As more digital news is blocked behind pay walls, news providers compete for subscribers, promising higher-quality content and perks. Membership has its privileges. At least at The Times and the Sunday Times, part of News Corp´s UK unit, digital pack subscribers will be able to accompany their digital news consumption to tunes from Spotify, a music-streaming service with worldwide reach.

Search giant Google, submerged in antitrust wrangles for years, has settled with the European Commission, pending formal approval. The European Commission had been investigating Google for the last three years for alleged abuse of its dominant market position.

Behind the scenes - and creating the scenes - at the Sochi Games are the big media players like NBC. A giant aggregator of American audiences, NBC is covering the Games as NBC Universal Olympics, part of their sports group. NBC Olympics is partnering with Adobe to stream content from the Cloud across multiple screens.

A robot writing poetry? Not quite, the operator actually writes the words, with Scryf, a robot adapted from an old CNC milling machine by Dutch artist Gijs van Bon, transferring the words onto city streets with sand. This ephemeral poetry quickly disappears as passers-by walk through it.

Since its IPO last year, Twitter has ramped up its efforts to advertise and ignite conversation about products. Putting its money where its mouth is, the social media platform is experimenting with business models to allow users to buy products directly from its site. Recent news of this plan comes from information leaked on Friday via the Internet.

Mobile marketing is a green pasture for 2014, in which many marketers are earmarking a significant portion of their budgets. A recent survey of marketers - Digital Trends 2014 from Ecoconsultancy and Adobe - showed that customer experience, content marketing, and mobile marketing are top priorities this year.

Who is accessing our online data?

What are the current trends in search marketing broken down by type of device, industry, and search engine companies?

A spokesperson for Google confirmed that it had acquired London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind.

A recap of SEO in 2013 includes a number of algorithm updates and releases from Google with Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird. Encrypted search capabilities, with Google’s move to secure search in September, have undermined keyword data. This move has caused an SEO identity crisis in some and provoked an answer to the call of the survival of the fittest in others. Google moves in 2013 have led Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers to voice the lingering question, Is SEO dead?