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Square has struck a deal with Wal-Mart that will bring the dongle into retail stores across the country.

In theory, Wal-Mart could arm all of the floor representatives with Square dongles and have customers in and out. It may even help alleviate long lines at the checkout.

It is also imaginable that Wal-Mart could set up in-store payment kiosks away from the registers with the Square Register.

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

With the excitement surrounding the arrival of undersea cables in Sub-Saharan Africa and the prospects of the smartphone revolution in bringing mobile connectivity to most parts of the continent, it is easy to forget for instance that the continent still has 1 domain per 10,000 users.

In education, there are the vast prospects that e-learning provides for students, but doing this in a way that scales is difficult in Africa’s low bandwidth environment. There are also prospects in various sectors ranging from agriculture to finance each with its own unique set of challenges.

Amidst this backdrop, the obvious respite for bridging the access gap appears to be through smart phones. However, majority of Africans can only afford the cheapest of phones which are typically low end phones. To truly expand access, smart phone prices will need to crash drastically and rural connectivity would need to expand dramatically. Save for these two actions, revolutionizing the continent via the Internet will continue to remain a pipe dream.

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."

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.

By providing an open platform for the creation of augmented-reality layers, these apps have democratised the AR industry - and made possible flights of fancy such as Unseen Sculptures, in which new-media artist Warren Armstrong and nearly two dozen others collaborated to populate central Melbourne and Sydney with a range of virtual artworks that "appeared" when smartphones running the Layar app were pointed at particular parts of the city."I'm fascinated by mobile devices and their ubiquity," says Armstrong, who has spearheaded the project's expansion - including planned engagements with the Sydney Fringe Festival, Cairns Festival and other projects. "It's very immersive: you can go to a location, put on headphones and do amazing things with sounds. Layar takes care of the fiddly back-end stuff for people who aren't au fait with PHP or MySQL programming. The whole thing is in its infancy, and there's a lot of scope for creating new things."

As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.

Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Here’s how Monash describes the essence of WibiData: WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop,* is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides. Also included are: