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picture a world where software platforms are available online and easily customizable. Picture a world where compute power is generated off site, available in quantities when and where you need it. And picture a world where information is safely stored, efficiently managed and accessible, when and where you need it. These are cloud infrastructures. The economies of scale, flexibility and efficiency they offer will not only save organizations massive amounts of capital and maintenance costs but emancipate them to apply and use information as never before. An unbelievable opportunity to raise productivity while creating unprecedented opportunities for businesses and workers.

Now picture a health-care system where a doctor has medical records at his fingertips, can see x-rays with the click of a mouse, is able to learn and apply the latest diagnostic and surgical technique from anywhere in the world. Think of the efficiencies in hospital supply chains, the delivery of prescription drugs, the processing of billing and insurance claims, reductions in fraud, and the application of best practices for cost controls. The capacity for improvement is endless.  As a matter of fact, these innovations are already being applied in isolated pockets. But for us to seize the opportunity before us it’s imperative that we move from isolated centers of excellence to connected systems of excellence. Pick any industry and systemic improvements like these are available.

A new age of innovation and technology advancement is within our grasp – an opportunity for job creation, greater productivity and economic growth. The time for cloud computing is now. We need government and industry to accelerate broad scale adoption of cloud infrastructures so we can reap the rewards of a true information based economy.

In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

Nielsen reports a 39-percent Android platform market share across the major smartphone manufacturers, while Apple’s iPhone operating system claims a 28 percent stake.

A new app storefront forecast by Strategy Analytics says the app economy is strong and getting stronger. Paid downloads are expected to drive nearly $2 billion per quarter by the end of 2012. They predict the Android Market will overtake the Apple App Store in quarterly volume by the end of 2012. Android will be helped with additional assistance from third party distribution outlets such as the Amazon App Store, GetJar, Nook App Store and others.

Judith Cherry, Head of Research and Insight at the UK-based organization Opportunity Now and author of the report “Out of Office: Solutions for an Agile Future” [PDF] explained, “We’re moving the debate away from flexwork – because we’ve come to the understanding that we’re all flex workers. What we’re doing now is “agile working.”

The distinction is important, she said, because agile working is about more than working from home, or using mobile devices. It’s a whole new system of management.

She explained, “Technology allows us to work after hours, across time zones, at home, at the airport – we can manage this, so how come it is so hard to let people work three days out of the week? The psychology of work has not caught up with the technology.”

45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).

The large existing user-base of low-cost, mid-tier, NFC-less feature phones popular in emerging markets is a prime target for this technology. However, technical difficulties have prevented the adoption of SIM-based NFC. As the SIM card slot is located behind the battery, radio signals to and from the NFC module are effectively blocked in many phones.

Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.

Outstanding research group that sees the future in a very different way. The entire site is worth a day’s reading and I’ll probably wind up Amplifying a lot of it here….its that good

See more at www.ingenesist.com 

For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, has renewed concerns about how digital life has led children off the playground and into the computer room… permanently. The study concludes that the average 10-year-old today

For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.

Although the study found that Body Mass Index (BMI) had remained constant, BMI is notorious for not factoring in the composition of muscle and fat ratios in its results. According to Dr Gavin Sandercock, a fitness expert at Essex University, a constant BMI is all well and good but the results are still “worrying from a health point of view” because they show that “pound for pound, [children are] weaker and probably carrying more fat,” he told The Guardian.

Earth is expected to be home to over nine billion people by 2050. That’s a lot of people for Mother Nature to manage.

Space issues aside, the biggest concern on an over-populated planet is whether or not there will be enough resources to go around. Last week, British investor and Co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO) Jeremy Grantham offered what Business Insider called a “startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.”

the purpose of this piece isn’t to tread well-worn ground about the planet’s perils. So forget about fossil fuels, drinking water, crops, ice-caps, trees and animals for now. What we’ll be looking at is all those elements that go into helping you do what you’re doing right now. Whether you’re reading this on your laptop, smartphone, tablet…or any other digital device, the natural environment has had a huge part to play in this experience.

People and businesses are spending a lot of time trying to engage people on every social platform in the universe. People put out content “betting” it will attract people to their advertisement, conversation, their offering or in lots of cases their scam.

To gain the currency of your conversational bet you must understand how to work them in your favor. The odds of creating conversational currency are based on the “human network” and not the “institutional network“. The difference between the two is creating “human content” vs. “institutional content“. The difference between those two is knowing how to speak in human terms. Human terms are based on an exchange of value received. If your conversations doesn’t create and give value you can “bet” the house will win. A few other things you can bet on.

If you try and steal peoples time and trick them into a conversation you can “bet” your not going to “get” any value back.

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.

American Express is making a significant move in the expansion of its digital wallet, Serve to international markets today. The credit card company is announcing the first global partnership for Serve with Lianlian Group, of of China’s leading mobile payments providers. Additionally, AmEx has also made an equity investment of $125 million in LianLian Pay.

Group President for Enterprise Growth for American Express Dan Schulman tells us in an interview that American Express has come to realize that in a lot of fast growing economies internationally, people move money in different ways and in order to enter these markets, the company has to think beyond just plastic cards and checks, and consider moving straight to mobile platforms.

AmEx is generally predicting China to be a huge market for its mobile and digital payments products and is planning to open a new American Express’ Enterprise Growth Group office in Hangzhou, China. The China-based team will provide technical and consulting support to Lianlian Group on the Serve partnership, and the new outpost will be headed by Matthew Lee, President, Enterprise Growth, American Express, China.

The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining.

Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?

Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.

Visa this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire Fundamo, a specialist mobile financial services provider to network operators and financial institutions in developing economies, for $110 million in cash.

In a separate announcement, the giant payments technology company said it has entered into a new, long-term commercial agreement with Monitise, a provider of mobile money solutions for financial institutions in more developed regions.

Here’s how the duo of agreements was pitched: The combination of acquiring Fundamo and expanding the relationship with Monitise will enable Visa to deliver best-in-class mobile financial services and payments capabilities to consumers across the full spectrum of uses, geographies and mobile environments from basic services on simple handsets to more advanced services for smart phone owners.

It is clear that MasterCard have taken mobile payments seriously, if the number of initiatives announced during the past period is an indication.

As one of the big card payment providers and a major player in payments in mature economies, this is further ratification of the importance of this industry for emerging markets.

Utilising Intel two-factor authentication in conjunction with Symantec to bring more secure mobile payments to market (Read here)

Money is just information, a way we measure what we trade, nothing of value in itself. And we can make it ourselves, to work as a complement to conventional money. Just a matter of design.We believe that the problems that come from conventional money can be resolved with open money systems.- where conventional money is scarce and expensive, the new money is sufficient and free.- where conventional money is created by central banks, new money is issued by us, as promises to redeem - our money is our word.- and where conventional money flows erratically in and out of our communities, creating dependencies that are harmful to the economy, society and nature, the new complementary money re-circulates, enabling business and trade.So let’s fix the money problem and for the rest of the problems that we face in our world, let’s see what follows.Read more at www.openmoney.org

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 

The Internet is a vast mosaic of economic activity, ranging from millions of daily online transactions and communications to smartphone downloads of TV shows. Little is known, however, about how the Net in its entirety contributes to global growth, productivity, and employment. New McKinsey research examined the Internet economies of the G8 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden. It found that the Internet accounts for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. Register to continue.

Faster, denser and cheaper hardware is enabling users to create and store incredibly more data than has ever been possible.  Currently, the amount of business data is doubling every 1.2 years.  As of 2010, global enterprises in total stored more than 7 exabytes of business data.  A McKinsey report (McKinsey Global Institute) identifies all this data as being at the source of another upcoming wave of change.

Big Data Analytics (BDA) could positively transform our lives.  When applied to applying collected shopper information, big data would give retailers the potential to increase their operating margins by more than 60 percent says the McKinsey report.  When BDA is applied to health care information, the quality of health care could dramatically improve, efficiencies in the health care delivery system would increase, and health care costs could drop as much as 8 percent, creating as much as $300 billion in value annually.

The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, together with the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.  Data have now reached every sector in the economy.”