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Any other organization can join them in asking for partners to design a new way of offering accreditation to their own organization.

Individuals can earn badges from multiple organizations, some certifying human skills such as collaboration or even helpfulness, that mean as much to future employers as skills and experience and credentials from traditional institutions.   And an individual can choose to reveal or not reveal an e-portfolio.  YOU own your portfolio.

Some might be games---but most will have nothing to do with games

Linking the data together is proving to be one of the sticking points for the Internet of things, according to Maurizio Pilu, lead technologist at the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB). The TSB recently held an over-subscribed workshop to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing the ‘Internet of things’. “The feeling was that applications and services that could make money, and that could change our lives, are not emerging fast enough,” explains Pilu. “And one of the main reasons is that data produced by ‘things’ is not interoperable, due to the fragmentation of the industry.”

Maurizio Pilu believes the UK has three strong advantages when it comes to the Internet of things. “We have world-class communications technology research base; we are strong at data analytics; and we are an early adopter of technologies like this,” he says.

“But there is one big disadvantage,” he says. “This stuff costs money, and like other countries, the UK is going through a period of cautious investment decisions.”

Both of these hacks were fully fledged platforms, another great project was more of a utility. ScanCampaign allows users to generate their own QR codes, which the author hoped could be used for donations to charity or for campaigns such as UK Uncut – to quickly share information.

Taking disparate data sources and giving them a unified view is tricky: do the data sets match? can you link the concepts contained? and so on. These guys did a great job doing those things and provided plenty of hooks for further thought.

Google today launched a “limited field trial” of the long-in-the-works social initiatives it is now calling the Google+ project. Google has been rolling out lots of little social products, but this is the first time it has bundled them into a sort of unified vision. The new features are: Circles, a product that helps you segment friends, family, coworkers and other people into different groups; Sparks, a personalized recommendation service; Hangouts, a video chat product; and Huddle, a group chat application.

Currently NFC is seen as one of the most exciting areas in our industry in terms of revenue generation: projections show up to 700 million NFC-enabled mobile phones will be sold by 2013, according to Jupiter Research. At Nokia, however, we would argue that the industry's current focus on secure NFC may be at the expense of realizing the potential of open NFC. As pioneers in NFC technology, and as a founder of the NFC Forum, Nokia believes that open NFC will have a far greater impact on consumer behavior and the NFC ecosystem than secure NFC will. Open NFC has the potential to spur a vast number of business opportunities for developers, retailers, advertisers, electronics manufacturers and others.

NFC tags, which cost only a few cents, offer huge potential for advertisers, retailers and others to reach, reward and stay in touch with their customers. These tags can be promoted at any location, including a phone retail point, a coffee shop, or even at the local supermarket, with immediate and measurable results.

Open NFC will benefit consumers on a much larger scale and get people familiar with using their device for NFC interactions, before secure NFC reaches a high level of penetration. As more and more NFC phones come to the market in 2011 and 2012, open NFC will change the way consumers interact with each other and open up a host of opportunities for developers both large and small.

Not long ago, we reported on a prototype thin, flexible smartphone known as the Paperphone. While it isn't actually made out of paper, the success of a research project at North Carolina State University indicates that phones in the future could be. Scientists there have been able to deposit conductive nanocoatings onto textiles, meaning that items such as pieces of paper or clothing could ultimately be used as electronic devices.

smart fabrics.

"Research like this has potential health and monitoring applications since we could potentially create a uniform with cloth sensors embedded in the actual material that could track heart rate, body temperature, movement and more in real time," said Dr. Jesse Jur, NCSU assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science, and lead author of a paper on the technology. "To do this now, you would need to stick a bunch of wires throughout the fabric - which would make it bulky and uncomfortable."

The cool kids of today - yes, the same kids who will be voting in the 2012 election - don't want to talk about infrastructure. Instead, they want to talk about mobile devices, crowdsourcing real-time data and collaborating via high-tech RFID sensors. They don't want to think about massive government expenditures and cheap bank loans for new construction projects. They think about cool ways for The Internet of Things to empower everyday citizens.

NEC has launched a wearable computer, the NEC TeleScouter, intended to allow fieldworkers to consult a virtual 16-inch transparent display projected in front of them while they go about their business. Consisting of a Brother AirScouter wearable display and a compact 500MHz ARM-based computer packing WiFi a/b/g and Bluetooth, the system currently targets industrial augmented reality (AR) applications, but NEC sees the future being far broader.

In fact, the target is AR that can remind you of the identity of acquaintances when you bump into them at parties, pull up information on products you’ve bought but haven’t kept the user guide to hand, and other more personal applications. NEC is also working on the potential input and control methods, such as sensors which would allow you to tap your arm in different ways to trigger functionality.

By providing an open platform for the creation of augmented-reality layers, these apps have democratised the AR industry - and made possible flights of fancy such as Unseen Sculptures, in which new-media artist Warren Armstrong and nearly two dozen others collaborated to populate central Melbourne and Sydney with a range of virtual artworks that "appeared" when smartphones running the Layar app were pointed at particular parts of the city."I'm fascinated by mobile devices and their ubiquity," says Armstrong, who has spearheaded the project's expansion - including planned engagements with the Sydney Fringe Festival, Cairns Festival and other projects. "It's very immersive: you can go to a location, put on headphones and do amazing things with sounds. Layar takes care of the fiddly back-end stuff for people who aren't au fait with PHP or MySQL programming. The whole thing is in its infancy, and there's a lot of scope for creating new things."

A new Kinect hack places virtual objects anywhere in the real world and lets you interact with them as if they were actually there.Most Kinect hacks just use a single version of the sensor, but a team at Microsoft Research has used four ceiling-mounted Kinects to map an entire room and the objects inside it in full 3D. A handheld projector acts as a flashlight that lets you peer into this virtual version of the world to reveal hidden images or draw in 3D space.This close link between the real and virtual world allows for some impressive interactions, such as creating virtual copies of real objects or generating a stream of virtual particles on a desk and watching them roll inside a real-life drawer.The project is unlikely to become a commercial product any time soon, but it's easy to imagine how a more polished version could lead to a holodeck-like environment in the comfort of your own living room.

In late 2008, news broke that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz was leaving the company to launch a new startup of his own, joined by early Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. It was a move that led to plenty of raised eyebrows — Facebook’s growth was (and still is) explosive, and there were clearly lots of exciting things going on at the company.

The duo later revealed that they were working on a productivity app called Asana, raising a total of $10.2 million to fund the company. And yesterday, after two years in production and lengthy beta testing, the site held its public launch (you can find our full rundown on the launch right here).