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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?

The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com

Quotes on the importance of strategy with social media marketing from some of the top social media experts and brands online including: Chris Brogan, Peter Kim, Joseph Jaffe, Jason Falls, Katie Payne, Debbie Weil, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, David Meernan Scott, Valeria Maltoni, Scott Monty and about 40 others.

It’s a debate that’s more common than you might think. Strategy or Tactics first when it comes to social media? Many companies approach their participation on the social web tentatively, picking a popular tool like Twitter, Facebook or for the more adventuresome, a blog. The exercise of setting up and populating a profile, friending others and seeing what happens is akin to the proverbial “throw spaghetti against wall to see if it sticks” school of marketing. There’s a time and place for tactics, for strategy and for experimentation. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to test certain channels without a broad corporate wide commitment to being more social. However, that effort should be guided by smart analysis of audience, tools and with the aid of goals and measurement methodology. Without a plan, social media efforts often fail, waste time, money and detract from the brand experience.Read more at www.toprankblog.com

If you take the time to create good content, take the time to share it well. There is no magic formula, only thoughtfulness + tools. Know the Flow is my approach to social media data flow. Over the next week I’ll be sharing some of my theory and tips that I touched on in a recent #SoSocial presentation. Consider this the starter pack. Tools & Theory for social media content distribution

Distribution Tools

Social Blogs

IDC’s Q1 scorecard for smartphones in western Europe is out. Nokia’s sales are sliding 10% year-on-year in a market for all phones growing at 5%, while the smartphone sector grew 76% (how long before we stop using the word smartphone, you might well ask). Nokia’s smartphone market share has gone from 57% to 19.6% in two years. Europe’s biggest handset maker is now Samsung and the fastest growing is HTC. The biggest platform is Android, with 35.7%, followed by Apple iOS on 20%, and then Symbian and BlackBerry OS.

4 out of those 5 companies are heavily committed to Android, and two are also committed to Windows Phone,

In the Android sphere, Sony Ericsson has announced the latest lot of Xperia phones. They’re keeping the Xperia Mini brand from the hit X10, and the Mini Pro gets a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Both run Android 2.3/Gingerbread and get a new Facebook app.

The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These  other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions."  But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.

When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database.  If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."

Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service.  With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.

It's the so-called 'Internet of Things' right? The point at which your milk carton has an RFID tag on it to let your electronically enabled fridge know that it has gone off. Your fridge (which is Internet-connected of course) then automatically orders your online shopping account to send you new milk and your auto-payment system takes that out of your bank account. All you have to do is pick your milk up at the door, open the carton and pour it into your PG Tips -- nothing more. But are we ready for all this? Are developers ready for this? Are web developers ready for this? Are manufacturers ready for this? Are the world's major IT vendors ready for this? Answer: umm, probably not.

QR code technology arrived late to North America for numerous reasons, and with Near Field Communication (NFC) fast emerging, it is a valid concern that it may not tip the adoption needle in time to establish itself as a household communication tool.

With the release of the Google Wallet, Google has been building a lot of support for NFC. This may explain why they replaced QR codes with NFC for Google Places. Another reason may be because the stickers they distributed to the retailers were intended to be permanent, in which case NFC makes more sense. They may be a bit ahead of the market on this, but if they are distributing millions of these stickers across North America, it pays to plan ahead. Following their announcement, a vast number of articles surfaced with some variation of “QR codes are dead”. This in my opinion was a bit excessive considering Google Places is the only implementation where they made the changeover.

Getting away from Google, let’s briefly look at the expected rate of NFC adoption. Smartphones have been available on this continent for at least 4 years and they currently hold approximately 33% of the market. Google’s Nexus S is one of the first phones to be available with NFC technology and it was released only this spring. Blackberry will start releasing models this fall, and Apple has yet to confirm whether they will include NFC support in the iPhone 5. It’s not unreasonable to expect NFC gaining mass adoption no sooner than 2-3 years.

That viral growth is deserved, too. Turntable.fm is arguably the most interesting social startup to emerge in a long time. Inventing a new subgenre, ‘social listening’, the site revels in something humans have enjoyed for millennia: shared experiences around music. If you haven’t tried it yet, here’s how it works: You can only sign up if a friend of yours on Facebook is already signed up. Once you’re in, the site lets you DJ, playing songs in an on-screen ‘nightclub’. Others come to listen to you in your ‘room’ and can join you on the decks if they choose. Multiple DJs (up to five) play a song each in turn and everyone else in the room gets to vote on the current DJ’s choice. If your choice gets voted up, you get a point. If it gets voted down by too many people it’s ditched for the next DJ’s choice.

when DJs demonstrate that they’re listening to each other by playing off each others’ track selections, there’s a commonality that transcends… individual achievements. Social games that offer the promise of individual success may be missing out on the uniqueness of shared experiences capable of creating shared surprise and pleasure. As when tracks flow well, as when it’s clear that DJs are not just picking their own favorites but show that they’re paying attention to each other, as when a “good” stretch of DJing attracts newcomers to the room, and so on.

A new way for media companies to interact with their audiences: Earlier this week, we experimented with setting up our own The Next Web room (you can often find TNW staff spinning tunes in there). One tweet brought in a crowded room and it was fun for us to be able to play music with our readers. Music is a brilliant bonding tool and being able to have direct group chat with readers can help media companies get to know their audience better, and vice versa. I even got teased with knowledge of a stealth startup over the chat function yesterday – so maybe we’ll get a few news tips this way too!

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley doesn’t think that you should have to open up a mobile app to interact with it. I caught up with Crowley a couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, where he was a speaker. In the video interview above, he compares Foursquare’s newest feature called Radar to the Siri personal assistant on the new iPhone 4S. For Crowley, it’s all about getting mobile apps to push relevant information out to you at exactly the right place and time. “If you have a problem to solve with your phone, you don’t have to go to the search box.”

Radar taps into Foursquare’s Explore recommendations and pushes them out to you automatically via notifications. “What we have been doing with Radar is finding a way for people to use the app really without having to actually use it,” says Crowley. It runs Explore in the background, which tells you when you are near a place on your to-do list, where someone you know has left a tip, or where a lot of your friends are at that moment. Siri is similar in that it pushes out reminders and other information to you without you having to tap on the screen.

In part II of this interview, coming up, Crowley talks about how Radar fits into his overall strategy and plans to make money.

Although Siri is limited in what it can do, what it does do, it does well. And based on my experiences with Siri so far, I think it illustrates what I think of as the “invisible interfaces” of future connected devices. Admittedly, that sound like a bold claim, but the reality is this: Thanks to the “Internet of Things,” more devices are gaining connectivity that makes them smarter and more useful. At the same time, computing interfaces haven’t changed all that much in the past several decades. They’re going to have to, however, as we can’t have a multitude of different interfaces across a myriad of connected devices in this new world.

The key for potential success here is in Siri’s uncanny ability to understand not just natural language input, but also context. This is great for smartphones where we have so much personal data such as contact names, addresses, phone numbers and digital music tracks. Even better is when Siri works with multiple apps or services on our handsets; tying them together through a simple command. “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home,” for example, leverages both the Reminders application and the integrated GPS radio of an iPhone.

“Close the windows and turn on the air conditioning if the outside temperature rises above 85 degrees,” could be a real-world example in just a few years time.