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When we spoke to Jiepang CEO and co-founder David Liu back in June, he told us that a second-round of in-the-field NFC trials was coming, and now we see what Jiepang and Nokia were cooking up. Impressively, Nokia has even released three new NFC-capable handsets to coincide with this – the Nokia 600, 700, and 701 (pictured above) – which would all work perfectly with Jiepang’s newest NFC poster check-ins. The three Symbian-Belle powered smartphones are aimed at developing countries where customers are looking for an affordable but powerful device. The 701 model will sell for 290 Euros (2,700 RMB), which puts it at about the same price as new Android-powered phones from HTC, such as the Desire.

Jiepang’s NFC posters – just put your phone up against one for an automatic, smart check-in – will appear in six cities across Greater China: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Hong Kong and Taipei. Actually, any NFC-equipped phone could make use of them, such as the Samsung Nexus S.

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.

To enable NFC-powered check-ins, establishments need to display a sign or poster containing an NFC tag that points to their venue's Foursquare listing URL. Nokia's developer blog has some resources on getting started with NFC tags. Signs like this not only enable people to check-in with less effort, but can also provide a visual, real-world call to action. For non-power users of location services like Foursquare, it can be pretty easy to simply forget to check in to a restaurant or other local business. Having that sign hanging there can provide a mental trigger. Business owners can also use the opportunity to push promotions and deals, offering discounts or free products to the mayor or anybody else that checks in. Admittedly, the average person has no idea what NFC is right now. But it's almost universally predicted to reach mainstream adoption within a few years, quite possibly replacing our wallets and keys at some point in the future. NFC is already included on a number of Android-powered handsets and is rumored to be coming to the iPhone 5 next year.

Near-field communication (NFC) has been trashed by critics, who say it adds no value to consumers or is a technology in search of a need. But as we’ve pointed out, NFC is just a technology that can applied in a lot of different ways, apart from the digital wallet framework through which many people understand it.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more interesting projects and applications being built that show how NFC will be deployed outside of mobile payment situations. This not only indicates how flexible the technology is but also could help propel the overall technology in adoption, as consumers become aware of NFC and learn to use it for a variety of reasons.

Right now, NFC is still below the radar for most U.S. consumers, and the slow roll out of Google Wallet or the pending launch of Isis next year are, by themselves, only going to accelerate NFC adoption by so much. But having a host of uses for the technology could open people’s eyes and push them past any usability or safety concerns.

How do you compete with Google's new Wallet mobile payment system? Well, a $100 million cash infusion certainly couldn't hurt. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have plans to invest just that amount in Isis, sources told Businessweek. That sum is likely to grow, since taking on Google is no small feat, especially considering Wallet is already off the ground, with nationwide retail partners and support for MasterCard PayPass. Though Isis first made its debut last year, Google Wallet, which was announced in May, has clearly taken the lead. Isis is little more than a top-level website at this point, though with three of the nation's largest carriers providing support, it could have a chance to catch up -- especially if the carriers elect not to partner with Google, leaving Sprint as the sole wireless provider. We're glad to see some potential healthy competition for Wallet, especially considering that it was looking like Google was poised to create a monopoly. We expect much more to come on the Isis front, but in the meantime, hold on to those wallets -- cell phone payments may be in your future, but for now, paper and plastic are where it's at.

Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

Location Media Microsoft Mobile Sessions Shareables Social Media Twitter Video Editions Africa Asia Australia Canada Europe India Latin America Middle East UK United States Languages France Nederland Polska Portugal Romania Russia Google Offers is now live in Brooklyn: Starting with $4 for SHARKS! 9th November 2011 by Courtney Boyd Myers Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

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.

It’s Your Problem, So What Are You Going To Do About It” 3 Ways to Communicate More Effectively With Your TeamThe Four Powerful Keys to Virtual Team Success Creating virtual teams is not challenge-free. Why? Imagine trying to communicate effectively with people you have never met and whose personalities you are not familiar with. If this hurdle is not overcome, establishing successful virtual teams can be extremely frustrating.

The Secret to Being an Effective Virtual Team How do you foster communication and collaboration when project members are geographically dispersed? An effective starting point is the creation of a team operating agreement. Virtual Teams Generate Real Sales: How To Save Money And Generate Revenue Without Leaving Your ChairBusiness Continuity in a Crisis Environment Is your business capable of surviving a crisis situation? Will you be able to manage your staff for an effective return to “business as usual”? With some foresight and careful planning, the worst storm can be weathered. “Virtual teams” offer a compelling way to offset potential risks.

Read more at www.virtualteambuilders.com

Use your meetings for decision making and exchange of ideas rather than routine updates. Instead, email or post the updates ahead of time so people can read through them prior to the meetingMeetings should be no longer than 90 minutes.  If meetings are longer than 90 minutes offer your team members a 10 minute breakBe realistic about how many agenda items can be covered in a meetingAt the end of each meeting discuss what worked, what did not work, what could be improvedIf possible, rotate roles-scribe, timekeeper and facilitatorHave multiple presenters. The change of voice and pitch can help keep people engagedAgree to start and end on timeRead more at virtualteambuilders.wordpress.com

We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals.Getting people to the content they want to see, using the search functionality your average newspaper website has on offer, is not exactly what I’d describe as fast or effortless. Full-text search can be a daunting experience. We need some sort of a sitemap that acts as a gateway to our content and is broader than our primary navigation.We need deep links to the topics that are currently on people’s mind and that are being talked about.How neat would it be if we could also browse by mood or by genre?We need quick links to topic pages about related persons, organizations, events and locations.We need links to terms on Wikipedia (e.g. using Apture) or the ability to look things up in a dictionary (like the one they have over at the New York Times)Related content should be referred to either using tags or if you’re really hip, using relationships. Search behavior doesn’t always revolve around a big input box and a submit button.Faceted search needs facets: ways of splitting up search results into meaningful categories. Rich metadata and a well thought-out categorization scheme is a prequisite.Online search should work similarly to asking a question to a flesh-and-blood reporter

appending real-world purchase information to its treasure trove of online behavioral data will vastly increase the value of customers’ profiles and increase the rates Google (NSDQ: GOOG) can charge its advertisers. It will be a way for Google to increase its local presence. NFC (near-field communications) is too often equated simply with payments, but Google understands that NFC tags have broad application (working like Quick Response [QR] and other 2D barcodes do today). Google can help retailers use NFC tags for in-store promotions and check-ins, augmenting the understanding of customer behavior for ad targeting.

Numerous players—from Internet pure players to operators and retailers—are embracing the mobile/social/local combo. Unifying the online and offline worlds via mobile will create long-term market disruption. There are plenty of new opportunities opening up if you center your approach around the notion of context, trying to invent new product and services that will tie together places, brands, and consumers. Think about mobile augmented reality. At the end of the day, it is all about facilitating the discovery and understanding of information around you.

Who cares about ancient history? If you're a gamer you should, because it's happening again. This time, though, its console gamers lobbing the same lamentations at Angry Bird players, Words With Friends addicts, and ever-sneaky Fruit Ninjas. As smartphones and tablets get more powerful, the dedicated gaming machine looks more and more quaint. Where once software supported hardware in one big, happy family, it's all becoming rather more... disjointed. For a gamer like me, that's a little troubling. If app gaming does for consoles what those consoles did to the PC scene a decade ago, a lot of big game studios are going to be in trouble, and a lot of gamers are going to be pining for the good 'ol days.

It's hard to tell at what point mobile gaming became a serious threat to the console scene, but surely nobody at Nintendo lost any sleep when Snake crawled its way into the hearts of many a Nokia user back in the late '90s. Then, just a few years later, Steve Jobs started comparing iPod sales to those of dedicated gaming machines. I initially thought the very notion was preposterous; that an iPod didn't hold a candle to the DS and PSP I took with me on every flight. In the ensuing months, however, I've changed my tune.

In recent years we haven't exactly seen a lot of innovation on the console gaming front. Sure, there was a giant rush to jump on the motion gaming bandwagon -- Microsoft with the Kinect and Sony with the Move, even Nintendo sauntering back in with the MotionPlus -- but none of those technologies have delivered the new gameplay experiences that even grizzled veterans like myself secretly hoped they might. Nor have they succeeded in whetting my appetite for something truly new. As someone whose youth was punctuated by a three-year console cycle, booting up the same 'ol hardware almost six years later feels wrong.

Too much trouble The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to your phone, is that they are just becoming too much trouble to organize and maintain. It's just not realistic to have an app for every store you go to, every product you own and every website you visit. This creates an ever increasing set that must be curated, organized and culled. It's a common task we all perform, removing old and unused apps every few months, effectively garbage collecting our phones. Very organized folks relish the opportunity to tidy their burgeoning app menagerie but most can't bother and their home pages scroll into a receding haze of choices.

Movie posters with radio tags such as RFID or NFC will allow me to get an interactive version of the poster on my phone to show me more information 

Any consumer item, such as ketchup or milk bottles, also with radio tags, will allow me to not only get more information on these items just like the poster, but also track usage and even offer to purchase replacement items

Mobile users with NFC-enabled devices will no longer need a special application in order to exchange contact details or other types of data between their phones thanks to a new NFC specification which has just been released.

a standardization of the Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol (SNEP) to use peer-to-peer mode for data exchanges.

the new specification extends the NFC data exchange format (NDEF), which previously described how data, like a website URL for instance, would be moved from an NFC tag to a NFC-enabled phone by tapping or waving a mobile device within close proximity to the tag.

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.

Forget consoles and PCs -- mobile gaming is prepped to be the number one gaming platform for the next decade, according to Glitch developer Tiny Speck. Vice President of Product and Operations Kakul Srivastava says we're already seeing it everywhere: "It is what is happening right now. I think the killer console is going to be your mobile device. That is absolutely where people will play more rich and involving, and even graphically intensive games."

With the newest editions of smartphones outpacing their predecessors and coming out much faster than the next console generation, Srivastava thinks it's not surprising that mobile gaming has momentum in the industry. "That pace of change is why mobile devices are going to be the console of the future. The way player interaction and player needs are changing, it's much faster than the five to seven years [of console development] that we're talking about," she said.

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.