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Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.

In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,

Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.

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.

Linking the data together is proving to be one of the sticking points for the Internet of things, according to Maurizio Pilu, lead technologist at the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB). The TSB recently held an over-subscribed workshop to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing the ‘Internet of things’. “The feeling was that applications and services that could make money, and that could change our lives, are not emerging fast enough,” explains Pilu. “And one of the main reasons is that data produced by ‘things’ is not interoperable, due to the fragmentation of the industry.”

Maurizio Pilu believes the UK has three strong advantages when it comes to the Internet of things. “We have world-class communications technology research base; we are strong at data analytics; and we are an early adopter of technologies like this,” he says.

“But there is one big disadvantage,” he says. “This stuff costs money, and like other countries, the UK is going through a period of cautious investment decisions.”

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.

Imagine getting points in an online game each time you drink more water, floss your teeth or take a step toward some other healthy lifestyle goal. That's the promise of Green Goose, a company that uses tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers or credit cards to track everyday behavior and record it online.

Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.

All thanks to a simple sticker or other attachable sensor. It's the simplest and most pleasing example we've seen yet of the widely anticipated trend called The Internet of Things.

Master tinkerer [Ryan Rusnak] created the very popular BEER ROBOT. With a press of button on Ryan’s iPhone, the mini fridge armed with an air cannon and webcam fires a beer at him with deadly accuracy. Ryan linked the controls to the iPhone using the ioBridge IO-204 module. So, in reality he could control his creation from anywhere in the world via the Internet. Less exciting and deadly are Ryan’s ability to remotely monitor and control the temperature of the refrigerator also via ioBridge. The Mini Fridge Beer Robot is featured in Popular Science magazine in the June 2011 issue: Inventions of the Year. In this PopSci, you can learn how-to create your very own beer firing robot with a step-by-step guide. The beer robot, dubbed the ioFridge, is the perfect connection between man and machine! And, when we created ioBridge, you better believe we saw a future of armed machines that are web-enabled. Congrats on making PopSci and getting us one step closer…

Augmented reality has been touted as the "next big thing" for a while, yet mainstream success has proved elusive. So what can be done to turn it from a gimmick into a commercial necessity?Imagine being able to watch miniature versions of Kings of Leon or Lady Gaga play on a table right in front of your eyes.

One company - String, in partnership with tech firm Digicave - has developed and demonstrated a system that creates the impression of a 3D figure mapped onto, for example, a book shelf. Such technology opens up the possibility of having a pop star appear in your bedroom, performing as if they were on-stage.

The idea of augmented reality was first mooted as far back as in 1965, with Ivan Sutherland's now famous essay Augmented Reality: The Ultimate Display. In it, he said that "with appropriate programming… a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked," stating that digital handcuffs would be able to actually restrain users, and those shot by digital characters would be killed in real life.

The global optical networking market is estimated to reach revenues of $20 billion in 2016, according to analyst firm Ovum. The global market is forecast to grow at 6% CAGR between 2010 and 2016, driven by investment from carriers in 40G and 100G networks. This level of growth, however, will vary according to region, with the North American market, for instance, estimated to grow by 12% this year while the Asia-Pacific market is predicted to contract by a further 3.2% in 2011. “Increasing bandwidth from residential broadband networks, mobile networks, and enterprises is the key driver of the growth. Carriers are investing in access networks and mobile long-term evolution (LTE) roll-outs are beginning to gain momentum,” said Ovum analyst Ian Redpath. “The optical networking market is also reaching a watershed moment in terms of technology. Networks based on 40G and 100G wavelengths are now poised for mass-market deployment.”

A 2009 analysis from Juniper Research (News –Alert) of the $110bn NFC opportunity forecasted that one in every six mobile subscribers (about 17 percent) globally will have an NFC enabled device by 2014. Adoption was expected to be highest in the Far East,with use very limited outside of that region.

By 2014,Juniper now predicts that North America will account for just under half of NFC smartphones,followed by Western Europe.

The latest forecast from Juniper Research suggests that at least 20 percent of smartphones will support NFC by 2014,about 300 million phones.

“We want to build tools that change the way all the people in this room experience the real world,” said Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at the Web 2.0 Summit today, as he described his company’s retreat from the game mechanics that first made the check-in service a success. With more than 10 million downloads, Foursquare is the category leader for location services, even as it moves away from its initial offering. Crowley said Foursquare is about much more than check-ins, and features such as Foursquare Radar and Foursquare Explorer are going to power even stronger user adoption in the future.

“We have a very narrow focus on building features that help people experience the real world,” Crowley said. “How we were able to survive the Facebook onslaught — that was a big motivating factor for the entire company.”

In spite of banner user adoption, Crowley said he can identify with newcomers who are still struggling to understand why they should use a check-in service at all. Crowley said when he first downloaded Twitter, it was 18 months before he really understood why the product was worth using, because he hadn’t discovered that “thing” which made it special.

Mobile payment start-up Square, is set to deploy its credit card readers for smartphones in Wall-Mart Stores at locations in the US, according to reports.

According to online media outlet businessweek.com, before being made available in Wall-Mart stores, Square’s device has been sold via about 200 Apple stores, as well as via Target, RadioShack and Best Buy outlets.

The technology employed by Square for this device works on Apple’s iPhone and iPad as well as Google Android. The card reader is plugged into the headphone jack of the mobile device which allows merchants to swipe customers’ credit or debit cards.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed speech interface technology that enables users to retrieve a variety of information by simply speaking into a smartphone, without having to look at the smartphone’s display.

After listening to a synthesized speech read the latest news and other information, users can articulate the information that they would like to learn more about. The software will then read details about the topic and other related information

In recent years, by employing devices to remotely access data centers, where an abundance of computing resources can be utilized, it has become possible to develop speech recognition and synthesis technologies that handle a larger lexicon than has previously been possible on stand-alone devices. This has led to high expectations for the delivery of new and innovative services.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley doesn’t think that you should have to open up a mobile app to interact with it. I caught up with Crowley a couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, where he was a speaker. In the video interview above, he compares Foursquare’s newest feature called Radar to the Siri personal assistant on the new iPhone 4S. For Crowley, it’s all about getting mobile apps to push relevant information out to you at exactly the right place and time. “If you have a problem to solve with your phone, you don’t have to go to the search box.”

Radar taps into Foursquare’s Explore recommendations and pushes them out to you automatically via notifications. “What we have been doing with Radar is finding a way for people to use the app really without having to actually use it,” says Crowley. It runs Explore in the background, which tells you when you are near a place on your to-do list, where someone you know has left a tip, or where a lot of your friends are at that moment. Siri is similar in that it pushes out reminders and other information to you without you having to tap on the screen.

In part II of this interview, coming up, Crowley talks about how Radar fits into his overall strategy and plans to make money.

Has Android copied elements from Apple's iOS? It's not a matter that Google's senior managers for the Android operating system want to get involved in.Hugo Barra, product management director for Android at Google, insisted in London on Tuesday that he hadn't heard the revelations that emerged last Friday from the Steve Jobs biography: that the late Apple chief executive "swore to destroy Android", and was so furious at what he saw as copying implemented in Android 2.1 on HTC phones released in January 2010 that he summoned Eric Schmidt to a meeting in March and said he wanted it stopped.

Barra declined to answer when asked Google had implemented a "feature freeze" on Ice Cream Sandwich, the new version of Android which will be implemented in phones due for delivery from next month. A "feature freeze" is the point at which no new features are added to code, so that it can be tested and refined: "That's an internal matter," he said.

What do smartphones, tablets, and self-service business information tools have in common? All three are on high-growth trajectories for enterprise adoption. In a new report issued last week by Forrester Research called called TechRadar For Enterprise Architecture Professionals: Technologies For Empowered Employees, Q4 2011, it shows how these and others have taken over the enterprise. It is the classic IT problem. As Gene Leganza writes in the introduction, "Mobile, social, video, and cloud technologies give individuals tremendous access to information and resources. Employees can become the best source of innovation and the breakthrough ideas that CxOs are hungry for. But as employees become empowered, central IT begins losing control of the technology strategy."

Mobile device usage has spread across the globe. In terms of mobile penetration, the United States is actually on the lower end of the worldwide spectrum, with only 77% cellular device ownership. That seems counterintuitive to the way the U.S. views itself as the heart of mobile acceptance and innovation. It is China and other Asia-Pacific countries that really lead in mobile adoption. Research firm Forrester released a study last week showing global mobile usage trends. In almost every mobile usage aspect, metropolitan China and other Pacific Rim countries lead the way. That includes mobile social usage, work usage and multiple device ownership. Mobile is near an inflection point, changing the way people interact with information around the globe.

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."

It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.

there are many ways to incorporate game mechanics into a community and which ones are appropriate depend a lot on the make-up of your community audience and what the ultimate goals for the community are.

my belief is that you need to gradually introduce new elements into a community and make sure that any new features are fully explained and documented.

2008 Elections From the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses to the Nov. 4 general election, information graphics were a major component of the New York Times election coverage. Interactive maps on the nytimes.com home page and inside the web site were rich with information, but easy to navigate.

2008 Olympics Coverage In August 2008, The New York Times graphics department published more than 30 interactive graphics covering subjects ranging from the Olympic torch to the medal count. The package included graphics produced in advance of the games, plus more than a dozen produced on deadline analyzing results from a vareity of events. Because NBC tape-delayed the showing of many events, these graphics frequently were readers' first visual picture of how a race was won.

Flight 1549 Lands in the Hudson River When U.S. Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, graphics editors immediately began reporting what happened in the air, building 3-D models of the plane and developing an interactive graphic. The graphic was initially published the same day as the emergency landing, and updated over the next several days as more information was released. Published Jan. 15, 2009

Mobile handsets have a bad habit of oversharing with the networks they operate on, with some handsets being chattier than others. This signaling data, as it’s known in the industry, can congest mobile networks, and Traffix Systems, a six-year-old Israeli company wants to help operators solve that problem.

The company said Wednesday that it raised a first round of $7 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners to help it expand operations. Ben Volkow, the CEO, says that 60 percent of operators already have some Traffix gear on their networks to address and manage signaling traffic, but more operators are interested. As more operators began deploying LTE networks, which add to the complexity of signaling traffic and to the overall network, Volkow decided that his previous strategy of growing the business through bootstrapping it no longer made sense. “We needed to scale and grow the business,” he said in an interview.

Signaling traffic is the data the phone or device sends out to the network to tell it where it is, what is it is doing, how much it is allowed to do based on the subscriber’s plan and figure out when to hop to the next base station. Chetan Sharma, a wireless analyst, issued a report last year noting that network congestion is generally caused by two big things: (1) signaling traffic caused by smartphones and superphones and (2) peak data traffic caused by data cards and embedded laptops.