E-cigarettes are a booming business among smokers who want to light up indoors, smokers who want to quit and, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month, among children.
And right now, e-cigarette-makers have a tremendous amount of latitude in the U.S. to market those products as they choose, even on television, where traditional cigarette ads have been banned since 1971.
That's because the Food and Drug Administration has not yet determined whether e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine to the lungs through a battery-generated vapor rather than via tobacco smoke, should be considered tobacco products — with all the regulation that designation entails. The agency is expected to make its determination as early as this month.
In the meantime, "the marketing that you're seeing in these cigarettes now, it's the wild west," Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, tells NPR's Melissa Block on All Things Considered. "They're using celebrities, movies, television — it's just like getting into a time machine."
Perhaps some readers will remember those heady, hazy days, when TV was filled with ads touting cigarettes' health benefits, as the center of a refreshing set break for John Wayne — even as part of a wholesome breakfast:
Not surprisingly, today's e-cigarette ads look a lot slicker than their midcentury tobacco cousins. Actors Stephen Dorff and Jenny McCarthy crank up the sex appeal in their advertisements for Blu eCigs, owned by Lorillard, which manufactures Kent and Newport tobacco cigarettes. At the bar, McCarthy says, "I can whip out my Blu, and not worry about scaring that special someone away."
And FIN electronic cigarette's national television spot goes for a stylish smash-up of vintage and modern, complete with a retro-looking diner waitress.
Andries Verleur, co-founder of VMR Products, which makes V2 Cigs, told Bloomberg News that the industry does expect the FDA will eventually clamp down on e-cigarette advertising.
As Mitchell Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, told Shots, the jury's still out on the health effects of e-cigarettes. But, for now, as NJoy King put it in its TV ad that ran during the Super Bowl in February, "the most amazing thing about this cigarette is, it isn't one."
At least, not yet.
You can hear more about the e-cigarette industry in Melissa Block's story on Monday's All Things Considered.
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When it comes to online genealogy, the two major for-profit players are Ancestry.com and MyHeritage. Ancestry.com got a major head start over MyHeritage, but it mostly focused on gathering historical records while MyHeritage put an emphasis on building and matching family trees. But now it’s also starting to amass a wider range of historical records. Today, MyHeritage announced a major multi-year partnership with the largest nonprofit player in the space, the Mormon church-sponsored FamilySearch. Thanks to this partnership, MyHeritage’s users will now gain access to 2 billion historical records and family tree profiles from FamilySearch. In return, FamilySearch’s users will be able to use MyHeritage’s technology (through that company’s API) for matching family trees with historical records. MyHeritage has committed about 40 of its 150 employees to this project. While the partnership has a time limit, MyHeritage founder and CEO Gilad Japhet didn’t disclose the length of the agreement. Japhet says the service currently has about 75 million registered users who have added 1.6 billion profiles. It’s available in 40 languages, and while Ancestry.com may be bigger in the U.S., MyHeritage argues that it’s the biggest player in most European and South American countries. Because it’s hard to migrate family trees between services, it’s seeing very high retention rates, but this also means that it’s hard to gain new users from smaller competing services without outright acquiring those services. About a year ago, for example, MyHeritage bought Geni.com to acquire its engineers, user and data. One feature that makes MyHeritage unique is its ability to match up its users’ family trees, which helps them discover previously unknown branches of their families. The service’s fuzzy matching algorithm can find these matches even when there are minor errors or alternative spellings. Today’s partnership with FamilySearch.org brings a wide range of new documents to MyHeritage, which the company is now ingesting and plans to start exposing over the next few months. Given the Mormon church’s focus on genealogy for religious reasons (which at times lands it in hot water), FamilySearch has amassed one of the largest – if not the largest – database of records related to family history. In total, FamilySearch will provide about 1 billion records to MyHeritage. As Japhet noted, FamilySearch was sitting on a treasure trove of data, but didn’t have the technology to easily analyze it. MyHeritage, on the other hand, has the technology but needed more data. ThisSource: 
As it stands, Google Glass doesn't have a simple way of cataloging real-world items -- you have to snap a picture and make a note afterward. It may get much easier if Google implements a newly granted US patent, however. The technique uses a wearable display's camera to detect hand gestures made in ...
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