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Putting sensors and actuators in everything from homes and cars to shoes and coffee cups promises to make our daily lives easier, safer and more efficient. But such 'ambient intelligence' requires a merger of the virtual and digital worlds. EU-funded researchers in the Sensei project are bridging the gap and their results are already leading to 'smart cities' being set up all over Europe.

'Today, the internet world is a virtual world of data mostly stored and accessed from servers,' says Dr Hérault. In the future, we will have an 'Internet of things' in which a multitude of things in the real, physical world will be digitised continuously: in many situations, we won't just be asking web servers for data, we will be asking sensors in everyday objects for data, he suggests. 'We need to understand how best to interconnect the real world and the virtual world.' 

An open service interface that uses semantic information to process data means that information is accessible and understandable to both humans and machines.  'You could ask, for example, "What is the temperature on Oxford Street?" The system would decode that semantic information, access sensor networks on Oxford Street that have temperature sensors, check the reliability of each network with regard to information quality, and return an answer,' Dr Hérault explains. 

Mobile Continues to Grow

Association, mobile spending is predicted to grow 39 percent and should come close to the$1.2 billion mark. With only 33% of US businesses having mobile friendly websites, the time is now to “go mobile” while the opportunity still exists.

Dickson Chu, the high profile and often outspoken head of digital and mobile networks at Citi, has quit the bank to join daily deals outfit LivingSocial.

Chu joined Citi from PayPal less than two years ago with a brief to kickstart the bank's mobile payments programme. Unusually for the conservative banking industry, Chu was prepared to speak his mind and was an unashamed advocate of the Google Wallet venture.

Citi is currently the sole banking partner for the search giant's mobile payments operation, which is straining to make a mark on the high street ahead of the forthcoming launch of a rival programme by the Isis carrier consortium.

What with self-driving cars and such like, Eric Schmidt is not averse to some blue-sky thinking. But one new prediction may be a moonshot too far.

“By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google (NSDQ: GOOG) TV embedded in it,” Schmidt said on stage at the Le Web conference.

The whole connected TV space will explode in 2012, as more new TVs ship with internet connectivity, bringing new content services to the living room. The on-screen gateway to that room is up for grabs.

American retail company REI ventures into augmented reality (AR) promotions by creating an AR app to give prizes to consumers and at the same time encourage traffic inside its new location in New York.

The app is named “Find Out NYC” and may be used by consumers to scan more than 400 specially-designed REI posters located around New York City, which serve as portals to six virtual scenes. Upon finding one of these posters, they can use their smartphone at the poster to scan and capture its respective headline. This will take them to an AR page that projects the virtual nature scene along with pictures of outdoor gear prizes that they can tap to win them. Apart from winning the outdoor gear prize, customers are also given the chance to win a trip for two to Costa Rica.

From REI: REI is now in New York City! We’re located in the historic Puck building near Manhattan’s SoHo district. Drop in and explore our 39,000-square-foot, three-level store. REI offers top-brand outdoor gear and clothing for camping, climbing, cycling, fitness, hiking, paddling, skiing, snowboarding and more. We’re also a complete New York City bike shop, offering professional bike shop services to help keep you biking the streets and trails year-round. Come by, meet our friendly staff of outdoor experts, and gear up for your next adventure. Find out about all of the REI events going on now in the New York area, and be sure to download our new FIND OUT NYC app! Use your phone to scan and unlock specially designed REI posters around the city which serve as portals to six virtual scenes. Use the map functionality on the app to find the posters nearest you. Get Find Out NYC app details.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt caused some raised eyebrows last week when he claimed that by next summer “the majority of the televisions you see in stores” will come with Google TV.

Okay, he may have the timing wrong, but I think that Google will absolutely come out on top of this. It will dominate the smart TV world much in the same way it now dominates the smartphone world.

I liked some of the ideas behind the first iteration of Google TV, but like everyone else, was disappointed by the execution

The Starbucks brand may be synonymous with pricey lattes, but the coffee conglomerate has pushed a number of mobile initiatives in 2011 to make its name also stand for digital innovation.

New numbers released Monday suggest that the strategy is working.

Starbucks has now processed more than 26 million mobile payments since January, Adam Brotman, vice president and general manager of digital ventures at Starbucks, told VentureBeat.

Sensors, he said, have gotten so cheap that they are being embedded in all sorts of products. Pretty soon, every soda can and cereal box could have a built-in CPU, screen, and camera, along with Wi-Fi connectivity. And at that point, the gaming of life takes off. "You'll get up in the morning to brush your teeth and the toothbrush can sense that you're brushing," Schell said. "So, 'Hey, good job for you! Ten points' " from the toothpaste maker. You sit down to breakfast and get 10 points from Kellogg's for eating your Corn Flakes, then grab the bus because you get enviro-points from the government, which can be used as a tax deduction. Get to work on time, your employer gives you points. Drink Dr Pepper at lunch, points from the soda maker. Walk to a meeting instead of grabbing the shuttle, points from your health-insurance provider. Who knows how far this might run? Schell said.

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth, reports Kevin J. O’Brien in The New York Times.

PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The yellow-handled hammer, which the eBay CEO purchased at Home Depot using PayPal, signals that the company’s plans for entering the mobile payments business has entered the construction phase.

The company also announced fourth-quarter results yesterday, solidly beating both the company’s internal guidance and analyst expectations. One of eBay’s big initiatives over the past year has been to find ways to work more closely with physical retailers by providing them with the technology they need to operate more efficiently online and offline. Over the past year, that has included buying 13 companies, for a total investment of $3.4 billion.

“We are right at the intersection of something that’s really cool,” Donahoe said. “This isn’t something that everyone sees, like social networking three years into it, when only the early people knew about it.”

The fundamental problem with all payment systems is to accurately verify the identification of the buyer. If one can be hundred percent sure that the identification of the buyer is absolutely accurate, one can be hundred percent sure that the payment is not fraudulent. In the physical world this is achieved by verifying physical documentation (for instance ID documents, fingerprints etc.). The problem is of course much more difficult in the digital world.

That is why solving digital identification is almost the same as building a fraud-proof digital payment system. This is emphasised by a recent announcement from Paypal (Read here). In this announcement, Paypal aims to become the custodian for their clients' digital ID's. Similarly, deploying well-designed mobile payment solutions in emerging markets is similar to rolling out robust identification systems. One should consider combining both problems: rolling our national ID systems at the same time as deploying mobile payment systems.

The race right now is primarily between three parties – PayPal, Dwolla, Square and newcomer Clover Pay. Each of these services have its ups and downs, but it’s worth noting that they can all be used for peer-to-peer payments and that’s how we’ll be reviewing them.

PayPal Setup: Nearly instant. You can sign up for a PayPal account in just a couple of minutes, then have it funded from a credit card almost immediately after. Pros: Widely accepted payment form, in use by millions. Full-featured mobile app on iOS and Android, including the ability to scan checks for deposit. Tight integration with the USPS and eBay makes for easy collection and shipping. Cons: Often criticized for high fees. PayPal tends to lock down accounts for investigations with a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach. Terms of service disallow many actions, and are quite obtuse in important sections.

Dwolla Setup: Signing up for and using Dwolla is quick, but you’ll need to tie it to your bank account to fully leverage its abilities. This can take 3 to 5 business days, depending upon your bank. But, if your bank supports instant transactions, you won’t have the typical transfer lag. Pros: Dwolla charges only $0.25 per transaction, no matter how much money is being transferred. A highly-secure mobile app is available for Android and iOS. Instant transfers to and from your bank account, if your bank is part of the participating network. Dwolla is integrating with merchants, allowing you to pay directly from your account. Instant feature will “loan” you up to $500, charging a $5 fee only if you don’t pay it back before your statement is over. Cons: This could be a pro, depending on how you see it. Dwolla has no debit card function. It’s intended to be used as an extension of your existing bank account. Smaller base of users means that you’re not as likely to find a Dwolla customer for exchanging funds.

The first of these changes is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) computing. BYOD is a much better term than “consumerization” and really portrays the meaning that many of us are buying smart phones, tablets or laptops to use them on a work network. The tension this creates is predictable.

In 2012 and beyond, we’re going to see more and more different devices coming into the workplace.

If you use PayPass, Tap & Go, or other contactless credit cards, that’s NFC. In fact, NFC hardware already is appearing in smart phones and tablets. There are relatively few devices with NFC today, but there will be more in 2012.

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.

This year, NFC technology will finally make its way into the hands of millions of users. This will be spurred along by new smartphones, notably from Android, that have NFC capabilities baked into them. The technology industry is waiting to see if and when Apple decides to put NFC into the iPhone. Many pundits think that when Apple goes NFC, that will be the true harbinger of the heyday for mobile payments. As it stands, Apple's newest iPhone 4S is three months old and a new one will not be released till the third or fourth quarters of 2012, if at all.

It is still a cash world, with about 85% of transactions still being made with paper currency. It behooves the financial system and their technology partners to shift those scales. Even a 1% increase in digital payments means billions dollars flowing through the ecosystem.

Mobility will reshape the credit card and payment industry.

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel launched an interactive dialogue on government mobile policy on Wednesday that he said would be the first step toward a governmentwide mobile roadmap due out in March. That roadmap, VanRoekel said, will address a range of issues from ways the government can save money -- such as by buying smartphones in larger quantities -- to serving citizens more effectively through public-facing apps

It also will include information about building internal mobile applications to help federal field officers, such as U.S. Forest Service workers and Border Patrol agents, do their jobs more efficiently. As things stand now, too many agencies and bureaus are putting time and effort into mobile projects without leveraging each other's gains, he said.

The dialogue will be open for 10 days and the mobile strategy should be out about two months later, VanRoekel said. Within six months, he hopes to introduce new procurement vehicles so agencies can buy smartphones and tablets more efficiently and cheaply

Kicking off the new year with a fresh wad of cash: according to an SEC filing, mobile and online payments startup Jumio has raised $25.5 million in funding on top of the $6.5 million it raised from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin – and others – back in March 2011.

The startup’s twist on helping e-merchants process card payments digitally is to leverage webcams (and smartphone cameras) to read credit cards rather than making people enter their details or swiping their cards. Its solution, called Netswipe, in other words turns phone cameras and webcams into credit card readers.

Jumio confirmed the financing round but declined to provide more details (which investors participated and what they plan to use the additional capital for) at this time.

We’ve been hearing that PayPal is going to be rolling out an in-store payments experience at a national retailer in the U.S. soon. It looks like the payments giant is testing another in-store payments experience in Sweden, using NFC technology, and partnering with two Swedish developers Accumulate and Point. You can find more information about the partnership here (in Swedish).

As PayPal’s Anuj Nayar tells me, PayPal is experimenting with in-store ‘proximity’-based NFC payments in the test with two Swedish retailers, an electronic store and a sports equipment store. Users can download a PayPal in-store iOS or Android app (only available in Sweden). This app will give them access to special discounts at the retailers. When users visit the store, they will receive an NFC sticker, which will allow them to pay via NFC (with the payments deducted from their PayPal accounts) at the retailer point of sale systems.

PayPal worked with mobile payments developer Accumulate on the technology as well as with startup Point, which was acquired by VeriFone earlier this year for over $1 billion, on the point of sale integrations. It’s actually a short-test as well and will only last for five days.