As you may already be aware, Facebook is rolling out the first major update to its News Feed since the feature launched nearly seven years ago. As with every other change the site has made, the new design has been met with mixed reactions and hasn’t gone unnoticed by the media.

Facebook’s revamped News Feed gives the homepage a starkly mobile look, reducing clutter and lending more space to prominent photographs. It takes significant cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets, adding a new side navigation bar and more white space.

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Richard Robinson, Director at Google, kicked off this year’s Technology for Marketing and Advertising event with a keynote presentation on the ‘Future of Digital’.

He reeled off some impressive statistics relating to three main areas of development:

Pace

• There are currently 2.4 billion users of the Internet worldwide. This figure was 1.8 billion 18 months ago and is expected to reach 5 billion by the end of the decade. He described this growth as the ‘democratisation of technology’. more…

The humble wristwatch, an invention of the early 20th century, looked set to be consigned to history as consumers dumped single function devices and switched to smartphones and tablets which tell the time alongside dozens of other applications.

But Apple is rumoured to have 100 engineers working on a curved glass wristwatch computer, heralding a new era of wearable technology  and arguably the most significant development since the digital watch first appeared in 1970.

Technology blogger Jason Perlow predicted that Apple’s “iWatch” would not be an autonomous computer but a “remote display and interaction unit for applications running on a smartphone.” In practice this could remove the need to dig deep into pockets and bags each time you are called, texted, or emailed.

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The mass adoption of smartphones among physicians has not only triggered an explosion of medical apps targeted at healthcare providers, it has also encouraged an emerging trend of health and wellness apps aimed at empowering patients. In fact, there are thought to be 40,000 medical applications available for download on tablets and smartphones, with the market still in its infancy.

Medical apps enable users to monitor health and encourage patient wellness on a moment-to-moment basis, instead of only during occasional visits to the doctor’s surgery. Some even replace devices used in hospitals and doctor’s offices, such as glucometers and high-quality microscopes used by dermatologists to examine skin irregularities.

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Following the successful launch of a mobile friendly version of Emergency Medicine Journal back in 2011, we have now rolled out the same interface on more BMJ Journals:

• Archives of Disease in Childhood
• Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
• Gut
• Heart
• Thorax

More mobile sites launched:

• BMJ Open
• British Journal of Ophthalmology
• BJSM
• DTB
• Frontline Gastroenterology
• In Practice
• JAMIA
• Journal of Clinical Pathology
• JNIS
• Veterinary Record

The mobile web browser detects when a user is accessing each of these sites via a mobile device. Regardless of the type of smartphone, all mobile users are automatically forwarded to an optimised template. The new system offers streamlined content and display for web-enabled, smaller screens with low bandwidth networks. It has been specifically designed to accommodate the mobile behaviour of “keeping up” and “looking up” and works across all devices, including Blackberry, Android and iPhone. more…

Google have extended their content offering by launching a much-rumoured Flipboard competitor, Google Currents. It’s a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones, that lets you explore online magazines, blogs and news sites through a clean, touch-friendly interface.

Google have worked with more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, The Guardian, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Popular Science and more. Content has been optimised specifically for smartphones and tablets, allowing users to navigate between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline. more…

There’s a notable scene in the film Minority Report, where a man reads a newspaper that updates in real time with breaking news. Whilst we are not quite at that stage yet, Augmented Reality (AR) is making use of computer visions algorithms in order to superimpose virtual information (2D or 3D, textual or pictorial) onto real world scenes in real time.

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According to the 2010 International Communications Market report by OfCom, the UK saw the highest growth in smartphone ownership, with numbers increasing by a whopping 70% between January 2009 and January 2010. Over in the US, 72% of physicians used smartphones in 2010, which is up from 64% in 2009, according to the Manhattan Research’s Taking the Pulse report. By 2012, that number is predicted to rise to 81%.

Given this astonishing growth in usage, BMJ Group has been investing in a variety of mobile technology solutions, including the iPad App for the BMJ, and now a ‘mobile friendly’ web interface for Emergency Medicine Journal.

The new mobile web browser for EMJ detects when a user is accessing http://emj.bmj.com via a mobile device. Regardless of the type of smartphone, all mobile users are automatically forwarded to an optimised template. The new system offers streamlined content and display for web-enabled, smaller screens with low bandwidth networks. It has been specifically designed to accommodate the mobile behaviour of “keeping up” and “looking up” and works across all devices, including Blackberry, Android and iPhone.

What does it look like?

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