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Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile are planning to invest more than $100 million to take on Google with Isis, the companies’ mobile payment project, according to a report.

Isis, which the three carriers announced last November, is a mobile payment system that uses near-field communication. The three companies hope that it will be a viable competitor to Google Wallet, a NFC solution from the search engine giant that is rolling out in the market this year.

According to Bloomberg, the three carriers have earmarked $100 million for the venture. Previously, no funding had been announced.

Come November, the world's second largest mass transit company will let its riders pay for trips by waving their cell phones at the terminal. The Deutsche Bahn, Germany's main railway operator, began implementing its Touch&Travel mobile payments system in 2008 and expects it to be ready within two months.

The system will rely on near field communications (NFC) chips contained in customers' mobile phones to handle the payment transactions for each trip. Alternatively, riders can pay with their phones by scanning a QR code at the beginning and end point of their ride.

Touch&Travel mobile apps are available for iPhone and Android-based smart phones. "In addition to using NFC or barcodes to provide location information, smartphone apps can use GPS or the user can type in a location ID number," writes NFC World. Riders will be billed for their transit usage at the end of each month.

Back in 2007, the Chief Executive of Visa Europe claimed that we could all be living in a cashless society by 2012. With that milestone fast approaching, it’s safe to assume that notes/bills and coins won’t be going the way of the dodo that quickly, but a new forecast has emerged from another giant from the finance world.

PayPal has produced a new report which will be released shortly – Money: The Digital Tipping Point – in which it predicts not only that consumers won’t need cash to go shopping, but they won’t need a wallet at all. And when can we expect this vision to be realized? 2016, it seems.

We’ve written quite extensively about mobile payment technology in recent times. Back in September we spoke with Ben Milne, founder of peer-to-peer Web and mobile payment platform Dwolla, who discussed the future of m-commerce. And prior to that, The Next Web’s Brad McCarty looked at how NFC will get its piece of the $4 quadrillion payments pie. There’s little question mobile payments will play a big part in the future of commerce. But will it completely outmanoeuvre paper, coins AND plastic by 2016?

This weekend in Amsterdam you may see a whole bunch of people waving their smartphones around at once. It’s the first social net/augmented reality flashmob, aka a fabulous way to combine three novel Net memes into one event.“Every square in every major city in the world knows the ‘human statue’ phenomenon,” he notes, so the intention of this weekend’s performance art is to take the human statue game totally into the digital world.have a smartphone that’ll run Layar (i.e. one with GPS).activate Layar, wave your smartphone in the air and ogle whatever strange and wonderful digital statue installations Veenhof’s chosen to populate the augmented space over Dam Square with. There’s a rumor that the Beatles will be showing up in pixel form, to recreate their famous Abbey Road pose.Is this the start of a new trend? You betcha. Flashmobs are still a popular affair, and AR is a tech that’s on the point of exploding into the mainstream public consciousness.

The Internet Has Been a Force for Good” No. In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village. Writing in 1994, a group of digital aficionados led by Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler published a manifesto modestly subtitled “A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” that promised the rise of  “‘electronic neighborhoods’ bound together not by geography but by shared interests.” Nicholas Negroponte, then the famed head of the MIT MediaLab, dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace. Read more at www.foreignpolicy.com

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

1. You don’t have to jump immediately into hiring a social media expert.

2. You don’t have to spend on high-tech gadgets.

3. To help you maximize your allotted time for social media marketing, don’t spread yourself too thin.

The series of events will be launching in Paris, Brussels, Madrid, London, Milan and Berlin on the 18th of May, the aim of this high-tech outdoor treasure hunt is to encourage people to rediscover the environmental treasures hidden in these great cities by harnessing every day technology in their search for geocaches, rewards and fun. For all those taking part the rewards are multiple: besides the satisfaction of discovering beautiful outdoor locations, the geocaches, the give-aways and the joy of adventure, Timberland is offering a hiking trip to Iceland

Adding realism to AR by using real world surrounding information (HDRs panoramas, IBLs) is a thing we all want to have sooner than later! We have seen a cool demo of Suomi’s VTT on this, where they fake the surrounding information using the background and scanning a ping pong ball for lighting information. Now we have another candidate porting a similar approach to our beloved mobile devices. The paper of the University of Münster (Germany) has been published already in 2004 (titled “Virtual Reflections for Augmented Reality Environments”), but now it’s time to hit the mobile world with it!

If you are interested in some tech talk, please read on! :-) Their approach can create CubeMaps for all reflective or lighting purposes in real-time using only the information from the background video frame: they not only flip and stitch the frame six times and mirrored together, but do a pretty smart estimation, that yields in plausible neat-looking reflections (although obviously fake): they project six regions of the background frame (see below) onto the new six sides of a Cube. The general idea is to have reasonable regions to map from

This way they get to simulate glossy and diffuse reflections already. Lighting/shadow influence will probably be the next step, since the CubeMap is already there…

We observed the emerging trend of online dating among today’s tech savvy generation and in order to simplify it, we decided to launch Dates Near Me, a free mobile dating service which caters towards the requirements of today’s generation. The iPhone dating application works by broadcasting the location of users based on GPS signals that permit them to find nearby singles and meet up right away if they desire. “Begin your search to find a like-minded companion, friend, lover or date using DatesNearMe mobile phone dating application on your iPhone and Google Android. With the singles showing an ever increasing desire for on the spot gratification, we realized the importance of mobile dating technology”, remarked the CEO of DatesNearMe.com Few reasons that make DatesNearMe better than any other mobile dating application are: 1. Highest level of privacy and security settings so that you can flirt with comfort. 2. Find singles around you with the help of our map view or list view. 3. 100% Free. Definitely no charges or catches. 4. Filled of features with high user friendliness. 5. Create your profile in less than no time. Just a few clicks if you update from Facebook. 6. Add users to your hot List, and see who has added you to theirs. 7. Easily flirt with hotties with winks, smiles and live messages.

"Intel, speaking out of turn and damaging its intimate relationship with Microsoft, has revealed that legacy x86-compiled software will not work on the ARM version of Windows 8. Microsoft has promised that the Office suite will be available on Windows 8 ARM, but beyond that, nothing. While this means there won't be many compatible apps at launch, it also means this will be the first full-bodied version of Windows that won't (initially) be susceptible to viruses and malware..."

"Yesterday NXP and Green Wave Reality announced to the world that they plan to give every lightbulb an IPV6 address. Hot on the heels of Google's 900 mhz announcement, Green Wave Reality already has iPhone / Android / and Web-based support. Looks like the lighting wars have started."

"In Windows 7, any time you connect to a network, Windows tells you if you have full internet access or just a local network connection. It also knows if a WiFi access point requires in-browser authentication. How? It turns out, a service automatically requests a file from a Microsoft website every time you connect to any network, and the result of this attempt tells it whether the connection is successful. This feature is useful, but some may have privacy concerns with sending their IP address to Microsoft (which the site logs, according to documentation) every single time they connect to the internet. As it turns out, not only can you disable the service, you can even tell it to check your own server instead."

"After years of dominance in computer chips, Intel now is chasing the mobile chip market and trying to redefine its future. During Intel's financial analyst meeting Monday, CEO Paul Otellini announced that he is refocusing the company, moving its 'center' from PC processors to processors for the burgeoning mobile market. 'I think Intel recognizes that they absolutely have to get a win here,' said analyst Rob Enderle. 'All the activity is in mobile. A post-PC era would be a post-Intel era if they don't get a beachhead established.' Earlier this month, Intel made a move in this new direction when it unveiled its new 3D transistor technology that is expected to position the chip maker to grab a piece of the mushrooming tablet market."

"We all know about the growing popularity of collision avoidance systems. As recently as this week, we've even heard about developments on the autonomous car front. Problem is, most of those systems depend on vehicles going it alone, using radar and other technology to avoid hazards in their way. But what if cars could talk to one another and the surrounding infrastructure? Wouldn't that be even better — and safer? The US Department of Transportation thinks so, and it's hoping to prove it in a new series of 'talking car' experiments taking place in six locales across the US. These technologies may potentially address up to 82 percent of crash scenarios with unimpaired drivers, preventing tens of thousands of vehicle crashes every year (further research [PDF] will incorporate heavy vehicle crashes including buses, motor carriers, and rail)."