Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With over 1.4 million apps available on Google Play and over 1.2 million on the App Store, the idea that smartphone users are spoilt for choice is an understatement. And it’s not just free apps that are crowding the stores. January 2015 was the App Store’s most profitable month ever, with users spending about half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases in the first one week alone.

Think about that figure for a moment. Half a billion. That’s more than the entire budgets of the Titanic and Avengers: Age of Ultron combined. And that’s what people like you and I spent on our favorite yoga app or must-have game in just one week.

There’s a je ne sais quoi about apps that go viral that every app developer would like to lay their hands on. I don’t claim to be have all the answers, but an analysis of the flavors of the season – Dubsmash, Meerkat and Periscope – might help us distill the secrets behind building apps that drive fanatic downloads and sky-high engagement rates....

Hey, where'd you go?

University of Rochester researchers have developed — take a breath — a “three-dimensional, transmitting, continuously multidirectional cloaking” device.That pileup of adjectives basically means the “perfect paraxial” cloak makes an object invisible, and it stays invisible even when the viewer isn’t looking straight at it. That’s an improvement over early cloaking efforts where the abracadabra effect is ruined by as little as a head tilt.

And the scientists pulled it off with relatively cheap and easily found materials, specifically a set of four lenses set at just the right distance to bend light around an object.

The new research, submitted to the journal Optics Express and available on arXiv.org, is the latest in a growing body of studies exploring various approaches to making objects appear to vanish into thin air....