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Dan R.D.

Facebook debuts new features to be the newspaper of your dreams [20Sep11] - 0 views

  • Facebook is now getting even more personal, announcing that starting late Tuesday it will begin calibrating how it presents its News Feed feature
  • The company says the new News Feed is made to “act more like your own personal newspaper”
  • presenting the most interesting news that has been published since the last time a user signed in
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  • Accompanying each top news piece will be in-line controls that allow you to unmark an update as a top story; doing so will mean that Facebook will stop prioritizing similar posts in the future.
  • Facebook will also roll out two new updates set to roll out Tuesday evening: Slightly larger photos in the News Feed, and a new feature called Ticker that shows the latest updates from all a user’s friends in real time.
  • The Ticker is meant to allow people to join in on their friends’ updates as they are posted, to facilitate more of a conversational feel within the site.
Dan R.D.

Self-Powering, Wireless Energy Sensors Join the Internet [01May11] - 0 views

  • EnOcean’s sensors are the latest in a wave of increasingly connected and intelligent objects that some people have termed “the internet of things.” British microprocessor giant Arm Holdings, for example, has bolstered this development with its mbed project, which gives engineers a cheap toolkit to work on a microcontroller, and the encouragement to come up with novel ways to connect them to other (often unconventional) objects. Other companies, like EnOcean and semiconductor maker Atheros, are focused on developing low-cost, low-consumption devices that can operate on wireless networks. Pressing an EnOcean switch to turn a light on generates enough energy to send out a wireless signal, which enables communication between the switch and a wireless receiver up to nearly 100 feet away. Until recently, EnOcean sensors were only communicating amongst themselves and a specific wireless receiver within range. Now, with TCP/IP enabled communication, any computer hooked up to the internet can communicate with the sensors.
Dan R.D.

Why Badges? Why Not? | HASTAC [16Sep11] - 0 views

  • Any other organization can join them in asking for partners to design a new way of offering accreditation to their own organization.
  • Individuals can earn badges from multiple organizations, some certifying human skills such as collaboration or even helpfulness, that mean as much to future employers as skills and experience and credentials from traditional institutions.   And an individual can choose to reveal or not reveal an e-portfolio.  YOU own your portfolio.
  • Some might be games---but most will have nothing to do with games
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  • peer run or top down
  • you don't need much technology or money to implement a badging system--or, at least, that is another of the goals of this Competition.
  • operating on inexpensive mobile phones or Web-based platforms
  • inspire learning and collaboration, and so ownership is key.
  • The point is to thing big, think new, think change. 
  • If you contribute, you can have a record of that contribution.   That’s the beauty of digital badge systems or eportfolios such as Top Coders where you can actually click on the badge and see all the specific contributions or skills of a person that were recognized by peers in the form of a badge.
  • Badging helps one developer to know how much they can trust some unknown contributor and then, if the project goes well, one participant in the virtual team can recognize the skills, collaborative attributes, and other technical as well as social collaborative skills of another.
  • Another inspiring aspect of open badges for lifelong learning:  they recognize achievement and contribution, not reputation or credentials. 
Dan R.D.

HP and Shell Team on a Massive Wireless Sensor Network for Exploration [20Sep11] - 0 views

  • HP and Shell are working on a Mega Channel Seismic Survey System that will wirelessly connect millions of sensors ten meters apart from one another for oil and gas exploration. The system promises a highly detailed 4D image of oil and gas reservoirs below the earth’s surface.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Starbucks Perks Up Mobile Payments Program - eMarketer [23Sep11] - 0 views

  • In January 2011, Starbucks debuted a new way for customers to pay for coffee—through the brand’s mobile app. With 2-D barcode scanners installed in nearly 9,000 of its store locations, the coffee chain has served as a model for retailers looking to enter the mobile payments space.
  • Starbucks’ mobile platform builds on the success of the Starbucks Card, which has grown from a popular stored-value card to a significant method of payment in stores. Extending the program to a mobile platform was a natural opportunity to enhance the experience and allow customers to manage their Starbucks Card on the go.
  • Our customers told us they want a faster and easier way to pay, and Starbucks mobile payment apps are the fastest way to pay.
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  • Customers control the mobile payment transaction by holding their mobile device in front of a scanner on the countertop and scanning the barcode on the screen to make a purchase.
  • “Within nine weeks of the national launch of mobile payment, customers in stores paid more than 3 million times using our mobile payment app, and this number continues to grow at a steady rate.”
  • We deployed this program independent of carriers, handset manufacturers or payment companies so as many customers as possible can download and use the app. Additionally, we were unwilling to wait for the NFC landscape to mature. We use barcodes because it meets our needs, allowing all customers to use this technology to access the fastest way to pay at Starbucks.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Study: Someday our bodies could 'talk' to gadgets - Tech News and Analysis [23Sep11] - 0 views

  • UW researchers say this new type of transistor could one day understand or even control body functions.
  • Materials scientists are looking at these proton-based microscopic transistors for future advances in prosthetics and biological sensing.
  • In the body, protons activate “on” and “off” switches and are key players in biological energy transfer. Ions open and close channels in the cell membrane to pump things in and out of the cell. Animals, including humans, use ions to flex their muscles and transmit brain signals. A machine that was compatible with a living system in this way could, in the short term, monitor such processes. Someday it could generate proton currents to control certain functions directly.
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  • A first step toward this type of control is a transistor that can send pulses of proton current. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a basic type of transistor that includes a gate, a drain and a source terminal for the current. The UW prototype is the first such device to use protons.
  • Because their device’s proton current can be switched on and off, it can act as its own kind of electronic current, according to Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. The transistor itself is “a twentieth the width of a human hair,” or about 5 microns wide. It is made of a compound, chitosan, found in both crab shells and squid pen (the structure inside a squid’s body that muscles attach to).
  • The first applications of this research will come some time “in the next decade or so,” and will be aimed at direct sensing of cells in a lab, researchers say
  • But further out they could be implanted directly in living organisms to monitor or control bodily processes.
Dan R.D.

Mozilla Open badge Infrastructure project kicks off [19Sep11] - 0 views

  • Badges for Javascript courses are currently being developed at the School of Webcraft by Mozilla. It also plans to rope in diverse groups such as P2PU, 4H, NASA, PBS, US Department of education and Intel to develop badges. This new process claims to be of advantage to learners as they will be given an opportunity to collect badges from any internet website. These collected badges will reveal the learner’s proficiency in various subjects. And that’s not all, it is believed that open badges may prove beneficial for users to build online reputation, look for collaborators and find jobs. “Open Badges is a response to this trend: an open specification and APIs that provide any organization the basic building blocks they need to offer badges in a standard, interoperable manner. If we’re successful, the benefits to learners will be tremendous. Open Badges will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved,” states the Mozilla blog.
Dan R.D.

Social achievement app Star.me is "the happiest place on the webs" [32Sep11] - 0 views

  • Ze Frank: Star.me is a cross between a social network and a social game that provides a playground for people to have more fun with their friends. We are in the midst of a major shift in media industry where social engagement is the new currency and real interactions are replacing impressions and clicks. That’s what I have been focused on for years, play and participation, and star.me is a distilled version of that thinking. Plus it’s super fun
  • Star.me boasts 20,000 users and is “growing fast!”, there have been 117,000 mini missions answered, 70,000 stars sent, and 84% of all users have contributed content. That’s engagement.
Dan R.D.

Mobile, 'enriched reality' top 2012 IT trends - ZDNet Asia News [04Oct11] - 0 views

  • Speaking at a press briefing here Tuesday, Bidaud pointed out such mobile strategies would also provide "contextual and social user experience", which he described as "enriched reality" in which information would be meshed with the real world. For example, location-aware apps that could inform users which bus stop they were at and the arrival times of buses that stopped there, he said.
  • viewpoint, the Gartner analyst said the Internet of things, also known as machine-to-machine communications, was an arena in which there were "lots happening". Defining it as having a network-connected device sending information back to the network, he predicted that beyond smart utility grids, the technology would be used by consumers to share community-specific information such as a weight-watchers group, for instance.
  • "Restrictions could be in requiring social networking sites and Web companies to host their data centers locally, as well as having a tighter compliance environment for shared data," Sengar suggested, noting that this could stifle the growth of social CRM uptake in Singapore.
Dan R.D.

3 Steps to Create a Global Social Media Content Plan [05Oct11] - 0 views

  • Governance can mean a lot of different things. In this context, it needs to be the foundation of the content plan. Not in terms of content creation but in terms of standards and processes for expanding into a certain market. For example, Company A wants to launch a Facebook page and Twitter channel in Latin America to support its operations into that region. A governance model will ensure that the regional marketing team has the following lined up before launch: A content plan to include frequency and context of Tweets, Facebook Updates, blog posts (or whatever relevant tools/platforms are used in that region) An established moderation policy A crisis communication plan An understanding and “buy in” of the measurement philosophy (everyone in the organization SHOULD be measuring social media the same way)
  • Content Library If it’s one thing that marketing teams in other regions lack, it’s content. The reality is that most brands do have really good content. It’s just scattered all across the internet, various internal portals and even within employees’ inboxes. Content can include videos, PDFs, spec sheets, FAQ, blog posts, infographics and the list goes on.
  • Community Management Without an active community manager, a content marketing plan will fail. A community manager will not only be responsible for actively posting and aggregating content; but he/she is essentially the face of the brand and should be sanctioned to solve customer problems. A proficient community manager will answer questions and provide real and “tangible” solutions to disgruntled customers. Additionally, he/she should have the authority to provide rewards to random customers simply for being customers.
Dan R.D.

How technology can help us redesign our cities - and lives [05Oct11] - 0 views

  • Technology will also transform our daily urban existence in a myriad number of small ways, says Philip Sheldrake, director of Intellect, which represents the UK technology industry. He believes 2011 is the year the ultimate in connectivity – the "internet of things" - will finally take hold: "It is almost like we have got a perfect storm coming. There are a number of technological innovations and a number of calls on this technology coming together at the same time."
  • Urban areas are ultimately likely to be transformed by sensors that transmit data on conditions such as energy consumption, pollution, and temperature, which can be used to create a "smart grid" system. Such a grid could automatically turn on domestic devices such as washing machines at night when consumption is low and regulate heating, water supply and air conditioning systems. And as we negotiate our way around urban transport systems, sensors will also track our movements sending information back to bus companies or electric car hire schemes.
Dan R.D.

Gamification: 75% Psychology, 25% Technology [06Oct11] - 0 views

  • Should enterprise applications be as addictive as Angry Birds? A true believer in gamification would say yes, if you want people to actually use them.
  • [Social media is a powerful tool to connect with customers, but it can create big problems for your company if it's not done right. Learn more at 10 Social Networking Don'ts.]
  • Most of all, gamificiation is about understanding that "if you can make something more fun, and include notions of play, you can get people to do things they otherwise might not want to do."
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  • Businesses have successfully applied gamification principles to achieving goals like reducing travel expenses (Google) and improving cashier checkout performance (Target). The Google example is interesting because it "actually got people talking about how to save money on travel," whereas the more traditional corporate water cooler conversation would be about how to cheat the system, Zimmerman said.
  • "Gamification by Design" largely focuses on the psychology of engagement and ways it can be applied to business applications.
  • Gamifying an application doesn't necessarily mean adding fancy graphics and sound effects, but often it does mean keeping score and letting "players" see how they rank on a leader board--the equivalent of the high scores screen on a video game. In a business context, that might mean letting salespeople see how they rank and how close they are to achieving a goal or securing a bonus as a way of getting the competitive juices flowing.
  • On the other hand, in a traditional loyalty program you might award one point for every dollar a user spends. In a gamified system, you might want to instead provide variable, unpredictable reinforcement where participants can hit the jackpot. This is the design principle that keeps slot machine players glued to their chairs, even though they ought to know the house always wins.
Dan R.D.

Ban.jo Breaches the Barriers Between Location-Based Apps [13Jul11] - 0 views

  • More and more social networks are offering geolocation. How does a person keep up without joining every service under the sun? A Palo Alto, CA-based startup called Ban.jo hopes to become geo-location central by allowing iPhone or Android mobile users to see who’s nearby, no matter what social network they may be using. Ban.jo founder Damien Patton, who launched the free app at the end of June, says it has already been downloaded in over 100 countries. He wants to make all geolocation services more useful to more people by eliminating the barrier of having to sign up on a case-by-case basis. So far, Ban.jo users can see the locations of people who have declared their locations via Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, or Facebook.
Dan R.D.

Sweden's 13th Lab brings augmented reality to Apple iPad [12Jul11] - 0 views

  • The Lab’s first game went live this week, called Ball Invasion (here’s a link on iTunes). It’s a shooter in which the world around you becomes a canvas for playing: hold your iPad 2 in front of you, and it becomes a window on a world that fills with targets that you can chase and shoot. The game’s fun enough, but really the excitement is all about the technology. While you’ve no doubt seen augmented reality before, the difference here is 13th Lab is using a complex computer vision technique known as SLAM — that’s Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. This is a system developed in part by NASA for use in robotics, which allows an object (like, say, a drone) to look around, build up a picture of the world and then understand where it is.
Dan R.D.

Health Internet of Things | Quantified Self [14Feb11] - 0 views

  • Here is a guest post by futurist Walter de Brouwer: We want our health to become a number. That is one of the reasons why we seem to be at the beginning of a real Cambrian Explosion of ‘Health Internet Things’ and tracking gadgets. Everything in our bathroom or pharmacy will soon have a display and a WUSB or Bluetooth connection because all of these displays will want to connect, thereby producing a real-time, ever-changing picture of our ambient health.
Dan R.D.

Glympse Raises $7.5 Million To Help You Share Your Location, A Few Hours At A Time [22J... - 0 views

  • Of course, oftentimes you don’t really want to tell all of your friends where you are, and even then you may only want them to be able to see your whereabouts for a short while. That’s where Glympse comes in. The service, which is based entirely around ‘sharing your where’ with select friends a few hours at a time, has just raised a $7.5 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners.
  • Say, for example, you were running late for a meeting and wanted your coworkers to have a sense for when you’d be arriving at the office. Instead of having to send a series of text messages (“15 minutes..”, “traffic bad, make that 30 min”, and so on), you could just send a Glympse that let them track your progress on a map. Then, when you arrived, you could turn the Glympse off and the map would stop updating.
  • So where is Glympse going next? The company isn’t sharing much about its future plans, other than to say that they’re working with partners to integrate the product into “the everyday life experience”. In other words, expect them to move well beyond their own iPhone and Android apps in the near future.
Dan R.D.

Current Analysis Ranks AT&T a Top Provider of Machine-to-Machine Services [21June11] - 0 views

  • According to the Current Analysis report, AT&T's strengths include: Providing "custom solutions" for companies, including expanded professional services, targeted to specific business needs Offering cost-effective services to global customers, with expanding global M2M footprint Developing key relationships with platform providers to provide enhanced services for M2M customers Excellent traction with 12 million Connected Devices in Q1-11 "AT&T continues to add value to its M2M solutions," wrote Kathryn Weldon, Principal Analyst, Current Analysis. "AT&T has made a number of recent alliance announcements with application platform providers, which adds to its arsenal of solutions."
Dan R.D.

NFC and the Internet of things | VentureBeat - 0 views

  • Because NFC tags are more expensive than barcodes or RFID tags (just under $1 in volume) they will make their way into high-end retail products first: Cars, electronics, consumer appliances.  As more products start to include NFC tags, this will drive the price down even further.  As the price goes down, NFC tags will make their way into products $20 and above (clothing, wine, shoes, Costco-sized purchases). And then there are the phones. With almost 100 million NFC-equipped phones estimated to be shipped just over the next year and more than 1 billion predicted for the next four years, shopping, comparing, and purchasing via NFC-equipped smartphones will become commonplace.
Dan R.D.

Symplio Presents Rymble: A Product That Brings Internet Social Networks to the Real Wor... - 0 views

  • Rymble is an object connected to Internet social networks, merging the real and the virtual worlds. It is a “social compass” that, instead of pointing to the north, moves in different directions as news and alerts happen in the user’s social network, in the web page of a company, artist, sports team or any other subject.
Dan R.D.

Hactivate - A participant's perspective [22Jun11] - 0 views

  • Both of these hacks were fully fledged platforms, another great project was more of a utility. ScanCampaign allows users to generate their own QR codes, which the author hoped could be used for donations to charity or for campaigns such as UK Uncut – to quickly share information.
  • Taking disparate data sources and giving them a unified view is tricky: do the data sets match? can you link the concepts contained? and so on. These guys did a great job doing those things and provided plenty of hooks for further thought.
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