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Google’s official Android Market is not available in China, leading to a plethora of independent markets – over 70 at last count. The system works – sort of – but users may find it annoying because you actually don’t know how to find the good stuff. China is still lacking any sort of innovative search mechanism to help people identify the apps they really need in daily life.

Discovering the apps should not be boring, and the core value of Qiuqiu is to bring the pleasure of discovering apps during different activities. Qiuqiu’s app search engine is unique because it offers results based on your location, the time of day, and the things you like and do. Each scenario is expressed by a series of apps – education apps for the school day and travel apps for your vacation. It’s a compelling and interesting change from the traditional “editor’s choice” and selected apps lists found in many markets.

Qiuqiu, the new app discovery engine is developed by AppChina, one of the leading third party Android markets. The founders are a group of very experienced senior engineers and product managers from STC Bing search technology centre and graduates from Tsinghua, Beijing and Fudan Universities. Being successful in the Android market, as Luo Chuan, the co-founder of AppChina, formerly CEO of MySpace China, said, means suppling the right apps at the right time. AppChina is moving forward to the field of search engine and data mining and try to develop a new way of discovering Android apps most suitable for you.

Online video is exploding, with annual user growth of more than 45 percent. Mobile-device time spent increased 28 percent last year — with average smartphone time spent doubling. And social networks are now used by 90 percent of U.S. Internet users — for an average of more than four hours a month.

Every venture capitalist, Web publisher, and digital marketer is hyper-aware of these three trends.

What replaces the declining searchable Web is a new and “fully connected” digital life. You may have heard this before. After all, the promise of the Web was to connect pages with hyperlinks. Well, this time, “connected” means much more. It means the Web connects us, as people, to each one of the individuals online; and those connections, ultimately, extend from one of us to all of us.

As part of BlackBerry Dev Con Asia taking place in Singapore right now, Wikitude has announced additional support for smartphones running on the BlackBerry 6. Bringing Wikitude to devices running BlackBerry 6 will help answer considerable demand expressed by users who want to experience Wikitude’s extensive content offering including more than 2,000 content Worlds consisting of approx. 150 million places around the globe. Users of the BlackBerry Bold 9700, 9780,9788 and BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphones can download Wikitude on BlackBerry App World starting today.

After being crowned “The Most Addictive Social App Using the BBM Social Platform” at BlackBerry DevCon Americas in October, Wikitude most recently won the BlackBerry® EMEA Innovation Award for “Best BBM Connected App”, awarded in Alicante 1stDecember. “Extending the Wikitude platform to millions of BlackBerry 6 smartphone users will make the BBM experience richer than ever before. We are extremely happy to finally bring this version of Wikitude to even more BlackBerry smartphone users,” says Martin Herdina, Wikitude’s CEO.

Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations, Research In Motion, said: “We’re delighted that Wikitude has integrated BBM support within their app. Integration with BBM can allow much greater viral discovery for apps, as well as enrich and transform the user experience with important social elements.”

People fed up with the proliferation of credit cards, IDs and key cards that fill their wallets to bulging may soon have an alternative. New technology could bundle such functions into just one item: your cell phone.

Near Field Communication technology, jointly developed by Sony and Royal Philips Electronics, lets wireless devices connect to other devices nearby and transfer data, from payment information to digital pictures. Samsung Electronics and Philips say they are developing cell phones with embedded NFC chips that could double as debit cards or electronic IDs. The companies plan to begin field trials toward the end of the year.

Such phones are already available in Japan and Korea, where users can charge their phones with virtual cash, then wave them near NFC-enabled machines to buy anything from a soda to lunch. But it remains to be seen how Americans will react to the devices, which are not yet available outside Asia, said wireless technology analyst Allen Nogee of In-Stat/MDR.

Since it was announced some time ago in 2011, Google Wallet has been completely exclusive to the Sprint Nexus S 4G. Every carrier other than Sprint has opposed the Google Wallet program and blocked it from being installed on their devices as they were preparing their own proprietary NFC payments system called Iris. That didn’t stop people from hacking Google Wallet and installing it onto non-Sprint Nexi, but still, we’d like to see more support from the carriers on this. Thanks to some brand new Android Market discoveries, however, it now looks like Google Wallet is officially available for all Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and AT&T!

Head over to the web version of the Android Market and search for Google Wallet. If you’re on a Verizon or AT&T (unlocked GSM) Galaxy Nexus, it now says Google Wallet is compatible with your phone! As a day one AT&T Galaxy Nexus user I can confirm it hasn’t always been this way and this could possibly be the first step towards seeing Google Wallet become a more widespread program. If you try to install from the app version of the Android Market it still says incompatible, so it’s probably in the first phase of rollout. Google Wallet is still apparently blocked for Galaxy Nexus users on T-Mobile, but hopefully that changes soon

If you are a Galaxy Nexus user on Verizon and AT&T, let us know in the comments if you successfully installed Google Wallet from the web version of the Android Market. I can confirm that installation worked perfect on my AT&T Galaxy Nexus.

PayPal has been a powerhouse in online payments but it hasn’t really cracked the much bigger market for payments for goods in the real world. Now, the company is starting to show off how it can put all of its components and recent acquisitions together to form a broad tool for mobile payments.

PayPal hosted a partner event for retailers yesterday and began explaining how they’ll be able to implement its tools for in-store payments. The big reveal will happen next month at PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco, but the company showed a glimpse of how it’s marshaling its resources. It’s important for PayPal to step up with a compelling offering because the mobile payments market is getting crowded with options like Square, Google Wallet and upcoming services like Isis from the cellular carriers and digital wallets from credit card companies.

Scott Thompson, president of PayPal, said in a blog post the company is looking to be a one-stop shop for merchants to help them address every part of the shopping lifecycle. OK, that’s a bit of jargon, but it means PayPal is going to help push out targeted advertising, help with in-store discovery and improve transactions with a handful of options.

Nokia City Scene is a prototype app from Nokia Beta Labs that combines street maps, 3D panoramic views with gesture navigation and social network integration to provide what appears to be a powerful map discovery tool.

A user can transition from a top-down conventional street view to a Google Maps Streetview-like panoramic view with simple gesture-based navigation. In this 3D panoramic view, the phone user can read information about the businesses in the area in a text overlay. Check-ins by friends on Facebook and Foursquare is also available. The following cities are currently supported within Nokia City Scenes: London, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Newark-Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

It is somewhat unfortunate that this powerful tool is only available for the Nokia N9 which is based on an orphaned mobile platform, the Linux-based MeeGo. Nokia has not said whether this app will be ported to Windows Phone (its current smartphone platform).

SoundTracking, a social mobile application that allows people to create “musical postcards” that can then be shared with friends on social sites,  announced Tuesday that it had received $4.75 million in financing.

To use SoundTracking, people take pictures, log their locations and attach the songs they are listening to at that moment.

“We are making sharing the core experience and discovery is a bi-product.”

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.

NLP goes by many names — text analytics, data mining, computational linguistics — but the basic principle remains the same. NLP refers to computer systems that process human language in terms of its meaning.

Apart from common word processor operations that treat text like a mere sequence of symbols, NLP considers the hierarchical structure of language: several words make a phrase, several phrases make a sentence and, ultimately, sentences convey ideas. By analyzing language for its meaning, NLP systems have long filled useful roles, such as correcting grammar, converting speech to text and automatically translating between languages.

NLP can analyze language patterns to understand text. One of the most compelling ways NLP offers valuable intelligence is by tracking sentiment — the tone of a written message (tweet, Facebook update, etc.) — and tag that text as positive, negative or neutral.

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.

Google Ventures has quietly invested in a stealth startup called Wingu, reports StrategyFacts (subscription required). Indeed, while the Google Ventures website lists four career opportunities for one of its portfolio companies located in Cambridge, Massachusetts without naming Wingu, the stealth startup published the exact same job openings on its job board, leaving nothing to the imagination. Wingu is building a enterprise-grade cloud platform dubbed Elements that will enable research teams to collaborate more effectively and use data in ‘new ways’. Here are the four main selling points of Wingu’s platform, according to its website: MANAGE: Unify your cross-discipline teams on a common platform to share data and ideas. ANALYZE: Drive decision-making with our analytical workflows and discovery tools. SHARE: Connect your researchers across silos and geographical divides for better collaboration, coordination and communication. PROTECT: Breathe easy knowing that your data is backed and protected by leading systems and security experts.