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People Don't Care about PCs...the Buzz is All About Mobile To paint an image of the very large scale of the mobile ecosystem, Jacobs talked numbers: There are 1.3 billion 3G connections worldwide, and there will be 2 billion more connections by 2015. Mobile data use will increase 10 to 12 times over the next four years. There are over 120 HSPA+ mobile networks and 180 commercial EVDO networks offering mobile broadband. There are 200 LTE networks planned, 20 of which have launched now.

Mobile Unleashing the "Greatest Wave of Creativity in History" And what is that? Only that mobile is going to unleash the "greatest wave of creativity in history." Dr. Jacobs said he knew that sounded like a "heady" proposition, especially because many mobile developers are just trying to build an app people like, he says. "But your app could reach hundreds of millions of users!" Now is the time to "think and act globally," Jacobs said. "Mobile is now the dominant computing platform, and it's never going back."

Augmented Reality Demoed as Marketing Tool AR, or augmented reality, was also at the forefront of today's keynote, with a sobering presentation from John Batter, Co-President of Production, Dreamworks Animation SKG. He produced data showing the decline of DVD sales over the years.

Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, it now sells more e-books than it sells physical books: Amazon reported that it sold 115 e-books for every 100 physical books it sold in 2011. Unfortunately, e-books are still very much the same as physical books: they are static, their content is not updated nor does it include videos or interactive infographics.

If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, we highly recommend downloading “Our Choise”. Not only is it an intelligent and interesting book, its format is the first peek into what your book experience will become in the next few years. It might be time to kiss those physical books goodbye after all.  If you’re not convinced, check out the great demo given at TED:

P Diddy has announced its first-ever location-based service but can also be used as an simple desktop chat system.Once registered, it gives a location marking for each user showing their geographic region and location (within a 10-mile radius) and provides a map to help identify fellow chatterers nearby.  The fledgling provider, based out of New York, says it is gaining 50,000 new users a day and is "second only to Skype for live-streaming web chat." Currently, it boasts 8 million daily users and is growing at a rate of 700 per cent y-o-y, since its foundation in 2009. However, this pales into comparison to VoIP darling Skype, which has around 145 million monthly users on average and another 400m registered. Nonetheless, it seems the market is ripe for other online chat providers. The new location service will also respect user anonymity, it insists, and users can opt in or out, to build a private or public chat group, or join live interactive online community. As part of its update, the chat site has developed widget versions of the service are available as well for use with all the leading web browsers, including: Firefox, IE, Google Chrome and Safari. Although it doesn't require any downloads to use, it does require Flash.

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value.

"The National Endowment for the Arts recently published their criteria for next year's Arts in Media grants. One of the key changes is the inclusion of video games as works of art. 'Projects may include high profile multi-part or single television and radio programs (documentaries and dramatic narratives); media created for theatrical release; performance programs; artistic segments for use within an existing series; multi-part webisodes; installations; and interactive games. Short films, five minutes and under, will be considered in packages of three or more.' For those who worry that game companies will try to get a grant for a commercial game, notice that the grant is only for non-profit organizations."

By nearly every indicator, Russians are embracing social and digital media in ways deeper and more impactful than most other countries around the world. For those looking to do business in the former Republic, significant opportunities now exist to leverage this new wave of social adoption.

Consider that in the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly. Nearly three-quarters of those making the switch from homegrown social platforms such as Vkontakte (with tens of millions of members) to Facebook are under 27, signaling a generational desire to engage in global communities and interact with brands, celebrities, friends and politicians in decidedly new ways. Twitter usage, while still in its infancy in Russian, grew three-fold in 2010.

And while it should come as little surprise that nearly 80% of the Russian population owns a mobile device, the dramatic adoption of smartphone technology and advanced mobile usage are beginning to change the way in which businesses — and the government — communicate. According to Nielsen, Russians under 24 are the third-largest users worldwide of “advanced mobile data,” behind only China and the United States.

I am very skeptical about gamification in enterprise software and deeply suspicious about the hype around it in my company and outside. I have been searching for a while for a good introduction to behavioral mechanics that engage people. I found this talk by Amy Jo Kim very useful for the kind of work I do. She has worked in areas where social media and game mechanics intersect. Game mechanics change people's behavior Games engage us in flow, unfolding challenges over time to the player The 5 foundational elements of game mechanics are Collecting The power of completing a set Points Game points are points given by system Social points are given by other players. They drive collaboration. Redeemable points drive loyalty in those who care Leader boards drive player behavior such as competitive behavior Levels are short hand of points earned. Feedback Feedback accelerates drive to mastery. Feedback is fun Social Feedback is more powerful than system feedback Exchange Structured social interaction Explicit exchanges Adding a friend in facebook Implicit exchanges Are more powerful than explicit exchange Gift exchange Customization Character customization Customization engaged players and makes them stick Social media trends influencing game mechanics Accessibility Social media is making games more accessible to more people Recombinant Syndicated

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.

“There’s been an ‘intranet of things’ in manufacturing for years now,” says Tony Paine, president of Kepware (www.kepware.com), a technology company in Yarmouth, Maine that develops communication and interoperability software for the automation industry. Explaining his statement, Paine points to the growing use of preventative and condition-based monitoring that are widely accepted, if not always implemented, by most manufacturers.

“This is not just about connecting smart devices, this is about modeling all the things in your manufacturing world so that it’s easy to remix them in new ways to build new applications,” says Russ Fadel, chief executive officer of Thingworx (www.thingworx.com), a two-year-old company located in Exton, Pa. The company combines the key functionality of real-time data, mashups, search, social media and the semantic web, and applies it to any process that involves people, systems, devices and other real world “things.”

“That kind of automated, connected response could save you, say, 3 percent on your utility bill,” Fadel says. “The ability to remix people and systems to interact with radical equality—this will be the source of some unexpected innovation. For manufacturers, the Internet of Things is not just about connecting your car to your alarm clock, it’s about creating a competitive advantage.”

QR code technology arrived late to North America for numerous reasons, and with Near Field Communication (NFC) fast emerging, it is a valid concern that it may not tip the adoption needle in time to establish itself as a household communication tool.

With the release of the Google Wallet, Google has been building a lot of support for NFC. This may explain why they replaced QR codes with NFC for Google Places. Another reason may be because the stickers they distributed to the retailers were intended to be permanent, in which case NFC makes more sense. They may be a bit ahead of the market on this, but if they are distributing millions of these stickers across North America, it pays to plan ahead. Following their announcement, a vast number of articles surfaced with some variation of “QR codes are dead”. This in my opinion was a bit excessive considering Google Places is the only implementation where they made the changeover.

Getting away from Google, let’s briefly look at the expected rate of NFC adoption. Smartphones have been available on this continent for at least 4 years and they currently hold approximately 33% of the market. Google’s Nexus S is one of the first phones to be available with NFC technology and it was released only this spring. Blackberry will start releasing models this fall, and Apple has yet to confirm whether they will include NFC support in the iPhone 5. It’s not unreasonable to expect NFC gaining mass adoption no sooner than 2-3 years.

Hyper-connectivity (Internet of things, people-centric networks, mobility): The world is becoming an interconnected network as the Internet expands outside of the web and into smart "things". Connectivity or as I've often referred to it, hyper-connectivity, driven by an increasingly mobile society that is always on, has far reaching business consequences. In a real time, always connected world, personal and professional blend or merge and the very definitions of workplace changes. The addition of the social web is creating a people-centric, interconnected network that is supported by real time access to data, content, and computational tools that change decision making and interactions. Business itself is moving to a business model where connectivity leads to a broad business network of partners behaving as an ecosystem. This ecosystem is the business of the future.

Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.

In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,

Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.

Ze Frank: Star.me is a cross between a social network and a social game that provides a playground for people to have more fun with their friends. We are in the midst of a major shift in media industry where social engagement is the new currency and real interactions are replacing impressions and clicks. That’s what I have been focused on for years, play and participation, and star.me is a distilled version of that thinking. Plus it’s super fun

Star.me boasts 20,000 users and is “growing fast!”, there have been 117,000 mini missions answered, 70,000 stars sent, and 84% of all users have contributed content. That’s engagement.

A new app in this field is TagWhat. Part augmented reality-app and part social networking service, it lets people check and view locations along with additional random info like the place's history, the famous people who lived in it, anecdotes about the neighboring establishments, or any other information that can either be trivial, interesting, or extremely useful.

The fun, friendly user interface allows you to tag pictures, locations, as well as include your own stories and musings about a place, or even include multimedia like a video of a famous event that happened in a location, or a famous song that was written in an establishment.

What differentiates TagWhat from Foursquare (and what makes it more like Facebook), is the fact that it eschews the formers' game mechanics and focuses on the user interaction and community building aspects of the latter. The basic use of TagWhat is that it lets users turn a view of any location into an engrossing, educational experience, as users provide interesting stories and entertaining information about every single thing that can be captured by your camera - think a diner and its history is interesting enough?

Mobile advertising revenue reached $700 million in the U.S. in 2011, according to Gartner research group. That’s a drop in the ocean compared to Internet ad revenue, which hit $7.3 billion in just the first quarter of 2011, according to figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Concerns about privacy, tracking and the disclosure of personal information could limit the number of people opting in to targeted or local ad mobile campaigns, said Jason Koslofsky, an attorney who specializes in consumer privacy and telecommunications at Arent Fox. Businesses have also been hesitant for these same reasons. “It hurts brands if it looks as though they are generating spam,” Koslofsky said, adding,“companies shouldn’t want to be seen as though they are tracking their users’ every move.”

While 9% of adults in the U.S. said they would use their phones to learn about in-store promotions or event, interest in location-based offers was low, according to a report in February by Forrester Research. Only 6% of adults in the U.S. said that they are interested in receiving location-based retail offers on their mobile phones and only 4% are interested in receiving time-sensitive promotions such as daily specials.

For example, way back in 1961, cinematographer Morton Heilig patented his Sensorama machine, an immersive multi-sensory device that looked like a giant arcade game, except it emitted aromas, environmental elements such as wind and it also vibrated and played stereo sounds. Whilst some have referred to this as the earliest example of augmented reality, it probably leans more towards the virtual reality world.

Other key advances that helped blur the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds include American Computer scientist Ivan Sutherland’s development of the first head-mounted display (HMD) in 1968. It was primitive and bulky, but it was a sign of things to come:

Moving forward, computer artist Myron Krueger built what was called an ‘artificial reality’ laboratory called the Videoplace, in 1974. The Videoplace combined projectors, video cameras and special purpose hardware, and onscreen silhouettes of the users, placing them within an interactive environment.

That viral growth is deserved, too. Turntable.fm is arguably the most interesting social startup to emerge in a long time. Inventing a new subgenre, ‘social listening’, the site revels in something humans have enjoyed for millennia: shared experiences around music. If you haven’t tried it yet, here’s how it works: You can only sign up if a friend of yours on Facebook is already signed up. Once you’re in, the site lets you DJ, playing songs in an on-screen ‘nightclub’. Others come to listen to you in your ‘room’ and can join you on the decks if they choose. Multiple DJs (up to five) play a song each in turn and everyone else in the room gets to vote on the current DJ’s choice. If your choice gets voted up, you get a point. If it gets voted down by too many people it’s ditched for the next DJ’s choice.

when DJs demonstrate that they’re listening to each other by playing off each others’ track selections, there’s a commonality that transcends… individual achievements. Social games that offer the promise of individual success may be missing out on the uniqueness of shared experiences capable of creating shared surprise and pleasure. As when tracks flow well, as when it’s clear that DJs are not just picking their own favorites but show that they’re paying attention to each other, as when a “good” stretch of DJing attracts newcomers to the room, and so on.

A new way for media companies to interact with their audiences: Earlier this week, we experimented with setting up our own The Next Web room (you can often find TNW staff spinning tunes in there). One tweet brought in a crowded room and it was fun for us to be able to play music with our readers. Music is a brilliant bonding tool and being able to have direct group chat with readers can help media companies get to know their audience better, and vice versa. I even got teased with knowledge of a stealth startup over the chat function yesterday – so maybe we’ll get a few news tips this way too!

Boring conversation? Accessories that decipher emotional cues could save your social life – or reveal that you're a jerk

The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?

In a 10-day experiment in 2008, Japanese and American college students were given the task of building a complex contraption while wearing the next generation of jerk-o-meter - which by that time had been more diplomatically renamed a "sociometric badge". As well as audio, their badge measured proximity to other people.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has unveiled Kaching, a mobile phone application and case capable of conducting NFC-based, e-mail P2P, and Facebook payments from a single handheld device.

Commbank Kaching combines peer-to-peer payments via the phone's contacts and email addresses, and 'social payments' via a user's Facebook friends along with NFC contactless technology.

David Lindberg, executive general manager cards, payments and retail strategy says: "The recent explosion in uptake of digital and smartphone technology has revolutionised how we all transact, interact and communicate with each other, and this new application will make the dream of mobile payments a reality."

Forget consoles and PCs -- mobile gaming is prepped to be the number one gaming platform for the next decade, according to Glitch developer Tiny Speck. Vice President of Product and Operations Kakul Srivastava says we're already seeing it everywhere: "It is what is happening right now. I think the killer console is going to be your mobile device. That is absolutely where people will play more rich and involving, and even graphically intensive games."

With the newest editions of smartphones outpacing their predecessors and coming out much faster than the next console generation, Srivastava thinks it's not surprising that mobile gaming has momentum in the industry. "That pace of change is why mobile devices are going to be the console of the future. The way player interaction and player needs are changing, it's much faster than the five to seven years [of console development] that we're talking about," she said.