Group items tagged

GPS devices have become ubiquitous: Millions of drivers rely on them for directions.

The government hopes to construct a new air traffic control system based on GPS navigation rather than the use of radar.

They've also become an important tool in agriculture.

In New York, at the Mobile Marketing Association forum, Google presented sponsored research on global smartphone user and marketer behavior. The data come from two related studies. The first is an “an online survey of thousands of mobile consumers in 30 countries.” The second is based on “a telephone survey of 1,000 marketing decision makers,” with a focus on US, UK, Germany, France and Japan.

More than Half of Smartphone Users Online Daily In the US smartphone penetration stands at about 36 percent according to the most recent Nielsen data. In Western Europe, on a percentage basis, the numbers are higher in several countries. The Google research showed that increasingly smartphone users go online daily and that many are on the mobile internet multiple times a day: US — 58 percent (online) 53 percent (multiple times) UK — 55 percent (online) 49 percent (multiple times) France — 59 percent (online) 47 percent (multiple times) Germany — 45 percent (online) 42 percent (multiple times) Japan — 78 percent (online) 68 percent (multiple times)

Almost All Local Info Seekers Take Action Here’s what the data showed about local-mobile information seekers and then the percentage who have “taken action” after a local search/lookup: US — 90 percent (search/lookup) 87 percent (took action) UK — 81 percent (search/lookup) 80 percent (took action) France — 83 percent (search/lookup) 83 percent (took action) Germany — 85 percent (search/lookup) 79 percent (took action) Japan — 90 percent (search/lookup) 80 percent (took action)

A handful of not very descriptive top-level domains, such as .com, .net, .org, as well as country-specific TLDs are what the web is currently made of, but this is about to change drastically

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the international authority over top-level domain names, has approved the expansion of generic TLDs which will allow companies and organizations to create domains for their branda (such as .coke) or simply create generic names (such as .car or .green).

The option won’t come cheap, though: The application fee alone is $185,000, and the annual fee is $25,000. Still, we can imagine large corporations spending millions on these very soon. If you’re in the business of making phones, owning a “.phone” TLD sounds like a great idea — if you can afford outbidding other phone manufacturers.

Smartphones are addictive, according to a study from the British telecom regulator Ofcom, which, like many other studies on the topic, emphasizes that people do things like using handsets in bathrooms in lieu of talking to their children and points out how they are changing social behavior. The press release on the research, issued Thursday, uses the word addiction in a variety of forms five times, including when it says 37 percent of adults and 60 percent of teens admit they are “highly addicted” to the devices.

Joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC (Internet Relay Channel)-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream from Twitter.

you’re trying to engage in a conversation with someone on Twitter that goes beyond a few “@ replies”, you’re either forced to DM or take the conversation elsewhere. Joint allows users to easily join a group chat, as well as discuss notable or popular hashtags. For instance, of late “#irene” has become a much-used hashtag, as Hurricane Irene is poised to hit the East Coast. Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location.

because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about having public conversations (about more private issues, especially) on Twitter.

Google made a $12.5 billion bet on Monday that its future — and the future of big Internet companies — lies in mobile computing, and moved aggressively to take on its arch rival Apple in the mobile market.

The Silicon Valley giant, known for its search engine and Android phone software, rattled the tech world with its announcement that it would acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, allowing it to get into the business of making cellphones and tablets.

The deal, which requires regulatory approval, would also give Google a valuable war chest of more than 17,000 patents that would help it defend Android from a barrage of patent lawsuits.

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

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.

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?  

What if those new jeans you've just bought start tweeting about your location as you cross London Bridge? It sounds far-fetched, but it's possible - if one of your garments is equipped with a tiny radio-frequency identification device (RFID), your location could be revealed without you knowing about it. RFIDs are chips that use radio waves to send data to a reader - which in turn can be connected to the web.

"The IoT challenge is likely to grow both in scale and complexity as seven billion humans are expected to coexist with 70 billion machines and perhaps 70,000 billion 'smart things', with numbers infiltrating the last redoubts of personal life," says Gerald Santucci, head of the networked enterprise and RFID unit at the European Commission.

NFC tag scans for connection sharing, social networking and marketing are increasing at a rate of 22 per cent per month, according to new research carried out by Kimtag. Kimtag, a UK based connection hub, analysed the visits to 10,000 selected Kimtag connection pages over a six month period ending in August 2011. The company compared QR Code, NFC tag, direct and referral hits from visitors around the world. 

During the research, Kimtag regarded a successful visit as a user reaching and fully downloading a Kimtag connection page via an address assigned specifically for NFC tags and then subsequently visiting a connection such as a social network or website.  The research revealed that the number NFC tag scans grew by an average 22 per cent month on month. Over the whole six month period, NFC scans increased by over 170 per cent.

Phil Coote, Kimtag’s CEO, commented, "The research illustrates that while a lot of the current focus within the NFC industry has been on payment systems, the use of NFC to empower the new ‘internet of things’ is likely to play an equally important role in it’s growth." 

In working with thousands of clients, IBM has established that businesses and the world at large have become more interconnected and certainly more intelligent. Just to toss out a few factoids – data is growing at 6 trillion bytes per second, IP traffic will accelerate in 3 years to over a trillion gigabytes, and as of 2010, there were an estimated 30B RFID tags across the global ecosystem. Almost 162 million smart phones were sold in 2008, surpassing laptop sales for the first time. Soon there will be one trillion connected devices in the world, constituting an “Internet of things.” This environment provides both the individual and the organization the opportunity to adapt their thinking and actions to address the challenges of the new world.

Clouds are now seen as an element of a transformative process. Organizations spend time looking at their business processes and deciding which ones to change for competitive advantage as they move into the cloud. More efficient workflows that incorporate “outsiders,” such as customers, contractors, and suppliers can be created.

The ability to allow outside partners to connect to a legacy application via the cloud is an important consideration.

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.

(OR): I think one of the things that’s a coming disruptor is the concept of machines becoming aware – the Internet of Things (IOT). Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication will take off. There are more machines than humans. Smart grid is a subset of this. Eventually in the consumer space, this type of communication and volume in network connectivity will outstrip what’s happening today. Even though it’s still nascent, we should pay attention to it.

In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.

Mobile

by 2020 and each consumer will have approximately seven devices connected to the Internet.

Speaking at a press briefing here Tuesday, Bidaud pointed out such mobile strategies would also provide "contextual and social user experience", which he described as "enriched reality" in which information would be meshed with the real world. For example, location-aware apps that could inform users which bus stop they were at and the arrival times of buses that stopped there, he said.

viewpoint, the Gartner analyst said the Internet of things, also known as machine-to-machine communications, was an arena in which there were "lots happening". Defining it as having a network-connected device sending information back to the network, he predicted that beyond smart utility grids, the technology would be used by consumers to share community-specific information such as a weight-watchers group, for instance.

"Restrictions could be in requiring social networking sites and Web companies to host their data centers locally, as well as having a tighter compliance environment for shared data," Sengar suggested, noting that this could stifle the growth of social CRM uptake in Singapore.

Governance can mean a lot of different things. In this context, it needs to be the foundation of the content plan. Not in terms of content creation but in terms of standards and processes for expanding into a certain market. For example, Company A wants to launch a Facebook page and Twitter channel in Latin America to support its operations into that region. A governance model will ensure that the regional marketing team has the following lined up before launch: A content plan to include frequency and context of Tweets, Facebook Updates, blog posts (or whatever relevant tools/platforms are used in that region) An established moderation policy A crisis communication plan An understanding and “buy in” of the measurement philosophy (everyone in the organization SHOULD be measuring social media the same way)

Content Library If it’s one thing that marketing teams in other regions lack, it’s content. The reality is that most brands do have really good content. It’s just scattered all across the internet, various internal portals and even within employees’ inboxes. Content can include videos, PDFs, spec sheets, FAQ, blog posts, infographics and the list goes on.

Community Management Without an active community manager, a content marketing plan will fail. A community manager will not only be responsible for actively posting and aggregating content; but he/she is essentially the face of the brand and should be sanctioned to solve customer problems. A proficient community manager will answer questions and provide real and “tangible” solutions to disgruntled customers. Additionally, he/she should have the authority to provide rewards to random customers simply for being customers.

Can the UK overcome sector fragmentation to build an ‘Internet of things’ industry? The European Commission recently approved a plan to encourage farmers to use electronic tagging to identify cattle. This, regulators believe, will help make rearing cattle more efficient, cut fraud, and help stem the spread of diseases.

revealing new patterns of interconnectedness in the physical world.

A broad term (even by the standards of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘big data’), it was first coined by British-born MIT researcher Kevin Ashton in 1999. Its approximate meaning today is a system for integrating the data produced by devices such as RFID tags or sensors in order to monitor, measure, manage and enhance physical objects.

Technology will also transform our daily urban existence in a myriad number of small ways, says Philip Sheldrake, director of Intellect, which represents the UK technology industry. He believes 2011 is the year the ultimate in connectivity – the "internet of things" - will finally take hold: "It is almost like we have got a perfect storm coming. There are a number of technological innovations and a number of calls on this technology coming together at the same time."

Urban areas are ultimately likely to be transformed by sensors that transmit data on conditions such as energy consumption, pollution, and temperature, which can be used to create a "smart grid" system. Such a grid could automatically turn on domestic devices such as washing machines at night when consumption is low and regulate heating, water supply and air conditioning systems. And as we negotiate our way around urban transport systems, sensors will also track our movements sending information back to bus companies or electric car hire schemes.