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social analytics platform Viralheat, we have new data points in which to judge the fallout of SXSW.

the one getting the most attention on Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks is clearly Foursquare (), which earned more than 38,000 mentions on social channels at its peak. In comparison, Gowalla () garnered less than 25% of that amount, peaking at 8,296 mentions.

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

While tablet computing may in future transform the whole computer industry, it is already changing the way we look at augmented reality. And this is not only because of the big display. More and more different devices for multiple OS platforms are expected to appear on the market, equipped with advanced sensors such as high-resolution cameras. The cost of data roaming is likely to drop and considering the millions of people expected to buy such a device in the next few years, there are incentives enough for optimizing augmented reality (AR) tablet software and to start creating really useful and fascinating applications taking full advantage of the promising, new capabilities. metaio, with its junaio 2.6 release, a junaio plug-in for third party app integration, and the revised mobile AR SDK Unifeye 2.5, is well prepared and ready to go for the next generation of AR applications. If you want to learn more about mobile AR in general and on tablets, everything is summed up here: http://www.metaio.com/specials/augmented-reality-on-tablets/ And here you can find a movie with almost everything we´re working on: 3D tracking, markerless 2D tracking and image processing, virtual manuals, interactive TV, smart packaging, advertising as a service, context sensitive product visualization, AR gaming and so on. By the way: to my knowledge it´s the first AR demos running on the Android 3.0 based Xoom!

At the close of an almost three-hour hearing on cell-phone tracking, Sen. Al Franken said Tuesday that he still has "serious doubts" that consumers' privacy rights are being respected when it comes to location-based services via iOS and Android. "I think that people have a right to know who is getting their information, and a right to decide how that information is shared and used," said Franken. "After having heard today's testimony, I have serious doubts that those rights are being respected in law or in practice."

"We need to think seriously about how to address this problem, [especially since] mobile devices are only going to become more and more popular," he continued. "This is an urgent issue we'll be dealing with." Franken, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the new Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, heard testimony from Apple and Google executives today about how their mobile platforms collect and use location-based data, and what type of control users have over that information. Google said that any location-based data it collects via its Android mobile operating system is anonymous in nature and the majority of that information is deleted after one week. "The location information sent to Google servers when users opt in to location services on Android is anonymized and stored in the aggregate and is not tied or traceable to a specific user," said Alan Davidson, director of public policy at Google. "The collected information is stored with a hashed version of an anonymous token, which is deleted after approximately one week."

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.

Real patients as simulation Imagine the ability to have a ‘patient’ reflecting the emotions and speech of a real person in combination with the current simulation functionality i.e. feedback, monitoring of biometric data etc. Taken a step further: a real patient experiencing a real health issue is able (with consent of course) to have their experience transferred to a simulation exercise in real time. There are already consumer devices on the market able to control avatars via thought processes, this is only a small step beyond that.

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

IDC’s Q1 scorecard for smartphones in western Europe is out. Nokia’s sales are sliding 10% year-on-year in a market for all phones growing at 5%, while the smartphone sector grew 76% (how long before we stop using the word smartphone, you might well ask). Nokia’s smartphone market share has gone from 57% to 19.6% in two years. Europe’s biggest handset maker is now Samsung and the fastest growing is HTC. The biggest platform is Android, with 35.7%, followed by Apple iOS on 20%, and then Symbian and BlackBerry OS.

4 out of those 5 companies are heavily committed to Android, and two are also committed to Windows Phone,

In the Android sphere, Sony Ericsson has announced the latest lot of Xperia phones. They’re keeping the Xperia Mini brand from the hit X10, and the Mini Pro gets a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Both run Android 2.3/Gingerbread and get a new Facebook app.

EBay and its online payment unit, PayPal, on Thursday sued Google and two executives for stealing trade secrets related to mobile payment systems. The two executives, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, were formerly with PayPal and led the launch on Thursday of Google's own mobile payment system in partnership with MasterCard, Citigroup and phone company Sprint. The suit highlights the growing battle by a wide range of companies from traditional finance to Silicon Valley trying to take a major stake in what has been described as a US$1 trillion ($1.2 trillion) opportunity in mobile payments. The mobile phone is seen as the digital personal wallet of the future. The eBay suit said Bedier worked for nine years at PayPal, most recently serving as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. He joined Google on January 24 this year.

Computex trade show in Taipei.

“Investors want to know which tablet is better, which has the best price-performance, and when the non-iPad camp is going to get going,” said Angela Hsiang, an analyst at KGI Securities Co. in Taipei. “Previously, people couldn’t actually see the products. At Computex, we’ll be able to touch and use them.”

Global shipments of tablets will climb to 215 million units in 2015 from 17 million last year, Toni Sacconaghi, a New York- based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., wrote in a May 26 report. Fifteen percent of all tablets will cannibalize the sale of consumer PCs, reducing computer-sales growth by 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015, Sacconaghi wrote.

I was especially interested in commentary on the Chinese market by Robin Goad, Hitwise UK’s research director, who adds some sharp focus on the huge growth in micro-blogging in China – and the tool of choice isn’t Twitter: [...] Chinese Internet users are primarily interested in micro-blogging when it comes to social media.  Sina Micro blog (China’s alternative to Twitter) accounted for 1 in every 158 Internet visits in China for April 2011. This makes China one of the most voracious micro-blogging nations worldwide, with a greater market share of visits going to micro-blogging sites in China than in the UK, US, France, Canada, Australia or India. Twitter is by far the most dominant micro-blogging platform in the UK and US, but Twitter accounted for 1 in every 250 visits online in the UK and 1 in every 555 in the US during April 2011, much lower than Sina Micro’s dominance of the online market in China. What’s more, this data doesn’t take into account mobile or 3rd party applications, so the actual usage of micro-blogging in China is likely much higher than our statistics suggest. The metrics Robin posted underline the sheer scale of what’s happening in China in terms of connecting people. Add that info to other metrics such as Royal Pingdom’s The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000. It shows China as clearly the top country on the internet with 420 million users (compared to 22.5 million in 2000).

The internet of things with its unprecedented level of connectivity does not only catalyze the rise of “social” but also the rise of “smart.” And smart means complex. Increasingly, products and services are multi-functional, multi-layered, and connected to a broader ecosystem of services, serving as a platform for added-value applications. Companies, across industries, are beginning to develop smart solutions – from smart phones, smart energy, smart healthcare, smart housing, to smart mobility, and more. Smart ecosystems have emerged as the lynchpin of innovation – as the holy grail for user experiences that brands can truly own.

What if “connectedness” was a new modus operandi for brands and required them to be “smart brands”? By textbook definition, smart systems are self-organized systems with built-in feedback mechanisms and the ability to constantly reorganize themselves in order to adapt to their ever-changing environment. They are capable of describing and analyzing a situation, and taking decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner, thereby performing smart actions.

as Allison Fine, author of Social Change in the Connected World, puts it aptly: “It is counterintuitive but true; the more decision making we push away from the center, the more powerful our social networks become. That’s the power-to-the-edges concept.”

Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, writes in an editorial this month that while M2M communication has great potential, the "real value" for sensor technology lies in machine-to-object communication.

"On the other hand, a firm could put passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) transponders inside a container at various levels. Since the liquid would interfere with the ability to read the tags, a company could determine liquid levels by ascertaining which tags can and can not be read...you can't put a Wi-Fi transmitter or a cell phone on every box of Tide detergent, bag of Granny Smith apples or Van Heusen shirt. Low-cost RFID tags will, one day, be put on all of these things, enabling M2O communication."

Leading wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma detailed a similar vision to us in an interview earlier this year. (How 50 Billion Connected Devices Could Transform Brand Marketing & Everyday Life.) Sharma talked with us about cereal boxes with sensors inside them.

People Don't Care about PCs...the Buzz is All About Mobile To paint an image of the very large scale of the mobile ecosystem, Jacobs talked numbers: There are 1.3 billion 3G connections worldwide, and there will be 2 billion more connections by 2015. Mobile data use will increase 10 to 12 times over the next four years. There are over 120 HSPA+ mobile networks and 180 commercial EVDO networks offering mobile broadband. There are 200 LTE networks planned, 20 of which have launched now.

Mobile Unleashing the "Greatest Wave of Creativity in History" And what is that? Only that mobile is going to unleash the "greatest wave of creativity in history." Dr. Jacobs said he knew that sounded like a "heady" proposition, especially because many mobile developers are just trying to build an app people like, he says. "But your app could reach hundreds of millions of users!" Now is the time to "think and act globally," Jacobs said. "Mobile is now the dominant computing platform, and it's never going back."

Augmented Reality Demoed as Marketing Tool AR, or augmented reality, was also at the forefront of today's keynote, with a sobering presentation from John Batter, Co-President of Production, Dreamworks Animation SKG. He produced data showing the decline of DVD sales over the years.

As the electronic age puts physical bookstores and libraries under increasing threat, Local Books is a great example of how, by encouraging a resurgence of consumer interest at a local level, new technologies can be used to provide a shot in the arm for traditional outlets. Launched in January, it’s a free iPhone app that allows users to search an area for bookstores, libraries and literary events such as readings, book discussions and signings. Local Books is powered by LibraryThing Local—a crowdsourced database of 51,000 bookstores and libraries around the world. Users can search for these “venues” by name or by location. The details provided for venues include maps plus (when available) descriptions, photographs, links, and information about upcoming events at those establishments. Venues and events can be sorted by distance, name, type and date. At present Local Books does not show inventories from bookstores and libraries. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this feature available from them or from someone else in the near future. Could that be you? (Related: Online platform connecting booklovers.) Website: www.librarything.com/blog/2010/01/local-books-iphone-application.php

While the focus of this post is not specifically Apple or the iPad, it’s almost impossible to talk about successful mobile strategies without recognizing that the iPad has created a transitional moment for the Learning & Development world. The reasons why have been the subject of countless blog posts, but I think DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, in this video from TechCrunch, says it best:

“[The iPad] it’s the first device that actually is a reflection of me – or us. It’s so revolutionary that it’s no longer about me adapting myself to somebody else’s set of programmings or the way in which a device is going to engage. It is the reverse. It is as though I’m looking in a mirror.”

While it took the iPad to make learner-controlled content a reality, this level of flexibility is now the gold standard for delivery to any device, be it tablets, smart phones or any number of performance support devices.

The latest wave of social networks document, photograph and broadcast your every move, opening an unprecedented opportunity for small businesses and big brands alike to target consumers based on their whereabouts and activities.Local Response wants to help businesses collect and respond to their customers’ public posts. The platform scans Twitter for explicit checkins to locations, like on Foursquare, as well as natural language that indicates location (ex. “I’m going to…”), and responds with Twitter @mentions on behalf of businesses. Messages most often include a coupon or offer in a bit.ly link.In other words, when customers check into a store on Foursquare, the store can send them a coupon while they are there. If customers tweet a photo through Instragram from a competing store, they might get the same coupon.

A few weeks ago, iPhone users were outraged to discover that their iPhones were tracking their every move, storing the information (in an unencrypted file, no less), and sending the data directly to Apple when synced with iTunes. Even more shocking was the news that iPhones do this even when they do not have location-based services enabled. Users concerned about their privacy were left vulnerable, with nothing they could do about it while they waited for Apple to offer a patch.

Naturally, Ashley Madison's specialty is guaranteeing privacy and anonymity for its customers (well, that and "an affair to remember!"). Users choose whom they share their photos with. Conversations on the site are password-protected. When users delete their accounts, also deleted is all evidence that they were ever members of the site. All messages and correspondence, photos, and personal data -- gone.

Ashley Madison is an online dating service owned and operated by Toronto-based Avid Life Media Inc. Nearly ten years old, Ashley Madison claims to be the world's largest dating site, with nearly 9.3 million members. What truly distinguishes Ashley Madison from its competitors, however, is its target demographic: married people.

The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These  other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions."  But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.

When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database.  If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."

Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service.  With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.

"Throughout the past few years, Google's newspaper-scanning project has digitized more than 60 million pages from newspapers spanning 250 years, including such gems as the moon landing. But according to the Boston Phoenix, this ambitious effort is slated to soon be axed in favor of Google One Pass, a platform for publishers to monetize content from their own sites."

When choosing from over one million mobile apps across multiple platforms, which ones are really worth it? What about Web-based applications that aren’t apps but are highly effective when used on your mobile device? Well, there isn’t an app that can figure out which apps are right for you but there is a non-app alternative—humans—that can do that.

Here are three business-related apps that every small business owner should consider trying. PayPal PayPal offers small business owners the ability to sell goods and services, send payments, receive payments and transfer money securely.

Quickoffice It can be very annoying when you are on the road and someone sends a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet for you to review. You click the download link on your phone only to realize that you can’t open the attachment.