Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella challenged Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Larry Page to have a bucket of ice water dumped on their head to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The ability to bring sensory experiences to the mobile screen just might change the way consumers purchase goods and services online. Devices could one day simulate sticky and smooth sensations through electrovibration by altering the voltage levels on glass surfaces that change the friction between the fingertip and the screen.

Marketers don't pay attention to geeky hardware stuff, but they should, especially when the technology will make search engines from Baidu and Microsoft run faster. Engineers at Microsoft ran tests using boards with semiconductor chips from Altera and found the specialized type of reprogrammable chip outperformed anything they currently use.

No doubt about it -- Snapchat continues to gain fans who admittedly "love" the platform -- although it remains unclear what the reported Snapchat-authorized sale of 17.4 million preferred shares in a Delaware filing made Monday means for the company. No one wants to say it, but compulsive behavior seems to be a trait. A new study reveals that the majority of fans are women, so what does that insinuate about the female population?

Programmatic ad buying began with search engine marketing. Data introduced programmatic audience buying for display, video, television and other media buys. Unlike audience buying, Google AdWords and Bing Ads, described as auction-based systems, allow marketers to bid on keywords rather than lumping personas into audiences. The campaigns would rise to the top above the fold, with many of these search campaigns run by in-house marketing departments, rather than agencies.

Kenshoo reports that mobile spend and click share rates for paid search in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia rose during the past year among its clients, although share in the latter two regions outpaces the former.

While IT takes charge of the technology across companies, 51% of marketing leaders say they do not firmly believe that IT has the knowledge about customer life cycles to make the correct decisions that accelerate their department's success, according to a Forrester Research survey that cites responses from 3,532 technology leaders. CIOs need to better understand marketing technology requirements to increase revenue and drive profits. And marketers need to teach them. This turns marketing into a profit center rather than an empty hole that bleeds red.

Google has acquired Emu, per the mobile messaging virtual assistant's Web site. The app creates reminders from messages based on time and location, as well as showing movie times and schedule restaurant reservations from text message. The creators of the app are alumni of Siri, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and AOL/TechCrunch. They built Emu using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. The technology understands the content and context of messages, and adds relevant information to help get things done.

For the first time, I opted-in to mobile location tracking last week on my iPhone to get directions for my road trip from Huntington Beach, Calif. to Wyoming. Allow me to refer back to a SearchBlog article that ran July 31, pointing to survey findings from PunchTab identifying the top reasons that consumers agree to mobile location tracking. The trip was my reason. It worked out well, for the most part, but the mapping applications didn't offer an overlay of local businesses on my way. Huge disappointment. Here's why.

Some amazing structures remain on the Oregon Trail, a 2,200-mile historic east-west rugged wagon route originally only passable on foot or by horseback, but trying to get Internet access from some of the stops to share photos on Google+, Facebook or Twitter seems pretty much impossible. The same goes for Yellowstone National Park, where the deer, bear, buffalo, bison, moose and other animals run free. It makes you feel as if you're in a wildlife zoo without the modern conveniences that most of us have come to depend on.