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We’re far more social now and more likely to use social network sites like Twitter and Facebook as a buffet. Consuming whatever we want at our leisure by selecting posts from links shared by our networks.

So what does this mean? Increased traffic to blogs and posts compared to when we were more reliant on RSS Less likelihood that our posts will be read if we’re not an active part of the edublogosphere and aren’t social networking with others

these emails show Google explicitly seeking to use bundling as a tactic.  Discussing Google Maps, top Google manager Steve Lee writes:

"We are in the process of trying to bundle NLP [Google's location service] with GMM [Google Maps] on Android, just like we do on other platforms...If successful, all GMM android partners will automatically get NLP, at least when GMM is used."(p. 47)

But Google had an even bigger bundling club, tying its location-based services to the Android operating system itself, much as Microsoft tried to tie installation of its Explorer browser to its Windows operating system.   By June and July, you see the evidence of Google using that club on manufacturers to knock Skyhook out of the competition.   You have the June email from Motorola to Skyhook telling the company:

"As you will see from the language in a note received from Google (relevant text is coped below), Skyhook's implementation of the XPS service on Motola's device renders the device no longer Android compatible."(p. 27)

developers continue to chase after our elusive social graph to make geolocation as indispensable as microblogging and photo sharing.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) and NFC (near field communication) technologies are going to become much more popular as geolocation apps continue to evolve and developers look for ways to make sending and receiving location-based data easier.

Foursquare has already begun testing NFC check-ins and Coca-Cola used RFID at last year’s Coca-Cola Village teen camp to enable Facebook Likes and status updates to be sent with wristbands.

What Else Can We Expect? There are some exciting innovations emerging in geolocation already, but there’s surely much more value to be had from this technology. Some of the developments I’m most interested to see are: A collection of user-generated information about a place, like a location-based Wikipedia Mobile check-in for flights, bypassing the long check-in counter queues Mobile check-in at doctors’ offices, sending the secretary an automatic notification of your arrival Mobile identification, providing entry to adult-only venues like nightclubs (our phones are already replacing cash, so why not our photo IDs?) Digital, geotagged nightclub stamps to prove you’ve paid to get in Bookmarking for places with push notifications, so you’ll finally remember to check out that café your friend keeps recommending Interactive maps attached to promotional material (with QR codes?) so you can easily find the new pizza place that sent you coupons in the mail

they actually have thinner skulls than adults, and will probably be using cell phones longer than I ever wil

The JV will be an infrastructure for payments, but it won’t process any payments. This will be down to each operator, working with their individual partners, it seems.

It also looks like the first products of this JV will be about advertising rather than NFC payments. Again, Dunne: “NFC is gong to take a little more time, but between the three of us we buy considerable amounts of handsets and [handset makers have] been looking for someone to put their hand up and embrace NFC in a big way.” On advertising, it looks like the idea will be to use the platform to launch campaigns, targeting the subscriber bases of all three operators. In both services, users will be able to opt in and opt out of services.

On the portable gaming front things are moving -- but slowly. Over the past seven or so years Nintendo and Sony have both been slowly refining their portable systems of choice, but not even Nintendo's glasses-free 3D technology really qualifies as something particularly innovative. It is, after all, just another graphics technique

With nothing really changing it's mighty easy for the others to catch up, and of course those others are the smartphones, the iPods, and the tablets. They aren't there yet -- the Samsung Galaxy S II has a dual-core processor running at 1GHz while the Xbox 360 has 3.2Ghz spread over three cores -- but mobile devices are gaining ground quick. And, with services like OnLive, one could say that hardware no longer matters.

Regardless, hardware is losing its importance.

While we'll surely get one more generation of great dedicated gaming hardware from the big three, I have my fears that it will be the last. Sony sees the writing on the wall, with its (currently half-assed) PlayStation Suite program for devices, and Microsoft is testing the waters with Xbox Live integration on Windows Phone. It's only a matter of time before everybody's following suit -- or getting left behind. But don't worry, console gamers, because it's not all bad news. We're actually on the verge of some very interesting changes which, believe it or not, could work out for the best. Think about it: all modern phones have Bluetooth, so connecting external gaming controllers is easy -- even a keyboard and mouse. HDMI output is now more-or-less standard, and hopefully WHDI ubiquity isn't far off.

People actually get a kick out of locating themselves. They want to know where their colleagues are. There will be more programs like Sococo. The idea is to have a virtual office on your screen. You see your virtual coworkers located in their “office” room, can “walk” to their room, when in the same room the mics let you talk and listen seamlessly, you have conference rooms with whiteboards, water coolers and tea kitchens for those in need of small talk, etc. People’s real location doesn’t matter, but they choose to locate themselves in respect to the virtual office so the team cohesion is supported.

The thing that’s far-fetched is robots with their own intelligence. Who knows if general purpose A.I. is ever going to happen? But robots that can move around in an office and be used as communication devices isn’t science fiction at all. Now we’re getting to the point where you can do it over a much larger distance because you can just do it over the internet, and the cost is low enough and reliability is high enough that it makes sense to do every day in an office. Our goal is to have 100,000 of these out there in five years.

Of course, both technologies boil down to an extension of video conferencing, with the likes of Sococo adding the possibility of spontaneity and easy initiation of contact, and robot avatars offering mobility and the ability to inspect locations. Still, whichever technological future you favor, there will still be a screen between you and your fellow humans.

But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done.

So bullish are Anderson and his team on the idea that they have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx, set up to help other companies go clockless. CultureRx expects to sign up at least one large client in the coming months.

It seems to be working. Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE.

"It wasn't hugs and smiles," she says of Ressler's and Thompson's campaign. "Managers in the old mental model were totally irritated." In the e-learning division, many of Wells's older co-workers (read 40-year-olds; the average age at Best Buy is 36) expressed resentment over the change, insisting that work relationships are better face-to-face, not screen-to-screen. "We have people in our group who are like, `I'm not going to do it,'" says Wells, who likes to sleep in and doesn't own an alarm clock. "I'm like, `that's fine, but I'm outta here.'" In enemy circles, Ressler and Thompson are known to this day as "those two" and "the subversives."

`How are you going to measure this so you know you're getting the same productivity out of people?'"

Achen could see that not only was his team's productivity up, but engagement scores, or measuring job satisfaction and retention, were the highest in the dot-com division's history.

"For years I had been focused on the wrong currency," says Thompson. "I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."

Achen says he would never go back. Orders processed by people who are not working in the office are up 13% to 18% over those who are. ROWE'ers are posting higher metrics for quality, too. Achen says he believes that's due to the new office paradox: Given the constant distractions, it sometimes feels impossible to get any work done at work.

But it's worth remembering that most big companies fail to grow at the rate of inflation. That's true in part because the bigger the company gets, the harder it is to get the best out of each and every employee. ROWE is one of Best Buy's answers to avoiding that fate. "The old way of managing and looking at work isn't going to work anymore," says Ressler. "We want to revolutionize the way work gets done." Admit it, you're rooting for them, too.

The second half of the NFC conundrum is that there are a lot of hands reaching for the supposed pile of money that NFC payments will enable. Look at Google's announcement of the Wallet product. Or the ISIS partnership between Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Google is partnering with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (the NFC partner), Hypercom, Ingenico and NXP (another NFC partner). All of these large companies are going to want a slice of the pie. Where does that leave the retailers? You know, the ones that are actually trying to make money with good and services? Sadly, on the outside of the circle. The carriers are the biggest culprits, wanting to take as much as 50% of transaction revenue because it is "going over their pipes." The financial services companies will be happy taking their normal rates in the 1.75% to 3% range as long as there is a promise that more people will pay electronically (read: sans cash). Between retailers, partners and infrastructure, NFC has years to go before it will be viable for all parties involved.

What will happen in this time frame? Think about the so-called "4G" technology WiMax. The technology is already becoming antiquated with LTE and all the major carriers are working on the next version after that. Sprint is keeping a hybrid of WiMax and LTE going forward but overall it is a tech that died before it even matured. NFC may be the same. What if there are massive leaps in quantum teleportation in the next several years? Does NFC become the WiMax of the payment world?

Maturation Of Direct Carrier Billing The "I do not see myself buying a fridge with this" line comes mostly from the direct carrier folks. Direct carrier billing is the perfect area for micro-payments and payments that stem from ease of use. Think of parking. If you could pay for your parking on the street with your phone, would that convenience be worth an extra couple of cents on the dollar to you? The direct to carrier ecosystem has evolved to the point where it actually makes sense for offline and online use. Zong (acquired by eBay for PayPal integration), PaymentOne and Boku are the leaders in this space. PaymentOne has processed $5 billion in mobile payments and lets users pay with their phone numbers, validating transactions via text. Zong allows that capability as well. Payment One's "One Care" features, announced last week at CTIA, makes direct to carrier billing safe and secure. Transparency is important in mobile commerce because consumers do not really trust their phones to handle their money quite yet. The most important aspect of direct to carrier billing now is that the revenue mechanism has been flipped. It used to be that merchants only got some 40% or less of payments while the carriers and partners took the rest. Even with high margin transactions, that is unacceptable. Today, direct to carrier billing provides the merchants with more than 80% of the revenue, sometimes nearly 95%.

The Dongle World: Smartphones As Credit Card Readers Square, VeriSign and Intuit are pushing hard into the dongle department. Jumio is doing the same thing, just without the dongle. There is not much to be said about the dongle world that we have not already touched on at ReadWriteWeb outside of the notion that it is bringing easy credit card readers to the mobile masses.

The dongle competitors are not worried about what is happening in the ecosytem because it does not really touch their core business. For instance, PayPal does not see NFC or dongles infringing on its business in any way, shape or form. As Laura Chambers, PayPal's head of mobile, said in a recent interview, "we are not worried about much in the ways of competition. There is a lot of white space in the industry for horizontal movement."

What Is PayPal Really Doing? In the interview with Chambers, the first question I asked was, "Why does it seem like PayPal has become a "me too" operator in mobile payments?" It is a fair question, even if Chambers balked to acknowledge that PayPal has been in "me too" mode for the last year or so. PayPal has ignored the dongle movement and NFC is not on its radar as a technology it feels it needs to integrate. "What is the difference between a tap versus a swipe?" Chambers asked. "We are working with what works in the current infrastructure ... We have sat down with consumers and merchants to work with them on what they want." PayPal is growing sideways because there is not a ton of room right now to grow vertically. PayPal will get into NFC solutions when the time is appropriate. Its strategy now is to create as much flexibility for consumers as possible through its mobile wallet program. PayPal's stance is data driven - the company can track when and what consumers buy from mobile phones and tablets. Hence, PayPal is focusing on the shopping end of the spectrum, as opposed to a pure payments play. "60% of people buy more and spend more on mobile," Chambers said. "But, we see that people are not really buying different things on mobile ... the No. 1 driver of growth in mobile payments is boredom." That fits in well with what PayPal sees as "couch commerce." They released a study recently saying that mobile shopping is going to boom this holiday season. As such, PayPal is ready to deploy an end-to-end solution for merchants and consumers to reward loyalty and provide deals and offers along with digital receipts. PayPal believes that it has a lot of room to grow in mobile through these types of horizontal movements. We are also seeing this on a non-mobile front with eBay partnering with Facebook and the Open Graph API and the new X.Commerce initiative that consolidates the PayPal, Zong, Magento, RedLaser and Milo technologies. The company is calling it an "open commerce ecosystem."

Future Of Mobile Payments This article is the first in a series of the trends in mobile payments that ReadWriteWeb will be working on in the next several months. There are a lot of questions and the answers are just beginning to emerge. Who are the winners in the space? Are retail shops in danger of "becoming expensive fronts for online shopping," as Chambers said in the interview? Does NFC really have potential to disrupt offline payments or is it just cool technology? These questions and more are what we will be tackling in the months to come.

Having thoroughly figured out how to cover giant events from ground level, they are now exploring ultra-cheap alternatives to the hundreds of thousands of dollar news choppers used for aerial reporting of big events like protest marches and police clashes. In the process, the video bloggers are discovering both how far low-cost consumer technology has come and how much farther it needs to go.

Built-in Wi-Fi allows control from an iPhone or Android phone. The Wi-Fi also beams back moderate-resolution (640-by-480-pixel) video to the phone

Introduced in 2010, the one-pound styrofoam craft has four rotors and a plethora of sensors to keep it stable and navigable. In some ways, it resembles an iPhone, with accelerometers and a gyroscope to measure movement and location, for example. Parrot says that it can fly 50 feet high, up to 11 miles per hour and stay aloft for about 12 minutes on a charge.

Shapiro tracked down a European hobbyist group that had written its own software, called Javadrone, from scratch “and did a much better job of it.” Pool first used the AR Drone, which he’s dubbed the Occucopter, in December to cover a New York City rally for immigrant rights, but he said that the video from that attempt was unusable. He also made a test-run at Occupy Albany. Pool expects his first coverage with the new software and high-quality video will be at the Occupy Congress action on January 17 in Washington, DC.

the AR Done isn’t in his long-term plans due to its clear limitations. “You need perfect weather. It just doesn’t weigh enough,” said Shapiro.

Pool and Shapiro are already thinking bigger for their projects, and developing better tech to eventually provide to other live stream journalists. “The most important thing is the zeppelin,” said Pool. Basically a big balloon, it will be able to lift a lot of gear with just a little power for the rotors that steer it. And the slow speed is a benefit: It holds the camera steady and won’t suddenly go out of control. In fact, they are trying to build copters that work more like zeppelins.

“All it needs to do is hover and take a proper picture.” Instead of relying on constant commands from the ground, the zeppelin and copter will dial in periodically for updates.

If eBay is able to capture just 2 percent of the sales occurring at the point of sale, it will be able to double PayPal’s $70 billion business today. If they capture 4 percent, they’ll triple it.

One major opportunity is payments being made at the cash register, and arguably many others see it, too, including Google, Visa, MasterCard and the wireless carriers, which are all working on their own solutions.

What everyone is not seeing, he explains, is how retail and payments are two massive industries that are “at an inflection point where they will go through dramatic change.”

Of course, that will take some time.

This year, eBay is focused on learning and testing out the technology in several trials; then, in 2013, it will begin to scale the business. In 2012, the company is not even factoring in a lift from point of sales in eBay’s revenue guidance.

The company’s big test will start later this week, when it expands its trial with Home Depot from five stores in the Bay Area to 51 stores in the Bay Area, Atlanta and Omaha.

Everything continues to be on track, despite the unexpected departure of PayPal President Scott Thompson. Thompson shocked Donahoe right after the New Year with the announcement that he was leaving to become CEO of Yahoo.

So far, Donahoe said, the mobile payments technology works flawlessly, based on his own experiences, but there’s still some additional scenarios they will have to consider.

Yesterday morning, he drove to a store in San Jose, where he consciously left his wallet and phone in the car.

He walked through the aisles to find a hammer and tape measure, and then went to check out, where the terminal gave him the option of checking out with PayPal. He entered his mobile phone number and PIN, and the transaction was completed, with the receipts sent to his phone and email.

“It was faster than swiping the card,” Donahoe said. “This is an advantage that PayPal has. No one else can do it with a mobile number and PIN. There was no fancy whiz-bang technology.”

Customers will also be given the option of paying with a PayPal credit card.

But not all the pieces are in place yet.

Coming soon: Users will be able to store their loyalty cards in their PayPal wallet, and will be able to receive personalized offers based on their shopping habits.

Also, it’s worth noting that while Donahoe checked out easily, there will be a learning curve for others. In advance of going to the store, users will have to associate a phone number and PIN with their account, and enable their account for in-store checkout.

Right now, there’s no contingency plans for if a person doesn’t have a PayPal account, or if it’s not set up. In fact, a very small percentage of the more than 100 million PayPal users have likely done that.

The next of these changes is increased security on mobile devices.

Just a few weeks ago, Forrester Research said, “It’s time to repeal Prohibition” about Macs in the workplace, but the real changes are going to come from the smartphones and tablets.

Together, three trends lead to an Internet of Things, where smart phones use NFC to make statements about the physical world. For example, there has already been an art exhibition that lets visitors vote for their favorite display by tapping with their smartphone. But more importantly, there’s an Internet of Secure Things coming. You will be able to use your smartphone to badge in to work, unlock your PC, start your car or motorcycle (the prototype of that is already working), as well as merely pay for things.

Together, three trends lead to an Internet of Things, where smart phones use NFC to make statements about the physical world. For example, there has already been an art exhibition that lets visitors vote for their favorite display by tapping with their smartphone. But more importantly, there’s an Internet of Secure Things coming. You will be able to use your smartphone to badge in to work, unlock your PC, start your car or motorcycle (the prototype of that is already working), as well as merely pay for things. It isn’t going to all happen in 2012, but we are likely to look back at 2012 as the year when it took off.

It isn’t going to all happen in 2012, but we are likely to look back at 2012 as the year when it took off.

San Francisco announced earlier this week it was partnering with PayByPhone to enable 30,000 parking meters with NFC support. People can tap their phone against a parking meter and call up a parking application that identifies the parking location and allows the driver to enter his or her desired parking time and complete the transaction. The actual payment happens inside the app with a stored credit card, but the technology provides a short cut to the transaction.

Intel and MasterCard have teamed up to enable future Intel-powered laptops to work with PayPass enabled MasterCard credit cards. Users will be able to enter in their payment credentials for online purchases by tapping their card on their computer instead of storing the information on their machine or entering it manually.

Personal contact and content sharing has become one of the emerging uses for NFC. RIM in October introduced BlackBerry Tag, which will enable users of NFC phones to exchange contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other multimedia content with a tap of their phones. Google has enabled a similar a solution with Android Beam, which will work on NFC-enabled phones. This can serve as a Bump-like way to pass back and forth information quickly.

Access card maker HID Global announced a trial with Arizona State University in September in which students were provided NFC-enabled phones, enabling them to gain physical access to buildings. All the participants were able to enter residence halls with their phones, and some were also allowed to open individual room doors using unique digital key and PINs.

The Museum of London and its sister institution, the Museum of London Docklands launched a project in August that allows visitors to tap their NFC-enabled phone at exhibits and gain more information, buy tickets to future exhibits or check in, follow or “like” the museums on social services. It’s part of Nokia’s NFC Hub effort to help businesses set up NFC campaigns.

T-Mobile partnered with Meridian Health and iMPak Health in October on a new SleepTrak sleep monitoring system, a wearable device with an NFC-equipped card. Users can upload their sleep data to an NFC-enabled Nokia astound with a tap.

Nokia and NFC Danmark launched NFC-enabled smart poster campaign in Telia stores in Denmark, enabling Nokia N9 users to download mobile apps by tapping on a poster. The two companies also introduced what Danmark called the world’s first NFC-enabled vending machine.

The winning application of the WIMA NFC USA conference in San Francisco earlier this month was a project called Think&Go, which is being tested by French supermarket chain Groupe Casino. Think&Go allows visually impaired and elderly shoppers to call up large text information on products by tapping NFC tags on store shelves.

These are just a sample of the projects and real applications leveraging NFC. As you can see, none of them are actual mobile wallets. The biggest thing they provide is a real short cut to information and actions that can happen without much work. Many of these things can be done through QR codes, bumping, Bluetooth or other methods, but NFC provides a very simple and often elegant way to get through the process.

Also, in some of these cases, what’s also nice is that since they aren’t trying to conduct sensitive transactions, they don’t need to access the secure element inside a phone. That could be a limiting factor in the roll out of NFC, because the owners of the secure element, often the carriers, don’t seem to be in a hurry to enable a lot of other NFC payments systems. But with a host of other non payment uses emerging, users won’t have to wait to find out if their digital wallet is enabled on their particular phone. There might be other ways they can experience the power of NFC first. That will help in just teaching people the practice of tapping for information, transactions and access.

We’re still very early in the NFC game and the phones are just now trickling out in the U.S. But there’s going to be a much bigger flow of NFC-equipped phones starting next year. It’ll be these broader applications that might convince users that the technology has merit.