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P Diddy has announced its first-ever location-based service but can also be used as an simple desktop chat system.Once registered, it gives a location marking for each user showing their geographic region and location (within a 10-mile radius) and provides a map to help identify fellow chatterers nearby.  The fledgling provider, based out of New York, says it is gaining 50,000 new users a day and is "second only to Skype for live-streaming web chat." Currently, it boasts 8 million daily users and is growing at a rate of 700 per cent y-o-y, since its foundation in 2009. However, this pales into comparison to VoIP darling Skype, which has around 145 million monthly users on average and another 400m registered. Nonetheless, it seems the market is ripe for other online chat providers. The new location service will also respect user anonymity, it insists, and users can opt in or out, to build a private or public chat group, or join live interactive online community. As part of its update, the chat site has developed widget versions of the service are available as well for use with all the leading web browsers, including: Firefox, IE, Google Chrome and Safari. Although it doesn't require any downloads to use, it does require Flash.

The Installer writes with news of yesterday's stock offering from LinkedIn, which shocked investors by closing at more than double the initial price. "Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper. The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares." That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue, leading to speculation that this is either evidence of the second dotcom bubble (a possibility we discussed in February) or a "watershed moment for social media." Many experts are questioning the value of LinkedIn, while others are claiming intentional market manipulation.

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.”

Third-party apps are the weakest link in user privacy on smart phones. They often get access to large quantities of user data, and there are few rules covering how they must handle that data once they have it. Worse yet, few third-party apps have a privacy policy telling users what they intend to do. That was the message delivered at a hearing of the U.S. Senate committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held yesterday. Companies and regulators are struggling to find ways to ensure that user data is handled properly by apps installed on smart phones, but the way apps are designed makes this difficult.

This week, Facebook joined Google and Apple on the hot seat. But all three companies run platforms that support thousands of third-party developers, and how to make sure those apps respect users' privacy, and explain their rules, is a major question. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas) said at the hearing, "It's not clear that Americans understand how their information may be shared or transferred."

Twitter is updating its authentication system to give users more control over how third-party applications can access their accounts. Applications will now have to explicitly request additional permission from the user during the authentication process in order to send and receive direct messages on behalf of the user. At first glance, the change seems like a welcome improvement to the Twitter APIs. Support for granular permission tiers is one of the technical advantages of authority delegation systems like OAuth

Twitter's approach to implementing the feature comes with some serious problems for third-party client implementors

The OAuth standard was originally intended to enable server-to-server authentication for limited third-party access to non-public APIs. It is poorly suited for open APIs with an arbitrary number of independent third-party applications. More significantly, it doesn't address the needs of desktop and mobile authentication at all. Despite the significant limitations of the standard, it is being adopted and mandated by a number of social networking services, including Twitter.

"Facebook has done well with the Friendster patents and patent applications that it acquired. Just last week, a patent application for passing personal info between users based on degrees of separation became public. Now, thanks to the Friendster IP purchase, Facebook pretty much owns the technology for publicly identity-tagging digital media of any sort in a database."

Faster, denser and cheaper hardware is enabling users to create and store incredibly more data than has ever been possible.  Currently, the amount of business data is doubling every 1.2 years.  As of 2010, global enterprises in total stored more than 7 exabytes of business data.  A McKinsey report (McKinsey Global Institute) identifies all this data as being at the source of another upcoming wave of change.

Big Data Analytics (BDA) could positively transform our lives.  When applied to applying collected shopper information, big data would give retailers the potential to increase their operating margins by more than 60 percent says the McKinsey report.  When BDA is applied to health care information, the quality of health care could dramatically improve, efficiencies in the health care delivery system would increase, and health care costs could drop as much as 8 percent, creating as much as $300 billion in value annually.

The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, together with the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.  Data have now reached every sector in the economy.”

"With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers."

Earth is expected to be home to over nine billion people by 2050. That’s a lot of people for Mother Nature to manage.

Space issues aside, the biggest concern on an over-populated planet is whether or not there will be enough resources to go around. Last week, British investor and Co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO) Jeremy Grantham offered what Business Insider called a “startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.”

the purpose of this piece isn’t to tread well-worn ground about the planet’s perils. So forget about fossil fuels, drinking water, crops, ice-caps, trees and animals for now. What we’ll be looking at is all those elements that go into helping you do what you’re doing right now. Whether you’re reading this on your laptop, smartphone, tablet…or any other digital device, the natural environment has had a huge part to play in this experience.

What will it take for mobile augmented reality to become mainstream? Big brands are starting to experiment with AR features in their own apps and partnerships with startups such as Layar, Wikitude and Metaio, but there was a strong sense at yesterday's AR Summit conference in London that much work remains to be done to take the technology beyond early adopters."One of the worst things about this industry is the name," said Nick Brown, chief executive of AR technology provider Crossplatform. "Augmented reality? What does that mean to the public?"Layar's AR strategist King Yiu Chu suggested that the key may be a shift in the way people think about AR. "Augmented reality is not a technology: it's part of everyday life," he said. "It will be embedded in televisions, cars ... everything that has to do with vision. You don't want to be aware of that, you just want to experience."

the Internet of Things will allow physical objects to transmit data about themselves and their surroundings, bringing more information about the real world into the online realm. Imagine getting precise, live traffic data from all the local roads; trains that tell your smartphone that they’re full before they arrive; flowers that email you when they need watering; maybe even implants in your body that give you real-time updates about your health that feed into a secure online ‘locker’ of your personal data. All this and more is possible with the Internet of Things, helping to transform what we expect from the Web and the Internet.

“You know,” said a good friend of mine last week, “there’s really no such thing as big data.” I sighed a bit inside. In the past few years, cloud computing critics have said similar things: that clouds are nothing new, that they’re just mainframes, that they’re just painting old technologies with a cloud brush to help sales. I’m wary of this sort of techno-Luddism. But this person is sharp, and not usually prone to verbal linkbait, so I dug deeper.

And this was his point about big data: that given how much traditional companies put it to work, it might as well not exist. Companies have countless ways they might use the treasure troves of data they have on us. Yet all of this data lies buried, sitting in silos. It seldom sees the light of day.

Small, agile startups disrupt entire industries because they look at traditional problems with a new perspective. They’re fearless, because they have less to lose. But big, entrenched incumbents should still be able to compete, because they have massive amounts of data about their customers, their products, their employees, and their competitors. They fail because often they just don’t know how to ask the right questions.

Joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC (Internet Relay Channel)-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream from Twitter.

you’re trying to engage in a conversation with someone on Twitter that goes beyond a few “@ replies”, you’re either forced to DM or take the conversation elsewhere. Joint allows users to easily join a group chat, as well as discuss notable or popular hashtags. For instance, of late “#irene” has become a much-used hashtag, as Hurricane Irene is poised to hit the East Coast. Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location.

because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about having public conversations (about more private issues, especially) on Twitter.

Cities are experimenting with releasing more public data, engaging with citizens on social networks, adopting open source software, and finding ways to use new technologies to work with their citizens. They've been doing it through the depth of the Great Recession, amidst aging infrastructure, spiraling costs and flat or falling budgets. In that context, using technology and the Internet to make government work better and cities smarter is no longer a "nice to have" ... it's become a must-have.

That's the kind of "citizensourcing" smarter government that Tolva is looking to tap into in Chicago.

"This is as much about citizens talking to the infrastructure of the city as infrastructure talking to itself," he said. "It's where urban informatics and smarter cities cross over to Gov 2.0. There are efficiencies to be gained by having both approaches. You get the best of both worlds by getting an Internet of things to grow."

Earlier this year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) classified radiation emitted by mobile phones as a possible cancer risk, with a similar threat to lead and the banned pesticide DDT. And the European Commission also issued a warning saying that individuals should be protected from low-frequency radiation emitted by cell phones, masts and Wi-Fi systems.

Mr Stein, the chief group executive of Samworth Brothers

began suffering the effects of low-frequency radiation six years ago when he experienced pain when using his mobile phone. “I began getting weird sensations in my ear if I went near a computer or TV, any electrical equipment with a microchip” he said. “I took the view that I was a freak and kept quiet, but it was difficult because I couldn’t drive a modern car with computers on board.” Mr Stein’s research eventually led him to the diagnosis that he is electro-sensitive, a condition he shares with several thousand people in the UK. Electro sensitivity is caused by the thousands of magnetic fields that surround us, from mobile and cordless phones to other wireless devices, including car sat-nav kits. The symptoms include sleep problems, headaches, tinnitus and earache, chest pains, loss of memory, poor concentration and depression.

“Wireless sensor networks are the enabling technology for key applications in defense, health care, home and industrial automation and energy management. Technology leaders have recognized this fact and are providing high end application solutions for their customers based on advanced WSN technology. The Millennial Net Energy Management System which includes LEM energy sub meters, wireless pneumatic thermostats and numerous other devices allow for monitoring and control of commercial, public and light industrial buildings of several hundred thousand square feet with unprecedented scalability and reliability, leading to substantial energy savings and ROIs of around 1 year,” said Dieter Schill, President and CEO of Millennial Net.

This gateway connects the networked devices to existing Building Management System via BACnet or communicates with hosted internet-based application for monitoring and control. The devices are designed to work with legacy HVAC systems, fixtures, and appliances, making it unnecessary to upgrade HVAC equipment to save energy. Energy savings are achieved by improved compliance and energy policy enforcement.

David McCullough has connected up into Pachube’s public platform, to share, store and visualise weather sensor data, using the Opengear ACM5000 smart device server

The Opengear ACM5000’s Linux system under the hood made integrating Pachube API support quick and easy using the free Opengear Custom Development Kit. The ACM5000’s legacy as an industrial-grade, rugged device that is proven and reliable in harsh environments, and wide array of network and data ports, make it an ideal solution to provide network connectivity and data telemetry for things such as weather stations.

Pachube is a global data brokerage platform for the Internet of Things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals, organisations and companies around the world. By sharing data feeds from and between physical Things, such as environmental sensors, smart meters, building management and process control systems, Pachube provides a globally distributed data ecosystem and application development platform.

canning that mysterious QR code sticker that someone stuck on the wall in a tame but oh-so-technophilic act of modern vandalism.

Instead, the nasties are using QR codes to lure people into downloading Android malware. While some users are likely to assume that QR codes are unique to the Android market and thus be comfortable scanning them, these codes actually take you to an Android install package hosted on some third-party server. The QR code itself isn’t bad — but the link it’s obfuscating is.

Once downloaded, the dirty app (which, in the most recent case, was a hacked version of the Russian ICQ client, Jimm) begins firing off text messages to a premium number. Each text it sends (without your knowledge) sets you back around $5+. You can find an outline of the method by Kaspersky Labs here.

LocalResponse, a new startup in the social media mobile ad space, is using semantic analysis to capitalize on real-time social data: “LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round… Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.”

As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.