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Michael Abbott, the CEO of carrier-backed mobile payments joint venture Isis, has an interesting take on rival Google Wallet: "It's the best thing that could happen."

That's not the sort of thing you would expect to hear from the head of a venture that is planning to roll out its own mobile-payment system, designed to allow consumers to tap their phone on special terminals to pay for goods. Abbott, however, holds a longer-term view of the business, and believes that the entry by multiple parties is a good thing. It generates greater consumer awareness, stirs the various retailers, carriers, handset makers and banks into motion, and generally gets the debate about mobile payments flowing. He doesn't believe there will be any clear-cut winners or losers, and expects to see many options for consumers.

"There will be multiple solutions out there, and none of them are wrong," Abbott said in an interview with CNET, noting that "competition is what this space needs."

Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.

Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

Are you a “fast zebra”??? If so, it means you have special insight into navigating informal networks, I suspect there may be herds of them racing around in social media.

former US Ambassador to the United Nations, has a term for people who can quickly absorb information, adapt to new challenges, and get people aligned in the right direction: fast zebras. They are the people who can skirt around or blast through the kind of gridlock found not only in the political spectrum, but in organizations of every stripe.The metaphor is based on the fast zebra on the African savannah who survives a trip to the drinking hole by moving quickly while slower herd members fall prey to waiting predators. Well, organizations are sometimes like the savannah; to the new-comer, they constitute vast, unexplored areas fraught with hidden dangers. The fast zebras in both contexts travel the terrain swiftly to accomplish significant goals while the naïve ones run into the predators of red tape, unaligned incentives, and unmotivated teams.A fast zebra is someone who is singularly focused on achieving performance results, knows how the organization can both hinder and help, and charts their course accordingly. In particular, they are wise about when to use the formal and rational elements of organization (such as hierarchy, processes, and monetary rewards) and when to use the informal and emotional elements (including values, networks, and feelings about the work). Read more at blogs.hbr.org

ust last month, we got word that CEO Gina Bianchini had left the company. On the heels of this news came a 40% workforce reduction and a dramatic announcement from the new CEO, Jason Rosenthal:

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks[...] drive 75% of our monthly U.S. traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

We will phase out our free service.

For Google, the increasingly available broadband / fiber-optic / wireless network is oxygen. Smart phones are proof enough that thin clients can succeed in this early atmosphere, but it's not yet rich enough for them to become the technological equivalent of anything more complex than jellyfish. Which, not incidentally, ruled the seas of the early earth.

Denser, higher-bandwidth communications networks(more wi-fi hotspots; more numerous, smaller and faster cell towers) are the direct equivalent of a denser atmosphere. Google's Chromebook not only has the ability to take advantage of this ever-improving network, it also has the power to drive it, just as smartphone adoption has already forced cell carriers to invest heavily in their existing networks.

We’ve changed how we use RSS

The simple truth is we’re less likely to use RSS or email subscription now compared to our RSS usage in the previous era of the Web.  We’re just less into RSS readers and start pages.

We’re using real-time web & social networking more

"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."

It’s like a Hollywood political thriller come true: a handful of people lurking in the shadows, controlling the minds of millions. New research reveals that it’s possible for a few individuals to enslave an entire network, even if they aren’t highly connected themselves.Scientists have figured out how to identify the nodes — the points that link to other points in a network — that when tweaked can control the entire network. The research, published in the May 12 Nature, might lead to more secure power grids, tricks for controlling the metabolic processes of cells and marketing campaigns that spread like the plague.

Hyper-connectivity (Internet of things, people-centric networks, mobility): The world is becoming an interconnected network as the Internet expands outside of the web and into smart "things". Connectivity or as I've often referred to it, hyper-connectivity, driven by an increasingly mobile society that is always on, has far reaching business consequences. In a real time, always connected world, personal and professional blend or merge and the very definitions of workplace changes. The addition of the social web is creating a people-centric, interconnected network that is supported by real time access to data, content, and computational tools that change decision making and interactions. Business itself is moving to a business model where connectivity leads to a broad business network of partners behaving as an ecosystem. This ecosystem is the business of the future.

NFC tag scans for connection sharing, social networking and marketing are increasing at a rate of 22 per cent per month, according to new research carried out by Kimtag. Kimtag, a UK based connection hub, analysed the visits to 10,000 selected Kimtag connection pages over a six month period ending in August 2011. The company compared QR Code, NFC tag, direct and referral hits from visitors around the world. 

During the research, Kimtag regarded a successful visit as a user reaching and fully downloading a Kimtag connection page via an address assigned specifically for NFC tags and then subsequently visiting a connection such as a social network or website.  The research revealed that the number NFC tag scans grew by an average 22 per cent month on month. Over the whole six month period, NFC scans increased by over 170 per cent.

Phil Coote, Kimtag’s CEO, commented, "The research illustrates that while a lot of the current focus within the NFC industry has been on payment systems, the use of NFC to empower the new ‘internet of things’ is likely to play an equally important role in it’s growth." 

Rymble is an object connected to Internet social networks, merging the real and the virtual worlds. It is a “social compass” that, instead of pointing to the north, moves in different directions as news and alerts happen in the user’s social network, in the web page of a company, artist, sports team or any other subject.

Banjo has three main goals. One is to connect you to your social networking friends you didn’t know were nearby – for example, a friend from Facebook or Twitter, killing time at the airport, only a few gates away from you. It also wants to hep you find out what’s going on nearby by providing access to status updates and tweets from everyone around you, in a radius you specify. And it provides you with a way to virtually visit other locations, even when you’re far away, to see what’s going on with the people there.

The people Banjo finds don’t necessarily have to have “checked in” using a location-based networking service like Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook Places. While that helps, of course, Banjo is designed to also pull in locations from geotagged tweets, uploaded photos, and other media from all social networking services. Wait – all? Yes, that’s the plan. Patton says they have 22 services they’re focused on integrating now, but the company’s goal is to become a federation of all social networks, big and small, from around the world.

A research team at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has come up with a new optical amplifier that can help boost the efficiency of backhaul optical networks, a move that could have a big impact on the overall economics of bandwidth.

Chalmers’ new breakthrough is more efficient and allows optical signals to be sent over longer distances 4,000 kilometers as opposed to 1,000 kilometers – which in turn would make the cost of building and operating the networks cheaper.

“The entire optical telecom industry is our market. But the technology is generic, and scalable to other wavelengths like visible or infrared light, which makes it attractive in areas such as measurements, spectroscopy, laser radar technology and any applications where detection of very weak levels of light is essential”, says Peter Andrekson.

It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.

there are many ways to incorporate game mechanics into a community and which ones are appropriate depend a lot on the make-up of your community audience and what the ultimate goals for the community are.

my belief is that you need to gradually introduce new elements into a community and make sure that any new features are fully explained and documented.

YaCy has no web portal like that of traditional search engines, instead it relies on users to download a peer-to-peer software client, which crawls the web from users’ computers, and indexes sites they visit.

Instead, each user gets to make these decisions locally. The portal at search.yacy.net is just a limited demonstration. To get the full experience, you have to install YaCy locally (this usually takes no more than a minute). Then your computer will be part of the YaCy network, and you will be able to draw on the whole network for search results.

At FSFE, we find YaCy highly interesting because it’s part of a trend to replace centralised systems with distributed ones. We have Diaspora and other distributed social networks as an alternative to Facebook. We have identi.ca and its status.net platform as an alternative to Twitter, which users can install and run on their own servers. YaCy is one of less than a handful (to my knowledge) of distributed search engines.

25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.

Along with “general assembly” and “99 percenters,” Occupy Wall Street has brought the phrase “live streaming” to the forefront. Rising-star reporters — known best by their Twitter and Ustream handles — such as Pool (timcast) in New York City and Spencer Mills (oakfosho) in Oakland are passionate, deeply embedded correspondents who provide live video reporting – sometimes lasting a dozen hours or more – of protests, general assemblies and other Occupy events. Instead of using a satellite truck, they broadcast live “TV” coverage from 3G- and 4G-equipped smartphones over video networks such as Ustream.com and Livestream.com.

The AR Drone is the first toy that came out,” said Sam Shapiro, a 24-year-old programmer from Brooklyn who’s helping Pool hack together an airborne news network.

American Express is making a significant move in the expansion of its digital wallet, Serve to international markets today. The credit card company is announcing the first global partnership for Serve with Lianlian Group, of of China’s leading mobile payments providers. Additionally, AmEx has also made an equity investment of $125 million in LianLian Pay.

Group President for Enterprise Growth for American Express Dan Schulman tells us in an interview that American Express has come to realize that in a lot of fast growing economies internationally, people move money in different ways and in order to enter these markets, the company has to think beyond just plastic cards and checks, and consider moving straight to mobile platforms.

AmEx is generally predicting China to be a huge market for its mobile and digital payments products and is planning to open a new American Express’ Enterprise Growth Group office in Hangzhou, China. The China-based team will provide technical and consulting support to Lianlian Group on the Serve partnership, and the new outpost will be headed by Matthew Lee, President, Enterprise Growth, American Express, China.

PlaySpan, a virtual goods monetization platform, has been acquired by Visa. According to the release, Visa will pay $190 million in cash for the company, plus additional payouts for performance milestones. The deal comes nearly a year after Visa spent a whopping $2 billion on e-payment company CyberSource. Visa says that the acquisition of PlaySpan complements the CyberSource deal and will extend the company’s presence in digital and mobile commerce.

This is a big exit for PlaySpan, which has raised a total of $46 million in funding since its launch four years ago. PlaySpan has been growing like a weed, striking partnerships with a number of social network, gaming and media companies, including Viacom, Disney, Facebook, Ubisoft, and Sanrio.

PlaySpan’s flagship product UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience. Currently, PlaySpan powers virtual goods marketplaces across 1,000 video games, virtual world publishers and social networks.

Nokia City Scene is a prototype app from Nokia Beta Labs that combines street maps, 3D panoramic views with gesture navigation and social network integration to provide what appears to be a powerful map discovery tool.

A user can transition from a top-down conventional street view to a Google Maps Streetview-like panoramic view with simple gesture-based navigation. In this 3D panoramic view, the phone user can read information about the businesses in the area in a text overlay. Check-ins by friends on Facebook and Foursquare is also available. The following cities are currently supported within Nokia City Scenes: London, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Newark-Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

It is somewhat unfortunate that this powerful tool is only available for the Nokia N9 which is based on an orphaned mobile platform, the Linux-based MeeGo. Nokia has not said whether this app will be ported to Windows Phone (its current smartphone platform).

Advertising and content network operator Adconion this morning announced that it has acquired smartclip, a European digital video advertising startup.

Smartclip’s network of in-stream and connected TV distribution partners stand to increase the volume of inventory available across Adconion’s digital distribution platform, which delivers targeted ads and content across display, email, social and both in-banner and in-stream video.

Adconion says that, with the inclusion of over 500 new publisher sites from the Smartclip portfolio, Adconion will significantly grow its content network (current reach is said to be close to 700 million unique users) and expand its footprint to 17 countries worldwide.