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“I thought someone would be able to change the way people shop, but I didn’t think it would be a startup because this will happen quickly and you also need brands that people trust. And PayPal is one of them. It takes the combination of a trusted payment company and the cooperation with great brands that people trust to change how people shop. I thought I would be able to convince all the major retailers all around the world because I have had  relationships with them for 30 years,” Kingsborough said.

Even with the departure of PayPal’s president Scott Thompson, who is now Yahoo’s new CEO, PayPal hasn’t missed a beat and is executing on its vision, Kingsborough said.

Solving consumer and merchants needs Kingsborough came in and honed the in-store payment initiative, which was underway well before Kingborough arrived. He focused on appealing first to consumers and making it simple for them to grasp, before ensuring the merchants could be able to understand the value of the system. Then he went about getting the cooperation of merchants, criss-crossing the country to call upon retailers and payment infrastructure companies to get them on board. Along the way, he helped PayPal pick up necessary components like location-based service WHERE, whose CEO Walt Doyle was personally persuaded to sell by Kingsborough. The plan is now to start rolling out the payment system in the second quarter though the first U.S. trials have already begun with Home Depot.

Kingsborough said he was drawn to PayPal’s approach to payments because it was aimed at solving deep consumer and merchant needs. He said competitors who focus on near field communication and other alternative payment systems are too often preoccupied with the capabilities of their technology, but they’re not addressing the pressing needs of users.

“Competitors think they’ll solve how easy it is to pay at retail, but that’s not a consumer problem. Their problem is how do they become masters of shopping and use their money smartly and organize their efforts to shop online, in-store and on mobile,” said Kingsborough. “We have a holistic approach. We ask the consumers [what they] want to do. They want to save money, save time and feel important in stores.”

NFC: a feature, not a solution That’s partly why he thinks NFC in particular isn’t ready for prime time. He said it’s going to take a while for it to proliferate in stores and on handsets. But more fundamentally, it doesn’t make consumer’s lives better.

“Do I think NFC will work someday? Maybe. But to me, NFC is a feature, not a solution that solves problems. If your strategy is NFC today, you need a new strategy,” Kingsborough.

Google and Isis, the carrier consortium including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, are pushing hard on NFC and are angling to become the go-to mobile wallet for users, who will be able to pay at point-of-sale terminals with a tap of their phone. Many of the pieces for NFC fell into place for the technology in 2011, though there are still many hurdles ahead toward a broad rollout (subscription required) and mass consumer adoption.

PayPal’s approach bypasses many of the hardware constraints of NFC and pushes a two-pronged approach to in-store payments. Users can either use a PayPal Access card connected to their account, or more intriguingly, enter their phone number and PIN at a POS terminal and access their PayPal account. PayPal takes a user’s identification and turns it into a token, which is authenticated in the cloud, so no actual credit card numbers or financial data travels back and forth.

What it takes to win Kingsborough said the companies that win will be comprehensive and ubiquitous, allowing consumers to conduct transactions wherever they want to. By going with a software-based approach, PayPal can address about 8.2 million of the 10 million point of sale terminals with its payment system, without forcing retailers to buy new hardware. Then it’s up to PayPal to convince retailers to jump on board. It’s doing some critical work by signing deals with payment infrastructure companies like AJB Software Designs, which helps connect the point of sale terminals at many tier-one retailers to payment processors and financial institutions. Merchants that use AJB will have an easy path in enabling PayPal payments in store. PayPal is talking to other point of sale companies such as Verifone.

Merchants won’t just be getting a potentially cheaper alternative to credit cards. In PayPal’s vision, they’ll also be getting a way to push out offers to consumers, both in-store and nearby. Kingsborough said PayPal is working through its mobile app to address a variety of needs of merchants, from helping them manage online, mobile and in-store sales to improving loyalty and offering targeted discounts to users. Those additional tools will be rolled out over time in the next year or two. Google has outlined early plans to also provide coupons and offers to consumers using Google Offers in conjunction with Google Wallet.

Providing value But the other important winning determinant will be providing valuable, relevant and easy-to-use services to consumers, becoming the one mobile wallet they turn to, said Kingsborough. He said using tools like WHERE’s targeting and location technology will allow merchants to not just push out deals but deliver very context-aware content. For example, he said a clothes retailers might be able to message a nearby customer, letting them know they’ll earn $5 in their PayPal account that day if they buy jeans that they’ve purchased in the past. And, with the right permissions, the merchant may also be able to know the customer is with two friends and offer a group discount.

“It’s not just the capabilities of location-based services or understanding what a person just did; but it’s about being highly relevant to the person using the services,” Kingsborough said

He said in the battle to become the preferred digital wallet, PayPal will be the simplest for people to use, allowing people to link their credit, debit and loyalty cards, even potentially their drivers license. Just as people stick primarily to one browser, he said consumers will want to rely on primarily one wallet and he believes that PayPal will be that provider.

“Ours to lose” Kingsborough said it’s the whole offering that makes PayPal’s approach a winner. It’s a trusted name with more than 100 million users worldwide and it’s focused on providing value to both consumers and merchants with an easy path to ubiquity. “This is ours to lose,” he said. “I’m very confident about that. Otherwise, I’d be golfing right now in Hawaii.”

Any business that ignores these transformations does so at its own peril. Despite recession, currency crises, and tremors of financial instability, the pace of disruption is roaring ahead. The frictionless spread of information and the expansion of personal, corporate, and global networks have plenty of room to run. And here's the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast--the road map and model that will define the next era--no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.

To thrive in this climate requires a whole new approach, which we'll outline in the pages that follow. Because some people will thrive. They are the members of Generation Flux. This is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one: What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates--and even enjoys--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. Not everyone will join Generation Flux, but to be successful, businesses and individuals will have to work at it.

Digital competition destroyed bookseller Borders, and yet the big, stodgy music labels--seemingly the ground zero for digital disruption--defy predictions of their demise. Walmart has given up trying to turn itself into a bank, but before retail bankers breathe a sigh of relief, they ought to look over their shoulders at Square and other mobile-wallet initiatives. Amid a reeling real-estate market, new players like Trulia and Zillow are gobbling up customers. Even the law business is under siege from companies like LegalZoom, an online DIY document service. "All these industries are being revolutionized," observes Pete Cashmore, the 26-year-old founder of social-news site Mashable, which has exploded overnight to reach more than 20 million users a month. "It's come to technology first, but it will reach every industry. You're going to have businesses rise and fall faster than ever."

You Don't Know What You Don't Know "In a big company, you never feel you're fast enough." Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE

Within GE, she says, "our traditional teams are too slow. We're not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change." Comstock connected me with Susan Peters, who oversees GE's executive-development effort. "The pace of change is pretty amazing," Peters says. "There's a need to be less hierarchical and to rely more on teams. This has all increased dramatically in the last couple of years."

Executives at GE are bracing for a new future. The challenge they face is the same one staring down wide swaths of corporate America, not to mention government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we've lived: These organizations have structures and processes built for an industrial age, where efficiency is paramount but adaptability is terribly difficult. We are finely tuned at taking a successful idea or product and replicating it on a large scale. But inside these legacy institutions, changing direction is rough.

" The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: "In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That's something our current systems can't handle.

"There's a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve," Patnaik continues. "Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They're absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems--when you don't know what you don't know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

The security of the 40-year career of the man in the gray-flannel suit may have been overstated, but at least he had a path, a ladder. The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort (see "The Four-Year Career"), with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you'll stay in a single industry.

"So many people tell me, 'I don't know what you do,'" Kumra says. It's an admission echoed by many in Generation Flux, but it doesn't bother her at all. "I'm a collection of many things. I'm not one thing."

The point here is not that Kumra's tool kit of skills allows her to cut through the ambiguity of this era. Rather, it is that the variety of her experiences--and her passion for new ones--leaves her well prepared for whatever the future brings. "I had to try something entrepreneurial. I had to try social enterprise. I needed to understand government," she says of her various career moves. "I just needed to know all this."

You do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades to flourish in the age of flux, but you do need to be open-minded.

Nuke Nostalgia If ambiguity is high and adaptability is required, then you simply can't afford to be sentimental about the past. Future-focus is a signature trait of Generation Flux. It is also an imperative for businesses: Trying to replicate what worked yesterday only leaves you vulnerable.

"We now recognize that external focus is more multifaceted than simply serving 'the customer,'" says Peters, "that other stakeholders have to be considered. We talk about how to get and apply external knowledge, how to lead in ambiguous situations, how to listen actively, and the whole idea of collaboration."

"What we wanted to focus on was removing the mechanics of the transaction and building the relationship between the merchant and customer," said Megan Quinn, director of products at Square, which occupies space at the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission streets.

But, of course, Square isn't the only company working hard to crack the nut of mobile payments - and they all face considerable challenges.

Google, Visa, MasterCard, VeriFone, eBay's PayPal division and a joint venture among AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are attacking the problem in various ways. In most cases, those businesses are going a different direction than Square, employing near field communications (NFC) technology that allows people to tap their phone near a terminal to make a payment.

Done right, mobile payments can accelerate the monetary exchange, while streamlining the issuance, acceptance and storage of receipts, coupons and loyalty cards. Down the road - once consumer and retail use reaches critical mass - the hope is that people will be able to leave their wallets at home altogether.

But there's a chicken and egg paradox: Customers won't start using mobile payments in great numbers until they're accepted in great numbers, and retailers don't have a huge incentive to roll these systems out until customers are clamoring to pay this way.

There are only about 150,000 retailers nationwide that accept payments over MasterCard's NFC-based Paypass readers. Google's Wallet payment app works with this system, and industry rumors suggest the next iPhone might as well.

Square, which has so far focused on small merchants has about 20,000 that accept Card Case.

Another big challenge is human inertia. To get people to download apps, key in credit card numbers and transform a habit they're very comfortable with, mobile payments will have to represent more than a little improvement over what they do today.

"You have to offer them a compelling reason to do it," said David Mangini, an IBM executive focused on mobile payments. "At a very, very minimum ... it has to be just as convenient, just as broadly accepted and just as safe."

One of the big knocks on basic NFC payments is that tapping a phone near a reader doesn't represent a whopping improvement over swiping a card. In addition, merchants have little to gain by replacing one expensive payment infrastructure with another, some observers say.

"It doesn't upset the status quo," said Nick Holland, senior analyst at Yankee Group. "It doesn't really change the original business model and it all goes through the same rails."

Receipts, deals Google argues that its NFC-based Wallet app is a big step forward for a few reasons. A single tap replaces not just the payment, but also the exchange of receipts, coupons and loyalty points.

On top of that, Google believes it's tying together the on- and off-line retail worlds, by allowing consumers to move the deals they spot on the Web into the Wallet app, where they can redeem them in the real world. Google Wallet also advertises nearby deals when users open up the app.

"For the consumer, it's really about tap, pay and save," said Osama Bedier, vice president of payments at Google. "On the merchant side, it's about closing the loop on that advertising."

This is a critical goal for Google, too, as it experiences slowing growth in online advertising - 93 percent of commerce still occurs offline, according to Forrester Research

For its part, Square steers around the limitations of NFC - as well as the various roadblocks of wireless carriers and credit processing networks - by leveraging the powers of the Internet to process payments. The credit card information is stored online, in Square's secure cloud, not on the device itself.

Square, which started by providing small attachments that allow merchants to swipe credit cards using mobile devices, acts as the merchant of record for its customers. This allows the businesses to quickly start accepting credit cards without going through the usual drawn out and expensive process of applying for a merchant account. But it also clearly puts more risk onto Square's shoulders.

Square turned on the hands-free feature on its Card Case app, which takes advantage of the so-called geofencing capabilities in the latest version of Apple's mobile software, in an upgrade to the app in November. The feature is only available on Apple devices to date

Quinn said "automatic tabs" represents an obvious improvement over traditional payments and it's quickly driving user growth (though the company doesn't disclose user numbers).

In addition, retailers have seen revenue leap as much as 20 percent since integrating the app. It drives traffic by highlighting nearby establishments, and the ease of payment encourages customer loyalty, the company says. Tips also tend to go up.

Is it safe? But the question that has dogged Square - and indeed hangs over much of the mobile payment space - is security.

Early last year, VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron blasted Square - its attention-grabbing young competitor - for what he called serious security flaws. In an online video, he argued that any bad actor could use the Square dongle and an easy-to-create app to skim credit card numbers.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey, also the co-founder of Twitter, defended the company's security practices in a letter. He also highlighted the inherent insecurity of credit cards, noting that any sketchy waiter is equally free to steal your information.

Meanwhile, Quinn argued that Card Case is actually more secure than credit cards because it only works if you're in the location and your face matches the picture that pops up on the merchant's screen.

The radio technology behind NFC has taken some security lumps, too.

Late last month, a security researcher at a Washington, D.C., conference used a wireless reader she bought on eBay to highlight some weaknesses of radio frequency identification, Forbes reported. She pulled the critical data from an RFID-enabled credit card through a volunteer's clothing, encoded that data onto a blank card and put it to use onstage.

Holland said that any new form of payment inevitably creates new forms of fraud. The challenge will be to educate consumers and merchants about how to minimize the risks.

"Clearly, having a device always with you and connected is a very inviting target for criminals," he said. "Any safe is only as strong as the key."

Of course, some aren’t so bullish on NFC, notably eBay (who owns PayPal) CEO John Donohoe, who in a recent earnings call said merchants refer NFC “not for commerce.” And odd statement considering PayPal just dipped its toes in the NFC pool with support for Android.

Gajda tells is, “I think for some people NFC will replace the actual physical credit card but it will be a long time before NFC replaces all payments.” He believes that we are going to start seeing more traction by end of this year but says the capability of “taking credit cards and putting them on mobile phones will represent the long tail” in payments. But he adds, “the pieces are in place for NFC to take off.”

The second part of the Visa’s mobile strategy involves the digital wallet and the mobile web. Gajda says that as e-commerce ramps up on mobile phones, there is a need for one-click, simple username and password checkout experience in a transaction being made on a mobile device. That’s an area where PayPal has been working hard to dominate in but Visa sees room for other players. Should we expect a PayPal-like, one-click mobile payments technology coming from Visa soon? Perhaps, the company hasn’t been afraid to enter PayPal’s territory in the past, launching a peer to peer payments service earlier this year.

Gajda tells us that the biggest challenge of mobile payments in the current market the massive amount of fragmentation in the mobile industry. He explains that with all of the various mobile operating systems, specific manufactured phones, applications and more, keeping up with pace of innovation on the development side is a major challenge for Visa.

Visa actually tested a partnership with retailer The Gap earlier this year which alerted customers via SMS of discounts in stores near them. Gajda tells us Visa is working with a number of other retailers and banks on similar deals which will be announced soon.

Gajda says there are a number of other factors at play in the mobile payments place that need to be highlighted when talking about mobile payments. International is a huge growth area in mobile payments. He tells is that outside the U.S., there are a large number of people who have mobile phones but don’t have banking relationship or credit card. In fact, he says there are 2 billion people in world that have phone, but don’t have a bank account or credit card.

In these markets, Visa’s goal is to bring prepaid accounts, purchasing power and other financial services to basic phones. These could include topping up a mobile phone with airtime, buying transit tickets, peer to peer payments. And this goal was the mean reason behind the purchase of behind the $110 million purchase of Fundamo. The company’s platform delivers mobile financial services to unbanked and under-banked consumers around the world, including person-to-person payments, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking services.

Connecting with the small business world that don’t yet use credit cards or are new to the system is another area where Visa feels there is strong potential, especially with mobile payments. That’s why the company invested in disruptive mobile payments company Square and took an advisory role in the company. Gajda says that the power of Square is that it is enabling small businesses and independent workers such as doctors, designer and other merchants to start using credit cards and grow their businesses. It would make sense for Square and Visa would somehow work to harness the power of their partnership (As of April roughly two-thirds of transactions using Square’s payments service were through Visa credit cards.), but it’s unclear what the two companies will reveal any new co-produced products soon.

MOBILE Gajda explains that there are three prongs to Visa’s mobile payments strategy. One of these is NFC, and focuses on payments using a mobile phone at a physical store. For background, NFC (near field communications) enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. As we’ve seen with Google Wallet, Android phones such as the Nexus S are being built with NFC chips, making your cell phone a mobile wallet. Visa recently joined the ISIS network, a NFC mobile payment network that is a joint venture formed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. ISIS will soon launch in a number of markets, including Utah and Texas.

But he says that there is still so much room for innovation around how we pay with mobile phones. “With the rise of smartphone usage, we are already seeing a lot of innovation around commerce,” he explains. “It’s inevitable that this will extend to the payments around the sales in mobile commerce.”

DIGITAL Visa’s digital payments guru Schulz outlined her strategy for digital payments at the company, which centralizes around the creation of the digital wallet. Schulz says that because of the fact that e-commerce is being more easy and convenient with customers, especially with m-commerce, the underlying payments infrastructure has to evolve.

And Visa’s answer to this is a new digital wallet initiative. Here’s how it works. Users will have an account, and they can add their credit card numbers (and cards from other credit card companies such as American Express and Mastercard). Visa is partnering with a number of financial institutions to offer this product to their customers.

Users can also load their loyalty points and rewards cards, as well as organize their shopping lists. Schulz describes it as a “wallet in the cloud.” But she says the key to the success of the wallet is a seamless, one-click payments experience for the consumers. So Visa has partnered with a number of large-scale retailers (which will be announced soon) to integrate what Schulz refers to as a ‘new acceptance mark’ on a merchant payments page.

So there will be a button you can click on, which will prompt you to sign-on and then will sync your digital wallet with the purchase in your shopping cart. So for example, imagine you had a camera in your cart, and Visa offered a 20 percent off at camera’s purchased at BestBuy, the wallet would sync and show the discount in your cart. The same works for loyalty points and more.

Visa competitor American Express is also working hard to innovate both at the large retailer level, as well as among smaller retailers, with GoSocial.

She compares the digital wallet offering to “two-hand clapping.” ” You can have a digital wallet,” Schulz explains, “but you need a merchant solution of click to buy, and Visa’s going to transform that experience.” And Schulz highlights another recent acquisition, Playspan, has helping drive a simplified commerce experience, a.k.a. click to buy, within game or within app.

Of course adding another checkout experience to online retailers’ sites can be a complicated and time-consuming process. But that’s where Visa’s $2 billion acquisition of CyberSource comes in. CyberSource is said to process about 25 percent of all e-commerce dollars transacted in the United States, and operates e-commerce for hundreds of thousands of retailers. Schulz says this relationship has helped speed up the pace of implementation.

Creating the digital wallet, both on the mobile and web platforms, is no easy task. Visa has a name for itself in the credit card industry but the fact is that the brand still has to attach innovation to itself in order for people to take these products seriously. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Google’s Mobile Wallet news created waves, even though NFC technology is in its early stages.

Schulz explains that the idea behind the wallet is that consumers want control over their wallet and want to have payment information and access available to them at all times. She believes that the digital wallet will click to buy incorporated on retailers’ sites is essential to the future of e-commerce in both the U.S. and emerging markets.

While Visa, American Express and others are looking to capitalize on the changes taking place in the payments industry, it is a challenging effort. Local commerce is a big part of this, and everyone is trying to find a way to close the redemption loop. But e-commerce, amongst larger retailers, is also a multi-billion dollar market that Visa hopes to continue to play in with products like a digital wallet. And in-store payments, whether that be through NFC, Square or others, represent another market.

I’ve been talking to a number of executives of payments companies and founders of innovative payments startups, and while their objectives are different, they all seem to agree on one thing. It’s early and there is still much more innovation were going to see in the next few years in the online and mobile payments space.

The startup then provides a separate “CFO App” that lets the financial officer, or the executive in charge, to approve and release payments. Both accounting manager and CFO apps are available on the iPad or via a secure web app. In turn, the bank used by the SMB gets a third web-based app that enables the financial institution to manage its MineralTree users.

Each of the three apps are linked to the startup’s payment server, which coordinates and manages all payment functions in the system, between customers, the bank, and payment service providers, etc. While it may sound like there are a lot of moving parts, in reality, the MineralTree solution provides an all-in-one, universal platform for all the payment channels an SMB or bank uses, whether it be check, ACH, wire, payment cards, PayPal, or mobile banking.

MineralTree’s payments platform is definitely niche, but for the 2.5 million SMBs currently operating in the U.S., this has the potential to solve a lot of problems inherent to the paper-based and snail-slow payment, approval, and accounting processes many are currently working with. It will be interesting to see if the team can convince the big banks that this is a workable solution for their SMB clients.

There's a couple different forces I see at work:

1) Selling & Customer Acquisition

2) Users Drive Enterprise Tech Adoption

3) UI/UX Matters in B2B

At present the consumer web is the tail wagging the enterprise dog, in that you see business software companies copying consumer companies' marketing strategies, product features, etc.  I think this will continue for a few years at least.  But hopefully B2B software companies will innovate in some interesting ways that will bleed into consumer-facing products.

Listrak sampled Internet Retailer's Top 1000 online retailers, loading up carts and then abandoning them ("Hey you kids! Knock it off!") to see who would follow up. Only 14.6% sent a follow-up email, and fewer still sent a second or third email which, Listrak's CEO Ross Kramer told Internet Retailer, is where about half of the revenue comes from. Among Listrak's suggestions to retailers: get the shopper's email address first.

Intuit cuts payment rate for AT&T subscribers Intuit announced a partnership with AT&T for its GoPayment mobile payment solution, which competes with Square. Like Square, Intuit offers a free card-swiping attachment that plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry device, allowing anyone to collect credit card payments. Intuit's basic rate of 2.7% slightly undercuts Square's 2.75%, but AT&T customers will pay even less (1.7%). Intuit originally charged customers $175 for the swiper dongle, but last January, in a bid to compete with Square, it began offering the dongle for free. Still, Intuit has struggled to gain the visibility that Square founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois and high-profile investors like Richard Branson have brought to Square. This week's deal with AT&T is a reminder that Intuit is serious about GoPayment, which may actually offer more to merchants since it integrates with QuickBooks, its bookkeeping package that also targets small businesses.

PayPal embraces NFC (just a little) PayPal has made something of a point of not jumping on the NFC bandwagon, emphasizing the technology-agnostic nature of its mobile payments platform. Demonstrations at PayPal's recent Innovate conference emphasized payment options like PayPal's Empty Hand system, which lets you buy things with only your mobile number and a PIN. Still, NFC seems an inevitable part of the payments picture in the years ahead, and this week, PayPal delivered the peer-to-peer NFC payment technology that it promised last July. Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile Applications, wrote on the PayPal blog that the technology for NFC P2P is included in version 3.0 of PayPal's Android app. No need for it in the iOS app yet, obviously, since the most recent iPhone upgrade disappointingly didn't include support for NFC. As we noted back in July, in practice, the transfer of funds through PayPal's NFC system isn't substantially different from what was already possible using Bump, which sends the transfer through servers in the cloud rather than wirelessly between the mobiles. But the NFC system will let PayPal developers acquire experience with NFC wireless transfers, which should serve them well as NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals begin to show up next year and beyond.

The ascendancy of fiber isn’t just happening in our home broadband and long-haul networks, but also must occur inside the data center and even on the chips themselves as we demand more from our computers and networks. Luxtera’s chip helps usher in the age of light inside the data center in a way that doesn’t require the replacement of all the existing gear. Luxtera will sample the chips this year with the chips supporting both Ethernet and Infiniband applications.

The trial used the Infinera gear and was conducted between Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., a distance of 1,105 kilometers. Previous terabit trials utilized multiple 300 Gbps channels.

In April 2011, Verizon and NEC tested a terabit backbone in Verizon’s fiber network in and around Dallas. 

Scientists have been pushing for networks toward 100 terabit speeds. The move to these higher-speed and high-capacity networks is part of the coming terabit age.

“As 10 Gb/s services proliferate and 100 Gb/s router ports emerge, we are trialing advanced solutions that scale optical networks beyond 100 Gb/s,” said Erik Hallberg, the president at TeliaSonera International Carrier.

Strobe is described as “an App Delivery Network that solves the problem by enabling you to combine what the Web and native apps do best, using cutting-edge tools and technologies. It’s the quickest and easiest way to get your HTML5 applications up and running, on the web and in app stores.”

As SproutCore is remaining an independent product, at least for now, it seems like Facebook is after the technology or skills offered by the Strobe team. This appears to be an effort by Facebook to bolster its web and mobile experience and syncing services between them.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 include:

Media Tablets and Beyond.

Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces.

Contextual and Social User Experience.

Internet of Things.

App Stores and Marketplaces.

Next-Generation Analytics.

Big Data.

In-Memory Computing

Extreme Low-Energy Servers.

Cloud Computing.

The trick will be organization. Hashtags—the # symbols people use to create discussion threads, such as #ashtag for the Iceland volcano cloud and #snowpocalypse for the February snowstorm that swept Washington, D.C.—are a start. But many tweeters don’t bother to tag their posts.

The answer is: both. On the one hand, there’s more useful information for historians to sift. On the other, there’s more useless information. And without the benefit of hindsight, it’s impossible to tell which is which.

if we handle our innovation infrastructure right, we will participate in every major trend. We can detect them earlier now and we may be a causing a few of our own. For instance, one of the top 10 companies in cloud computing is from Chennai called OrangeScape. One of the best charting applications is Fusion Charts from Pune, and they moved faster from Flash to HTML5.

We can use some simple tools to gather information from tweets, blogs, web pages, portals and create information pipes. We can apply NLP, pattern mining and machine learning technologies to surface some of the weak signals.

All this presents an abundance of economic opportunity, and it is an opportunity that the UK is as well placed as any country to grasp. It certainly sits well with the government’s strategy of supporting high-tech manufacturing as a source of economic growth.