rose 11% last year, to nearly 6,000; mobile phones are blamed for more than 11,000 distracted-walking injuries between 2000 and 2011. Critics of the law worry about government overreach, and say that lowering speed limits, or cracking down on intoxication (of both drivers and pedestrians), would work better. Augsburg in Germany has tried another approach, embedding lights into pavements to catch the attention of downward-looking phone users and let them know when to cross a road. Before signing the bill, Honolulu’s mayor, Kirk Caldwell, lamented the need for such laws, but said: “sometimes we lack common sense”.

One Billion Smartphone Upgrades

From Delloite CIO Journal –

Deloitte predicts that one billion smartphones will be purchased as upgrades for the first time in 2015, generating over $300 billion in sales.

The adblocking revolution is months away (with iOS 9) – with trouble for advertisers, publishers and Google

From The Overspill –

“Remember newspapers? In the old days, adverts appeared in print, on the radio and on the TV. Most ad-supported news organisations that have shifted to the internet began in print.

Ads in print were straightforward. Advertisers bought space, and editors could turn them down, or sometimes decide not to run them if a story broke that would bring about an awkward juxtaposition of, say, the advert for a shoe store on page 3 and the big breaking story now being placed on page 3 about people having feet crushed by a runaway steamroller. (The ad would get moved to another page.) Print ads were hard for advertisers to track, though they could use codes and so on that would clue them in to where someone had seen one if they responded directly.”

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