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Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?

Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it.

We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free.

Internet traffic is booming, and something has got to give. Cisco reported this June that global IP traffic increased eightfold during the last five years, and is expected to jump by a factor of four, as we reach the rather ominously named "zettabyte threshold" by 2015. With the proliferation of millions of networked devices, and the popularity of Internet video, none of this data demand is expected to slacken.

Very few of those devices are going to require a cable. But Wi-Fi is only one (rather limited) option of getting Internet signals through the air to you. In the future, the Internet might come from the "white space" in your television spectrum, unused satellite signals, or the LED office lights overhead. Perhaps all of them. For the immediate future, your new lightbulb is a leading contender.

A German physicist has come up with a wireless Internet solution to send data through an LED lightbulb fluctuating in intensity faster than the human eye can detect. The invention, dubbed D-Light, can send data faster than 10 megabits per second--faster than the average broadband connection--simply by altering the frequency of the ambient light in the room. It has new applications in hospitals, airplanes, military, and even underwater.

Too much trouble The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to your phone, is that they are just becoming too much trouble to organize and maintain. It's just not realistic to have an app for every store you go to, every product you own and every website you visit. This creates an ever increasing set that must be curated, organized and culled. It's a common task we all perform, removing old and unused apps every few months, effectively garbage collecting our phones. Very organized folks relish the opportunity to tidy their burgeoning app menagerie but most can't bother and their home pages scroll into a receding haze of choices.

Movie posters with radio tags such as RFID or NFC will allow me to get an interactive version of the poster on my phone to show me more information 

Any consumer item, such as ketchup or milk bottles, also with radio tags, will allow me to not only get more information on these items just like the poster, but also track usage and even offer to purchase replacement items

Here are the 'Nine Commandments' of ROWE:

We do not post office hours or core hours. Our employees know where to be when they need to be there. We don't dictate it. Everybody has complete control over how they spend their time. All the time.

We do not track time for our exempt/salaried workforce. We track work getting done.

I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.

The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing.  eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The  rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.

Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity: - Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide. - Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide. - Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world. Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for  information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.

New technical standards and consumers’ extensive use of mobile media put us on the cusp of an explosion in mobile payments.

Long rumored and heavily used in Asia, mobile phones have the ability to be used as payment devices similar to credit cards.

Now, the growing penetration of smartphones, the widespread use of phones to comparison shop, share price or product features or accept discount and coupon offers makes mobile payments the next high demand phone function.

Cloud computing has been eyed for some time as a solution for business continuity needs, as the thought of setting up new virtual servers on an automated, on-demand basis seems highly appealing. But when it comes to figuring out the kind of cloud offerings that will work best for business continuity, typically private cloud options are usually the ones considered. The reason for this bias is the configuration of the virtual machines themselves. While public cloud services can afford business clients a lot of computing power in a hurry for a low rate, that combination does not always equate to a continuity friendly environment.

Then there are the security concerns. If you are patching your own systems diligently, is the cloud provider providing the same patched for their own base operating systems? What other kind of security protocols are in place? On the legal side of the equation, does the cloud provider meet compliance in the areas of data breach notification, data retention, auditing, and whatever other compliance regulations you need to follow? What are the local laws for the datacenter and how do they comply with your own corporate needs in terms of security?