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In September, Wikets, Inc., announced it had raised $1.5 million from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, to build a new iPhone application that allows users to rate products and share those recommendations with friends. Today, the app has gone live in iTunes.

At launch, Wikets lets you recommend products from its featured partners and from 60 major retailers, including iTunes (music and apps), Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Best Buy, The Home Depot, Wine.com, and others, as well as any place you can pull up on Yelp or Foursquare. You can also scan a product’s barcode, if you choose.

The resulting product is deceptively simple. You make a recommendation, optionally share it with friends via Facebook or Twitter, and then get rewarded in the form of points that can be later turned in for gift cards at online merchants.

With the exception of the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, the Android tablet race is starting to look like the PC race of the early 2000s: SPEEDS AND FEEDS ... and not a lot else. Case in point is Asus' Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the first quad-core tablet to hit the market. That's right, people, four whole cores!

quad-core tablet

For $499, the price of a 16GB iPad, you get 32GB, and can get up to 64GB for just $100 more. It will ship with Android 3.2 Honeycomb, but Asus promises that it will get an over-the-air update to the eagerly anticipated Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich "at a later date." Great, terrific, you know?

Come November, the world's second largest mass transit company will let its riders pay for trips by waving their cell phones at the terminal. The Deutsche Bahn, Germany's main railway operator, began implementing its Touch&Travel mobile payments system in 2008 and expects it to be ready within two months.

The system will rely on near field communications (NFC) chips contained in customers' mobile phones to handle the payment transactions for each trip. Alternatively, riders can pay with their phones by scanning a QR code at the beginning and end point of their ride.

Touch&Travel mobile apps are available for iPhone and Android-based smart phones. "In addition to using NFC or barcodes to provide location information, smartphone apps can use GPS or the user can type in a location ID number," writes NFC World. Riders will be billed for their transit usage at the end of each month.

China's leading location-based social service is distributing NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchants in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong

Jiepang is to distribute NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchant partners in six cities in Greater China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong.

Jiepang is China's leading location-based social service. Its users currently check in and earn rewards via a GPS-enabled smartphone app which comes preloaded on all new HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and other smartphone brands in China, including all three of the new Nokia NFC smartphones announced earlier this week.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 22pc of businesses polled in the sector were investing in social media marketing. This figure fell to 8.5pc in the first quarter of 2012 and to 6pc by the second quarter. Pearlfinders, a major business research company, spoke to more than 5,000 marketeers around the world about their budgets. “This represents an interesting about-turn. We saw investment in social media increase steadily throughout 2011, to reach the highest levels ever by the end of the year. However, as financial services brands embraced new methods for communicating with customers, they opened themselves up to criticism and negative sentiment,” said Anthony Cooper, Pearlfinders managing director.

putting spending on hold until they have developed a clearer picture of how social media can be harnessed to improve their brands.”

conversations directly linking to brands near impossible to control

It is clear that MasterCard have taken mobile payments seriously, if the number of initiatives announced during the past period is an indication.

As one of the big card payment providers and a major player in payments in mature economies, this is further ratification of the importance of this industry for emerging markets.

Utilising Intel two-factor authentication in conjunction with Symantec to bring more secure mobile payments to market (Read here)

Orange and Barclaycard have launched the UK's first contactless payment service allowing customers to pay for purchases using a smartphone.

Orange Quick Tap allows payments of up to £15 in over 50,000 outlets around the country, including Pret A Manger, McDonald's and Subway.

Customers have to purchase a Samsung Tocco Lite smartphone to use the service, which is available for £55 on pay-as-you-go or free on a £10 per month, two-year contract.

Starbucks customers in the UK will be soon be able to walk into their local store, fire up their iPhone and pay for their orders via their Starbucks card, the company has announced.

The one-touch app, which has been available in the US since the beginning of the year, is set to launch on January 5th, allowing Starbucks card owners to link their accounts to the iPhone application and pay using the on-screen barcode in any of the 700 Starbucks locations in the UK.

It’s perfect for people that regularly travel without cash and regularly utilise their Starbucks card in order to pay for their coffee on the commute to work or when out shopping. With one in five customers already using their cards to pay for their cup of Joe, Starbucks is likely to see a rapid uptake in application usage.

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

geo-tagging (think Foursquare or Facebook Places), street view, face recognition, the Wii controller and the fact that sites like Facebook both impact and are impacted by the physical world to argue that “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a “real” (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) -an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world increasingly digital.

Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of a British user in a libel battle that could have huge implications for free speech on the web.The social network has passed the name, email address and telephone number of a south Tyneside councillor accused of libelling the local authority via a series of anonymous Twitter accounts. South Tyneside council took the legal fight to the superior court of California, which ordered Twitter, based in San Francisco, to hand over the user's private details.It is believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users and comes amid a huge row over privacy and free speech online.Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer named as being the plaintiff in a gagging order preventing reporting of an alleged affair with a reality TV model, is separately attempting to unmask Twitter users accused of revealing details of the privacy injunction.

However, Giggs brought the lawsuit at the high court in London and the move to use California courts is likely to be seen as a landmark moment in the internet privacy battle.

Ahmed Khan, the south Tyneside councillor accused of being the author of the pseudonymous Twitter accounts, described the council's move as "Orwellian". Khan received an email from Twitter earlier this month informing him that the site had handed over his personal information. He denies being the author of the allegedly defamatory material.

According to the Irish Times, one secondary school is getting rid of school books and replacing them with iPads. The iPads will be phased into use starting September, when all 90 first-year students at the college will be given the option of using the Apple machine instead of a bag full of school books.“We received huge support from the teachers and parents for the idea – we had 96 percent support – but in no way is this obligatory," school principal Jimmy Finn told the publication. “Parents have the choice to go with the iPad or school books like it was always done.”

In the United States, the average cost of school books per semester is $400 to $900 and up or $2,400 to $3,200 or more (depending on degree). Textbook savings wouldn't be the only benefit. Publishers that ordinarily charge $100 or more per book to make up the high cost of color printing, durable covers, and modest distribution could save significantly and possibly even generate more money for textbook authors by making the material more public than school book stores.

Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, it now sells more e-books than it sells physical books: Amazon reported that it sold 115 e-books for every 100 physical books it sold in 2011. Unfortunately, e-books are still very much the same as physical books: they are static, their content is not updated nor does it include videos or interactive infographics.

If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, we highly recommend downloading “Our Choise”. Not only is it an intelligent and interesting book, its format is the first peek into what your book experience will become in the next few years. It might be time to kiss those physical books goodbye after all.  If you’re not convinced, check out the great demo given at TED:

*Theory mashup of AR and cyborgs.

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/09/cyborgs-and-the-augmented-reality-they-inhabit/

*Actually, it’s more of an argument about the definition of Augmented Reality and the definition of Cyborgs, until you can get ‘em to click together like puzzle pieces. But so much debris is left on the floor when they’re done with the theory tin-shears, that the debris looks more interesting than the remainder.

Security vendor Juniper Networks has warned users of Google’s mobile OS Android that there has been a 400 percent increase in Android malware between June 2010 and January 2011. In its “Malicious Mobile Threats Report 2011“, the company has said that Android as the dominant growing force in the mobile device market, was the biggest target of malware and exploit developers in 2010.

Symbian mobiles continue to remain the most prone to threats.

While the focus of this post is not specifically Apple or the iPad, it’s almost impossible to talk about successful mobile strategies without recognizing that the iPad has created a transitional moment for the Learning & Development world. The reasons why have been the subject of countless blog posts, but I think DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, in this video from TechCrunch, says it best:

“[The iPad] it’s the first device that actually is a reflection of me – or us. It’s so revolutionary that it’s no longer about me adapting myself to somebody else’s set of programmings or the way in which a device is going to engage. It is the reverse. It is as though I’m looking in a mirror.”

While it took the iPad to make learner-controlled content a reality, this level of flexibility is now the gold standard for delivery to any device, be it tablets, smart phones or any number of performance support devices.

at http://www.yellowbrck.com. Email PDF Print New York, NY (PRWEB) May 12, 2011 YellowBrck is a new location-based social network mobile application created for moms and dads on the go. By downloading the free YellowBrck iPhone/iPad app in the App Store, parents can easily share their activities and locations with friends and other parents, as well as score special savings incentives from retailers. YellowBrck was created as a way to connect parents, help them share tips on ways to keep their children entertained, and learn about the latest family spots and events nationwide. By checking into YellowBrck on a regular basis, users are able to earn discounts and rewards from their favorite retailers. YellowBrck empha

is a new location-based social network mobile application created for moms and dads on the go. By downloading the free YellowBrck iPhone/iPad app in the App Store, parents can easily share their activities and locations with friends and other parents, as well as score special savings incentives from retailers. YellowBrck was created as a way to connect parents, help them share tips on ways to keep their children entertained, and learn about the latest family spots and events nationwide. By checking into YellowBrck on a regular basis, users are able to earn discounts and rewards from their favorite retailers. YellowBrck emphasizes the social aspect, allowing parents to meet up with nearby parents, keep tabs on what activities their friends are doing, and discover family-friendly places in their neighborhood. An impromptu playdate at the park or a last-minute trip to the museum is easily shared on YellowBrck for others to join in. Parents are also able to check-in for everyday tasks pre-listed on the app, including potty training and getting dressed, with the chance to “win” virtual stickers and real world savings from online and brick & mortar retailers, including Totsy, Ecomom, Dapple, Abe’s Market, Torly Kid, and many more.

InMobi SmartPay™ will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the US $200bn mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly and easily into new markets by providing a one-time, no-cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.

The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of 2011.

†The new solution already offers reach to over one billion consumers in seven countries, including the US, UK, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Malaysia, with huge growth plans to expand to over three billion consumers in 30 countries by the end of the year.

re creating smartphone loyalty, determining which OS and device a consumer may buy. At least that’s what a recent Gartner report will have you believe. The sales report ranks Android, Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone sales in the first quarter of 2011, noting the impact of mobile apps on the market share of new sales. It seems the mobile device market is only gaining in strength, Google (GOOG) taking 36 percent market share, leading with 36.3 million unites sold. Symbian comes in second, with 27.4 percent market share at 27.6 million units, leaving Apple (AAPL) at 16.8 percent market share with 16.9 in sales. RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry comes in fourth, with 13 million and a 12.9 percent take of the market.

“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform,” notes principle research analyst Roberta Cozza. “This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google. As well as putting their devices in the context of a broader ecosystem, manufacturers must start to see their smartphones as part of a computing continuum.”

Apps have certainly created an expansive ecosystem for mobile industry, but just like the mighty dinosaur, this era may one day become extinct. The death of mobile apps has been predicted by MIT writer Christopher Mims, pegging web apps as the future. It’s their potential ubiquity across platforms that extends access to web users, instead of drawing lines in the sand around mobile browsing versus the web you access on a PC laptop. Mims calls for a browser-based utopia where offline access and standards like HTML5 harmonize our desperate web experiences, but notes that offline access is far from perfect. Things still boil down to business, where Google’s marketplace has lower operating costs than Apple’s, with a broadening reach.

"A lot has been written lately on the crowd effect and the wisdom of crowds. But for those of us who are doubtful, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has published a study showing how masses can become dumber: social influence. While previous studies show how groups of people can come up with remarkably accurate results, it seems 'even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.' Social influence 'diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.' In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden."

For Apple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike that of religious devotees, according to a BBC documentary series that cites neurological research. The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says. The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London. Observers and Apple critics have long accused fans of the tech company of taking their infatuation to an extreme. People have gone to great lengths to prove their love of Apple with tattoos, bumper stickers and home shrines to outmoded Mac computers. Apple's cult-like following was highlighted in a 2009 documentary called "Macheads." A blog, aptly titled Cult of Mac, wrote on Thursday about Oakland, California, resident Gary Allen's cross-country pilgrimage to Apple's first store in Virginia to celebrate the retail chain's 10th anniversary this week.

pple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike