Blippar announced Wednesday at Mobile World Congress that it will offer an augmented reality application that relies on an overlay for objects it recognizes. Wearers will have an option to look at a Coke can and see an advertisement, per Quartz, citing the CEO and co-founder Ambarish Mitra. It's the same as pulling up relative information on the image from across the Web.

Google executive Sundar Pichai denied reports that the company made a $10-billion bid to purchase WhatsApp, the messaging service that was recently acquired by Facebook, reports the Los Angeles Times. The denial came while he attended the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will grant $1 million in donations to companies needing to upgrade their technology infrastructure. He made the announcement Tuesday in an interview on "CBS This Morning," there to promote his coauthored book The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives.

Experts at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and other companies have been talking for years about a shortage of tech-proficient gurus who could support systems as more devices connect to the Internet. Now companies have begun to step up efforts to work with schools, so students have the education they need. For years, much of the hiring came from students who entered the United States internationally on student visas, stayed to get an education and work for a bit, and then went home to support their respective countries. Ethics and data privacy have since become major concerns. Now Carnegie Mellon …

The ability to learn requires more than a high IQ, per Max Nisen, citing Laszlo Bock, head of Google's people operations. Once upon a time, Google cared mostly about hiring people with top GPA scores at the best schools from around the world. The company execs have since discovered that graduates of top schools can lack "intellectual humility."

Candice Landau shows marketers how to use a variety of content -- not necessarily the marketer's -- to boost rank in search engine queries. This means relying on things other than fan-generated content to create a community and encourage engagement. One suggestion is to embed Quora quotes in posts or make use of fan-generated content, Landau tells us.

Oracle has bought digital marketing data veteran BlueKai for a reported $400 million. “This deal adds to Oracle's growing arsenal of acquired companies that sell technology to chief marketing officers,” Business Insider reports. “Marketing tech is shaping up to be the next big trend in enterprise tech spending, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wants to dominate it.” According Crunchbase, BlueKai has raised about $42 million in venture capital. 

Big changes are afoot at Microsoft under the new leadership of Satya Nadella. “Now it is about discovering the new formula,” Nadella tells The New York Times in his first interview as the software giant’s CEO. With regard to decision-making and innovation, Nadella said: “Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times … that is perhaps the big culture change -- recognizing innovation and fostering its growth.” 

It shouldn't come as a surprise to those deep in technology that semantic search must succeed for search engine marketing to flourish. Innovation drives change. Stifle search and it will die. Dave Lloyd uses the metaphor of the search spinning away from familiarity to demonstrate recent search engine marketing changes and the evolution toward semantic search. As he puts it: a world rapidly spinning away from search as we've known it for the past 15 years. He also analyzes how Google's Knowledge Graph, Schema.org and other semantic-based technology will evolve.

Rand Fishkin explains six ways to improve search engine rankings without investing in content creation and marketing. He tells marketers to make snippets better and pages will match the intent of the search. Leverage the network to help attract links, shares, traffic and endorsements. And, yes -- identify pages on the site that make people happy, but don't attract much search traffic. They have high engagement, low bounce rate, but don't get organic search traffic. Concentrate on keyword targeting and optimization for those pages.