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As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.

What kind of services is Schmidt referring to when he says that Google is looking at Google+ as an identity platform that could support other services? Dave Winer thinks that the company wants to effectively become a bank — something he also suspects that Apple and Amazon are interested in as well — and that’s definitely a possibility. Apple and Google both seem interested in NFC technology (near-field communication), which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets, and having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy. Ross Dawson says Google wants to build a “reputation engine” using Google+ as a platform.

Author: Sheryl Grant

Is there some core definition or badge-ness to explain what makes badges unique?

If badges are like degrees, diplomas, grades, or currency -- which many of us have collected and displayed and benefited from -- what's wrong with them? Why are badges worse or better? If badges are visual signs of rank, reputation, membership, and identity, and are just another way to show affiliation, why are they different than, say, titles, clothing, hair, language, accents, bumper stickers, friends, or an alma mater?  

Bao network technology companies yesterday announced the launch of ultrasonic mobile payments-”bat”, consumers only need the phone close to the payment terminal, you can complete the identity verification, payment and settlement. 　　It is understood that the “bat” is based on ultrasonic wireless technology, allowing electronic device between a non-contact interact point to point data (10cm) to enable mobile payments and near field service more online business solutions. 　　With existing mobile payments in different ways is, today, most mobile phones through text messages, picture (QR) to implement a pay, this payment is a one-time; if you are on a mobile phone RF technology implementation is similar to the bus card payment, and hardware modification to the mobile phone. “Bats” is used, only requires the user to download an ultrasonic software can be. 　　According to the company General Manager Tan Xinglie introduction, this technique may be more in the future for restaurants, cafes, and needed on-site consumption places, such as where the user through the online booking, get coupon, which acts as the identity verification and payment tools; another application area is the logistics industry, such as express delivery, user to mobile payments. (Reporters Zhang Yi)

PayPal has taken the wraps off its single sign-on digital identity service for online shopping, PayPal Access. The move comes as the San Jose-based payments operator unveils a series of new partnerships with a host of banking technology suppliers at the BAI Retail delivery show in Chicago.

PayPal Access is designed to simplify the checkout process by enabling the company's 100 million account holders to sign in at participating retailers' sites with just their PayPal user name and password.

The initiative is a key element of X.Commerce, a new division of PayPal parent company eBay, that aims to provide a common set of APIs for building consumer-facing online merchant services.

As part of a Data Privacy Day report, Microsoft commissioned a study of over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers. In one segment, they asked what kinds of sites they considered in researching applicants online. The short answer: almost everything. As PC World put it—and as Jason detailed in his online identity primer—having a decent-looking personal web site, with blog-like material showing your grasp of topics and general up-to-date skills, is the best defense against anything and everything else a potential employer or contractor might find about you online. Then again, take a look at how many online realms hiring managers peek into when peeking at you. It's reassuring, if you've put time into cleaning up your online image, and perhaps a wake-up call if you've still got LOLcats littering your photo service pages

The first of these changes is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) computing. BYOD is a much better term than “consumerization” and really portrays the meaning that many of us are buying smart phones, tablets or laptops to use them on a work network. The tension this creates is predictable.

In 2012 and beyond, we’re going to see more and more different devices coming into the workplace.

If you use PayPass, Tap & Go, or other contactless credit cards, that’s NFC. In fact, NFC hardware already is appearing in smart phones and tablets. There are relatively few devices with NFC today, but there will be more in 2012.

MasterCard, the longtime credit card and payments processor, wants to reposition itself as a technology company. Throughout the latter half of 2011, it has been pushing hard on the technosphere to make sure that journalists and bloggers know the company is doing some cool stuff around payments research and the cutting edge of technology, like NFC, audio signals and QR codes that can lead to purchases through smartphones.

It now comes as no surprise that MasterCard has announced a partnership with Intel on a multi-year strategic partnership that is intended to enhance the security and payment experience for digital commerce. These are two titans in the tech and financial industries and shows one of the first steps of these two industries merging in the future.

Making A Dent In The 85%

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.

Blippy, which lets people publish their credit card purchases online.

The blog found a Google results page that divulged the Citibank-issued Mastercard numbers for 127 transactions. Those numbers could be easily scooped up by identity thieves and used for fraudulent purposes.

plained that when people link their credit cards to Blippy, merchants pass along their raw transaction data — including some credit card numbers — and the site scrubs that information to present just the merchant and the dollar amount spent.

Face.com has launched the alpha of their new API. Now, almost any site could find faces on photos.Face.com, the company responsible for Facebook applications Photo Tagger and Photo Finder, lets you take any photo and quickly identify who is in it and where they are in the photo. This facial recognition is a boon to those tagging photos, and now Face.com is ready to bring a similar capability to the rest of the internet. May 3rd saw the launch of their new open API capable of scanning images and rapidly identifying the location, orientation, and identity of human faces. The API platform is meant for web designers who want to include a facial recognition feature on their own website. With this API, any company could let you upload a photo of yourself and find other photos of you in their database. Now in alpha testing, registering to try the API is free and very quick. Face.com, operated by Israel-based Vizi Labs, is looking to share the API with the developer community to see if the next killer application for facial recognition will arise organically. Eventually, platforms like this one may help your face become an access point to all the digital data about you on the web.

Read more at singularityhub.com

A deep integration of Twitter and iOS 5 was among the many things announced by Apple today but it's not just that you'll be able to post to Twitter from inside official Apple apps like photos and maps. Any 3rd party iOS developer will be able to leverage a number of Twitter Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make their apps better and more social. After email, SMS and iOS messaging, Twitter will now become a key social layer over the top of many of the apps on iOS devices.

"There is single sign-on, which allows you to retrieve a user's identity, avatar, and other profile data." That sounds like Facebook Connect, but I'm going to guess that Twitter will not prohibit developers from caching that data for time-shifted, aggregate, offline or other interesting types of analysis. Letting users skip having to create an account with every new app they download and instead click to log-in with their Twitter accounts is going to make many users very happy and encourage every iOS owner to get a Twitter account if they don't have one already. App developers will get more and better populated user accounts, faster.

"There's also a frictionless core signing service, allowing you to make and sign any call to the Twitter API." To be honest, I'm not really sure what this means. Perhaps it means that parts of the Twitter API that require user authentication will be accessible via the same single sign-on feature discussed above.

"Facebook has done well with the Friendster patents and patent applications that it acquired. Just last week, a patent application for passing personal info between users based on degrees of separation became public. Now, thanks to the Friendster IP purchase, Facebook pretty much owns the technology for publicly identity-tagging digital media of any sort in a database."

Local data Alec Muffett is working on a scheme called the Mine Project. This aims to give consumers a local place to store their credentials and sensitive data, so they can choose which services they want to expose the data to.

"I believe the structure of the internet encourages individuals to host their own data. In some ways, it's a little unfortunate that everyone thinks it's easier to have a big company do it on their behalf, but it's entirely understandable," he says.

"It's a karmic cycle," he says. But sooner or later it is going to swing the other way, and people should prepare for an age when their data is once again their own, he argues.

In the modern web, Google and Facebook are the feudal lords and people are the peasants — at least when it comes to control of the photos, comments, 'likes' and other data that each person posts online.

"The users contribute their own content to you for free. You sell it back to them with banner ads put on there. And on top of that, you spy on them to gather profiling data," says Michiel de Jong, of the Unhosted project to decentralise user data.

As your friends talk to each other, they feed Facebook data about how information flows between its users. It's likely that your friends will have their own friends and will talk to them as well. Every time these first- and second-level contacts interact, it gives Facebook more pointers to where you fit within your network. To you, it's a bunch of your mates; to Facebook, it's an expanding cloud of data to be harvested.

With millions of potential voters using mobile devices, strategists would be remiss to write off QR codes as a risky early-adopter consumer trend untranslatable to the political space.

“One of the exciting things about 2012 is that we have the opportunity to close the loop between online activities and real-world events,” he adds. “We’re seeing individuals rely on their phones, and QR codes present an optimal framework for that. There’s an opportunity for campaigns to reach out to mobile-savvy individuals and transmit a message that will lead to an activation.”

There is great potential in branding candidates, fundraising and collecting supporters’ data using QR technology.

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.

Alcatel-Lucent Geo-Location Mobile Game "Acquisition" On top of our platform and supported by our community members, Alcatel-Lucent ran an innovation & development challenge to bring new mobile applications and games to life. A TopCoder member came up with the idea for Acquisition, which leverages network-based API's for automated geo-checkin, SMS, subscriber identity, call control and player presence. It pairs it with game mechanics similar to a traditional game of Monopoly. In a game of Acquisition you are competing against a set of friends to amass the most wealth and you do so by physically checking into a variety of localities, trading properties, developing on top of owned properties, earning dividends and expanding your empire.

Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold.

Quora’s founders and their first hire—designer Rebekah Cox—created the core of the most impressive “subjective knowledge extraction” machine ever constructed.

By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet. What’s more, Quora is also using humanity’s collective wisdom to rank it.