Technology has blurred the walls of the workplace in at least two dramatic ways. People who once worked inside the clear confines of a cubicle, inside an office, within an office tower in a commercial district, can now work from nearly anywhere. And because the spatial distinction has been disappearing between work and home (and everywhere in between), neat divisions in time are now eroding, too.

Even if you do still have an actual office where you commute every day, you have probably experienced how these lines have softened simultaneously: You’ve walked out of your building and into the subway, pulled out your phone, and gone right back to triaging email.

These sweeping shifts in where and when work takes place have been brought about by much more than just the Internet. Credit the portable laptop and the smartphone, WiFi and fiber optic infrastructure, computer security from VPNs, high-quality teleconferencing and the cloud. As for your computer itself? “It’s just a shell,” says Adam Stoltz, a real estate workplace strategist based in Washington. “It’s the thing that enables me to get to the data.”

He says that the growing number of accounts in app stores could also have a disruptive effect on other media types: “Whereas video, books and music are targeted to smaller user bases, apps are broadly consumed. Developers like Rovio or Supercell can offer their products to billions while TV producers can only hope for millions. Apps are becoming the universal medium for entertainment, and iTunes the universal distributor.”

Apple has been criticised by both developers and customers because every app that goes onto the store is first checked by the company’s own team. Delays are commonplace – and can stretch to weeks at busy times.

Apps have been rejected for what seem like trivial reasons (such as appearing to use an Apple name in the title) or, more egregiously, for allowing people to access nudity and for expressing political views – which saw an app from a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist rejected (though later reinstated).

Just as stunning have been some of the apps that have been let through – ranging from the fairly inoffensive, but trivial (such as “fart apps”, which simply make a noise) – to one called Baby Shaker which encouraged the player to shake an onscreen baby to make it be quiet. “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” said the blurb.

Microsoft says it sold 100 million licenses for Windows 8 in the six months it was on sale. Not spectacular, but not bad either. But for Windows RT, Widows 8′s tablet-friendly little brother, things haven’t been so hot. Microsoft hasn’t given out numbers, but IDC estimates sales of Microsoft’s Surface RT at a bit over a million for October through March. It seems likely that combined sales of OEM RT products–all four of them–were even lower. By contrast, Apple is selling nearly 1.5 million iPads a week.

The failure of Windows RT–and it is getting very hard to call it anything else–leaves Microsoft in a terrible bind, as least a s a seller of consumer products. The post-PC era is upon us, not in the sense that traditional PCs are going way, but that they are no longer the center of the computing world, either in most people’s usage, in mindshare, or in sales. We’ve just entered this new era and it should be possible for a company with Microsoft’s resources to recover. But the first step in recovery is recognizing that you have a problem, and Microsoft doesn’t seem to quite be there yet. Consider Board Chairman Bill Gates’ comments on CNBC:

One of the many challenges a business must face is the decision to buy a pre-packaged solution or to build a customized version that meets the business’s exact specifications.
The latter often requires extraordinary time, money, and human capital resources. In the entrepreneur-friendly environment of today, it can seem like the best option. However, as many former “build your own solution” enthusiasts can attest, it’s often easier said than done.

During my stretch as VP of sales and operations for HPShopping.com, I learned the entire process of building our own solution was not only disruptive to our internal business process, it was also incredibly expensive. Having had that experience, if I were evaluating buying a solution versus building one today as a CEO or CIO, it would be a no-brainer — I would prefer to buy it.

But, before you go rushing down the proverbial shopping aisle, here are a few things to consider and some questions you should ask:

Michael Marchillo, a plumber, has been trying and failing for months to buy a bigger home for his family here in Sin City. He was pre-qualified by a bank for a $130,000 mortgage, which a year ago would have landed a typical three-bedroom home in the area. No more. Now, the 36-year-old says, it’s hard to compete with “greedy investors” who come to the table flush with cash for quick deals.

Marchillo is on to something. The once-beleaguered Las Vegas housing market has been on fire since investment firms led by Blackstone Group LP, Colony Capital and American Homes 4 Rent began buying homes here some eight months ago, backed by $8 billion in investor cash to spend nationally.

These big investors and a handful of others have bought at least 55,000 single-family homes across the U.S. in the past year. In the Vegas area alone, they have accounted for at least 10 percent of the homes sold since January 2012, according to a Reuters analysis of housing transactions.

Google’s dirty little secret is that its commercial algorithm is broken and it can’t distinguish between quality content and spam. Which is why it is backing big brands in a big way because that’s the easiest way to sort things out.

That’s too bad for small mom and pop businesses and the backbone of the economy.

The United States housing market is no longer the boat anchor dragging down economic growth. Data from the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices show that average home prices in an assortment of American cities have been on the upswing, increasing by almost 7 percent across the country in 2012. Recent reports that sales of new single-family homes rose in March are proof points that “the housing market recovery remains on track.”

We asked Nicolas P. Retsinas to reflect on the re-emergence of the housing industry, what it means to the rental market, and the future of the mortgage interest tax deduction. Retsinas is a senior lecturer in real estate at Harvard Business School, director emeritus of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, and former Federal Housing Commissioner.

Q: What factors have been contributing to the housing recovery?

here is nowhere left to live in New York. Trust me, I know. Fewer apartments are on the market today in the city than at any time since records began, and if you want one you’d better be able to put up the cash. Manhattan, converted these past 20 years into an antiseptic (that’s Giuliani’s doing) luxury goods emporium (that’s Bloomberg’s), has long been out of reach; the leafier areas of Brooklyn were colonized in the last decade by brunching hordes willing to pay seven figures to live in ironic imitation of their immigrant grandparents. Even Brooklyn’s drearier northern stretches have become the territory of the 1 percent over the past five years. The first to fall was Williamsburg, a character-free, formerly working-class neighborhood now populated by bankers who pay more for the privilege of living in a gritty outer borough than they would for a place downtown. Then came nasty Greenpoint, which sits alongside a fetid, carcinogen-spewing creek. Now it’s the turn of apocalyptic Bushwick, which you should avoid visiting at all costs and where otherwise professional people pack themselves cheek-by-jowl into spaces that resemble badly administered refugee camps, but with an artisanal ramen shop next door.

Socialism is a dirty word in many parts of the US. After all, America is a global symbol of free markets, muscular capitalism and the small state. Yet somehow the government has turned its mortgage market into a giant nationalised enterprise on a par with China’s Red Army or Britain’s National Health Service.

US mortgage finance vehicle Fannie Mae, created by Franklin D Roosevelt to drag the US out of the Great Depression, underwrote around one in five mortgages during the 1940s. It was seen as the archetype of Keynesian intervention. Yet Roosevelt’s efforts have been eclipsed by those made by 21st-century governments around the world to pull their economies out of the post-credit crunch tailspin.

Today, in the US, almost nine out of 10 mortgages issued in the US are subsidised by the state through a bewildering array of state-sponsored groups. They include Freddie Mac, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks and Fannie itself. Housing, in other words, has become an arm of the state.

One of these groups, the Federal Housing Administration, is so integral to the market that without it prices could have fallen a further 25 per cent, according to Moody’s Analytics.

And at the same time the Federal Reserve is soaking up some $40bn of mortgage debt a month – through “quantitative easing” – with more than one eye on the housing market.

None of these distinctions is hard and fast, of course, but at least it’s a start; basically, it all comes down to who writes the content in question.

Was the material written by a professional journalist, writing a piece for an editorial outlet? In that case, any advertising message embedded within it falls pretty squarely into the realm of public relations. But what happens when the publication in question syndicates that content for use on some brand’s website? In that event, it becomes content marketing: independently-produced material, repurposed by the brand in question.

On the other hand, was the material commissioned by the brand itself, rather than any editor? In that case, it’s sponsored content. It might be written by a group on the ad-sales side of the publisher; such groups have existed for as long as there have been advertorials. Or it might be written by some group within the brand’s ad agency. The distinction between sponsored content and native advertising is a bit squishy, but it you do need to make a distinction, then I’d say that sponsored content is material designed simply to convey information to the readership of the publication in question, while native content tends to aspire more to going viral, and being actively shared by that readership.