What We're Reading

There’s been plenty of chatter about what consumers want from wearables and what they’ll use them for, such as mobile payments and health and fitness tracking. Based on recent research, wearable devices are also set to change the business world.

In a March 2015 study by Salesforce.com, nearly eight in 10 US enterprise wearable adopters agreed that wearables would reshape their companies’ future success. More than three-quarters of users had already seen improvement in their business performance due to wearables, and 86% of adopters intended to increase spending over the next 12 months.

Enterprises were most interested in using wearables to track workplace productivity, but beyond that, improving the customer experience thanks to real-time access to customer data, business analytics and alerts, and customer instruction and coaching were all top use cases.

Salesforce noted that professionals viewed wearables devices as a huge opportunity for data collection—but they’re a long way off fr

Innovation continues in the advertising sector as cookies, which can be blocked or disabled, are fast being replaced with a digital "fingerprint".

This new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com...and they're difficult to stop.

First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.

Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites they visit — profiles that shape which ads, news articles, or other types of content are displayed to them.

But fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented b