It's been a highly emotional weekend for me. After a long battle, my Mom slipped quietly away in the middle of the night last Thursday. My dad, my sisters Laurel and Heather and I held her hand and stroked her forehead for most of the night as we watched her increasingly shallow breaths. We spent a lot of time reminiscing. It was all horribly beautiful. It was life - and death.

I just moved to a new home in a new (to me) town in a new (to me) state. This meant changing cable providers for the third time in six months, as we had moved temporarily six months ago. I now have experience with Cablevision/Optimum, Xfinity/Comcast and TimeWarner Cable (soon to be CharterTimeWarnerCable. Or something like that).

The year was 1996. A friend of mine had created a Web site to track bond prices in real time. He had just sold his first ad. "Can you click on it?" he asked me. "Every time you do, I make five cents." At the time, like the Internet itself, the problem he jokingly referred to was in its infancy. But that's no longer the case. As our media consumption has shifted online, the incentives to commit ad fraud have grown. And the Shakespearean irony is that the very thing that makes the Internet seem so compelling for advertisers -- …

I skipped Cannes this year. This isn't the first time I've done so, nor is it the first time that I've written about skipping Cannes. I'm not necessarily trying to sound triumphant, but I found a better place to for me to be this week. I was participating in Nielsen's Consumer 360 event in Washington D.C. instead.

Cannes is about creative, but this year the creative conversation is laced with something more than rose -- it's laced with talk of how data can finally be used to influence the creative process.

Sorry, Google. I realize this is my last chance to tell you about my experience. But you see, you're in a long line of companies that are also desperate for the juicy details of my various consumer escapades. Best Western, Ford, Kia, Home Depot, Apple, Samsung - my inbox is completely clogged with pleas for the "deets" of my transactional interactions with them. I've never been more popular - or frustrated.

Last week I was fortunate to meet with start-ups on both the East Coast as well as the West Coast -- in other words, Silicon Alley followed by Silicon Valley.

Technology is awesome. No, seriously: awe-some, as in, I am continually in awe of what is possible. In moments, you can create your own versions of famous movie intros. For $5, you can hire someone to paint your logo on their body. You can contribute toward a campaign to make a woman's "relentlessly gay yard more relentless, gayer." We live in truly magical times. These three examples are quirky, edge-case examples of a major, mostly wonderful shift in our approach to transactions and exchange, a shift exemplified by phrases like, "sharing economy" and "enabling platforms." Suddenly, we aren't dependent on …

I believe advertising has missed the greatest gift we've ever been given: the smartphone. For years it's been my belief that, as the time we spend on-screen increases every day, the ads we see on mobiles don't perform as well as expected. Consequently, ads become larger, more interruptive, harder to close -- and more likely to kill my data with video. There are two big problems.

Where is Twitter headed? The surprise resignation of Dick Costolo has almost everyone I know asking "Who, where and when?" - who will take over, where will the company go, and when will all this happen?