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Post-revolution Egypt is in a state of flux overlooked by outsiders. New political parties are forming while various factions hustle for power. As Egypt gears up for free elections, tech-savvy geeks are betting that their projects will have a major impact on how people will vote.

A combination of academics and entrepreneurs recently worked with Egyptian activists on a “Hackathon for Egypt” that provides some interesting--and fascinating--clues.

Participants in the hackathon were organized by Cloud to Street, a project dedicated to aiding Egyptian activists through technology. Cloud to Street is headed up by a loose group of primarily Canadian scholars and diplomats. Approximately 75 programmers took part, as well as Egyptian activists who attended both in person and via teleconference

EBay and its online payment unit, PayPal, on Thursday sued Google and two executives for stealing trade secrets related to mobile payment systems. The two executives, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, were formerly with PayPal and led the launch on Thursday of Google's own mobile payment system in partnership with MasterCard, Citigroup and phone company Sprint. The suit highlights the growing battle by a wide range of companies from traditional finance to Silicon Valley trying to take a major stake in what has been described as a US$1 trillion ($1.2 trillion) opportunity in mobile payments. The mobile phone is seen as the digital personal wallet of the future. The eBay suit said Bedier worked for nine years at PayPal, most recently serving as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. He joined Google on January 24 this year.

Every 34 seconds someone suffers from a heart attack in the US. In the fight against this insane plague, startups are scrambling to find ways to leverage popular technology. The latest attempt is SHL Telemedicine‘s SmartHeart, a smart phone enabled electrocardiagram (ECG) device that only takes 30 seconds to analyze your heart and email the results to your doctor. Now nearly anyone can take an ECG by strapping the palm sized monitor to your chest and pushing a few buttons on your phone. No need for bulky machines, conductive gel, or an on site trained clinician. Check out the video presentation on SHL’s newest health gadget below. Aiming to come to market with a price tag near $500, SmartHeart could be an affordable way to recruit everyday citizens in the fight against cardiovascular disease.

Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of a British user in a libel battle that could have huge implications for free speech on the web.The social network has passed the name, email address and telephone number of a south Tyneside councillor accused of libelling the local authority via a series of anonymous Twitter accounts. South Tyneside council took the legal fight to the superior court of California, which ordered Twitter, based in San Francisco, to hand over the user's private details.It is believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users and comes amid a huge row over privacy and free speech online.Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer named as being the plaintiff in a gagging order preventing reporting of an alleged affair with a reality TV model, is separately attempting to unmask Twitter users accused of revealing details of the privacy injunction.

However, Giggs brought the lawsuit at the high court in London and the move to use California courts is likely to be seen as a landmark moment in the internet privacy battle.

Ahmed Khan, the south Tyneside councillor accused of being the author of the pseudonymous Twitter accounts, described the council's move as "Orwellian". Khan received an email from Twitter earlier this month informing him that the site had handed over his personal information. He denies being the author of the allegedly defamatory material.

The first dual-core Android tablets only arrived in February, but Nvidia is already showing off an improved quad-core chip that’s expected to power tablets by August. The system-on-a-chip, codenamed “Kal-El,” has four computer cores and a dozen graphics processors that will offer a huge performance boost in mobile devices. Nvidia announced the chip in February, with support for 1440p video playback, which is higher than most HDTV sets.

Kal-El should bring faster device response times, vastly improved graphics, quicker camera applications and more. But perhaps the chip is too impressive when it comes to product timing.

the first dual-core tablets launched in February and slates using this new quad-core chip could be available by August, that means the very young Google Honeycomb tablet market is essentially running through a product cycle in six short months

these are some of the enticing claims made by the developers of a new system that embeds edible radio frequency identification (RFID) chips directly into food. Its creators insist the technology will revolutionize the way humans eat for the better, but critical-thinking onlookers will recognize the ploy as just another way to track and control human behavior.

Developed by Hannes Harms from the Royal College of Art in London, the “NutriSmart” system is based on the idea that RFID wafers injected directly into food can help better track the food supply chain, further automate the supermarket shopping experience, and simplify the eating experience by programming data into food so that humans essentially do not have to think about what they are doing.The technology makes both eating and dealing with food in general mindless, as a person simply needs to plop an RFID-embedded food item onto a special RFID-laced plate, which then tells the person all about the item and how much of it to eat. RFID ovens and microwaves also eliminate having to think about how long to cook an RFID food item — simply put it in the RFID microwave, oven, or toaster, and the machine will know exactly how long to cook the item.

mad scientists have already developed edible RFID tags for use in pharmaceutical drugs

Keeping track of everything we eat would be a great idea, and I'm sure we'd learn all kinds of things we don't really want to know about our diet and overall health. Until now it's been a major hassle to do this, but tiny digestible RFID tags could automate the entire process for every si

Keeping track of everything we eat would be a great idea, and I'm sure we'd learn all kinds of things we don't really want to know about our diet and overall health. Until now it's been a major hassle to do this, but tiny digestible RFID tags could automate the entire process for every single piece of food that we consume.

NutriSmart is a concept for a food tracking system that uses RFID tags embedded in food along with a special plate that scans everything you eat, for the purposes of tracking nutrition and food allergies as well as to provide a little extra information on just what exactly it is that you're scarfing down:

appending real-world purchase information to its treasure trove of online behavioral data will vastly increase the value of customers’ profiles and increase the rates Google (NSDQ: GOOG) can charge its advertisers. It will be a way for Google to increase its local presence. NFC (near-field communications) is too often equated simply with payments, but Google understands that NFC tags have broad application (working like Quick Response [QR] and other 2D barcodes do today). Google can help retailers use NFC tags for in-store promotions and check-ins, augmenting the understanding of customer behavior for ad targeting.

Numerous players—from Internet pure players to operators and retailers—are embracing the mobile/social/local combo. Unifying the online and offline worlds via mobile will create long-term market disruption. There are plenty of new opportunities opening up if you center your approach around the notion of context, trying to invent new product and services that will tie together places, brands, and consumers. Think about mobile augmented reality. At the end of the day, it is all about facilitating the discovery and understanding of information around you.

A deep integration of Twitter and iOS 5 was among the many things announced by Apple today but it's not just that you'll be able to post to Twitter from inside official Apple apps like photos and maps. Any 3rd party iOS developer will be able to leverage a number of Twitter Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make their apps better and more social. After email, SMS and iOS messaging, Twitter will now become a key social layer over the top of many of the apps on iOS devices.

"There is single sign-on, which allows you to retrieve a user's identity, avatar, and other profile data." That sounds like Facebook Connect, but I'm going to guess that Twitter will not prohibit developers from caching that data for time-shifted, aggregate, offline or other interesting types of analysis. Letting users skip having to create an account with every new app they download and instead click to log-in with their Twitter accounts is going to make many users very happy and encourage every iOS owner to get a Twitter account if they don't have one already. App developers will get more and better populated user accounts, faster.

"There's also a frictionless core signing service, allowing you to make and sign any call to the Twitter API." To be honest, I'm not really sure what this means. Perhaps it means that parts of the Twitter API that require user authentication will be accessible via the same single sign-on feature discussed above.

As the electronic age puts physical bookstores and libraries under increasing threat, Local Books is a great example of how, by encouraging a resurgence of consumer interest at a local level, new technologies can be used to provide a shot in the arm for traditional outlets. Launched in January, it’s a free iPhone app that allows users to search an area for bookstores, libraries and literary events such as readings, book discussions and signings. Local Books is powered by LibraryThing Local—a crowdsourced database of 51,000 bookstores and libraries around the world. Users can search for these “venues” by name or by location. The details provided for venues include maps plus (when available) descriptions, photographs, links, and information about upcoming events at those establishments. Venues and events can be sorted by distance, name, type and date. At present Local Books does not show inventories from bookstores and libraries. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this feature available from them or from someone else in the near future. Could that be you? (Related: Online platform connecting booklovers.) Website: www.librarything.com/blog/2010/01/local-books-iphone-application.php

As Groupon prepares for its IPO, critics are circling the daily deals site wondering whether it's worth the hefty $25 billion valuation it currently holds. Key to the future of Groupon's success is its ability to woo merchants, with the promise that participating will boost business and draw new customers.

But recent story in TechCrunch highlighted the hesitation that some merchants may feel about getting involved with the site. TechCrunch revisited one merchant who proclaimed that signing up for Groupon was the "single worst business decision" she had made. Her story echoes other merchants who have claimed that Groupons actually result in unprofitability, administrative nightmares, and, to cap it all off, that they don't result in new regular customers.

Jessie Burke, owner of Posies Cafe in Oregon, first told her story in September 2010. According to Burke, Groupon pushed her to offer a deal that would let users buy $13 of product for $6. Groupon originally wanted 100 percent of the money (what it usually takes when consumers pay less than $10 on a deal), but relented, revising their percentage cut of the deal price to 50 percen

"The Invisible Internet is associated closely with the concept of the “Internet of Things,” in which a multitude of everyday objects are connected wirelessly. In such a world, not every object will have the intelligence to make decisions for itself — your carton of milk doesn’t need an advanced processor, only the ability to communicate what it is and its expiration date — but collectively they’ll create a form of ambient intelligence, allowing them to self-organize as a group. If the Invisible Internet of Things does become a reality, the Web will cease to be merely a virtual space, where people interact with one another from behind a PC or phone’s screen, and become a real space — “meat space,” if you will — where thousands of objects, both personal and public, interact with one another.

The one element, besides a radio, all of those objects have in common is awareness. They have to be able to sense one another as well as their surroundings. Embedding devices and objects with that kind of sensitivity probably is the smallest challenge the Internet of Things faces right now, said Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research Center. The core sensors needed in the network of the future already are embedded in the average smartphone today: GPS and cellular triangulation sense location; accelerometers and digital compasses sense movement and direction; digital cameras can see for the devices. Some of those sensors need to be refined, but for the most part, devices already have access to enormous amounts of raw sensory data, Tirri said. The challenge for the industry is processing that data, interpreting it and combining it with data from other sensors to make it useful. Once the technology overcomes those problems, there’s no limit to what can be wirelessly enabled, he added.

“In today’s world of handsets, we talk in billions; in the future, we will talk about trillions of devices,” Tirri said. “Radios and sensors will be very small. They will be in everyday devices like coffeemakers and key chains, as well as all consumer devices, but also things you wouldn’t think you’d have wireless capabilities, like chairs, tables, even your bed.”

SHAPE Services, a leading mobile app developer best known for its IM+ All-in-One Mobile Messenger app, today announced that their new location-based messaging service, named “Neighbors,” is now available as a free update to its IM+ Mobile Messenger.With “Neighbors”, user can now find new real life connections and friends, buy and sell local services and goods using an interactive map, chat with local friends as well as initiate conversations with other people who are nearby, and publish and view local offers and announcements as status updates on their profiles.

Features:Location-Based Messaging Functionality – Allows users to find real people in their local area and easily initiate conversations, catch up with local friends and post local announcements.Location Privacy – Easy-to-understand privacy settings for disclosing user location, which includes the user’s ability to define their location as wide as their house, street or city.Interactive Map – With just a tap of the finger users can see the person’s profile and status, allowing the user to visually identify people around them.

SHAPE Services also plans to incorporate a unique patent pending augmented reality interface that will let the users look around with a 360 degree camera view.

Security vendor Juniper Networks has warned users of Google’s mobile OS Android that there has been a 400 percent increase in Android malware between June 2010 and January 2011. In its “Malicious Mobile Threats Report 2011“, the company has said that Android as the dominant growing force in the mobile device market, was the biggest target of malware and exploit developers in 2010.

Symbian mobiles continue to remain the most prone to threats.

Agencies Mizbala and twentythree created an eerie location-based campaign for If I Die, a Facebook application that lets people record a message that will only be published after they die. Of course, no one think they're going to die anytime soon so people needed a bit of prompting. Mizbala used th APIs of popular location services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Twitter and Google Latest to track checkins all over the world. Once they located a person, they'd place a call to the location the person had checked into and asked to have the establishment to put the person on the line. Once they had the person on the line, they'd leave a creepy message and tell the person to go to the If I Die Facebook app. You can check out the demo call to Mashable's Adam Ostrow in this video to see what it's all about. Did the campaign work? Oh yes it did. Without any advertising, the campaign received lots of press in newspapers, blogs, radio and TV coverage which resulted in an 800 percent increase in recorded messages being left on "If I Die". But ask yourself. Do you really wants to be found this easily?

n advertising circles there is an axiom that says that a customer has to be exposed to your product or service at least three times before they will convert. It's called the rule of three. It's why companies run remarketing campaigns. It's also an explanation for two conflicting surveys concerning location based social media.

In the first survey by Dubit, a youth communications agency, they found that 48% of teenagers surveyed had never heard of location based social media services such as Facebook Places and Foursquare. And of the 52% of the teenagers that had heard of these services, few of them actually used those services. The survey consisted of 1,000 teens between the ages of 11 to 18.

The second survey by Comscore's MobiLens showed that 16.7 million mobile users accessed check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And 95% of those users regularly accessed a mobile web browser. The medium age range was 18 to 34. So what's going on? How can teenagers, who practically live and sleep with their mobile phones, be so out of the loop when it comes to location based social media? The answer is that they simply haven't been exposed to the services often enough to see the value.

We observed the emerging trend of online dating among today’s tech savvy generation and in order to simplify it, we decided to launch Dates Near Me, a free mobile dating service which caters towards the requirements of today’s generation. The iPhone dating application works by broadcasting the location of users based on GPS signals that permit them to find nearby singles and meet up right away if they desire. “Begin your search to find a like-minded companion, friend, lover or date using DatesNearMe mobile phone dating application on your iPhone and Google Android. With the singles showing an ever increasing desire for on the spot gratification, we realized the importance of mobile dating technology”, remarked the CEO of DatesNearMe.com Few reasons that make DatesNearMe better than any other mobile dating application are: 1. Highest level of privacy and security settings so that you can flirt with comfort. 2. Find singles around you with the help of our map view or list view. 3. 100% Free. Definitely no charges or catches. 4. Filled of features with high user friendliness. 5. Create your profile in less than no time. Just a few clicks if you update from Facebook. 6. Add users to your hot List, and see who has added you to theirs. 7. Easily flirt with hotties with winks, smiles and live messages.

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value.

"Smartphone security recommendations seem to boil down to Windows-like practices: install an antivirus, run updates, and don't execute apps from untrusted sources. On my own computers, running Linux, I choose to only install (signed) packages from the distribution's or well-known repositories, or programs I can check and compile myself, or run them as a dedicated user — and I don't bother with an antivirus. What rules should I adopt on my soon-to-be-bought Android device? Can I use it purely with open-source apps and still make the most of it? Are Android's fine-grained permissions (accessing the network, contacts...) reliable? Can apps be trusted not to scan your files and keyboard for passwords and emails? What precautions do security-conscious Slashdotters take to keep control of their phones?"