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A second Big Pharma player has reached into the retail ranks to find someone to take the top digital job for the company.

Novartis today said that it is bringing on Bertrand Bodson, currently chief digital and marketing officer for Argos, the online and catalogoperation that grocery retailer Sainsbury acquired last year. His hire comes just weeks after GlaxoSmithKline announced it had hired a formerWalmart executive for top IT position.

Bodson, who starts Jan. 1 and will report to Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez, is taking on a new role at the company, chief digital officer. His charge is to help the drugmaker do better with data, from R&Dthrough interactions with doctors and patients, and make the companys business operations more efficient.

"Bertrand has a proven track record of creating and implementing successful digital strategies across global companies, and leading cultural change in order to make this happen at scale," Jimenez said in a statement. "This is not just about digital helping the business. Bertrand will help us transform our business model using digital technologies."

RELATED: Merck aims to put Amazon's Alexa to work on voice-enabled diabetes tools

The Belgian citizen and Harvard MBA comes with some street cred in digital, having co-founded Bragster, a video-sharing website where users dare each other to perform stunts or tasks. It was acquired in 2010 by Guinness World Records. Bodson started his career in 1998 at Boston Consulting Group and has held positions at Amazon and EMI Music.

With cell phones, social networking and big data creating so-called digital disruptions in a number of industries, Big Pharma is tryingto catch up to retailing and other industries that have been tapping that potential. Companies are doing more with digital in clinical trials and creating apps for tracking a variety of health conditions.

RELATED: Novartis expands Vivinda TV, offering docs digital access to medical conferences

Novartis is already trying on some new digital technologies, having started Vivinda TV, a virtual conference platform that delivers on-demand medical content for healthcare providers.

Some newer biotechs can form with digital wired into their DNA, but the big players are looking for experts to help them integrate it faster and effectively.

RELATED: GlaxoSmithKline partners with Alibaba for China HPV vaccine market grab

Last month, GSK CEO Emma Walmsley, who comes from a consumer health background, named former Walmart Stores executive Karenann Terrell to the new senior position of chief digital and technology officer to help the company harness data and digital to push forward. Terrell, who left Walmart in March, has also done stints at Baxter International and DaimlerChrysler.

Like other drugmakers, GSK is experimenting with new digital approaches. It recently worked out a deal with Chinas e-commerce giant Alibaba to push vaccinations in China.

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Novartis names e-commerce, social networking expert as chief digital honcho - FiercePharma

Social networking is all the rage. Kids these days have mostly moved to Instagram and Snapchat rather than Facebook, but many have profiles and access on all of the above and then some. Various websites continue to sprng up for the sole purpose of providing a place for users to express themselves, share with like-minded individuals, discover new things, and communicate with others. Theres a good chance there are some cutting edge social network platforms youre not even aware of, but your kids areand so are the predators that want to target your kids.

There have been numerous instances of sexual predators and child molesters posing as children to network with young victims on Facebook. The concept of social networking extends to other areas as well. For example, Youtube provides users with the ability to express their creativity, network, rate their favorite video clips, etc. While not directly related to a social network, Craigslist, the popular regional classified listings site, has used by a predators to lure victims.

Some sites like Flickr, Tumblr, or PhotoBucket provide users with the ability to post and share photos and family videos. It is possible to restrict access and only let users you identify view the pictures, but many users are proud of their kids and their photographic skills and allow the general public to view the photos as well. Child molesters and sexual deviants can search through these sites as well, though, and bookmark their favorite photos of young boys and girls.

The bottom line is that social networking is hugely popular and it is big business. Unfortunately, child molesters, sexual predators, and scam artists have discovered that these sites can also be exploited to find victims. Anywhere online that allows for commenting and communication can also be exploited by predators and bullies.

Follow these steps to use social networking sites responsibly and avoid becoming a victim:

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5 Ways to Protect Against Predators and Bullies on Social Networks - TechSpective

LinkedIn is primarily used as a business networking tool, or to find a job. While LinkedIn refreshed its entire site earlier this year, most users dont use it for daily social networking updates like they might on Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn is trying to tempt users to share more on the site by adding video support today.

Video testing began last month, and now all LinkedIn users can upload videos to the social network. LinkedIns Android and iOS apps support video uploads, but theres no live streaming support available at launch. Microsoft is rolling this out globally to all LinkedIn users over the next few weeks, and members will be able to access analytics on locations of viewers, the amount of comments, likes, and views, and the ability to see what companies are viewing videos.

LinkedIns video addition follows the Tinder-style launch of a feature for pairing mentors with people looking for professional advice last month. While Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion last year, the software maker has largely rolled out features that were already planned ahead of the acquisition. Microsoft did release a new Windows 10 app for LinkedIn last month, complete with notifications for the notification center.

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LinkedIn adds video support to become more of a social network - The Verge

If youre not paying for the product, then youre the product...

The saying may be well-versed in the world of social networks, however many users arent aware of the true price they are paying while posting online.

Many of the major social networking websites of today are all free to use, so naturally users arent aware of any hidden costs. While at the other end, the sites themselves keep becoming more and more valuable based on the contributions and data provided by users.

According to Metcalfes law, the value of a social network is directly proportional to the square of number of users. This is evident in the recent sky-high valuations of companies like Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Whatsapp which have billions of dollars in market cap, even though some are yet to make a profit.

There is a fundamental problem with existing social networks. Users are helping grow networks through content and interactions, and yet they are not the beneficiaries. They are side-lined as mere statistics and data points for the network to play social experiments with, like the case of Facebook manipulating users feeds in order to test their emotions. Furthermore, according to terms and conditions, the user hands all rights to their own data over to the platform operator, enabling them to sell the data to advertising and recruiting agencies, without any return to the users.

The open nature of blockchain can inherently help to solve this problem. The introduction of a public blockchain like Ethereum has the added incentive of financial rewards which allow users to earn while engaging on the platform. This model is a win-win situation for both the users and owners of the platform. Users ultimately become owners of their own data and privacy while also receiving revenue streams generated by the platform.

The advent of blockchain technology allows us to create a transparent, public and immutable record of transactions and activities performed by the users. While Bitcoin allows for transfer of monetary value, Ethereum gives us the ability to write Smart Contracts, and embed logic directly in the blockchain. This has opened up numerous possibilities to solve these previously unexplored or unsolved problems, including but not limited to privacy, ownership of the data, ability to earn from your contributions to the network, in completely new ways.

The Ethereum blockchain itself is not the ultimate solution to the common problems on popular social networks, but pairing it with other emerging technologies like Payment Channels and IPFS will lead the social network revolution.

Combining the Ethereum blockchain with Payment Channels opens up a gamut of features and autonomous abilities, aligned with financial incentives. Smart contracts paired with payment channels provide the computation and logic layer upon which the core engine of such a platform can be built. Platforms can now create unique cryptoassets which can be distributed to members of the platform as rewards for engaging on the platform. They can then exchange these cryptoassets for other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether. This creates real value for the members participating on the network while also helping the network itself grow.

IPFS can be used to store the data and content generated on such a network. In this case, this is the layer which gives back control of the data to the user. They can choose whether they want to store their data or not. Savvy users who are really concerned about their privacy can even maintain their own IPFS nodes which can be connected to this network, and possibly turn off the access to their data when they dont want to share it.

The question of why the Ethereum blockchain can be answered by looking at the community that surrounds Ethereum. There is a growing base of Ethereum developers, and it shows no signs of abating. There are several thousand developers working on Ethereum projects and applications, and thousands of apps are already deployed on the blockchain.

This entire ecosystem, and the ease of integration will give social networks on the blockchain a significant edge over the traditional way of doing things.

About Gaurang Torvekar, CTO & Co-founder Indorse.

Gaurang is cofounder and CTO of Indorse, the decentralized professional network which aims to build a social network where the user is in charge of their own data.

He is also the cofounder and CTO of Attores. Gaurang has been involved with several startups in FinTech and AI across India and Singapore as the tech guy. Gaurang graduated with a Masters in Information Systems from Singapore Management University.

He is the co-organizer of the Ethereum Singapore Meetup, and helped it grow from 23 members to 1300 members. He conducts courses on Ethereum hands-on coding and has also worked on a book on Building Ethereum Dapps.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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How Blockchain Will Shape the Future of Social Networks - Nasdaq

TEHRAN: Iran's new communications minister said Tuesday that negotiations were underway with Twitter to unblock the service, which has been banned for years despite being used even by the country's supreme leader.

"(Twitter) has announced that it is prepared to negotiate to resolve problems," Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi told the Iran daily newspaper.

"Considering the current situation there are grounds for such negotiation and interaction. Twitter is not an immoral environment needing to be blocked," he added.

The 36-year-old Jahromi became Iran's youngest-ever minister this week, and the first to be born after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

His selection has been criticised by rights groups over his involvement in surveillance during and after the mass anti-regime protests of 2009.

But Jahromi is also seen as a critic of online censorship in Iran, where sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter remain banned even if millions use them daily through easily available privacy software.

There was no immediate response from Twitter to his comments.

He said officials were also looking at ways to unblock YouTube while still censoring "immoral content" on the site, and that a pilot project was being run, allowing universities to access the site.

Jahromi added that the final decision on unblocking Twitter did not lie with his ministry, but with the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, which includes members of the hardline judiciary.

Twitter was banned at the time of mass anti-regime protests in 2009, that followed allegations of massive rigging in the re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But despite the ban, the US messaging service is widely used by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has official accounts in several languages, as well as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Even Ahmadinejad joined the service this year.

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Iran in talks with Twitter to unblock the social networking site - Economic Times