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Social payments are taking a giant leap forward. PayPal has unveiled a Facebook app that lets you send money to friends.

The app, simply titled Send Money, is just as straightforward as its name. You have the choice to send either an ecard with money or just money with no card. You select a card, choose a friend to send it to and then select how much money to send.

“The PayPal and Facebook infrastructure have now merged,” PayPal’s Anuj Nayar says. “This is another way to personalize the act of giving money.”

Near-field communications (NFC) technology will be built into one in five smartphones by 2014 as mobile payment and interactive promotions take off, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Over 23 million NFC-capable smartphones are expected to be in circulation by the end of 2011, said the NFC Retail Marketing & Mobile Payments report.

This willl rise to around 300 million by 2014, and half of these devices are expected to be active in the US.

The internet of things, as the ultimate version of the smart grid is often described, could bring with it one of the downsides of today’s internet: hacker attacks.

the possibility that someone with bad intent and networking know-how could tap into the metering infrastructure and determine, for example, when a household is typically unoccupied and easier to break into.

The more connected our systems become, the more opportunities there will be for someone to exploit the various parts of it … as researchers studying the vulnerabilities of on-board computers in cars have already discovered.

Dorai Thodla, CEO of the US-based iMorph Inc. (http://bit.ly/F4TThodlaD), speaks frequently on the emerging trends in IT.

This Internet of things will cause another fundamental shift. The shift will be at several levels – at the chip level (hundreds of cores), at the device level (smart phones more powerful than your current laptops), at the interaction level (smart devices talking to each other), application level (smart applications leveraging all these sensors for different uses), and interaction level (caused by touch, gestures and voice inputs).

In which areas of emerging IT do you see India playing a major role? India can play many roles both as a consumer of the technology and a producer.

"We all know about the growing popularity of collision avoidance systems. As recently as this week, we've even heard about developments on the autonomous car front. Problem is, most of those systems depend on vehicles going it alone, using radar and other technology to avoid hazards in their way. But what if cars could talk to one another and the surrounding infrastructure? Wouldn't that be even better — and safer? The US Department of Transportation thinks so, and it's hoping to prove it in a new series of 'talking car' experiments taking place in six locales across the US. These technologies may potentially address up to 82 percent of crash scenarios with unimpaired drivers, preventing tens of thousands of vehicle crashes every year (further research [PDF] will incorporate heavy vehicle crashes including buses, motor carriers, and rail)."

Big news today in the world of mobile payments: the three largest operators in the UK have announced a joint venture to offer mobile wallet services to its customers, in the hopes of finally kick-starting a service that has been long on discussion but painfully short on execution up to now. O2 UK, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK and Everything Everywhere (itself a joint venture between France Telecom’s Orange UK and T-Mobile UK ) are banding together to form what they call a cross-platform, single solution. The operators say that this will create a simplified, one-stop shop for banks, merchants, advertisers and other marketing partners in the mobile payments value chain.

And perhaps most importantly: with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Visa and to a lesser extent Square looking to spearhead mobile payments with themselves in the center of the transaction, it’s clear that that mobile operators have decided that scale, and control of those all-important SIM cards, is their best weapon.

“We’ll be customers of the venture, anyone can be,” explained Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2. “[O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere] have actually built and developed capabilities and we’re putting this together [and] creating a market for those who don’t have the scale to do it. The JV makes it easier to access this.”

Tools for collaboration The Internet of Things will introduce new smart objects to our homes. One challenge is to find effective solutions to enable different products to work together. Currently no standardised tools or distribution platforms exist in this area

A group of Norwegian researchers have been addressing this issue. In the research project Infrastructure for Integrated Services (ISIS) they have created a platform for developing and distributing applications for the Internet of Things. The platform encompasses a programming tool for developers, called Arctis and the website ISIS Store for downloading applications. The project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway's Large-scale Programme VERDIKT

"In a 'smart' everyday life objects and applications often need to be connected to several different communication services, sensors and other components. At the same time they need to respond quickly to changes and the actions of users. This requires very good control over concurrence in the system, which can be difficult to achieve with normal programming," he explains. Dr Kraemer believes that the tool will make it easier to create new applications, adapt them to existing applications and update software as necessary.

When trying to piece together the devices that we use to connect to each other, it’s easy to see that it’s going to take a piece of paper the size of Texas to feature them all. Even if we manage to do so, we will be far from connecting them all in whatever way they use the Internet. So what do we do? Well, we do it anyway, and on a computer of course. Intel put together a really interesting infographic that lines up all the devices (breeds) that we use to connect to each other. For the first time (I guess), we can get a clear view of how the technological infrastructure was built and to what extent it reaches out. As you can see, the numbers represented get multiplied with each major technological milestone, and it’s easy to see that we’re heading for something really interesting in the future. Whatever it will be that will beat the Internet will be major, and even though I can’t imagine what that will be right now, it’s still exciting to know that we always come up with something to beat the previous technology. What do you think will be the next big thing in technology that will top the Internet?

According to calculations by Cisco, 50 billion devices will connected to the Internet by 2020. Top technology infrastructure companies like IBM, HP and Ericsson are investing big in the Internet of things. IBM envisions a smarter planet, Ericsson envisions the social web of things.  But when I look at these visions I get the feeling something is missing—the consumer. Well, she's there, but always in a passive role. These visions are more about automation and efficiency. An exemplifying scenario can go something like this one, from Cisco: Imagine your morning meeting was pushed back X minutes, and your car knows there has been an accident on your driving route causing a Y minute detour; this is communicated to your alarm clock which allows you Z extra minutes of sleep and signals to your coffee maker to turn on the appropriate minutes later. Or, from Ericsson: You call your wife on your way home in the car, asking what she wants for dinner. When you arrive home the oven has calculated with precision the time it should turn itself on and at what temperature, depending on the groceries you got from the store. I'm sure these are plausible scenarios, but I don't think the killer apps of IoT will be the connected car or Internet-oven. 

I'm much more interested in big questions like: What will be the iBeer moment of Internet of things? What will be the Farmville of connected devices? These are the seemingly silly applications that always pop up in the wake of new technological possibilities. The simple, cheap, entertaining stuff. Humans are a curious species, and we don't always make rational decisions.

We are in the early stages of the Internet of Things, the much anticipated era when all manner of devices can talk to each other and to intermediary services. But for this era to achieve its full potential, operators must fundamentally change the way they build and run clouds. Why? Machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions are far less failure tolerant than machine-to-human interactions. Yes, it sucks when your Netflix subscription goes dark in a big cloud outage, and it’s bad when your cloud provider loses user data. But its far worse when a fleet of trucks can no longer report their whereabouts to a central control system designed to regulate how long drivers can stay on the road without resting or all the lights in your building turn out and the HVAC system dies on a hot day because of a cloud outage.

The current cloud infrastructure could crumble under the data weight In the very near future, everything from banks of elevators to cell phones to city buses will either be subject to IP-connected control systems or use IP networks to report back critical information. IP addressability will become nearly ubiquitous. The sheer volume of data flowing through IP networks will mushroom. In a dedicated or co-located hardware world, that increase would result in prohibitively expensive hardware requirements. Thus, the cloud becomes the only viable option to affordably connect, track and manage the new Internet of Things.

That is critical, in turn, to mitigate growing latency risks for mobile connectivity resulting from the wild proliferation of IP enabled devices on mobile networks coming in the new era of the Internet of Things.

The state of Ceará, in Northeast Brazil, contributes only to 2% of the Brazilian GDP. Yet, it will soon host the Brazil’s largest public broadband Internet network. The Cinturão Digital do Ceará (CDC), which translates as Ceará’s Digital Big Belt, will be inaugurated this Thursday by the governor Cid Gomes and the Science and Technology Minister Aloizio Mercadante. So why did the local authorities decide to invest around R$50m (US$28.6m) into this initiative?

Many people couldn’t afford faster speeds anyway – in Fortaleza, one third of the population lives in favelas (slums) filled with migrants who have left rural areas.

This situation led the state to develop its own public network, the CDC. It is a highly ambitious project; according to the government, it consists of a whopping 2,600 kilometers of optic fiber.