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A common mistake for those seeking to cope with this profound disruption is to confuse technology with innovation. Algorithms, apps and search tools help make data useful but they can’t replace the value judgements at the core of journalism.

Genuine innovation requires a fundamental shift in how journalists think about their role in a changed world. To begin with, they need to get used to being ‘curators’; sorting news from the noise on the social web using smart new tools and good old fashioned reporting skills.

I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we can trust it? * Delivery: How do we turn that content into stories for a changed audience?

appending real-world purchase information to its treasure trove of online behavioral data will vastly increase the value of customers’ profiles and increase the rates Google (NSDQ: GOOG) can charge its advertisers. It will be a way for Google to increase its local presence. NFC (near-field communications) is too often equated simply with payments, but Google understands that NFC tags have broad application (working like Quick Response [QR] and other 2D barcodes do today). Google can help retailers use NFC tags for in-store promotions and check-ins, augmenting the understanding of customer behavior for ad targeting.

Numerous players—from Internet pure players to operators and retailers—are embracing the mobile/social/local combo. Unifying the online and offline worlds via mobile will create long-term market disruption. There are plenty of new opportunities opening up if you center your approach around the notion of context, trying to invent new product and services that will tie together places, brands, and consumers. Think about mobile augmented reality. At the end of the day, it is all about facilitating the discovery and understanding of information around you.

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.

The latest wave of social networks document, photograph and broadcast your every move, opening an unprecedented opportunity for small businesses and big brands alike to target consumers based on their whereabouts and activities.Local Response wants to help businesses collect and respond to their customers’ public posts. The platform scans Twitter for explicit checkins to locations, like on Foursquare, as well as natural language that indicates location (ex. “I’m going to…”), and responds with Twitter @mentions on behalf of businesses. Messages most often include a coupon or offer in a bit.ly link.In other words, when customers check into a store on Foursquare, the store can send them a coupon while they are there. If customers tweet a photo through Instragram from a competing store, they might get the same coupon.

The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These  other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions."  But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.

When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database.  If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."

Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service.  With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.

"Smartphone security recommendations seem to boil down to Windows-like practices: install an antivirus, run updates, and don't execute apps from untrusted sources. On my own computers, running Linux, I choose to only install (signed) packages from the distribution's or well-known repositories, or programs I can check and compile myself, or run them as a dedicated user — and I don't bother with an antivirus. What rules should I adopt on my soon-to-be-bought Android device? Can I use it purely with open-source apps and still make the most of it? Are Android's fine-grained permissions (accessing the network, contacts...) reliable? Can apps be trusted not to scan your files and keyboard for passwords and emails? What precautions do security-conscious Slashdotters take to keep control of their phones?"

When choosing from over one million mobile apps across multiple platforms, which ones are really worth it? What about Web-based applications that aren’t apps but are highly effective when used on your mobile device? Well, there isn’t an app that can figure out which apps are right for you but there is a non-app alternative—humans—that can do that.

Here are three business-related apps that every small business owner should consider trying. PayPal PayPal offers small business owners the ability to sell goods and services, send payments, receive payments and transfer money securely.

Quickoffice It can be very annoying when you are on the road and someone sends a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet for you to review. You click the download link on your phone only to realize that you can’t open the attachment.

Twitter is updating its authentication system to give users more control over how third-party applications can access their accounts. Applications will now have to explicitly request additional permission from the user during the authentication process in order to send and receive direct messages on behalf of the user. At first glance, the change seems like a welcome improvement to the Twitter APIs. Support for granular permission tiers is one of the technical advantages of authority delegation systems like OAuth

Twitter's approach to implementing the feature comes with some serious problems for third-party client implementors

The OAuth standard was originally intended to enable server-to-server authentication for limited third-party access to non-public APIs. It is poorly suited for open APIs with an arbitrary number of independent third-party applications. More significantly, it doesn't address the needs of desktop and mobile authentication at all. Despite the significant limitations of the standard, it is being adopted and mandated by a number of social networking services, including Twitter.

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

It's the so-called 'Internet of Things' right? The point at which your milk carton has an RFID tag on it to let your electronically enabled fridge know that it has gone off. Your fridge (which is Internet-connected of course) then automatically orders your online shopping account to send you new milk and your auto-payment system takes that out of your bank account. All you have to do is pick your milk up at the door, open the carton and pour it into your PG Tips -- nothing more. But are we ready for all this? Are developers ready for this? Are web developers ready for this? Are manufacturers ready for this? Are the world's major IT vendors ready for this? Answer: umm, probably not.

Paul Bradshaw, visiting professor, City University and founder of helpmeinvestigate.com used the principal of toys to give ideas on developing the data story and explained the importance of  “future proofing the information we are gathering”, saying “that’s one of the big commercial imperatives”.

Conrad Quilty-Harper, data mapping reporter at the Telegraph, explained how creating maps adds to a story by using the example of a map on bike sharing schemes he created (though did not publish) using “Google Fusion Tables and a bit of javascript”. He recommends Google Maps and says the trailblazer of a news site using Google Fusion tables is the Texas Tribune.

My proudest example” was a live interactive Royal Wedding map which “worked brilliantly for three hours”. It showed some of the best tweets and were geolocated on the map. “We’ve got the data and we’re going to analyse it and do something with it in the future,” he said. “It tells you what people in specific locations were thinking”. The Telegraph would like to use the technology in a crisis news story, such as an earthquake or conflict.

"With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers."

The traditional internet is oriented towards person-to-person connection, whereas the Internet of Things is oriented towards connection of inanimate objects. As such, the Internet of Things covers a larger range of connections and involves more semantics. Internet and telecom networks are focused on information transfer, while the Internet of Things is focused on information services. By combining sensor networks, the Internet, telecom networks, and cloud computing platforms, the Internet of Things can sense, recognize, affect, and control the physical world. The physical world can be unified with the virtual world and human perception. This opens a whole new media market yet to be explored to see which is the killer applications.

the Internet of Things will allow physical objects to transmit data about themselves and their surroundings, bringing more information about the real world into the online realm. Imagine getting precise, live traffic data from all the local roads; trains that tell your smartphone that they’re full before they arrive; flowers that email you when they need watering; maybe even implants in your body that give you real-time updates about your health that feed into a secure online ‘locker’ of your personal data. All this and more is possible with the Internet of Things, helping to transform what we expect from the Web and the Internet.

This agile model (which is now well known in Silicon Valley and in the software engineering world) has transformed software.  It has many benefits:  it reduces the long cycle times that create risk; it enables engineers to take advantage of the fact that requirements change quickly; and it honors the fact that people perform best when they work on small projects they can finish quickly.

Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks - so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance.  And as the image on the right shows, daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.

Look at where Agile fits in Management and HR:

It may be difficult to describe what exactly the phrase “an internet of things” means, but the pieces of the puzzle that are required for that to develop are all here today, ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco. Those puzzle pieces include ubiquitous network connectivity, cloud-based services, cheap assembly of electronics, social design, open collaboration tools and low-volume sales channels. When put together, Kuniavsky said, they create an “innovation ecosystem” that is the foundation for an internet of things.

people want work and have to act like they’ve got work to get it. And more often than not, people won’t settle for work that’s matched to their experience. They want the big names because what do we honour in our social media circles? Names. The reality is that if these scores of people spent as much time projecting as they did actually humbling themselves to take work at their level and do it, they wouldn’t have to project having work in order to get the work they so desperately need. Right now I know of dozens of people who need work, some famous, some not, who if they would just stretch their hand out and ask, without searching for the big brands, the

I had a friend who told me the truth when he couldn’t tell others. His name was Trey Pennington, and when we lost him this month (and there was more to his loss than most know), we became determined to help others who felt equally unable to get the help that they needed

I know that most self employed and company owners within our Like Minds community are on the edge of their finances. They are startups in tough times, and the consultants especially are struggling to get work. I venture that together we could help a whole lot of people get the work they need if they told the truth and could be open with one another.

Geofencing: As long as you're here ... One of the promises of mobile advertising — at least from the merchant's perspective — has been the potential to advertise to customers when they're near your store and can act immediately (and impulsively) on your offer. To make these location-triggered offers, merchants need to delineate a "geofence" around their retail outlets — a radius or polygonal area in which customers who have opted into a deal program can be notified on their mobiles that an offer is available nearby. Indeed, Groupon is working on adding such location-based deals to its daily offers, according to a letter sent from its general counsel David Schellhase to two U.S. Representatives who were asking about Groupon's privacy policies.

By some measures, 90% of all texts are opened within three minutes of receiving them.

Goodman said that location-triggered delivery is highly effective with "exceedingly high" response rates: between 11% and 60% of users are likely to visit a store when pinged with an offer if they're nearby, and up to 46% are likely to make a purchase.

Kaggle is an Australian company that crowdsources predictive models. How does Kaggle do this? By hosting competitions of prediction models. Clients post their problem and correlating data promising a prize money for the most reliable prediction model provided by the community.

Kaggle’s community consists of data analysts from all over the world and from a wide array of fields, with the majority of users coming from computer science (15.6%), statistics (11.6%) and economics (10%) but also from physics, engineering and even social sciences. According to a recent blog entry, Kaggle’s community is reaching 13,000 data scientists.

Any other organization can join them in asking for partners to design a new way of offering accreditation to their own organization.

operating on inexpensive mobile phones or Web-based platforms

Some might be games---but most will have nothing to do with games