Rachel Feltman

Brick-and-mortar retailers are starting to track your behavior the same way online stores do, and customers aren’t happy about it. According to The New York Times, Nordstrom started an experiment in data collection last fall, tracking customer movement by following the wifi signals in their smartphones. But when they posted a sign alerting shoppers to the practice (and letting them know that they could opt out by turning off their phone’s wifi connection), people freaked out.

Market research from YouGov BrandIndex shows that Apple and Google have both fallen off the list of the 1o best-perceived brands in the US. Apple actually failed to make the cut for the second half of 2012, while Google came in last place. But this time, Google’s been knocked off the list by Amazon’s double placement: The rival now ranks both as a web retailer (second only to Ford) under its own name and is listed again under its branded e-reader, the Kindle (which, at number 9, beats Cheerios).

US secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced today that she’s stepping down to become president of the University of California. The former governor of Arizona will be the first woman to run the large UC system.

People are sending millions of dollars worth of presents to strangers from the internet. Just yesterday, I came home to find a painting of a goat waiting for me. The week before, it was a hand-blown glass octopus. My favorite snacks. Star Trek earrings. Fifty vintage stamps with mushrooms on them. Now, this anonymous gift-giving is the center of a growing online business.

The Allen and Co. Sun Valley conference is upon us. Heralded as the birthplace of major mergers and acquisitions, the tech and media pow-wow attracts all the big names—last year, Sergey Brin showed up wearing Google Glass—and the live tweeting of the event is reminiscent of the Oscars.

The real danger of the singularity isn’t that computers will conspire to overtake their masters, but that we’ll let them do it—and then be lost when they fail. This is already apparent in the number of major market crashes that have occurred on the watch of complex algorithms, according to some.

Small-scale production in the hands of consumers is sometimes touted as the future of 3D printing technology, but it’s probably not going to happen.

The era of the selfie—the self-portrait, for those of you not in the constant company of American 20-somethings—is upon us, and advertisers are finally catching on. Apps are now relying on those 20-somethings’ love of Instagram and its knockoffs to get them thinking about—and ultimately buying—stuff.

Reddit, the social news and entertainment site that bills itself as “the front page of the internet,” is meant to be the ultimate democratic web experience. Users submit links to web pages, discuss them, and vote them up and down. The most popular links, climbing gradually from various “subreddits” (sections) of the site to its homepage, attract tens or hundreds of thousands of clicks. Not suprisingly, gaming the system has become something of a cottage industry. The latest to be accused of doing so is Quickmeme, a website for generating memes by applying captions to pictures, which  got banned from Reddit earlier this week.

Do you suffer from password fatigue? If you’re a human and you use the internet, the Agence France-Presse says, you probably do. Symptoms include picking “easy” passwords—those that shirk suggestions for long strings of characters mixing numbers and symbols—and repeating passwords from one website to another, a dangerous game if you’re mixing low- and high-security accounts.

Google launched a flock of Wi-Fi toting balloons from New Zealand’s South Island last week, and the choice of location was far from incidental: Kiwis have made a name for themselves as the perfect market for testing new tech.

Jack Conte says he’s earning over $60,000 a year making music videos for his YouTube channel, and he wants to help other artists do the same. Launched in May, his crowdfunding platform Patreon aims to get YouTube personalities get paid for the things they make—great and small.

The US Federal Aviation Administration may be about to change its policy on in-flight gadget use, The Wall Street Journal reports. Current regulations, banning all devices until planes have reached an altitude of 10,000 feet, are now over 50 years old. And it seems increasingly clear that the electronic signal interference the ban was designed to prevent isn’t actually an issue. With this in mind, the FAA put together an advisory panel last August to reconsider regulatory standards, and the first draft of its report has just been completed.

France today announced its plan to cut food waste, and one of its targets is sell-by dates found on packages, which tend to be overly cautious and poorly communicated.

The US Supreme Court today ruled that Myriad, the US biotech company that holds a monopoly on testing for a set of breast-cancer related genes, can’t hold a patent on genetic material. But after the news broke, Myriad’s stock shot up.

PC maker Hewlett-Packard is changing the way it does business, which could dethrone a longstanding tech power couple.

Cell phones are expected to bring the next billion internet users on board by 2015, but not all those new users will come from Africa and Asia. Plenty of them are members of late-adopting ethnic groups within the US.

The world’s first Bluetooth-controlled cyborg is here in the form of an app-enabled cockroach. And it’s using Kickstarter to raise money. It’s also being developed and manufactured in a hackerspace—a cooperative lab and machine shop space where techies can tinker and invent together.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has access to a lot of data—almost all online communication passing through the US. But with resources that include hundreds of thousands of online accounts, where is the agency keeping all the data?

Just weeks after opening sales of their new flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, Samsung Electronics Co has lost $12 billion in market value. The 6 percent share slide, the biggest Samsung has seen in nine months, was sparked by downgrades in global sales forecasts for the third quarter—from 30 million handsets to 25 million.

3-D printing darling MakerBot Industries may be in talks for an acquisition, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Just who’s looking to buy the four-year-old start-up remains to be seen. With $10 million in revenue last year and $50 million in sales projected for 2013, the company is ripe for the picking.

The average mobile phone user in the UK will text as many as 7.3 million words in his or her lifetime, according to a study by MobileInsurance.co.uk. With novels typically clocking in at about 80,000 words, that makes more than 90 literary tomes for each texting Brit. (The 15 novels of Charles Dickens clock in at a relatively concise 4 million words.) The study polled 2,717 people over the age of 18 from around the country, and found that most of them texted “regularly”—on average, 14 messages a day—from age 14 through 55. That makes more than 200,000 messages total during prime texting years. And at an estimated 35 words a pop, your emoticons and reminders to buy milk could fill a bookshelf.

With the impending arrival of Google Glass, augmented reality, long the stuff of science fiction, will soon be invading our every waking moment. It will turn us into faster learners, gamifying our everyday lives, transforming our to-do lists into streams of real-world next actions, and making advertising more intimate (and invasive) than ever. Next week, innovators from around the globe will gather for 2013’s Augmented Realty World Expo to show off some of the most useful—and improbable—applications of augmented reality. Here are some of the earth-shattering ways in which blending the virtual and digital worlds could change our lives.