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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.

45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).

The large existing user-base of low-cost, mid-tier, NFC-less feature phones popular in emerging markets is a prime target for this technology. However, technical difficulties have prevented the adoption of SIM-based NFC. As the SIM card slot is located behind the battery, radio signals to and from the NFC module are effectively blocked in many phones.

Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.

As part of a Data Privacy Day report, Microsoft commissioned a study of over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers. In one segment, they asked what kinds of sites they considered in researching applicants online. The short answer: almost everything. As PC World put it—and as Jason detailed in his online identity primer—having a decent-looking personal web site, with blog-like material showing your grasp of topics and general up-to-date skills, is the best defense against anything and everything else a potential employer or contractor might find about you online. Then again, take a look at how many online realms hiring managers peek into when peeking at you. It's reassuring, if you've put time into cleaning up your online image, and perhaps a wake-up call if you've still got LOLcats littering your photo service pages

Social networking websites have lost some of their “cool” factor with younger users and are on their way to becoming the preserve of the middle-aged, according to figures published by Ofcom. The proportion of British 15- to 24-year-olds with a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace fell for the first time last year from 55 per cent to 50 per cent, according to the communications regulator. Older internet users are still flocking to the sites, however. The proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds claiming to have a social networking profile grew by 6 percentage points to 46 per cent, and among 35- to 54-year-olds by 8 percentage points to 35 per cent. the audience figures for individual social networking sites from Nielsen Online, another online research company, support the picture that social networking is an ageing medium. this ephemeral demographic may be moving on before media owners have properly learnt how to make money from their sites. Read more at www.ft.com Perhaps, older people will develop more serious, reflective uses for social networking than the young pioneers.

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.

A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing Assessing its impact as well as its volume will help companies take better advantage of buzz. APRIL 2010 • Jacques Bughin, Jonathan Doogan, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik

Exhibit 1: Word of mouth is influential throughout the consumer decision journey. Exhibit 2: By looking at impact as well as volume, marketers can measure the effects of word-of-mouth messages more accurately.

Consumers have always valued opinions expressed directly to them. Marketers may spend millions of dollars on elaborately conceived advertising campaigns, yet often what really makes up a consumer’s mind is not only simple but also free: a word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source. As consumers overwhelmed by product choices tune out the ever-growing barrage of traditional marketing, word of mouth cuts through the noise quickly and effectively.Indeed, word of mouth1 is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would. And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands. Register to read this article.

One in five smartphone users currently use location-based "check-in" services on their phones, representing 16.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers, or about 7 percent of the nation's total mobile phone population, according to a recent study from comScore, a Reston, Va., audience measurement service. That's quite a jump from the piddling 4 percent figure announced after the results of a Pew Research Center survey were released just last November. But for small business owners who've been looking to geolocation services to put them on the map in front of new customers, that growing propensity for check-ins is certainly welcome. The comScore study found that 16.7 million mobile phone subscribers accessed retail sites and shopping guides on their phones during the one-month test period. Further, 12.7 million of those participants said they did so on a smartphone -- a figure that represents 17.6 percent of the nation's smartphone users. That's an impressive growth statistic when you consider that companies like Foursquare and Gowalla launched in 2009 and 2007, respectively.

Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone - instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm, software to analyze the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, says the imaginary phone prototype "serves as a shortcut that frees users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device."

As a clinician fascinated by the use of new technologies to achieve outcomes, it’s hard to go past anything that is looking at bridging the divide between human emotions / touch and technology. Telenoid is one such project. It’s aim is to provide an effective way to transfer people’s presence. The research on telepresence is booming and it’s fairly widely accepted that videoconferencing is superior to teleconferencing and that platforms like virtual worlds provide even better telepresence sometimes. Telenoid is a step further again, providing a tangible means of interacting with someone remotely. In the second video below you’ll see its creator citing a key inspiration was the ability for remotely located grandparents to interact more with their grandchildren. That alone is laudable but for me the clinical simulation potentials stood out pretty strongly.

Real patients as simulation Imagine the ability to have a ‘patient’ reflecting the emotions and speech of a real person in combination with the current simulation functionality i.e. feedback, monitoring of biometric data etc. Taken a step further: a real patient experiencing a real health issue is able (with consent of course) to have their experience transferred to a simulation exercise in real time. There are already consumer devices on the market able to control avatars via thought processes, this is only a small step beyond that.

A specific example:

Developed for McGraw Hill Higher Education Education UK, PRACTICE Marketing is a 3D turn-based Serious Game intended to teach college kids the principles of product marketing and competition. In the game, players are able to fully experience the seven underlying principles upon which to base marketing strategy and efforts: Image, Differentiation, Repeat Business, Ease of Doing Business, Networking, Likeability, and Emotion. Gameplay You’ve been selected to manage a company’s new entry into the backpack market. Your first step in the game is to create a strong product that appeals to a specific market segment and price it appropriately.

You are upfront presented with the info you need to analyze the market, provided by market research, who has narrowed the backpack market down to five potential segments for you to consider targeting, selecting the one that looks the most promising.

Once you have selected a target market, you can use the backpack builder to design a pack that meets the needs of its particular demographic.

In the tradition of much post-Modern theorizing, “augmented reality” offers a new conceptual paradigm, seeking to implode/queer/do category work on the real/virtual dichotomy and make room for a more flexible understanding of social media that allows for recursivity between these two concepts.  A person embedded in augmented reality is a cyborg in the Harawaysian sense.  For this reason, the editors of this blog have proposed – somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that our research is best understood as “cyborgology.”  In augmented reality, the culture is hyper-literally super-imposed on the material.  Our bodies and all other objects in the world become canvases for the digital and its rapid circulation of signs and symbols.  In Bauman’s term, everything becomes a conduit of Liquid (post-)Modernity.  However, the symbolic order expressed through the digital does not emerge out of nothing; it is a reproduction or extension of what has always existed.  The digital and material are always in circulation and neither can be abstracted from the new order of social relations.  That is to say, society is neither online or offline; it is augmented.  Thus, augmented reality and the cyborgs who populate it are now the proper objects of sociological inquiry.

three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.

Researchers Sean Gustafson, Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso-Plattner Institute have created a working prototype of a touch interface

A wearable depth camera tracks the user's movements on the surface of the palm of his or hand, corresponding to specific commands for an iPhone or other touchscreen phone, such as sliding to unlock and time settings.

Imaginary Phone allows users to control their mobile devices without taking it out of their pocket. Instead, users mimic the interaction on the palm of their hand. The interaction is tracked by a wearable depth camera which sends input events to the actual physical device. By mimicking the layout of the physical device, here an iPhone, users can operate the device based on spatial memory built up while using the physical device.

The Internet is a vast mosaic of economic activity, ranging from millions of daily online transactions and communications to smartphone downloads of TV shows. Little is known, however, about how the Net in its entirety contributes to global growth, productivity, and employment. New McKinsey research examined the Internet economies of the G8 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden. It found that the Internet accounts for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. Register to continue.

Bill Keller of the New York Times has just written a provocative piece lamenting that new technologies are eroding essential human characteristics. I would certainly agree that almost all technologies, especially those with a cognitive element, transform the way we organize, value and manage our intellectual and social lives–-indeed, such complaints were raised, most famously by Plato about how writing was emptying words of their soul by disconnecting them from their living speakers. However, Keller makes not one but at least three distinct claims in his piece. I want to primarily discuss the one that he makes least explicitly and perhaps has never formulated directly himself.

first, let’s clarify the other two which are explicit.

here are the parts of Keller’s comments which have intrigued me

I was especially interested in commentary on the Chinese market by Robin Goad, Hitwise UK’s research director, who adds some sharp focus on the huge growth in micro-blogging in China – and the tool of choice isn’t Twitter: [...] Chinese Internet users are primarily interested in micro-blogging when it comes to social media.  Sina Micro blog (China’s alternative to Twitter) accounted for 1 in every 158 Internet visits in China for April 2011. This makes China one of the most voracious micro-blogging nations worldwide, with a greater market share of visits going to micro-blogging sites in China than in the UK, US, France, Canada, Australia or India. Twitter is by far the most dominant micro-blogging platform in the UK and US, but Twitter accounted for 1 in every 250 visits online in the UK and 1 in every 555 in the US during April 2011, much lower than Sina Micro’s dominance of the online market in China. What’s more, this data doesn’t take into account mobile or 3rd party applications, so the actual usage of micro-blogging in China is likely much higher than our statistics suggest. The metrics Robin posted underline the sheer scale of what’s happening in China in terms of connecting people. Add that info to other metrics such as Royal Pingdom’s The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000. It shows China as clearly the top country on the internet with 420 million users (compared to 22.5 million in 2000).

The internet of things, as the ultimate version of the smart grid is often described, could bring with it one of the downsides of today’s internet: hacker attacks.

the possibility that someone with bad intent and networking know-how could tap into the metering infrastructure and determine, for example, when a household is typically unoccupied and easier to break into.

The more connected our systems become, the more opportunities there will be for someone to exploit the various parts of it … as researchers studying the vulnerabilities of on-board computers in cars have already discovered.

The Topic-Mapper software development kit (SDK) by ai-one inc. reads and understands unstructured data without any human intervention. It allows developers to build artificial intelligence into almost any software program.

Unlike other machine learning approaches, ai-one’s technology extracts the inherent meaning of data without the need for any external references. A team of researchers spent more than eight years and $6.5 million building what they call “biologically inspired intelligence“ that works like a brain.

First, it automatically creates what ai-one describes as a “lightweight ontology” (LWO), The system determines the relationships between data elements as they are fed into the system. The primary benefit of LWO is that it is completely objective -- it makes associations without editorial (human) bias. LWOs are also very adaptive, automatically recalculating when ingesting new data. Unlike traditional ontologies, LWOs require no maintenance.

"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.”

Computer games make teenagers hungry and more likely to become obese,  scientists claim.They stimulate youngsters’ appetites encouraging them to raid the fridge and  cupboards for snacks.Experts believe this may explain why children who spend hours on games consoles  are often obese – it's not just because they don’t exercise.

The Canadian and Danish researchers found that the boys burnt off just 21 extra  calories during the hour they played computer games compared to resting.But they ate an extra 80 calories afterwards – nearly 60 more than they would  have burnt off.