The week in tech: A loved-up landscape

With less than a week until Valentines Day, it’s fitting that the tech world brings with it news of everyone and everything getting that little bit more snuggled up.   Tech giants looking for real estate in the UK’s capital; content finding you preemptively and responsively; b2b interactions on LinkedIn and an ever-more fluid cooperation between the human body and technology – the whole world is sidling a little closer to each other on the couch, fake-yawning, and stretching an arm around an unsuspecting shoulder. blur Group takes a look at a week that’s been nothing but love.   In love with London, but will it be unrequited? Hot on the heels of Google, news from Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica that Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce are all hunting out new office space in London. But what, he asks, will be the long-term effect of the capital becoming ‘Tech City’, as the Government would have it, and what will that mean for those start-ups so beloved from Silicon Roundabout? How affordable will extensively-developed areas, once a hipster business safe haven, be?   Unstoppable attractions Relevant content already nips at your heels when you whistle, but what if it was to hand the minute you started even thinking about a subject? That’s the premise at the core of ‘anticipatory computing’ or the slightly nattier ‘information gravitation’ – as you work, play, or dawdle, content that resonates with the way you’re behaving on screen will start to edge into your worldview. Not just search results either – your own docs and media too.   Creepy? Perhaps, but Derrick Harris for gigaOM argues that finally there’s an answer for those that don’t actually know what they want, or what to search for. The companies pioneering this tech would see desktop search killed forever, and if we get what we want quickly and more effectively then maybe it is time that Ctrl+F f’d off.   Linking arm(ament)s   LinkedIn is growing up, and Jo Webber at our own blur Group blog takes a look at the analytics-driven possibilities that are now accessible to those who have created groups on the rapidly-evolving business network.   While it still needs a lot of work, Webber says, it’s at least a much-needed insight into a website which is otherwise notoriously prohibitive to analytics from third-party tools. Even a modest amount of new information can change the way you approach your interactions with potential customers, employers, partners and opportunities.   A love worth waiting for   Robert Scoble certainly helps my Valentines theme along with his look at the literally ‘sensual’ side of CES2013. The show is old news to a lot of you by now, sure, but I thought I’d deviate slightly from my calendrial confines and give a whole lot of love to the discourse I enjoyed the most – having read just about everybody’s analysis, his look at sensorial and contextual developments is sharply-written, realistic about developments and as anticipatory as the technology he’s been covering.   That’s all from us this week – we’ll check back in next Friday when your Valentines nights of heady romance or sobbing ice-cream-eating will be done and dusted either way. Good luck!