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A 2009 analysis from Juniper Research (News –Alert) of the $110bn NFC opportunity forecasted that one in every six mobile subscribers (about 17 percent) globally will have an NFC enabled device by 2014. Adoption was expected to be highest in the Far East,with use very limited outside of that region.

By 2014,Juniper now predicts that North America will account for just under half of NFC smartphones,followed by Western Europe.

The latest forecast from Juniper Research suggests that at least 20 percent of smartphones will support NFC by 2014,about 300 million phones.

Energy drink brand Lucozade had teamed up with seven different British artists and the augmented reality (AR) app Aurasma, to create a new AR campaign which lets you scan cylindrical objects for exclusive content.

A number of artists including Tinie Tempah, Plan B and Calvin Harris have designed their own bottles which, when scanned, produce videos and animations featuring that particular artist.

The app achieves a first by integrating cylindrical mapping into AR, that is allowing the app to recognise the 3D surface of the bottle and augment it with video content. Once you download the app for your smartphone, pointing it at either the Plan B or Tinie Tempah exclusive bottles will showcase an animation before loading up a video of the artist. They will then direct you towards content exclusive to the AR app.

Every 34 seconds someone suffers from a heart attack in the US. In the fight against this insane plague, startups are scrambling to find ways to leverage popular technology. The latest attempt is SHL Telemedicine‘s SmartHeart, a smart phone enabled electrocardiagram (ECG) device that only takes 30 seconds to analyze your heart and email the results to your doctor. Now nearly anyone can take an ECG by strapping the palm sized monitor to your chest and pushing a few buttons on your phone. No need for bulky machines, conductive gel, or an on site trained clinician. Check out the video presentation on SHL’s newest health gadget below. Aiming to come to market with a price tag near $500, SmartHeart could be an affordable way to recruit everyday citizens in the fight against cardiovascular disease.

roughly 30 percent more individuals in the U.S. carry a smart phone than buy a daily newspaper.

New York Public Library In a move that embodies the public intellectual history of America and the perfect application of social media, the New York Public Library plans to celebrate its centennial smart phone style.

It recently launched a “Find the Future” Foursquare badge that encourages and rewards exploration of public libraries in New York City. It transforms visitors into library ambassadors who, via location-based check-ins, end up promoting library services, programs, and collections to their Foursquare friends.

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs.

Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages.

Mobile development framework Sencha is releasing several new products to tie HTML5 mobile Web development to the cloud. Sencha.io is designed to give Web app developers the ability to synchronize and manage data in the cloud without having to write an excessive amount of code. For messaging, data management, login and deployment, Sencha claims that a few lines of Javascript will allow mobile Web developers to easily integrate these functions to apps built with HTML5.

Sencha.io has four main components: data, messages, login and deployment.

It also serves as a place to manage the app through the senchafy.com domain and allows administrators to upload apps, manage different versions of apps and put apps in the production and development environments.

Strobe, an App Delivery Network that facilitates getting HTML5 apps up and running on various platforms and app stores, has joined Facebook, CEO Charles Jolley announced today.

Jolley is also the creator of the SproutCore JavaScript framework for web apps that is used to quickly build web apps in the browser. It’s used by companies like NPR, Second Story and Sports Illustrated, as well as being popular among Facebook app developers.

Before Jolley created SproutCore, he was responsible for Mobile Me app development at Apple.

China's leading location-based social service is distributing NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchants in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong

Jiepang is to distribute NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchant partners in six cities in Greater China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong.

Jiepang is China's leading location-based social service. Its users currently check in and earn rewards via a GPS-enabled smartphone app which comes preloaded on all new HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and other smartphone brands in China, including all three of the new Nokia NFC smartphones announced earlier this week.

Paul Bradshaw, visiting professor, City University and founder of helpmeinvestigate.com used the principal of toys to give ideas on developing the data story and explained the importance of  “future proofing the information we are gathering”, saying “that’s one of the big commercial imperatives”.

Conrad Quilty-Harper, data mapping reporter at the Telegraph, explained how creating maps adds to a story by using the example of a map on bike sharing schemes he created (though did not publish) using “Google Fusion Tables and a bit of javascript”. He recommends Google Maps and says the trailblazer of a news site using Google Fusion tables is the Texas Tribune.

My proudest example” was a live interactive Royal Wedding map which “worked brilliantly for three hours”. It showed some of the best tweets and were geolocated on the map. “We’ve got the data and we’re going to analyse it and do something with it in the future,” he said. “It tells you what people in specific locations were thinking”. The Telegraph would like to use the technology in a crisis news story, such as an earthquake or conflict.

If mobile video sharing is to follow in the footsteps of its more desirable mobile photo-sharing cousin, which application will users want to use to shoot, share and discover video clips? It’s too soon to tell, but startup Klip joins the fray and is now vying for your video attention. The startup released its application for iPhone on Monday with a focus on letting users share super-short 1-minute video clips — on Klip or with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube — and helping users discover clips from friends or other users based on topics of interests. “Klip re-invents the way consumers experience the world by organizing mobile videos in real time and by connecting consumers with the people and the topics that interest them,” the company says.