“They’re up at night and they’re dong a lot less homework than we thought and a lot more multitasking,” Dr. Christina J. Calamaro of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the lead researcher on the study, told Reuters Health.

She and her colleagues found that the more multitasking a teen did, the more likely he or she was to be dozing off during the day, while the kids who nodded off were also the heaviest caffeine consumers.

Experts believe that teenagers need at least nine hours of sleep every night, Calamaro and her team note in their report, but the average sleep time for US adolescents is seven hours. The researchers investigated whether teens’ use of technology and caffeinated beverages might affect how much sleep they got at night and how tired they felt during the day by surveying 100 12- to 18-year-olds.

To gauge how heavily the study participants used technology at night, Calamaro and her colleagues developed a measure they dubbed the “multitasking index”: the total number of hours a child spent doing each of nine different activities (watching TV, listening to MP3s, doing homework, and watching DVDs or videos, etc.) divided by 9 — the number of hours from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Kids’ average multitasking index was about .6, meaning they were engaged in the equivalent of one of the nine activities for 5.3 hours or four activities for an 80 minutes each.

Just one in five of the study participants said they got 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night, and these teens had an average multitasking index of 0.39.

One third of the study participants said they fell asleep in school, and these teens dozed off an average of twice a day, although some said they fell asleep as many as eight times a day. The higher a child’s multitasking index, the more likely he or she was to fall asleep in school.

The teens’ average caffeine consumption was 215 mg daily, or the equivalent of a couple of espressos.

Nearly three-quarters of the study participants were drinking more than 100 mg of caffeine a day, and there were a few with very heavy consumption, the researchers found; 11.2% drank over 400 mg of caffeine daily. One student reported drinking over 1,400 mg of caffeine every day.

Fourteen of the study participants had their licenses, and half of them said they felt sleepy while driving; one of them admitted to falling asleep behind the wheel.

“These adolescents who multitask the most are at risk for changes in school performance, difficulties with executive function, and degradation of neurobehavioral function,” Calamaro and her team warn.

The researcher said that while the current study was small, she expects the findings accurately reflect teen behavior. “I won’t be surprised if and when we replicate this that we’ll get similar results, because this is what adolescents are doing.”

Parents need to take steps to keep their children’s nighttime technology use under control, Calamaro said in an interview. It’s crucial to keep TVs, computers and especially cell phones out of kids’ bedrooms, she said. “The texting is a huge issue. I think we’ll find it to be a greater issue.”

Parents should also discourage teens from drinking caffeinated beverages after noon, the researcher added.

While teen’s body clocks may force them to stay up somewhat later than adults, and wake up later too, it’s still important for adults to convey the message that night is time to start slowing down, Calamaro added. “Even though we know adolescents are on a different time schedule, we can still get them less wired at night.”

Reuters Group by By Anne Harding

So where does that leave laid-off US workers as Congress argues over H-1B visas, and importing foreign workers, in a highly technological world where talent no longer needs to be in the same place. (Except apparently for Google).

“We are watching the decline and fall of the United States as an economic power — not hypothetically, but as we speak,” Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel, told the Times. He blames a slouching education system and says a stopgap measure would be to let companies hire more foreign engineers.

But applications for the visas are slow so far this year, some blaming the byzantine rules, slow economy and others saying its the federal government’s protectionist attitude to help citizens first. But could there be a shift, pushed by all these factors, out of bringing workers into this country and connecting with them abroad? Apparently, Bay area residential rents are falling and top tier office rent is down 25 percent in a year.

One of the reasons why Silicon Valley became the tech center of the world was because it was relatively cheap to live and work there. But no longer. And in the end, does it matter?

* from paidcontent: Seventy-four percent of Silicon Valley CEOs “surveyed by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group expect the “employment picture” in their industry to worsen this year, up from 18 percent who felt the same way a year ago. Only 40 percent think their own companies will either grow their workforce or keep it the same size, down from 83 percent who said so in 2008.”

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“I thought we were moving past paying back campaign favors with key positions. I thought we were changing the world.

Transparency doesn’t mean appointing your supporters so they can continue building their brand by plugging in familiar connectivity. Tools like Google-owned and advertising-supported YouTube and Google Moderator are already being tossed around as cornerstones of your administration’s communication strategy.

Just because the committee to elect you effectively exploited the consuming public’s fascination with Google doesn’t mean Google should be the alpha and omega of your talent search.

I encourage you to look beyond the monolithic information access society we’re building and do the right thing when it comes to listening to the people. Public servants genuinely interested in change shouldn’t hold financial interests in the companies they choose to utilize as communication platforms. I believe we used to call that a conflict of interest.”

Read the whole thing:

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“(This) will be a year of continued fragmentation in the digital space. Technologies will provide consumers with increased control over the content they receive and force marketers to work harder and smarter to engage consumers with relevant messages where, when and how they wish to receive them.

The ascent of the digerati-empowered Obama administration would suggest a period of rocketing investment in the digital investment led by the government. But, the impact of the worst economy since the Great Depression will have a major balancing effect, curbing experimentation in deference to the known in order to make it through these times.

Indeed, between the election and the economic meltdown, fall 2008 was a kind of fracture point – setting in motion a dynamic “push me, pull you” tension for 2009 with digital right at the middle. We’ll examine these two events, and how they will effect the digital space moving forward.

The Election

Like Kennedy before him, President-elect Barack Obama understands the power of technology. The Obama campaign leveraged text messaging, web based fund raising and online organization in an unprecedented way that was a decisive factor in his victory. By appointing a CTO, President-elect Obama created a role that has never before existed in the White House administration. The CTO will be in charge of updating and maintaining the “E-Government” by exploring emerging technologies, upgrading technological infrastructure, improving federal agency communication, and finding overarching solutions to federal or general technological obstacles.

So what does this mean for 2009? It means federal money is going to be heavily invested into digital infrastructure projects. Call it the New Digital Deal. Digital jobs will be created by this overhaul, from job postings in advertising to content management.

In additional to new positions, there are new regulations on the horizon. Case in point, President-elect Obama has mentioned regulating direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharma advertisements, as well as requiring pharma companies to report advertising expenses to the SEC. At this time, it is unlikely that pharmaceutical advertisers will be adversely affected by this new administration. Even if these regulations change the nature of DTC marketing, it will likely favor digital marketing investment, given the opt-in nature of the channel and recognizing that audiences are already in an information seeking mindset. But, they are regulations to be aware of, nonetheless.

The Recession

At the same time, the recession will have wide-ranging impact on the digital space. Companies will focus on projects with greater ROI potential. Profitability, now more important than ever, will need to be proven quantitatively and digital analytics experts will be increasingly sought after to help companies measure and understand where money should be allotted.

However, we’re unlikely to see the kind of costly experimentation that can lead to breakthrough innovations and entirely new technologies. The answer to this innovation question may be found, surprisingly, in Wall Street. Jobs will be scarce in the financial sector, driving a lot of former financial advisers to tangential careers in engineering and technology sectors, spurring investment and excitement in these areas.

In an effort to do more with less, new forms of digital advertising will encourage consumer participation and deliver direct communication through virals, CPC ads, or streaming content. As a result, there will be more interaction between businesses, clients, and consumers to redefine what marketing is. The brand emphasis will shift from “parent” (“You must buy this, you must go here…”) to “friend” (“Check this out, you might like this…”), creating a greater emphasis on user generated content and company voice.

The attention to the bottom line will push companies to explore more closely numerous existing underutilized technologies in order to more effectively reach their consumers, though the channel though.

Overall, these two overarching trends will play a major roll in 2009. Their influence will trickle down into more specific areas of digital marketing, from social networking to mobile marketing. How these specific areas will take shape is best saved for a future article… and another look into an even more fractured crystal ball.”

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That’s the speculation as CEO Eric Schmidt gabs on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC about bailouts for automakers and Citigroup, and talks elsewhere how the government should invest in technology, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin talk about green energy or anything else except how to goose Google’s market capitalization.

For Schmidt, it could be time to go, says Technology, Media, and Telecom Analyst. The CEO raised revenues to $20 billion in 2008 from $86 million in 2001. Hard cash is now at $14 billion compared to $100 million seven years ago as well.

Silicon Alley Insider, claiming no insider knowledge, leans toward a changing of the guard as well. With a spiraling economy and scrambling for the next product to drive the next spurt of growth, Google leadership needs the same intense energy and focus that it had to became the online advertising behemoth it is today. Silicon Alley said it wouldn’t be surprised if Eric or all three step away from a day-to-day operating role next year to do other, easier things, like save the planet.

And the obvious, terrifying perhaps, question for workers and shareholders alike, will be who will step into the visionary roles needed?

Once the game plan is set you must select the team that can make it all happen. You have creative folks, the people that create the look and feel of your site, in one end of the conference room and the technology team, the group that brings the creative vision to life, on the other. That’s the team you need to succeed right? Before you answer that question give it some thought.

What about the IT department? Yes, you heard me right, the IT department. The team that sits in the back room and makes sure the Web site is live, gets your Blackberry up and running and removes viruses that have taken your computer prisoner. The IT department represents the blood and guts of an organization and with online campaigns becoming more and more dependent upon technology and placing greater potential strain on the organization’s infrastructure, bringing the IT department into these discussions is essential.

Now that you are scrambling to send out Outlook invites to the IT team, keep in mind that this needs to be a two-way discussion for this relationship to work. Both sides have needs that must be met for the organization to find success. For now, let’s begin with your IT team. Before you introduce the plans for the next marketing program to them, here are a few considerations to think about.

First, don’t develop and staff your own applications without at least discussing it with IT. If the team does so, IT does not have the expertise or the staff to support these applications because they usually are not well-documented. Look around your marketing department right now. If you’ve got database programmers helping to stir the pot, the IT folks are going to tell you flat out that you are crossing the line. The IT department needs to be in on the ground floor of all application development because they, ultimately, are responsible for the maintenance and execution of them.

The second thing IT will tell you is to stop messing around with the network. After all, one wrong step can turn the network on its head and have huge ramifications for the company. There are concerns about a wide range of things including security, bandwidth and most importantly reliability. What is the point of having really cool applications if it crashes your network? Most marketers are unaware of how problematic it can be for a network manager, the person whose job depends upon network performance and uptime, to suddenly be presented with a series of major delays or outages caused by a rogue Web server that they didn’t even know existed. A move such as this can literally bring an entire company to a standstill.

The third issue that is important to your IT team is sticking with packaged solutions whenever possible. Ideally, they will recommend a solution from a vendor who has already built all the interfaces with the software the company runs on its enterprise and has tested them with dozens of other clients. Going this route takes a tremendous amount of work (and time) out of the assessment and development process. In a worst-case scenario, the IT department will tell you to go with a solution that was professionally developed and supported, fully documented and is based on industry standards.

While you are mulling over these guiding principles make sure you take the opportunity to get some IT-related questions ready yourself. After all, success requires execution on all sides. A good starting point is response time. As a marketer, its seems as though every time I ask IT for anything their answer inevitably starts with, “We’ll have to do a scoping study.” This is a major problem because scoping studies can take up to 14 months, the cost for which will be charged back to marketing. The funny thing is that this 14-month wait, which represents a lifetime in the marketing business, is generally the instigating catalyst for why the marketing team builds their own system, the first “no no” highlighted above.

Another item you may want to delve into in detail is cost – specifically cost of these scoping projects. As it stands now, marketing ordinarily flips the bill for the scoping study that lays out how much the project is going to cost and whether or not it is feasible. If the project is given the green light, marketing then has to pay for the overhead often embedded in the IT function. With budgets shrinking in all departments, this meeting is the best opportunity to talk about how both sides can be more efficient in getting to the “go/no-go” point. By discussing the timeline for deliverables during the preparation stages, both sides can reach compromises that streamline this process and help keep projects on track.

The last area you may want to talk to IT about is flexibility. Marketing has become more and more critical to the success of the organization — be it revenue generation, brand development or pricing. Taking this into account, IT needs to begin anticipating the degrees of flexibility that marketing will need and design some adaptability into the foundations of systems architecture.

If you really want your business to have a world-class marketing capability, you have to think of marketing as a primary customer of IT, not a secondary one. Then you have to bring the two sides together. By doing so at the onset of the next project you are taking the first step in that direction.

Developers wishing to create their own web applications using Google App Engine will have a free quota of 500 Megabytes of storage and bandwidth that can withstand about 5 million monthly pageviews according to Reuters.

Rates will depend on the amount of storage used and bandwidth required past the free quota.

Funding to date has totaled up at $17.8 million. The Series A round in June 2007 brought in $4.8 million. To raise the stakes of their investment, Lightspeed’s Managing Director, Jake Seid will be a part of Skyfire’s Board of Directors.

With the funding, Skyfire will build out its browser, which currently runs on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, to various other phones and operating systems. This newest round also creates some peer pressure for Opera Mobile, Skyfire’s main competition.

He worked on open development projects at Yahoo since joining the company in 2005 – he participated in RSS and social media initiatives. At the Guardian, he will report to Mike Bracken, the technology director for development for Guardian News and Media.

“We want to allow people to connect, and will provide data that people they can reuse and be creative with a vehicle that will help engage smaller agencies and development team in other companies create applications,” Bracken told the Guardian newspaper.