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It is often said that a picture paints a thousand words - well if that is the case, I suppose a good video can write a book. In the early days of mobile banking some crude mobile banking video's were made - a clear indication that the product specialists could not describe what they wanted to build to the video producers. But since a few years ago, some brilliant little video-clips were produced - either to advertise a new service or to inform or educate stakeholders. Below are some of the best clips that I know of:

The first mPesa advert (according to rumour produced on a very small budget). (Watch here) One of my favourite adverts, ever, is the one used for the launch of the product (Watch here). Telenor has subsequently produced a few more masterpieces (Watch here and here). The documentary produced in collaboration with the Worldbank for Wizzit in 2007 was also one of the great videos (Watch here) A delightful little ad (that I really enjoy) was produced for MTN in West Africa in 2010 (Watch here) Great Airtel Money ad (Watch here) Using local comedians in a series of adverts for mKesh in Mozambique was very successful (Watch here and here) A simple, but very cute advert for BSP bank in PNG, was produced recently (Watch here) The energy and pace of the Gemalto advert for their NFC product is a lot of fun (Watch here) And many others (Watch here, here, here and here)

Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.

the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.

Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.

IT has been said that Google knows more about what you like than your own partnerNow the search giant has given a glimpse on just how much information it has collected - and who thinks you are.But it seems the famed Google algorithms are far from infallible.

And people taking advantage of the facility that allows the public to view what kind of consumer Google thinks they are have been amused to find themselves listed with the wrong age and even sex.Nevertheless, the knowledge that Google works so hard to profile its 350m account holders is bound to intensify the debate about privacy which flared up again this week with the announcement that the company was going to start tracking users across all of its sites, including YouTube.

The detailed personal 'profile' sums up many of a user's interests, along with age and gender.Google builds a detailed profile by harvesting the history of its account holders' visits to sites in its advertising network.But your age and gender are decided by those of other Google users who have visited the sites you visit, leading to the mistakes

Intuit has made an interesting move today with its mobile credit card reader GoPayment reader. Intuit is allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment, which competes directly with Square, is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).

Similar to Square, the GoPayment mobile payment app is free and the basic service has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions. Intuit and Square actually both eliminated the per transaction fee.

With more than 200 million mobile users, Facebook and its currency platform Credits is poised to be the future of how we pay for both virtual and physical goods.

Right now there are various different technologies and start-ups actively looking at ways to penetrate the mobile payments market. Each company has taken a different approach, from digital bar codes to near field communication (NFC).

Introduced in May of 2009, Facebook Credits was originally designed as a virtual currency to allow people to make purchases within games and non-gaming applications on the Facebook platform.

Inviting customers back to their carts

Only three out of every 10 online shopping carts actually make it to checkout, according to email marketing vendor Listrak. That's 70% of carts lying abandoned in the virtual corridors of ecommerce. Listrak wants to improve those numbers. It's one of several vendors offering "shopping cart abandonment solutions" — essentially, programs to follow up with shoppers who've left the store and ask them, "Haven't you forgotten something?"

Retailers would love to close more of those sales: Listrak estimates $18 billion lost in sales to U.S. retailers every year. A Forrester study last May found that 89% of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Forrester's authors attributed that high rate to growing user sophistication: as shoppers become more experienced online, they are more likely to comparison shop even as they move toward checkout. Other industry observers offer a simpler explanation: shoppers are shocked at high shipping costs. A 2006 study by Goecart blamed comparison shopping, high shipping costs, and plain old running out of time as the leading causes of abandonment.

Clipboard aims to become the go-to service for saving and sharing the relevant parts of any page or service available on the Web, including much of its core functionality, or put differently taking care of everything in between simply bookmarking a URL and having to save an entire Web page.

Using a bookmarklet, Clipboard users can ‘clip’ things like search query results, stock quotes, tweets or Facebook status updates, video clips, images with captions, a Google Maps map, a forum answer, an Amazon book review, an eBay product summary, a digital coupon, and the likes.

Select part of a Web page or service, and use your mouse (simply by hovering over something or, preferably, by using the scroll wheel) to increase or decrease the number of ‘zones’ you would like to clip. Your selection – including links and images etc. – will be saved to your Clipboard profile instantly, and you can jump straight to it to visit your clip collection

Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.

Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

He is officially called the "Messaging Community Lead" for IBM's WebSphere message queue (MQ) architecture, which is a title that grants some modicum of honor without claiming too much authority. Andy Piper has become IBM's point man for the concept of a planet enmeshed in billions, perhaps trillions, of signal-sending, communicating devices. The case may be made that anything that can be "on" could be made to send a signal on a network - perhaps something as simple as "on" itself, periodically. The possibilities for a world where the operating status of any electronic device may be measured from any point on the globe, are astounding.

Two weeks ago, IBM and its development partner Eurotech formally submitted Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol to the Eclipse Foundation open source group. It's being called "the" Internet of Things (IoT) protocol, but in fairness it's only one candidate. It would serve as the communications mechanism for devices whose size may scale down to the very small level, with negligible power and transmission radius of only a few feet.

One example application already in the field, Piper told RWW, is in pacemakers. Tiny transmitters inside pacemakers communicate using MQTT with message queue brokers at their patients' bedsides. Those brokers then communicate with upstream servers using more conventional, sophisticated protocols such as WebSphere MQ.

A service called Strings, which launched today, is trying to find and collect all the different ways you can track yourself online — your purchases on Amazon, Zappos and other e-commerce sites; your watching on YouTube, Hulu and Netflix; your listening on iTunes; your check-ins on Foursquare. The service is not about socializing and sharing that information, like the Twitter-for-credit-cards Blippy, but about privately harnessing it. It aggregates all that different preference data to build a better picture of things and places you like. The problem with stalking yourself on the Internet is it’s potentially an invitation to other people to do the same — but Strings of course is promising to keep your data safe.

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?

Perhaps the saddest thing about Facebook (note: I do think there are good things) is that most users seem utterly unware of the way Facebook is changing things; unaware of FB’s ever-changing Privacy settings; little idea about how expansive the recent f8 announcements could be (in fact I’d say a huge percentage of users don’t even know what the heck f8 is or what its impact may have); and perhaps wholly uprepared when their profiles and their data are streaming out in the open publicly. Most users are using FB strictly to post pictures and update their status in the literal way in which FB was designed - no sense of re-purposing the software in broader ways. On one hand, it’s great that we can all share our experiences with each other; on the other hand it’s worrying that more users aren’t educated enough about the fundamental nature of these media to make smart connections back to their own lives.

Furthermore, if Facebook becomes the primary place where people congregate, purchase, publish and share, it will become imensely important that users are proficient and savvy and creative in using it *for* their interests as citizens and not against them. The smallest tweaks in any software can have major implications in their use. Imagine if Facebook had a Hate button. I agree with Scoble: I hope we never see something like that. …But I have a feeling, there’s a Hate button hidden deep within our collective social experience and dynamics just waiting to surface its ugly head in the not-too-distant future. Recommend on Amplify                

Currency: A formal system for shaping, enabling, and measuring currents (or flows)Currencies involve a number of functions, each of which can be modified independently: unit of measure, store of value, token of status, medium of exchange, etc. Monetary Currency or Money is just a common way of bundling those functions as a medium of exchange for a commercial economy. It is a minuscule part of the full spectrum of possible currencies. In this expanded sense, currencies are tools for seeing and changing flows.One specific way we use them is to create collective intelligence at the level of our social entities and institutions. At the individual level, we see humans born, growing, learning, walking around and dying. However, the state “sees” humans created through birth certificates, their activities and accounts woven together by social security numbers, their communication patterns via cell phone bills, and their discorporation via death certificates.Read more at newcurrencyfrontiers.com 

Literacy has evolved beyond the definition of the ability to read and write. Literacy now includes the ability to seamlessly interpret on-screen information, such as the graphics in a videogame, and the ability to rapidly decode symbols. To be effective, gamers must be able to quickly decipher each game’s symbols and conventions, which is essentially what good readers have to do in terms of deciphering the alphabetic code.

Serious Games are not replacing literacy activities, they ARE literacy activities.

Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. Students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

roughly 30 percent more individuals in the U.S. carry a smart phone than buy a daily newspaper.

New York Public Library In a move that embodies the public intellectual history of America and the perfect application of social media, the New York Public Library plans to celebrate its centennial smart phone style.

It recently launched a “Find the Future” Foursquare badge that encourages and rewards exploration of public libraries in New York City. It transforms visitors into library ambassadors who, via location-based check-ins, end up promoting library services, programs, and collections to their Foursquare friends.

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?

Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, writes in an editorial this month that while M2M communication has great potential, the "real value" for sensor technology lies in machine-to-object communication.

"On the other hand, a firm could put passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) transponders inside a container at various levels. Since the liquid would interfere with the ability to read the tags, a company could determine liquid levels by ascertaining which tags can and can not be read...you can't put a Wi-Fi transmitter or a cell phone on every box of Tide detergent, bag of Granny Smith apples or Van Heusen shirt. Low-cost RFID tags will, one day, be put on all of these things, enabling M2O communication."

Roberti says this will be a defining opportunity for the rest of the century. "This change - enabling computers to see and understand what is happening in the real world - is enormous. Most people have yet to grasp it, seeing RFID as a more expensive alternative to bar codes. They don't comprehend that when computers can automatically collect information regarding what is happening in the world, new insights and business strategies then become possible. And the companies that leverage these capabilities most effectively will be the big winners in the century ahead."

"The Invisible Internet is associated closely with the concept of the “Internet of Things,” in which a multitude of everyday objects are connected wirelessly. In such a world, not every object will have the intelligence to make decisions for itself — your carton of milk doesn’t need an advanced processor, only the ability to communicate what it is and its expiration date — but collectively they’ll create a form of ambient intelligence, allowing them to self-organize as a group. If the Invisible Internet of Things does become a reality, the Web will cease to be merely a virtual space, where people interact with one another from behind a PC or phone’s screen, and become a real space — “meat space,” if you will — where thousands of objects, both personal and public, interact with one another.

The one element, besides a radio, all of those objects have in common is awareness. They have to be able to sense one another as well as their surroundings. Embedding devices and objects with that kind of sensitivity probably is the smallest challenge the Internet of Things faces right now, said Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research Center. The core sensors needed in the network of the future already are embedded in the average smartphone today: GPS and cellular triangulation sense location; accelerometers and digital compasses sense movement and direction; digital cameras can see for the devices. Some of those sensors need to be refined, but for the most part, devices already have access to enormous amounts of raw sensory data, Tirri said. The challenge for the industry is processing that data, interpreting it and combining it with data from other sensors to make it useful. Once the technology overcomes those problems, there’s no limit to what can be wirelessly enabled, he added.

“In today’s world of handsets, we talk in billions; in the future, we will talk about trillions of devices,” Tirri said. “Radios and sensors will be very small. They will be in everyday devices like coffeemakers and key chains, as well as all consumer devices, but also things you wouldn’t think you’d have wireless capabilities, like chairs, tables, even your bed.”

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.