Group items tagged

The traditional internet is oriented towards person-to-person connection, whereas the Internet of Things is oriented towards connection of inanimate objects. As such, the Internet of Things covers a larger range of connections and involves more semantics. Internet and telecom networks are focused on information transfer, while the Internet of Things is focused on information services. By combining sensor networks, the Internet, telecom networks, and cloud computing platforms, the Internet of Things can sense, recognize, affect, and control the physical world. The physical world can be unified with the virtual world and human perception. This opens a whole new media market yet to be explored to see which is the killer applications.

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.

Last year, he co-founded (with Ed Lucero) a company called Tackable to develop his ideas, and in February, we described here Tackable’s first product: a pair of iPhone apps that Tackable envisions as the basis for a social network that “organizes media on a map.” Now Tackable has rolled out, in partnership with the newspapers of the Bay Area News Group, something much more complex and ambitious: an iPad app called TapIn BayArea, which Stangel describes as “the world’s first location-aware digital newspaper.” TapIn, at launch, is already an impressive, sophisticated product that shows potential to evolve in multiple ways. And its ability to engage users at various levels bodes well for its capacity to generate revenue.

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.

Research group Gartner issued a special report on Thursday, noting that Apple will have a "free run" in the tablet market this holiday season as rivals continue to lag. The group sees worldwide media tablet sales as on track to reach 63.6 million units this year, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010.

Gartner predicts Apple will hold on to a dominant 73.4 percent of the market this year, though down from 83 percent in 2010. Android is expected to remain in second place, with the firm assuming that no other platforms will manage a 5 percent share of the market in 2011.

By the end of 2015, the company's tablet share is expected to slide to 46 percent.

Facebook Updates Open Graph, Lets You Share EVERYTHING You Do Steve Kovach | Sep. 22, 2011, 1:53 PM | 3,626 | 3 A A A   x Email Article From To Email Sent! You have successfully emailed the post. inShare30 See Also: Eight Fascinating People You'll See At IGNITION THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Microsoft Could Play Kingmaker In Potential Yahoo Sale Facebook Users Are About To Riot Over Massive

Facebook announced the latest addition to the social graph. Instead of "liking" objects, you can participate in events. That means watching movies, going on trips, reading a book, whatever

Everything shows up in the new ticker, the real-time update list in the upper right corner. Zuck says this will make it possible for people to develop social apps based on the acitivities people do. Starting with media: movies, music, news, books, etc.

Auction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.

Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. S

Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.

“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.

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.

Should enterprise applications be as addictive as Angry Birds? A true believer in gamification would say yes, if you want people to actually use them.

[Social media is a powerful tool to connect with customers, but it can create big problems for your company if it's not done right. Learn more at 10 Social Networking Don'ts.]

Most of all, gamificiation is about understanding that "if you can make something more fun, and include notions of play, you can get people to do things they otherwise might not want to do."

Banjo has three main goals. One is to connect you to your social networking friends you didn’t know were nearby – for example, a friend from Facebook or Twitter, killing time at the airport, only a few gates away from you. It also wants to hep you find out what’s going on nearby by providing access to status updates and tweets from everyone around you, in a radius you specify. And it provides you with a way to virtually visit other locations, even when you’re far away, to see what’s going on with the people there.

The people Banjo finds don’t necessarily have to have “checked in” using a location-based networking service like Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook Places. While that helps, of course, Banjo is designed to also pull in locations from geotagged tweets, uploaded photos, and other media from all social networking services. Wait – all? Yes, that’s the plan. Patton says they have 22 services they’re focused on integrating now, but the company’s goal is to become a federation of all social networks, big and small, from around the world.

Online video is exploding, with annual user growth of more than 45 percent. Mobile-device time spent increased 28 percent last year — with average smartphone time spent doubling. And social networks are now used by 90 percent of U.S. Internet users — for an average of more than four hours a month.

Every venture capitalist, Web publisher, and digital marketer is hyper-aware of these three trends.

What replaces the declining searchable Web is a new and “fully connected” digital life. You may have heard this before. After all, the promise of the Web was to connect pages with hyperlinks. Well, this time, “connected” means much more. It means the Web connects us, as people, to each one of the individuals online; and those connections, ultimately, extend from one of us to all of us.

New technical standards and consumers’ extensive use of mobile media put us on the cusp of an explosion in mobile payments.

Long rumored and heavily used in Asia, mobile phones have the ability to be used as payment devices similar to credit cards.

Now, the growing penetration of smartphones, the widespread use of phones to comparison shop, share price or product features or accept discount and coupon offers makes mobile payments the next high demand phone function.

When it comes to mobile Augmented Reality technology, Qualcomm is the top dog. The San Diego company has the biggest AR R&D unit in the world and the message from its recent Uplinq conference in California was clear - it thinks that AR is going to play a significant role in shaping the mobile media horizon.

Qualcomm's senior director of business development Jay Wright

"For Qualcomm, we think the technology is interesting, we follow it closely but it's not on our near to mid-term horizon. This is beyond the five to eight year window," he said.

a new study conducted and released by Latitude, a technology research consultancy, published in collaboration with ReadWriteWeb. The study’s main takeaway message: “kids are predicting that the future of media and technology lies in better integrating digital experiences with real-world places and activities. They’re also suggesting that more intuitive, human-like interactions with devices, such as those provided by fluid interfaces or robots, are a key area for development.”

Researchers scored the kids’ inventions on the presence of specific technology themes, such as type of interface, degree of interactivity, physical-digital convergence and user’s desired end-goal.

The Digital vs. Physical Divide is Disappearing: Children today don’t neatly divide their virtual interactions from their experiences of the “real world.” For them, these two realms continue to converge as technologies become more interactive, portable, connected and integrated.

Traditionally, the most valued content was original. This emphasis developed within a content model of constrained distribution and expensive production costs. When there are only a handful of distribution points for content — some magazines, books, a handful of TV station and radio stations — the way to build audience was to deliver original and exclusive content experiences.

Into this explosion of information comes the concept of Curation. Long-time tech journalist Paul Gillen weighed in on the value of taking a curatorial approach to content in a post about the Chile earthquake. No longer is our problem lack of information; it’s that we’re drowning in information. That’s why curation is so important. Trusted curators who point us to the most valuable sources of information for our interests will become the new power brokers.

Gillen points out that the concept of curation shouldn’t be limited to media brands. Marketers should take this trend into account. Creating new content is important, but an equally valuable service is curating content from other sources. This demands a whole different set of skills as well as a new delivery channel. It also means ditching the “not invented here” mindset that prevents content creators from acknowledging other sources.

Craig Mod dreams of a different sort of book: Imagine a future where instead of lending someone a book, you lend them your bookmarks. Where your notes, annotations and references are synchronized across platforms and applications. Where your bookmarks belong to you, and a record of every book you read is saved and stored securely, no matter how or where you read it. Kevin Kelly envisions how the publishing industry will adapt. Alexis Madrigal explores how the New York Public Library has moved beyond books, existing now as a social network with three million active users.

Nuance Communications (NUAN) CEO Paul Ricci must have taken copious notes in class because his company's recent purchase of Swype has catapulted it from a voice recognition company to an input organization.

I think this is a big move for the company because it expands what it, as an entity, does.

To "swype," a person traces across keyboard letters in a continuous motion to comprise a word. Swype says its input method lets people do more than 40 words a minute, and says the application is meant to work across not just phones and tablets, but also game consoles, kiosks, televisions and other screens.