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Last year, Google invited itself into the living room with the Chromecast, a $35 dongle that plugs into the back of any TV with an HDMI port and lets you play online videos and other content on your television from another device. Now, Google hopes to get even comfier on the couch with the Nexus Player, a $99 black disc with a Bluetooth remote control that turns any TV with an HDMI port into an Internet-connected TV that can stream movies, play music and video games, and run select Android apps.

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Dropbox and Microsoft are partnering to integrate Microsoft Office with the cloud-storage platform more closely than any other save Microsoft’s own OneDrive service. The joint venture brings Dropbox the credibility in the enterprise that it has been fighting for in recent months, while smoothing the sharp edges on Microsoft’s public image, proving that the Redmond-based firm can “play nicely with others”.

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That's not because Apple promises an easier, more secure way of making a smartphone-based retail transaction. Nor is it because CurrentC wants to harvest data on you and provide behavior-bending coupons, incentives and special deals, while cutting out the middleman credit card processing industry. If you think those three sentences are complicated, it gets worse. Paying by smartphone -- which seems like a new and cool convenience -- is just the start of an unavoidable new in-person retail experience.

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One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain. At the same time, computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico.

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Over the next few months, Starwood (which owns those three chains) will upgrade 150 of its hotels to allow keyless, smartphone entry to some 30,000 rooms worldwide. Hilton, which is a much larger hotel chain, plans to roll out a similar system next year. Keyless entry via smartphone is obviously more convenient than using a magnetic swipe card (which is easily lost or demagnetized), and probably a lot more secure, too, considering how easy it was to hack conventional Onity locks. Did I mention that keyless entry also means you can skip the check-in desk and go straight to your room, too?

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