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SINGAPORE - With the help of an iPhone app, Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) has brought to life - through augmented reality (AR), location-based gaming and interactive features - its exhibition on the terracotta warriors.Said to be the world's first museum app, it resurrects characters from the story of Li Si, the prime minister and architect of the Qin Dynasty, and his son.The exhibit, which has 100 artefacts from Shaanxi, China, and includes 10 life-sized terracotta figures, spans seven interactive chapters and visitors can engage characters from each chapter in AR and gaming modes when prompted.

there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are actually creating next-generation social experiences for their companies like Jeff Schick. The IBM executive doesn’t just leverage social business solutions, he and his team create them. “We started well over 15 years ago. We’ve been thinking about how to better connect people with people and people with information in terms of IBM itself,” Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”

At Big Blue, the company encourages the use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs to support their sales, communication, marketing and recruiting efforts.  While employee’s social interactions are not under a microscope, the experiments in social on a massive scale have led to a set of social business conduct guidelines that govern their employees’ social interactions. Schick advises that you need to establish behavior standards for employees to follow.

So why do they do it? Since they are both an early adopter and creator of social technologies, they’ve learned that content management, business process management, collaboration, commerce and analytics must all be combined with a social layer to create a universal and unified solution.

So what’s making gamification so popular today? Consider these four factors.

1. Consumers Want It

consumers are looking for new ways to entertain themselves — 40% of U.S. online adults have expressed this interest in a recent survey. What’s more, consumers want game elements everywhere. 60% of consumers play a video game online in a typical week. Consumers (especially Gen Yers) are increasingly accessing games online and on mobile devices.

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.

A new Kinect hack places virtual objects anywhere in the real world and lets you interact with them as if they were actually there.Most Kinect hacks just use a single version of the sensor, but a team at Microsoft Research has used four ceiling-mounted Kinects to map an entire room and the objects inside it in full 3D. A handheld projector acts as a flashlight that lets you peer into this virtual version of the world to reveal hidden images or draw in 3D space.This close link between the real and virtual world allows for some impressive interactions, such as creating virtual copies of real objects or generating a stream of virtual particles on a desk and watching them roll inside a real-life drawer.The project is unlikely to become a commercial product any time soon, but it's easy to imagine how a more polished version could lead to a holodeck-like environment in the comfort of your own living room.

The highest scoring “influencers” like to think they deliver widespread impact with their followings. Every single book I’ve read by a blogger on influence claims this. In actuality, that influence lies closer to home. When real researchers parse influence we get a different story than the blogger myth propagated by social scoring. Instead, we see that true influence comes from those who are closest to us in our on and offline social networks, our peers.

But generally, their writings serve as a credibility point for readers, just like Consumer Reports, and nothing more. Why? Because relationships — true meaningful interactions beyond social platitudes (Like, love, you rock, etc.) — don’t scale after a certain point.

By selecting our friends, we’re also choosing to be influenced by their ideas, beliefs and behavior systems

That's what a Danish startup called Senseye claims to be doing; they say they've got software for Android that uses the front-facing camera to track a user's eye movement and then uses that to control what happens on the phone's screen. They're not alone in working on doing that kind of work, either. Eye tracking could be a big new way that users interact with their devices.

If the company can really pull this off, Senseye could join the ranks of Microsoft's Kinect, Surface and the touchscreen mobile devices in what people are calling the Natural User Interface (NUI). A Swedish company called Tobii announced in-car eye tracking technology this week as well and these aren't isolated innovations.

Google CEO Larry Page trotted out an impressive statistic during last week's quarterly earnings call: Google+ now has 90 million users, double what it had three months ago. Even better, 60 percent of those users are engaged daily, and 80 percent weekly.

But those users aren't necessarily engaging with Google+. Any action taken during a logged-in Google session—whether it be searching the Internet, checking Gmail or using Google Docs—counts as engagement under the statistic Page used. Google has refused requests from journalists and interested bystanders to reveal exactly what percentage of those 90 million signed-up Google+ users actually view Plus content each day, week or month. Instead, Google is arguing that it doesn't matter: Google+ is so integrated into the overall experience that what matters is the number of users interacting with any Google site. Combined with other steps Google has taken to integrate Plus into search results and other Google properties, the message is clear: Eventually, Google Plus will just be there whether you want it to or not.

On Friday, the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google) wrote a post titled "New Google Accounts Require Gmail and Google+." While this isn't strictly true, the blog demonstrates how Google is making it difficult for new users not to sign up for Google+.

The so-called digital wallet made important strides in 2011, sometimes eliminating the logistical need for paper vouchers, mobile apps, QR codes, and even cell phones.

At times this transition seems to be sneaking up on us. Earlier this month, thousands of merchants nationwide didn't know they had gained foot traffic and sales thanks to American Express and Foursquare. Amex rewarded consumers who synced their credit cards with their Foursquare accounts with $10 back if they spent the same at local businesses after checking in with the geo-social app. That effort followed up a successful post-Black Friday stint dubbed "Small Business Saturday," when Amex users checking in on Foursquare could get a $25 credit if they spent $25 with a local merchant.

Jake Furst, a business development director at New York-based Foursquare, said there was little to no organizational outreach to local businesses. "The merchants didn't necessarily know what was happening as we drove customers to their locations," he explained. "Small Business Saturday was a huge success. We got a ton of interest from Foursquare users and Amex card holders that didn't know about Foursquare yet."

We've been promised a wallet in our phones for years, but 2012 will be the year that it breaks through. The advent of this technology will mean more than just the convenience of a 'Jedi wave' of your phone to pay for coffee. From tracking your carbon footprint to smart posters, mobile payments are another piece of the infrastructure of the 'Internet of Things'.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, is a type of chip built into mobile phones to allow contactless payments. Although the NFC technology has been around for years, a major barrier to progress has been the lack of payment terminals.

The Transport for London Oystercard is a form of contactless payment, and you've probably seen contactless payment terminals in popular sandwich chains like Pret and EAT. The same terminals can be used for NFC mobile payments as these phones become available. The difference is that NFC will allow the phone to interact with the terminal using an app, making it much more flexible than the debit card or Oystercard systems.

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel launched an interactive dialogue on government mobile policy on Wednesday that he said would be the first step toward a governmentwide mobile roadmap due out in March. That roadmap, VanRoekel said, will address a range of issues from ways the government can save money -- such as by buying smartphones in larger quantities -- to serving citizens more effectively through public-facing apps

It also will include information about building internal mobile applications to help federal field officers, such as U.S. Forest Service workers and Border Patrol agents, do their jobs more efficiently. As things stand now, too many agencies and bureaus are putting time and effort into mobile projects without leveraging each other's gains, he said.

The dialogue will be open for 10 days and the mobile strategy should be out about two months later, VanRoekel said. Within six months, he hopes to introduce new procurement vehicles so agencies can buy smartphones and tablets more efficiently and cheaply

Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques: - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws; - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database. To put it another way, the system is transforming the vibrations transmitted from touch through a rigid body into waveforms that a computer can, in real time, recognize and either transmute into audible sound or use as a triggering mechanism for other sounds. It's an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it "hears" a tap.

will touch interfaces of the future rely on sounds as well as capacitance? Perhaps sound would be a cheaper, more-durable option for certain kinds of interfaces, making touch interactions all the more ubiquitous.

When people receive food or pharmaceuticals, the smart tag will display the temperature record. This method will be less expensive and more accurate than placing alarm sensors in shipping containers, ThinFilm said. ThinFilm's technology, which has been under development since the 1990s, is a printable memory device that stores the ones and zeros of digital information by changing the orientation of polymer chains when a voltage is applied. Last year, ThinFilm partnered with Xerox company PARC to combine its ferroelectric memory with PARC's printed transistors. Adding computing logic allows the device to not only read, write, and process data, but also to store more data.

The computing and storage are very limited on this sort of device and will work for less than a year but it is low power and, because it's printed on plastic, low cost. Data can be stored many times and is not lost with loss of power. By partnering with companies that have made a battery, display, and sensor for its memory system, ThinFilm has created smart tags which can be used for many different applications, said CEO Davor Sutija.

The company sees integrated printable electronics replacing silicon processors and enabling the Internet of things. For example, the company has deals to supply smart tags that add interactivity to toys and games. It has also had discussions with auto companies to use tags to gather data on vehicle brakes and notify drivers when they need service. In 2013 or 2014, the company plans to add a wireless networking module to its smart tag. That will allow everyday objects to communicate with the near-field communications in cell phones, said Sutija.

Imagine a world where by simply texting a word, like "Sandwich" will result in a quick and seamless transaction so you could  go about your day.  Think about how much easier our lives would be if we didn't have to wait in line, handle cash or be turned away from food or beverage if we don't have our wallets in hand

What if texting wasn't just meant for communication, but also designed for transaction?

Today, most people take more precautions about carrying their mobile devices than carrying their wallets or purses.

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)

Samsung mobile phones look set to double as m-wallets as the mobile phone manufacturer signs a Near Field Communication chip deal with Philips.

Through the use of Near Field Communication (NFC), Samsung mobile phones will be transformed into multi-functional devices from which users can conduct secure m-payment transactions, gain access to public transport and buildings or download event tickets, the company claims

"Joining forces with Philips for the further development of NFC-enabled devices is part of Samsung's commitment to change the way information and services are paid for, distributed and accessed by all consumers," said JK Shin, senior vice president of the research and development team at Samsung.

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification and interconnection technologies. It combines the functions of a contactless reader, a contactless card and peer-to-peer functionality on a single chip. It operates in the 13.56MHz frequency range, typically over a distance of a few centimeters.

Consumers will first see NFC technology appear in their most commonly utilized personal device – the mobile phone. With NFC, the mobile phone transitions from running primarily voice applications to becoming a more personalized device that can let you conduct secure payment transactions, gain access to public transportation, building access and store digital rights. In essence, the mobile phone becomes a point-of-sale terminal, a ticket counter, keys to your building, a transport card, a debit/credit card and an electronic business card all in one easy to use device

Users of Samsung’s mobile phones and other devices that include Philips NFC chips will be able to access content and services in an intuitive way. For example, a Samsung mobile phone equipped with NFC technology could automatically connect with an NFC-enabled PC or TV, simply by holding them next to each other, in order to transfer digital pictures or other data, according to the statement of two companies.

Google is finally opening up its near field communication payment system, Google Wallet, today to the public, allowing Nexus S users on Sprint to try out contactless payments through their smartphone. It’s a little later than originally expected and again, with only one handset that supports it, Google Wallet is just the first step in a long process.

But it’s a significant one that begins a much broader effort by Google to change both the way people pay for goods in the real world and interact with merchants and retailers. Toward that end, Google announced today that it has struck deals with American Express, Visa and Discover so their cards will also be integrated into future versions of Google Wallet. Initially, Google Wallet launched with MasterCard as its first partner. But now, banks that issue cards through Visa and Discover will soon be able to load up their accounts directly on to Google Wallet.

For Google, the wallet initiative signals a new opportunity to market deals and discounts to consumers and allows merchants a new way to reach consumers and strengthen their relationships with them through discounts and loyalty programs. And it enables them to close the loop on transactions, so they can see how effective their marketing is.

Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification; it sees a future in shaping behavior through a combination of game mechanics, private social networks and reputation and rank.

building off its Social Fabric technology that allows any website to build a social network out of its community using a new behavior graph. The behavior graph helps track a user’s interaction within a social context on any site, application or product.

provide corporate clients with a suite of services that can help them apply “behavior management” to their own employees or consumers.

In its press release today American Express revealed explicitly that its new $100 million Digital Commerce Investment Initiative was destined to fund "early stage startups to facilitate the company's digital transformation."

Amex's Dan Schulman, Group President Enterprise Growth, spoke to Fast Company to explain the move: As far as saying that the credit card is going to evolve, Schulman noted, "It goes even further than that. Our view of the world is that all of commerce is being redefined as the world moves somewhat rapidly into the advent of smartphones and mobile payments and the digitization of information across the entire commerce lifecycle." This quick change, covered by many a column-inch in the media over recent months, means that the areas where Amex "traditionally added value between merchants and consumers" is going to "fundamentally change" and payments will only be "one part of that."

Where traditional credit card transactions were all about giving the merchant a secure and authenticated copy of those all-important 16 raised silver numbers on the face of your card, technological developments like NFC, smartphone payments and even innovations like Square and Google Wallet show that there's scope for a much richer interaction to go on at the moment of payment--something that's never been possible before.