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PayPal today issued an update to its Android app that will enable people to make payments to each other via near field communications enabled smartphones. This does not include consumer to merchant payments but rather is a widget geared towards making payments with friends or other PayPal using people that happen to have NFC on their devices.

PayPal has shunned NFC to this point in its mobile payments push. The company's stance has been "it will not be a hard thing for us to implement if we find that it gains popularity." Really, this new NFC sharing widget for Android does not change that stance at all. Peer-to-peer payments in PayPal are a service, not a business vertical. Essentially, this update for PayPal does not affect how the company will approach mobile payments.

PayPal does not make any money from peer-to-peer transactions. It is a feature that the company offers more or less because it can. Really, the best thing that peer-to-peer does for PayPal is give it insights into how people transfer money between each other through the data generated by each transaction.

The race to replace your wallet with mobile payment options is on.

Consumer demand for smartphones, combined with near-field communication, or NFC, technology that enables everyday purchases, is fueling the shift from credit card swipes to mobile payments. With smartphone sales expected to increase 50% this year, mobile payment services are in a mad dash to capture market share, and the growing competitive space has sparked strategic partnerships among big names.

Meet the contendersMobile payment sales in the U.S. are expected to increase at a 68% compounded annualized growth rate over the next five years. It's no wonder that big players like American Express (NYSE: AXP  ) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) want in on the action.

Today, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items. Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an unfolding news story or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results.

Do you remember the amazing game of Memory?

The aim of the game is to remember each card you flip over and find all the pairs.

In a similar fashion, Dave Brown, the design blogger at Holiday Matinee created “The Amazing Game of REcollection,” that turns the art of discovery into a fun game that rewards you for playing. For online shoppers in need of a brain exercise, the app is great. Not only does playing the app double as online shopping, but for each board completed, you are given 15% discount codes to various online shopping sites like Toddland, Photojojo, WeJetSet, Feelgoodz, and Holstee.

In the past 20 years, a lot of research has been done towards visual information retrieval on pictures and video files. Not all of it has been successful. But on the last years, the quality of these visual search engines has reached levels that are beginning to be acceptable for eDiscovery, compliance, law enforcement and intelligence applications.

More and more electronically stored information (ESI) is non-text based or does not contain any searchable text components: sound recordings, video and pictures are growing exponentially in size and more and more collaborative and social network applications support (only) these information formats.

In addition, a whole generation is growing up that no longer uses written communication forms such as letters or emails: they only use social networks and other new media forms for communication and collaboration.

Peer 1, the hosting provider, has joined the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines the elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those many would consider more akin to a Platform-as-a-Service.

For example, instead of a virtual machine, a customer buys a “resource pool” that they can customize to fit their needs, as opposed to buying a small, medium or large virtual machine.

The company also offers auto scaling, a feature more common in Platforms-as-a-Service such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure or Heroku. However, the service is pay-as-you-go and deployed on demand. It includes a dashboard that functions as a fuel gauge for compute resources that shows IT pros when to spin up additional resources.

Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

Whenever people think of near field communications, they think of mobile payments. Your phone becomes your wallet and spending money becomes as easy as tap, tap, tapping all day. Well, the era of your tap-able digital wallet is not here yet. It may never come. But that does not mean there are not some very interesting uses of NFC coming down the pipeline.

For instance, there was a Coca-Cola vending machine at ad:tech this week that was tied to Google Wallet. Tap, tap, tap away and take a Diet Coke Break. At Nokia World there as a gate that could be opened with a tap from your phone. A developer is working on NFC solutions to help his father who has Alzheimer's. NFC could be great as a monetary transfer solution, but there is so much more.

Groundswell To An NFC Enabled World

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.

a survey administered by Jive Software that found both executives and knowledge workers believe social software will become a necessary part of doing business — even though the return on investment for this kind of software is still pretty squishy. 

Improving customer loyalty and service levels and driving increased revenue or sales were among the top reasons for using social software mentioned by survey respondents.

they shouldn't become so focused on attaining a hard ROI that they miss opportunities to use social to solve business problems.

The Tor developers are calling on people to sign up to the service in order to run a bridge - a vital point of the secret network through which communications are routed. "By setting up a bridge, you donate bandwidth to the Tor network and help improve the safety and speed at which users can access the internet," the Tor project developers said in a blog.

"Setting up a Tor bridge on Amazon EC2 is simple and will only take you a couple of minutes," it promised.

Users wishing to take part in the bridging project, need to be subscribed to the Amazon service.

Near-field communications (NFC) technology will be built into one in five smartphones by 2014 as mobile payment and interactive promotions take off, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Over 23 million NFC-capable smartphones are expected to be in circulation by the end of 2011, said the NFC Retail Marketing & Mobile Payments report.

This willl rise to around 300 million by 2014, and half of these devices are expected to be active in the US.

45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).

The 45 operators involved account for nearly 3 billion subscriptions worldwide, and include China Mobile, Vodafone Group, América Móvil, Telefónica Group, China Unicom, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T.

Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.

Collaborate with Customer Support to Build Conversation MuscleIt’s a point worth underscoring, especially for marketers.  From the data we’ve gathered via our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic, we know that Marketing and/or Corporate Communications are leading the social media charge in large (i.e., Fortune 1000) enterprises 65% of the time.  But when it comes to Customer Support involvement, more than 40% of large companies don’t involve support peers at all!  In another 50%, they are only moderately involved. That’s a huge problem.We need our customer support brethren to build the right muscles for social media.  Let them spot you. Read more at mlcwideangle.exbdblogs.com

Social media could transform the NHS and other public services in the same way that file-sharing changed the music industry, a conference has heard.Growing use of tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, offered an opportunity to reinvent services, delegates heard. “It’s happened to the music and travel industries and it’s going to happen to public services,” said Dr Paul Hodgkin, founder of the Patient Opinion site that organised the MyPublicServices conference. He said that conversations about people’s experiences with public services were going on all over the web and needed to be taken into account.“This is about turning things upside down so the thing that looks like a deficit, your experience, becomes the gift you have to give to other people.” “I’m not sure that the government can re-engineer itself from the inside out,” he said. “It’s going to take the demands of people to force it into shape.” Read more at news.bbc.co.uk

Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature.today’s software developers work in social networks in which everyone is closely linked to everyone else. “The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking holdTo restore the kind of aggressive innovation needed to build the next-generation internet will require re-engineering of the social networks of software developers themselvesThis could be doneif funding agencies ensured that research projects were carried out by many small, competing groups over longer periods.To enable innovation it may be necessary to reduce the number of social ties Read more at www.newscientist.com

Twitterers paid to spread Israeli propagandaIsrael’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel. Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict. The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year. About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.Read more at www.globalresearch.ca This kind of knowledge warfare was pioneered by the Russians and must now be used extensively by all governments. As Clipper abailart says: “One wonders whether it is worth it since the sort of chattering ‘politico’ twits who bounce soundbites off each other seven days a week are fortunately hermetically sealed in their own collective fantasies.” However, the manipulation of statistics as Trending Topics which muddies the water. Unfortunately, open also means open to abuse. I wonder if it means that those of us who want open discussion (and meaningful inferences from the flow) will need to do it in closed groups?

To bypass the media this is what you need to do to apply the “10 New Rules of PR”  1. Think like they do:

Publish your press releases through a distribution service:

ection of the Larger Press Release Distribution Services BusinessWire www.businesswire.com PRWeb www.prweb.com PRNewswire www.prnewswire.com Market Wire  www.marketwire.com

nterested? The backbone of Conversational Currency ™ is whatever social medium a person likes using. Where one takes it from there is the value this community provides

Amplify’d from www.conversationalcurrency.comThis community shares  tactical applications with community members on a one-to-one basis. We do not share the ‘secret sauce’ on a static website since there exists a myriad of customized solutions which can be developed using the fundamentals and vehicles being invented.Since we based all communications using the power of social media, we ask viewers to start with a very general engagement opportunity:Here we invite the world of bloggers who want to discuss, and propagate their knowledge about, and need for “Conversational Currency ™ “. A special invitation goes out to brands who can advertise their “conversations” on our site, and ultimately learn about our ‘solution’ one-on-one.Selected blogs (and particularly brand implementation plans) will be inserted into Business Week…drawing national attention and exposure to your demonstrated ability to turn ‘Conversation into Currency’…and perhaps be the 1st!!Read more at www.conversationalcurrency.com

1. You don’t have to jump immediately into hiring a social media expert.

2. You don’t have to spend on high-tech gadgets.

3. To help you maximize your allotted time for social media marketing, don’t spread yourself too thin.