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The amount of money that Australian banks are spending on social media strategies is the equivalent of a “rounding error” when compared to the squillions they spend on advertising, delegates at a banking and finance conference heard on Friday. But the banks understand that although there isn’t yet a credible business case for much additional investment in the area, they can’t afford not to develop a presence on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Speaking at the FST Media Technology and Innovation conference in Sydney on Friday Michael Weeding, head of digital banking for Citibank said that “We are probably not going to have a business case at this point in time” for heavier investment in social media bank. But he reminded delegates that the same once held true for mobile phone investment.

In a very short period of time mobile banking has moved from novelty item to mainstream banking platform, and social media could well follow.

Mobile ad network Millennial Media is announcing an expansion to the Asia-Pacific region. Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There’s no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.

So why Southeast Asia? Gartner forecasts that the mobile advertising industry in Asia Pacific will grow from $1.6 billion USD to $6.9B in 2015 and Millennial wants to be in a position to capitalize on this. The company is also eyeing Korea, Japan and China as other expansion areas.

In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million). And the company is now seeing $50 million in revenue.

NLP goes by many names — text analytics, data mining, computational linguistics — but the basic principle remains the same. NLP refers to computer systems that process human language in terms of its meaning.

Apart from common word processor operations that treat text like a mere sequence of symbols, NLP considers the hierarchical structure of language: several words make a phrase, several phrases make a sentence and, ultimately, sentences convey ideas. By analyzing language for its meaning, NLP systems have long filled useful roles, such as correcting grammar, converting speech to text and automatically translating between languages.

NLP can analyze language patterns to understand text. One of the most compelling ways NLP offers valuable intelligence is by tracking sentiment — the tone of a written message (tweet, Facebook update, etc.) — and tag that text as positive, negative or neutral.

Adyen, a provider of global internet payment and e-commerce services, has been selected by France-based cinema chain operator Pathé to power online and mobile payments for the latter’s 21 cinemas across the Netherlands.

Pathé in the Netherlands has chosen Adyen to integrate payment processing into its existing online and new mobile ticketing services.

With Ajax technology form Ayden, online and mobile payments are set to be processed on a single screen with a single click, instead of loading multiple pages to run through payment acceptance.

With the exception of the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, the Android tablet race is starting to look like the PC race of the early 2000s: SPEEDS AND FEEDS ... and not a lot else. Case in point is Asus' Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the first quad-core tablet to hit the market. That's right, people, four whole cores!

quad-core tablet

For $499, the price of a 16GB iPad, you get 32GB, and can get up to 64GB for just $100 more. It will ship with Android 3.2 Honeycomb, but Asus promises that it will get an over-the-air update to the eagerly anticipated Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich "at a later date." Great, terrific, you know?

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.

In this survey-based report, we look at the business drivers and adoption levels for social business and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, the benefits and issues being highlighted by users, and what platforms and infrastructures are being used for delivery.

We take a short look at three specific applications – Enterprise Q&A, Open Innovation, and Sales & Marketing collaboration – and make recommendations for maximizing the benefits from these new systems of engagement.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 22pc of businesses polled in the sector were investing in social media marketing. This figure fell to 8.5pc in the first quarter of 2012 and to 6pc by the second quarter. Pearlfinders, a major business research company, spoke to more than 5,000 marketeers around the world about their budgets. “This represents an interesting about-turn. We saw investment in social media increase steadily throughout 2011, to reach the highest levels ever by the end of the year. However, as financial services brands embraced new methods for communicating with customers, they opened themselves up to criticism and negative sentiment,” said Anthony Cooper, Pearlfinders managing director.

putting spending on hold until they have developed a clearer picture of how social media can be harnessed to improve their brands.”

conversations directly linking to brands near impossible to control

In all the rumor-crazed lead-up to the launch of the iPhone 4S, one feature that was speculated about but never that likely was the inclusion of near field communications. Next year, when the iPhone 5 is actually, finally released, there's a very good chance it will have NFC, according to a report from DigiTimes.

Citing sources at Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturers, DigiTimes says Apple's new iPhone will be one of several devices to ship with NFC in 2012, although we expect the sometimes faulty iPhone rumor mill to churn on until the device is unveiled next year.

If the iPhone 5 does include NFC, it will be far from the first smartphone of its class to include the technology. In typical Apple fashion, while it may not be the trailblazer, it's sure to popularize the feature and push it toward widespread adoption. Some say the iPhone's inclusion of NFC could propel the technology's penetration from below 10% to more than 50% in just a few years.

Orange and Barclaycard have launched the UK's first contactless payment service allowing customers to pay for purchases using a smartphone.

Orange Quick Tap allows payments of up to £15 in over 50,000 outlets around the country, including Pret A Manger, McDonald's and Subway.

Customers have to purchase a Samsung Tocco Lite smartphone to use the service, which is available for £55 on pay-as-you-go or free on a £10 per month, two-year contract.

Research In Motion has staked its claim as a leader in the mobile payment and Near Field Communications space with the announcement of a new pilot project which will see Telefonica employees at the network operator's Madrid headquarters able to pay for goods in local retailers with their BlackBerrys.

The Telefonica Wallet for BlackBerry project will allow users of the NFC enabled BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Curve 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380 handsets to pay by touching their device against a reader in participating stores.

The SIM-based NFC technology stores funds and transcation details electronically on the phone's chip while at the front end an application on the device allows user to choose which cards they want to use, as well as get account balances.

Opportunities emerge from the deep semantic web

Economics is the science of incentives. While the promise of searching a huge store of databases may not sound like Saturday social night at the local drive in burger joint, it does by extension, introduce new incentives.  The new technology will drive people to build databases.  A new generation of entrepreneurs will collect, organize, analyze and create – not information – but data.Database of databases of databasesThe first things entrepreneurs will organize are human knowledge data – starting with their own, then relating it to others. Not unlike the human genome project, the vast human knowledge reservoir will be mapped. Entrepreneurs will enter their communities (on line, neighborhood, work, school, church, social networks) and create a database for what other people know and parse the data in any number of important and useful databases.The reason for this is simple; data are collections of human observations.This is the only thing people are willing to pay forRead more at www.conversationalcurrency.com

The situation leaves Google’s other businesses in mainland China under threat, despite claims that it would stick by its research facilities, phone manufacturing and sales operations in the country.

A number of businesses are said to be considering their links with the company, including those run by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, who owns Britain’s mobile phone network 3 and runs Tom Online, one of China’s most popular web portals.

Faced with events yesterday, Tom has dropped Google as a partner and instead switched to Chinese rival Baidu - which self-censors - in order to provide its users with search results.

Cloud Computing is both an abstract concept which can reffer to every logical grouping of software services provided by one or more companies which may or may not be on the same hardware architectures. ted ar It also stands for the physical architectures involving SOA (services-oriented architecture) systems, server farms and a lot of hardware to provide on demand services 24/24 no matter what may happen. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk.  Of course it’s a 2010 buzzword and I am personally seeing some kind of Terminal Server (Mainframes anyone?…) à la sauce New Millenium coupled with web technologies. The thing is… Cloud Computing along with Software Virtualization are really promising.  I put the second one with it because everything is about having almost nothing on the client side. ore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be ga The idea of having every service in the Cloud is to ensure that eveything you need is always available from wherever you are on the planet.  You don’t need your PC or Laptop anymore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be games, movies or any software.  And with the huge Mobile market, you’re about to have any of your services right there in your pocket. Read more at www.gamasutra.com 

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