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Nielsen reports a 39-percent Android platform market share across the major smartphone manufacturers, while Apple’s iPhone operating system claims a 28 percent stake.

A new app storefront forecast by Strategy Analytics says the app economy is strong and getting stronger. Paid downloads are expected to drive nearly $2 billion per quarter by the end of 2012. They predict the Android Market will overtake the Apple App Store in quarterly volume by the end of 2012. Android will be helped with additional assistance from third party distribution outlets such as the Amazon App Store, GetJar, Nook App Store and others.

Here are the 'Nine Commandments' of ROWE:

We do not post office hours or core hours. Our employees know where to be when they need to be there. We don't dictate it. Everybody has complete control over how they spend their time. All the time.

We do not track time for our exempt/salaried workforce. We track work getting done.

I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.

The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing.  eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The  rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.

Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity: - Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide. - Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide. - Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world. Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for  information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.

In an interview, David Messenger, American Express’s head of online and mobile, tells me they have identified a major pain point among teens and others who are still using cash and checks to conduct a majority of their transactions.

The conversation got heated when a woman raised her hand to say she didn’t understand why she would ever adopt mobile payments: Seriously, how could a phone be easier than swiping a card?

He said the benefits are obvious when splitting a check at a restaurant, divvying up rent and utilities among five roommates every month, or being the person who fronts the money to buy tickets to a concert for a group of 10. Those transactions today are largely conducted with cash and checks.

Speaking at a press briefing here Tuesday, Bidaud pointed out such mobile strategies would also provide "contextual and social user experience", which he described as "enriched reality" in which information would be meshed with the real world. For example, location-aware apps that could inform users which bus stop they were at and the arrival times of buses that stopped there, he said.

viewpoint, the Gartner analyst said the Internet of things, also known as machine-to-machine communications, was an arena in which there were "lots happening". Defining it as having a network-connected device sending information back to the network, he predicted that beyond smart utility grids, the technology would be used by consumers to share community-specific information such as a weight-watchers group, for instance.

"Restrictions could be in requiring social networking sites and Web companies to host their data centers locally, as well as having a tighter compliance environment for shared data," Sengar suggested, noting that this could stifle the growth of social CRM uptake in Singapore.

Can the UK overcome sector fragmentation to build an ‘Internet of things’ industry? The European Commission recently approved a plan to encourage farmers to use electronic tagging to identify cattle. This, regulators believe, will help make rearing cattle more efficient, cut fraud, and help stem the spread of diseases.

revealing new patterns of interconnectedness in the physical world.

A broad term (even by the standards of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘big data’), it was first coined by British-born MIT researcher Kevin Ashton in 1999. Its approximate meaning today is a system for integrating the data produced by devices such as RFID tags or sensors in order to monitor, measure, manage and enhance physical objects.

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.”

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has unveiled Kaching, a mobile phone application and case capable of conducting NFC-based, e-mail P2P, and Facebook payments from a single handheld device.

Depending on the format selected for payment, the transaction will either take place instantly, or generate a unique code for delivery to the recipient, allowing them to access their payment online at a convenient time.

David Lindberg, executive general manager cards, payments and retail strategy says: "The recent explosion in uptake of digital and smartphone technology has revolutionised how we all transact, interact and communicate with each other, and this new application will make the dream of mobile payments a reality."

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

What do smartphones, tablets, and self-service business information tools have in common? All three are on high-growth trajectories for enterprise adoption. In a new report issued last week by Forrester Research called called TechRadar For Enterprise Architecture Professionals: Technologies For Empowered Employees, Q4 2011, it shows how these and others have taken over the enterprise. It is the classic IT problem. As Gene Leganza writes in the introduction, "Mobile, social, video, and cloud technologies give individuals tremendous access to information and resources. Employees can become the best source of innovation and the breakthrough ideas that CxOs are hungry for. But as employees become empowered, central IT begins losing control of the technology strategy."

Here is where Project Spartan may come in. Project Spartan is the unofficial name given to Facebook’s mobile HTML5 efforts. “I am not sure what Project Spartan was,” demurs Taylor before proceeding to explain how the mobile web it fits into Facebook’s overall mobile strategy. Facebook wants to be available everywhere on any device. If that means native mobile apps, that’s fine. But if someone doesn’t have a Facebook mobile app on their device, there will always be a mobile web version as well.

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.