Amazon Kindle Fire Makes Up Half Of All Android Tablets Sold In The U.s.

China is urging North Korea to release a Chinese fishing boat whose owner says it was seized by gun-toting North Koreans earlier this month and held for ransom, in the latest irritant in relations between the neighboring allies.    

Sunday night Madonna received a Billboard Music Award for the Top Touring Artist of 2012. Her MDNA tour, which brought in $305 million, was a musical and visual extravaganza. Madonna performed with 140,000 pounds of gear suspended above her head. She danced on 42-square-inch squares undulating up and down, reaching eight feet above the stage. What’s more, at each of the 88 stops of the tour, the stage had been built in a few short hours by a local crew who has never seen it (or the traveling roadies) before. Rock concerts descend upon a host site and then quickly disappear. The only certainty is that of unforeseen obstacles. How do they get the show to go on every night, no matter what?

Consumer spending is likely to pick up this year while government spending declines at a faster rate, according to a survey of business economists. The economists predict that the U.S. economy will grow 2.4 percent this year and 3 percent next year.

When Jim Keenan, the social sales specialist, describes his work today, he’ll tell you that he’s “ushering salespeople from the old world into the social world” - the cold calling world to the Twitter world, the salespeople who call prospects incessantly to the salespeople who educate their prospects with relevant content. Keenan’s argument in the The Rise of Social Salespeople is that using social media to sell - increases profits.

Wearable tech isn't new but Credit Suisse (as cited by Barron's here) is calling it “the next big thing” and forecasting the market to ramp from about $3B – $5B today to $50B over the next 3-5 years. The implications and opportunities for clinical healthcare (not just fitness/wellness) are intriguing. As this unfolds, it could easily be that the Credit Suisse forecast is overly conservative. One of the slides in the CS report included many of the devices that are well known in the mobile and digital health circles – including the new Shine by Misfit Wearables. There's good reason to be bullish. At a health conference last year – the CIO of a teaching hospital shared a provocative statistic that his organization had uncovered in their ROI analysis of a large iPad purchase. At the time, the hospital was debating the merits of such a large financial commitment – so they tasked the CIO to do a crude ROI analysis to justify the sizable expense. Was the ROI 6 months – or maybe a year? The (unscientific) results were jaw dropping. Using some crude calculations around workflow and time-motion analysis the CIO calculated the ROI for an iPad in their hospital would be 9 days. That’s right – 9 days.