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Singapore-based Bubble Motion is offering a voice-based version of Twitter.

Sequoia Capital, the bluest of blue chip Silicon Valley venture capital firms, brought Clayton in to salvage Bubble Motion in early 2008 after it had burned through $30 million in capital.

Clayton rather quickly saw that instead of continuing with its original offering — a peer-to-peer voicemail service, it could grow fast by providing a voice version of Twitter.

Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold.

Quora’s founders and their first hire—designer Rebekah Cox—created the core of the most impressive “subjective knowledge extraction” machine ever constructed.

By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet. What’s more, Quora is also using humanity’s collective wisdom to rank it.

Crowdpark, a Berlin-headquartered game developer, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from top German venture capital firms, Target Partners and existing investor, Earlybird Venture Capital. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the investment. The new round of funding brings Crowdpark’s total to $8 million. Why should you care? Well, Crowdpark is aiming to give gamers their fix of legal gambling, er, betting. Using its patented “dynamic betting” technology, Crowdpark enables forecasting in realtime for social gaming in much the same way the brave among us play the stock market. Unlike its social gaming competitors, the German startup allows gamers to compete against each other in betting events using virtual currency. This includes the opportunity to bet on real world events taking place in everything from sports and entertainment to news and technology.

GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

The trick is in the filtering, to be sure: you don't want to plow through irrelevant searches or receive too few alerts about the things that you want to track. "The quality of content I receive is unbeatable. I now spend less time searching for stories about prospects, competitors and my industry and more time engaging my audience," says Kelly Morgan, director of marketing at HealthRx and an early user of the GageIn service.

It tries to pull information about companies, people and actionable events such as personnel changes to a single place and doing so in real-time, too.

LocalResponse, a new startup in the social media mobile ad space, is using semantic analysis to capitalize on real-time social data: “LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round… Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.”

Young British teenagers would be less worried at being deprived of television than losing access to the internet or their mobile phones, as attachment to the medium slides among the young, according to new research from Ofcom.

On average, they watch 17 hours 37 minutes per week, up from 15 hours 37 minutes in 2007.Internet use has also become pervasive, with 95% of 12- to 15-year-olds having internet access at home through a computer. But the research by the communications watchdog also points to a "digital divide", in which only 80% of children in lower socioeconomic groups have access to the internet at home, compared to 98% in the richest ones.

The annual survey was carried out in spring with 1,717 in-home interviews, and focused on attitudes to communications technology by parents and children. It found that 28% of children aged 12 to 15 said they would most miss their mobile, and 25% would most miss the internet if deprived of them – compared to only 18% citing television. A year ago mobile was the most desired, while TV was level-pegging with the internet at 24%.

Cloud computing has been eyed for some time as a solution for business continuity needs, as the thought of setting up new virtual servers on an automated, on-demand basis seems highly appealing. But when it comes to figuring out the kind of cloud offerings that will work best for business continuity, typically private cloud options are usually the ones considered. The reason for this bias is the configuration of the virtual machines themselves. While public cloud services can afford business clients a lot of computing power in a hurry for a low rate, that combination does not always equate to a continuity friendly environment.

Then there are the security concerns. If you are patching your own systems diligently, is the cloud provider providing the same patched for their own base operating systems? What other kind of security protocols are in place? On the legal side of the equation, does the cloud provider meet compliance in the areas of data breach notification, data retention, auditing, and whatever other compliance regulations you need to follow? What are the local laws for the datacenter and how do they comply with your own corporate needs in terms of security?

As of late, Google Wallet and Near Field Communications have taken a lot of flak from cynics, naysayers and glass-half-empty types.

NFC will soon be integrated into nearly facet of personal finance and revolutionize the landscape of travel consumerism as we know it.

NFC has quickly become a widely covered topic on tech blogs, finance sites and news sources across the web, so we won’t spend too much time on the basics.

Just under half of the UK population now owns a smartphone, and Google's mobile operating system Android is powering half of those those being sold – followed by RIM's BlackBerry models with 22.5% and Apple's iPhone at 18.5%.

The pace of smartphone sales is accelerating rapidly, too. In the 12 weeks to 2 October, they comprised just under 70% of mobile phones, according to new research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Dominic Sunnebo, Kantar's global consumer insight director, warned that the next year could see a lot of jockeying for customers.""Over the next six to 12 months, the current group of Android owners will be coming to the end of their contracts and looking for an upgrade," he said."Our data shows that when these consumers upgrade they tend to remain fairly loyal to Android itself – 62% buy another Android mobile – but considerably less so to the handset manufacturer."

Your mobile wireless carrier may soon have a say in the way you think about health and wellness. AT&T, through its Emerging Devices unit, plans to offer for sale health-tracking clothing equipped with wireless sensors that enable you to track your heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs -- and then send all this data to a site where a physician can access it. The first offering will be a version of the E39 body compression shirt, originally designed by Under Armour for the NFL scouting combines and other world-class athletic competitions. Now imagine yourself as a high-performance weekend athlete, effortlessly transmitting your heart rate, skin temperature and activity levels to the Web. That the “smart fitness” trend – which can be traced back to the Fitbit tracker – is now transforming into a broader “e-wellness” movement is not a coincidence. The biggest wireless network carriers - like AT&T – are under intense pressure to produce new revenue streams. The total mobile Internet penetration rates at these companies have hit a saturation point. They can advertise as much as they want, but there’s simply no one else who needs another mobile phone these days.

A new Kinect hack places virtual objects anywhere in the real world and lets you interact with them as if they were actually there.Most Kinect hacks just use a single version of the sensor, but a team at Microsoft Research has used four ceiling-mounted Kinects to map an entire room and the objects inside it in full 3D. A handheld projector acts as a flashlight that lets you peer into this virtual version of the world to reveal hidden images or draw in 3D space.This close link between the real and virtual world allows for some impressive interactions, such as creating virtual copies of real objects or generating a stream of virtual particles on a desk and watching them roll inside a real-life drawer.The project is unlikely to become a commercial product any time soon, but it's easy to imagine how a more polished version could lead to a holodeck-like environment in the comfort of your own living room.

The number of mobile phone patent infringement cases filed in the US court system grew from 24 in 2006, to 84 in 2010, figures collected by Lex Machina, an intellectual property litigation data provider. That number is expected to grow to 97 cases this year, which would mark a four-fold increase in just half a decade. The rapid evolution and growth of the mobile phone industry is the underlying driving force of the rising patent wars. There are possibly over 250,000 active patents relating to a single smartphone, according to San Francisco-based patent aggregator and licensor RPX.

"The devices we used 10 years ago to make voice calls have become hand-held computers incorporating a vast array of software and hardware, which increases the breadth of patent exposure," said John Amster, chief executive of RPX.

On the surface, social media and knowledge management (KM) seem very similar. Both involve people using technology to access information. Both require individuals to create information intended for sharing. Both profess to support collaboration. But there's a big difference. Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important. Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself. These definitions may sound harsh, and biased in favor of social media, and to some extent they are. Knowledge should be like water — free-flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top and lifting all boats.

Social media looks downright chaotic by comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers and ostensibly little to no structure. Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof, allowing the "rain" to fall directly into the house, collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy. And organizations abhor a mess.

The state of Ceará, in Northeast Brazil, contributes only to 2% of the Brazilian GDP. Yet, it will soon host the Brazil’s largest public broadband Internet network. The Cinturão Digital do Ceará (CDC), which translates as Ceará’s Digital Big Belt, will be inaugurated this Thursday by the governor Cid Gomes and the Science and Technology Minister Aloizio Mercadante. So why did the local authorities decide to invest around R$50m (US$28.6m) into this initiative?

Many people couldn’t afford faster speeds anyway – in Fortaleza, one third of the population lives in favelas (slums) filled with migrants who have left rural areas.

This situation led the state to develop its own public network, the CDC. It is a highly ambitious project; according to the government, it consists of a whopping 2,600 kilometers of optic fiber.