I'm not sure there are any nationwide or global studies on the dangers of texting while walking, but regional and anecdotal evidence is mounting. The volume of news reports and legal posturing is growing as well, as reflected, for example, in a trend story this week by the AP's transportation reporter, Joan Lowy.

Six months ago I launched a company. To date, my startup has been funded through personal investments from individuals. But since we're now seeing a strong response to the product, it makes sense now to build the business at a faster rate and across more industries. This will involve hiring more employees, which will cost money. The business clearly requires more investment to grow. While there are a number of ways to fund a business at this stage, venture capitalists -- also known as VCs -- are usually best suited to fund technology companies like mine. Despite how it may …

I spend a lot of my time telling stories. When I teach, I use stories. When I consult, I use stories. When groups of us come together to collaborate and scheme and envision our futures, we use stories. And, certainly, storytelling is at the core of the work I do with TEDx. But something happened last night that made me think hard about the way I approach stories and the way I communicate.

Over the past several decades, we've all had our share of learning about crime forensics on television with shows like "Quincy," and "CSI," and networks like TruTV and Investigation Discovery. In the television world of forensics, science, technology, ingenuity, sleuthing and good luck always seemed to come together at just the right moment to find the needle-in-the-haystack physical clue that solved the puzzle, helped investigators recreate lost events of years before and caught the criminal. Well, get ready everyone, the TV world of forensics is now becoming mainstream, and forensically recreated pasts are in our future.

Super Bowl, Olympics or targeted online advertising? That's the question of the day! If you had a few million bucks lying around, how would you spend it? Would you blow your budget on a single Super Bowl ad, buy a category-exclusive Olympics sponsorship, or spend a few million bucks on the Web? The answer lies, of course, in strategy.

The average content posting by an advertiser on a Facebook page has a shelf life of about 18 hours, according to a recent analysis led by Colin Sutton, U.S. director of of OMD Word. Sutton's team defined shelf life as the length of time that users provide feedback after content is posted, and it was less for Facebook than other social media platforms. So how can marketers create greater presence and longer content shelf life in social channels? Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

Last week, computer scientist Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo. In the process, the Silicon Valley-based company passed over interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, the candidate favored by many New York media professionals. This occurred despite the fact that Yahoo is dependent on New York-based media agencies buying its ads. 70% of all U.S. media is still bought on the island of Manhattan. Yahoo's decision was only the latest example of New York's waning influence over the Valley.

A good friend of mine works for a radio communications company. Ask him about his vision of the future, though, and he'll sound like he's quoting a science-fiction movie. "We might not even need radios!" he enthuses. "Maybe I'll be able to just think something and a person in the other room will hear me." The first time I heard him say that, I thought it sounded pretty silly. But two recent technological developments have blown my mind so completely that I'm no longer sure my friend isn't onto something with his prediction.

Cross-platform ad campaigns are coming, and so is the desire for real cross-platform measurement. Unfortunately, no one yet knows what that measurement will look like and which metrics will rule it.

Since the topic of viewable ads rose to the forefront in the last few months, a number of publishers have jumped onboard to say they'll only sell viewable ads. ESPN was probably the biggest publisher to say it would test the model and see what happens. I wonder what happened?