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Nokia City Scene is a prototype app from Nokia Beta Labs that combines street maps, 3D panoramic views with gesture navigation and social network integration to provide what appears to be a powerful map discovery tool.

A user can transition from a top-down conventional street view to a Google Maps Streetview-like panoramic view with simple gesture-based navigation. In this 3D panoramic view, the phone user can read information about the businesses in the area in a text overlay. Check-ins by friends on Facebook and Foursquare is also available. The following cities are currently supported within Nokia City Scenes: London, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Newark-Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

It is somewhat unfortunate that this powerful tool is only available for the Nokia N9 which is based on an orphaned mobile platform, the Linux-based MeeGo. Nokia has not said whether this app will be ported to Windows Phone (its current smartphone platform).

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.

The race to replace your wallet with mobile payment options is on.

Consumer demand for smartphones, combined with near-field communication, or NFC, technology that enables everyday purchases, is fueling the shift from credit card swipes to mobile payments. With smartphone sales expected to increase 50% this year, mobile payment services are in a mad dash to capture market share, and the growing competitive space has sparked strategic partnerships among big names.

Meet the contendersMobile payment sales in the U.S. are expected to increase at a 68% compounded annualized growth rate over the next five years. It's no wonder that big players like American Express (NYSE: AXP  ) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) want in on the action.

Grove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today. It's IRC without the fuss, providing hosting, account management, access controls and fully searchable chat logging, as well as a sparkling new Web chat client.

It supports all the great IRC client apps, of course, but Grove takes care of the fiddly parts of setup and hosting.

Grove is the latest effort from Leah Culver, CEO and co-founder of Convore, and Convore developer/designer Jori Lallo. Culver was a co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, which was an early challenger to the Twitter way of communicating that also allowed attachments and events. Pownce was acquired by SixApart in 2008, and the service itself was shut down.

Taiwan's Acer Inc. plans to launch smartphones with near field communication (NFC) technology, which will allow users to make remote bill payments and contactless payments for retail and public transport, a company manager said Thursday.

"Telecom operators have forecast that NFC technology will become critical for smartphones next year, and I think other cellphone makers will also regard this technology as a default function on their products by that time," said Vincent Chen, product manager of Acer's telecom business department.

The current Mango operating system does not support NFC technology, but the next release of the Windows mobile platform -- Windows 8 -- is likely to feature the function, Chen said.

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

the Ctrip team has once again delivered the strong results in the first quarter, marking an encouraging start to the year 2011. Our net revenues grew 30% year-over-year and net income grew 23% year-over-year. With the solid execution, Ctrip has further enhanced its strategic partnerships, improved operating efficiency and elevated its customer service level. The Ctrip team has continued to build the brand’s strength and demonstrate industry leadership. Our hotel [ph] supply network continues to expand to satisfy the growing needs of travelers, reaching approximately 18,000 hotels by the end of March 2011 compared to 10,600 hotels at the same time in 2010. The number of hotels with guaranteed allotment rooms accounted for approximately 75% of the total hotel supply. We rolled out more options for making hotel reservations to keep for different needs of our customers. For example, Ctrip has launched the most expensive hotel group buying platform in China, with the daily participants reaching over 100 hotels. Our hotel group buying 2.0 platform features the most convenient booking process elevating service levels industry wide. Thanks to the great effort and strong execution on the product of IT, Ctrip has continued to outpace industry growth in the air ticketing sector growing far ahead of the industry average.

Bling's system, you may remember, worked by attaching an NFC-enabled sticker on the back of phones. Users could then tap the phone onto specialized hardware (the Blinger) at the register and Bling could debit the user's PayPal account to pay the merchant.

Unless you have a Sprint Nexus S 4G on Sprint, you'll be attaching an RFID tag onto the back of your phone if you want to try out Google Wallet this summer. Google Wallet is an Android app, so presumably even though the RFID hardware is a sticker, the system won't work on any non-Android phones. Even so, Google should be applauded for getting its program rolling without having to wait on the handset makers.

Ryan Kim on GigaOm has a good write-up detailing Google's partners in the effort and the likely gains to NFC as the dominant mobile payment platform.

Since 2007, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $7.15 an hour, yet workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—many of whom live in the US—make an average of $2 (according to the estimates of Mechanical Turk researcher Alex Quinn).  As illustrated in the above image, Amazon, itself, encourages businesses (at least implicitly) to pay workers (or “turkers” as they are called) less-than-minimum wages.  Moreover, to even qualify for these low-paying tasks called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), turkers are often expected to complete unpaid training sessions that can last for up to an hour.  Also, because turkers receive micro-payments for each task and because the time to completion for each task is rationalized to the second, turkers receive no pay during normal periods of rest during the workday.

Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing platform that allow anyone to recruit laborers for short online tasks, which cannot be effectively completed by computers.  For examples, turkers might compile contact information for various businesses, sort through images and tag offensive ones, or participate in university research experiments.  Because of the piecemeal and spatially-disembedded nature of the work, it is virtually unregulated. Can we simply dismiss this subversion of labor laws—as some commentators have—on the grounds that “$2 an hour is a decent wage in India?”  Even if we are angered by this exploitation of turkers, is it even possible to regulate an international platform of this sort?

A recent TED video showcased a new publishing platform for the ipad which I believe offers educational publishers a route to producing compelling digital resources to support learning within schools. Push, pop, press are in the process of creating a publishing platform which they plan to license and which allows quick and easy creation of compelling interactive e-books.

SHAPE Services, a leading mobile app developer best known for its IM+ All-in-One Mobile Messenger app, today announced that their new location-based messaging service, named “Neighbors,” is now available as a free update to its IM+ Mobile Messenger.With “Neighbors”, user can now find new real life connections and friends, buy and sell local services and goods using an interactive map, chat with local friends as well as initiate conversations with other people who are nearby, and publish and view local offers and announcements as status updates on their profiles.

Features:Location-Based Messaging Functionality – Allows users to find real people in their local area and easily initiate conversations, catch up with local friends and post local announcements.Location Privacy – Easy-to-understand privacy settings for disclosing user location, which includes the user’s ability to define their location as wide as their house, street or city.Interactive Map – With just a tap of the finger users can see the person’s profile and status, allowing the user to visually identify people around them.

SHAPE Services also plans to incorporate a unique patent pending augmented reality interface that will let the users look around with a 360 degree camera view.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the big differences between desktop and mobile platforms: Mobile device hardware is smaller and generally tends to have lower hardware resources than desktops/laptops. Smaller screens bring about different design considerations and challenges. Touchscreen technology introduces new interaction concepts that differ from traditional input devices (keyboard and mouse). With a mobile device, internet connectivity is not always as reliable as a hard-wired broadband connection, which means internet connectivity is a concern and data transfer could be significantly slower. Although these sound as if they are hurdles to get over, with careful thought and consideration, there’s no reason why they should be. Touchscreen technology is exciting. The smaller screen design will really make you think about how to get the user to interact with your mobile web app in the most satisfying way possible. What we should really be doing is looking at the list of differences above and seeing opportunities to deliver our content in a different way. Building mobile web apps will be a paradigm shift from traditional web development and web design.

In the next sections, we will discuss development/design considerations, as well as concepts and techniques for building mobile web apps.

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In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

Gartner has just released its Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users report for 1Q11, and results confirm the expectations: Android keeps growing and is with no doubt the number one platform, while Nokia is still the strongest manufacturer even though at its minimum level since 1997. The other great winner is the Taiwanese HTC, which sells almost triple amount of handsets thanks especially to its Android smartphones.

Nokia keeps loosing share but keeps first position, with Samsung holding number two with a slight loss in percentage but growth in sales. LG loses ground too and is now pushed by Apple and RIM. ZTE keeps growing, and just behind it HTC passes two of the bigger names from the past that are today relegated to bottom positions: Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Huawei closes the top ten thanks to its low-price devices. Can we expect HTC to pass ZTE and maybe even RIM before the next report? With amazing superphones such as the Sensation and the Thunderbolt that’s very possible! “Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85 percent year-on-year”, said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This share could have been even higher, but manufacturers announced a number of high-profile devices during the first quarter of 2011 that would not ship until the second quarter of 2011. We believe some consumers delayed their purchases to wait for these models”.

The smartphones report shows a huge growth by the Android OS, which is now firmly the platform to sell the most, with Symbian dropped to number two, and iOS third after surpassing BlackBerry OS. Microsoft OSs (both Windows Phone 7 and the older Windows Mobile, combined) mantains the same sales level of last year but halving its percentage; experts say Microsoft’s alliance with Nokia will bring Windows Phones back to the top replacing Symbian,

With a veritable “Cambrian explosion” of low- and high-end Android devices in Asia, venture firm DCM recently made a big bet that there will be some winning startups in the next few years by launching a $100 million early-stage Android fund with Japan’s GREE and mobile operator KDDI.

“We all recognize that Android is going to really take off in China and Japan over the next 12 months and we wanted to make sure we intersected with the best and brightest whether it’s apps guys or people working with chips,” he said. Chao says he sees Android as the fourth wave in a series of shifts affecting the gaming industry in Asia over the last several years. While there aren’t any truly reliable statistics, Chao says there might be about 15 million Android devices shipped in China by the end of this year. Higher-end Android devices like Sony Ericsson’s Xperia line of phones are starting to find a foothold in Japan.

“All of the majors are jumping on the bandwagon and the Android smartphones tend to do really well in Japan,” he said. “They’ll have traditional Japanese phone functions like FeliCA, which is a local payment method, and the ability to play GREE games.”

re creating smartphone loyalty, determining which OS and device a consumer may buy. At least that’s what a recent Gartner report will have you believe. The sales report ranks Android, Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone sales in the first quarter of 2011, noting the impact of mobile apps on the market share of new sales. It seems the mobile device market is only gaining in strength, Google (GOOG) taking 36 percent market share, leading with 36.3 million unites sold. Symbian comes in second, with 27.4 percent market share at 27.6 million units, leaving Apple (AAPL) at 16.8 percent market share with 16.9 in sales. RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry comes in fourth, with 13 million and a 12.9 percent take of the market.

“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform,” notes principle research analyst Roberta Cozza. “This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google. As well as putting their devices in the context of a broader ecosystem, manufacturers must start to see their smartphones as part of a computing continuum.”

Apps have certainly created an expansive ecosystem for mobile industry, but just like the mighty dinosaur, this era may one day become extinct. The death of mobile apps has been predicted by MIT writer Christopher Mims, pegging web apps as the future. It’s their potential ubiquity across platforms that extends access to web users, instead of drawing lines in the sand around mobile browsing versus the web you access on a PC laptop. Mims calls for a browser-based utopia where offline access and standards like HTML5 harmonize our desperate web experiences, but notes that offline access is far from perfect. Things still boil down to business, where Google’s marketplace has lower operating costs than Apple’s, with a broadening reach.