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Starbucks customers in the UK will be soon be able to walk into their local store, fire up their iPhone and pay for their orders via their Starbucks card, the company has announced.

The one-touch app, which has been available in the US since the beginning of the year, is set to launch on January 5th, allowing Starbucks card owners to link their accounts to the iPhone application and pay using the on-screen barcode in any of the 700 Starbucks locations in the UK.

It’s perfect for people that regularly travel without cash and regularly utilise their Starbucks card in order to pay for their coffee on the commute to work or when out shopping. With one in five customers already using their cards to pay for their cup of Joe, Starbucks is likely to see a rapid uptake in application usage.

Rainier , director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, looks ahead and makes a lengthy prediction of where we’re headed via the internet. As tempting as it was to clip the whole thing, I’ve resisted which means you will want to follow the link to read the article.

Themes:Cognitive capacities will shift (memorization)New literacies will be required. Fourth “R” is retrieval… “extreme Googlers”Tech isn’t the problem; people’s inherent character traits is the issuePerformance of information markets is a big unknown especially in the age of social media and junk information … Google will improve.Innovation ecosystem will change so radically (bandwidth/processing) that it’s hard to forecastBasic trends are evident — “the internet of things” and “sensors” and “mobile” and “location-based services” and “3D” and “speech recognition” and “translation systems”Law/regulations to protect privacy even though more disclosure required“Workarounds” to provide a measure of anonymityConfidentiality and autonomy will replace yearning for anonymityRise of social media is as much a challenge to anonymity as authentication requirements. Reputation management and information responsibility will emerge. Significantly more responsive govt, biz, NFP (71%/72%) v (26/26) [responses - anonymous, not-anonymous] Tide too strong to resist – pressure for transparency is powerfulData wil be the platform for changeEfficiency and responsiveness aren’t the same thingWe’re reading and writing more than our parents – participation breeds engagementNature of writing has changed (public). Quality will get better due to feedback and flamersReading and writing will be different in 10 years; screen literacy will become importantRead more at wiredpen.com

Face.com has launched the alpha of their new API. Now, almost any site could find faces on photos.Face.com, the company responsible for Facebook applications Photo Tagger and Photo Finder, lets you take any photo and quickly identify who is in it and where they are in the photo. This facial recognition is a boon to those tagging photos, and now Face.com is ready to bring a similar capability to the rest of the internet. May 3rd saw the launch of their new open API capable of scanning images and rapidly identifying the location, orientation, and identity of human faces. The API platform is meant for web designers who want to include a facial recognition feature on their own website. With this API, any company could let you upload a photo of yourself and find other photos of you in their database. Now in alpha testing, registering to try the API is free and very quick. Face.com, operated by Israel-based Vizi Labs, is looking to share the API with the developer community to see if the next killer application for facial recognition will arise organically. Eventually, platforms like this one may help your face become an access point to all the digital data about you on the web.

Read more at singularityhub.com

We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals.Getting people to the content they want to see, using the search functionality your average newspaper website has on offer, is not exactly what I’d describe as fast or effortless. Full-text search can be a daunting experience. We need some sort of a sitemap that acts as a gateway to our content and is broader than our primary navigation.We need deep links to the topics that are currently on people’s mind and that are being talked about.How neat would it be if we could also browse by mood or by genre?We need quick links to topic pages about related persons, organizations, events and locations.We need links to terms on Wikipedia (e.g. using Apture) or the ability to look things up in a dictionary (like the one they have over at the New York Times)Related content should be referred to either using tags or if you’re really hip, using relationships. Search behavior doesn’t always revolve around a big input box and a submit button.Faceted search needs facets: ways of splitting up search results into meaningful categories. Rich metadata and a well thought-out categorization scheme is a prequisite.Online search should work similarly to asking a question to a flesh-and-blood reporter

As a clinician fascinated by the use of new technologies to achieve outcomes, it’s hard to go past anything that is looking at bridging the divide between human emotions / touch and technology. Telenoid is one such project. It’s aim is to provide an effective way to transfer people’s presence. The research on telepresence is booming and it’s fairly widely accepted that videoconferencing is superior to teleconferencing and that platforms like virtual worlds provide even better telepresence sometimes. Telenoid is a step further again, providing a tangible means of interacting with someone remotely. In the second video below you’ll see its creator citing a key inspiration was the ability for remotely located grandparents to interact more with their grandchildren. That alone is laudable but for me the clinical simulation potentials stood out pretty strongly.

b. She consents to her next outpatient chemotherapy session being used for simulation purposes with third-year nursing students at a local university.

A specific example:

The Meaning of Being There is Related to a Specific Activation in the Brain Located in the Parahypocampus

Social Presence in Virtual World Surveys

“I’m Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear”: Combining Mediated Social Touch with Morphologically Correct Visual Feedback

May 24, 2011—CustomerIn Systems, a Canadian software-development firm located in Vancouver, B.C., is providing Near Field Communication (NFC) solutions for restaurants, bars and other entertainment establishments.

The first of what the company hopes will be many NFC solutions is a restaurant application dubbed the Connected Restaurant. This application, which has been deployed and tested, allows diners to use their mobile phones to request a table, order a drink and receive other services via their NFC-enabled phones.

known as SimpleNFC.com will provide developers with application software to build their own NFC solutions, and enable them to purchase software kits and tags.

Now Mobilizy, the leaders in augmented reality geo-location applications for mobile have taken the next major leap by combining augmented reality with GPS navigation software. Wikitude Drive is the award winning GPS navigation application for Android devices, it has already been awarded numerous prizes including the “Galileo Master 2010” of the European Satellite Navigation Competition, “Global Champion” of the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge and Winner of the “World Summit Award 2010”. Previously available for Austria, Germany and Switzerland the application is now available for Spain, UK, France and Italy. What’s different about Wikitude Drive from other navigation applications is it overlays the live route over the camera feed rather than using a traditional map view.  This new augmented reality view enables you to see exactly where you are going and the route without having to take your eyes off the road ahead. Having said sometime back that someday AR will change navigation, it’s been enjoyable playing around with the beta and testing the UK maps. As everything is stored on the server all the maps are up to date and I was even able to navigate to my house which hasn’t even made Google Street View yet. Turn by turn instructions are given clearly using a speech engine so you’ll always have the expected voice instructions.

Micro-targeted ads were only the first step; now companies can easily link anyone's social media profile to their web-browsing habits, and sell that information to anyone who's interested. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are, predictably, jockeying for lead position

Transformations of this magnitude are never confined to the market. Eventually, they spill over into the realm of politics and society. It's a familiar pattern: new technology enables new business practices. These practices, in turn, raise important social, political, and

Transformations of this magnitude are never confined to the market. Eventually, they spill over into the realm of politics and society. It's a familiar pattern: new technology enables new business practices. These practices, in turn, raise important social, political, and legal questions

Mage War Erupts on the Streets of Your Town in Shadow Cities “Shadow Cities allows players around the country to join the struggle between the ancient Animators and techo-magical Architects, two rival academies vying for control of this resurrected power. It’s an alternate reality game on a massively multiplayer scale, dividing communities and bringing them together on familiar battlefields.”

mapnificient travel-time map “specific to each city, ‘mapnificent’ sources the timetables of the major public transportation services to roughly calculate the areas accessible within a given time span, highlighting this area in a lit ‘bubble’. one’s location can be set via address or dropping a pointer on the map, and settings for the search include whether the user has access to a bicycle and (in beta) the day and time, as well as the maximum distance the user is willing to walk to a source of public transit. a google maps search can be conducted to find nearby amenities, with results overlain onto the visualization.”

"The Invisible Internet is associated closely with the concept of the “Internet of Things,” in which a multitude of everyday objects are connected wirelessly. In such a world, not every object will have the intelligence to make decisions for itself — your carton of milk doesn’t need an advanced processor, only the ability to communicate what it is and its expiration date — but collectively they’ll create a form of ambient intelligence, allowing them to self-organize as a group. If the Invisible Internet of Things does become a reality, the Web will cease to be merely a virtual space, where people interact with one another from behind a PC or phone’s screen, and become a real space — “meat space,” if you will — where thousands of objects, both personal and public, interact with one another.

The one element, besides a radio, all of those objects have in common is awareness. They have to be able to sense one another as well as their surroundings. Embedding devices and objects with that kind of sensitivity probably is the smallest challenge the Internet of Things faces right now, said Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research Center. The core sensors needed in the network of the future already are embedded in the average smartphone today: GPS and cellular triangulation sense location; accelerometers and digital compasses sense movement and direction; digital cameras can see for the devices. Some of those sensors need to be refined, but for the most part, devices already have access to enormous amounts of raw sensory data, Tirri said. The challenge for the industry is processing that data, interpreting it and combining it with data from other sensors to make it useful. Once the technology overcomes those problems, there’s no limit to what can be wirelessly enabled, he added.

“In today’s world of handsets, we talk in billions; in the future, we will talk about trillions of devices,” Tirri said. “Radios and sensors will be very small. They will be in everyday devices like coffeemakers and key chains, as well as all consumer devices, but also things you wouldn’t think you’d have wireless capabilities, like chairs, tables, even your bed.”

We’ve already told you about Juniper Research’s bullish forecasts of the augmented reality services. According to latest figures we have from the research company, the market for mobile enterprise applications featuring augmented reality elements is expected to exceed $300 million by 2015. Among the deployments that will help this grow, Juniper points to areas as diverse as corporate utility, surgery and counter-terrorism.

A company called Logica is already working with the UK government on a project that could identify current and future AR capabilities, whilst evaluating them against various security and counter terrorism scenarios.

According to the report author Dr Windsor Holden, “It is highly likely that AR apps which would also incorporate location awareness will soon be developed for security service handhelds – if they are not already in development.”

Microsoft's Kinect has been the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history, has over 10 million owners, and connects nearly 35 million users through Xbox Live--all of whom are capable of online sharing. "This type of experience is really an untapped market because these devices already live at home," says Dawson. KinectShop is primed to seamlessly integrate with real-life shopping experiences. "With an experience like KinectShop, a shopper can easily scan a QR code or swipe their NFC smartphone to take their experience with them and use wayfinding tools to locate the product in-store," Luke Hamilton, Dawson's Razorfish colleague, writes to Fast Company in an email.

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.

After completing a two-year project involving the use of an active RFID mesh network to track conditions that could degrade its stone walls and artwork, the Tower of London continues to utilize the technology to track the environmental cycles of ambient and surface temperatures, as well as humidity, at two towers. This information could then be compared against the conditions of the tower walls and a painting located within the stone structure. The system, known as FlatMesh and provided by Senceive, was put into place in 2009 as part of a research project that the fortress' caretaker initiated, seeking wireless solutions for environmental monitoring in areas in which thick walls can obstruct transmissions.

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.

We've written extensively about QR codes, including a story that ran earlier this week about using them as a virtual tourism activity. But an announcement from Hipscan.com caught our attention about how you can actually use these curious codes to generate hard cash money. Hipscan's Web site can be used by anyone to generate their own custom QR code, and what is interesting is how you can alter the referring location that the code leads to quite easily, with just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes.

This is the world of web 3.0, or what we call the ‘transcendent web’, and it will bring profound changes to people and businesses alike. The benefits it will provide users include the creation of a much more personalized web experience and the automation of many of the services already in use. Businesses too, will benefit from vastly greater amounts of information about consumers and thus the opportunity to market and sell to them much more directly. They will also be able to take advantage of the greater operational efficiencies brought about by technologies that will keep people, processes and products much more tightly connected. The transcendent web will play a critical role in the digitization of industries as wide-ranging as telecommunications, financial services and healthcare.

The Internet of Things: More and more things are being made Internet-enabled — houses, cars, appliances, even clothing — allowing them not just to be located through technologies like radio frequency identification but to communicate richer amounts of information about themselves; all of this becomes not just possible but also visible to web users.