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Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature.today’s software developers work in social networks in which everyone is closely linked to everyone else. “The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking holdTo restore the kind of aggressive innovation needed to build the next-generation internet will require re-engineering of the social networks of software developers themselvesThis could be doneif funding agencies ensured that research projects were carried out by many small, competing groups over longer periods.To enable innovation it may be necessary to reduce the number of social ties Read more at www.newscientist.com

Social networking is a daily activity for most of us. Anyone paying attention knows that sites like Facebook and Twitter have hundreds of millions of users and are extremely popular. But one thing I think we all forget from time to time is that these social networking sites are businesses. They do have employees and they do have costs. So I ask again, how do social networks make money?The short answer is that they don’t, not on their own at least – at first. There are a few different ways social networking sites earn money, with more on the horizon. This article aims at uncovering a few of these methods and answering the questions that many of us are asking.Read more at www.makeuseof.com 

A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

Furthering its efforts to extend its social network to mobile users regardless of which handset they own, Facebook has today announced a partnership with mobile chip maker MediaTek to deliver social networking capabilities to millions of consumers with Internet-connected featurephone devices.

The partnership will see Facebook embedded into MediaTek’s mobile platform solutions, providing mobile device owners in emerging countries with access to Facebook via affordable handsets. It will use MediaTek’s Runtime Environment (MRE) to deliver social networking from the core of the device.

MediaTek says that phones powered by its chipsets accounted for 40% of the overall Indian mobile market, with the company predicting that more than 50% of its customers will utilise its new runtime environment to deliver Facebook functionality. Facebook use is growing in the country, pulling users from Google’s Orkut social network, with additional mobile partnerships set to extend its growth.

A new phase in social media underway.

Force Field Analysis in Social Sciences analysis reflected on how things are accomplished or hindered by the way that people internalize external experiences in the process of their own psychological development.Now, suppose that an individual goes out and influences social situations in their community.  Also suppose that social media could amplify the persons exterior impact – this would likewise impact internal psychology, etc., setting up a form of polarity between two positions.  The greater the difference (diversity) in those positions, the greater the potential (energy state) of the outcome.The “Local Social” Force FieldSocial media is about to enter a new phase called “local social”.  The hyperlinks that bind the web will become the hyperlinks that bind a community.  The difference is that hyperlinks in “Global Social” environment converge down to specific information, Hyperlinks in Local Social will diverge up to diverse knowledge assets.Read more at www.ingenesist.com

The global optical networking market is estimated to reach revenues of $20 billion in 2016, according to analyst firm Ovum. The global market is forecast to grow at 6% CAGR between 2010 and 2016, driven by investment from carriers in 40G and 100G networks. This level of growth, however, will vary according to region, with the North American market, for instance, estimated to grow by 12% this year while the Asia-Pacific market is predicted to contract by a further 3.2% in 2011. “Increasing bandwidth from residential broadband networks, mobile networks, and enterprises is the key driver of the growth. Carriers are investing in access networks and mobile long-term evolution (LTE) roll-outs are beginning to gain momentum,” said Ovum analyst Ian Redpath. “The optical networking market is also reaching a watershed moment in terms of technology. Networks based on 40G and 100G wavelengths are now poised for mass-market deployment.”

“it’s interesting to see how large a company that provides an actually useful service can get bigger than one who’s apparent key reasons for existing are for you to share embarrassing photos of yourself and tend a virtual farm. Skype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web with questionable tools that track your movement from site-to-site, or manipulate your profile because you click a “Like” button somewhere. Skype just exists. If you choose to use it, great, but if you don’t, they aren’t in your face about it.”

Some might say it’s like comparing apples and oranges as one is a social network, and one is not, but it’s still interesting to see Facebook is not the biggest thing out there despite what that company might like to have you thinkGigaOm provided some stats that Skype gave out at the recent eComm ConferenceSkype added 39 million registered users in the fourth quarter to end the year with a total of 560 millionSkype in 2009 accounted for 12 percent of the world’s international calling minutes, a 50 percent increase over 2008

36 percent of Skype-to-Skype calls as of the end of the fourth quarter included video — in other words, Skype is going to figure prominently in the video conferencing business, challenging more established players with its no-cost solutionlike Facebook, there are people with multiple accounts, and there are also spammers, but those accounts get shut down pretty fastSkype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web

Mobile handsets have a bad habit of oversharing with the networks they operate on, with some handsets being chattier than others. This signaling data, as it’s known in the industry, can congest mobile networks, and Traffix Systems, a six-year-old Israeli company wants to help operators solve that problem.

The company said Wednesday that it raised a first round of $7 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners to help it expand operations. Ben Volkow, the CEO, says that 60 percent of operators already have some Traffix gear on their networks to address and manage signaling traffic, but more operators are interested. As more operators began deploying LTE networks, which add to the complexity of signaling traffic and to the overall network, Volkow decided that his previous strategy of growing the business through bootstrapping it no longer made sense. “We needed to scale and grow the business,” he said in an interview.

Signaling traffic is the data the phone or device sends out to the network to tell it where it is, what is it is doing, how much it is allowed to do based on the subscriber’s plan and figure out when to hop to the next base station. Chetan Sharma, a wireless analyst, issued a report last year noting that network congestion is generally caused by two big things: (1) signaling traffic caused by smartphones and superphones and (2) peak data traffic caused by data cards and embedded laptops.

TeliaSonera, a Scandinavian-based telephone company, has conducted a trial for an optical network that saw a terabit-speed optical transmission based on 500 Gbps super channels.

A super channel is a large unit of optical capacity created by combining multiple optical carriers into a single managed entity — like an optical cloud of sorts.

This is the largest super channel created so far, and it is based on Infinera’s 500 Gbps photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

The global optical networking (ON) market will reach revenues of $20 billion by 2016, as the sector pulls itself out of the economic downturn, predicts Ovum in a new forecast. However, the independent telecoms analyst warns that although the global market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6% from 2010 to 2016, not all of the regions will see strong growth. Ian Redpath, Ovum analyst and author of the forecast, said that "increasing bandwidth from residential broadband networks, mobile networks, and enterprises is the key driver of the growth. Carriers are investing in access networks and mobile long term evolution (LTE) rollouts are beginning to gain momentum. The ON market is also reaching a watershed moment in terms of technology. Networks based on 40G and 100G wavelengths are now poised for mass-market deployment.

Putting sensors and actuators in everything from homes and cars to shoes and coffee cups promises to make our daily lives easier, safer and more efficient. But such 'ambient intelligence' requires a merger of the virtual and digital worlds. EU-funded researchers in the Sensei project are bridging the gap and their results are already leading to 'smart cities' being set up all over Europe.

'Today, the internet world is a virtual world of data mostly stored and accessed from servers,' says Dr Hérault. In the future, we will have an 'Internet of things' in which a multitude of things in the real, physical world will be digitised continuously: in many situations, we won't just be asking web servers for data, we will be asking sensors in everyday objects for data, he suggests. 'We need to understand how best to interconnect the real world and the virtual world.' 

An open service interface that uses semantic information to process data means that information is accessible and understandable to both humans and machines.  'You could ask, for example, "What is the temperature on Oxford Street?" The system would decode that semantic information, access sensor networks on Oxford Street that have temperature sensors, check the reliability of each network with regard to information quality, and return an answer,' Dr Hérault explains. 

Mobile ad network Millennial Media is announcing an expansion to the Asia-Pacific region. Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There’s no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.

So why Southeast Asia? Gartner forecasts that the mobile advertising industry in Asia Pacific will grow from $1.6 billion USD to $6.9B in 2015 and Millennial wants to be in a position to capitalize on this. The company is also eyeing Korea, Japan and China as other expansion areas.

In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million). And the company is now seeing $50 million in revenue.

Social networking websites have lost some of their “cool” factor with younger users and are on their way to becoming the preserve of the middle-aged, according to figures published by Ofcom. The proportion of British 15- to 24-year-olds with a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace fell for the first time last year from 55 per cent to 50 per cent, according to the communications regulator. Older internet users are still flocking to the sites, however. The proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds claiming to have a social networking profile grew by 6 percentage points to 46 per cent, and among 35- to 54-year-olds by 8 percentage points to 35 per cent. the audience figures for individual social networking sites from Nielsen Online, another online research company, support the picture that social networking is an ageing medium. this ephemeral demographic may be moving on before media owners have properly learnt how to make money from their sites. Read more at www.ft.com Perhaps, older people will develop more serious, reflective uses for social networking than the young pioneers.

Entrepreneurs who incorporate LinkedIn into their B2B online marketing initiatives will likely be ecstatic to hear the social network has been deemed the most important social site. According to a survey conducted by Performics, which polled nearly 3,000 active social networkers, 59 percent said it is the most important to have a LinkedIn account. Half of respondents (50 percent) say they visit the social network at least weekly, while 20 percent log in daily.

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.