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12.7 million check-in done on smartphones in March 2011, says comScore report Nearly 17 million US mobile subscribers used location-based 'check-in' services on their phones in March 2011, found a new study by comScore.The study showed that users have done 12.7 million check-in on smartphones, representing 17.6% of the smartphone population.The check-in service users, representing 7.1% of the entire mobile population, showed a high propensity for mobile media usage, including accessing retail sites and shopping guides. They also displayed other characteristics of early adopters, including a stronger likelihood of owning a tablet device and accessing tech news, when compared to the average smartphone user.

The research firm said that of the 16.7 million people using check-in services on their mobile devices, 12.7 million (76.3%) did so via a smartphone device.Android accounted for the largest share of check-in service users with 36.6% checking-in from an Android device, while 33.7% of users checked in from an iPhone. Apple had the highest representation relative to its percentage of the total smartphone market.RIM accounted for 22% of check-in service users, while Microsoft, Palm and Symbian each accounted for less than 5%.The study showed that more than 95% of check-in service users used their mobile browser or applications. Nearly 62% accessed news. Check-in user behavior was also consistent with that of traditional early adopters, with 40.3% of users accessing tech news and 28.2% owning a media tablet, both significantly higher than average.

Further, check-in service users also showed a high propensity for accessing retail-related destinations on their mobile devices. Nearly one-third of users accessed online retail sites on their mobiles, while one-fourth accessed shopping guides.Check-in service users were also more likely to be exposed to mobile advertising, with nearly 40% recalling seeing a Web or app ad during the month, compared to just 27.5% of smartphone users.

Long-awaited data from an international study have shown no evidence of increased risk of brain tumors associated with mobile phones, except in people who have the most exposure. But design flaws of the Interphone study, which is partly industry funded, suggest that the latest results cannot be taken to mean that cell phones and brain cancer are unrelated, critics say. "I'm not telling people to stop using the phone. I'm saying that I can't tell you if cell phones are dangerous, but I can tell you that I'm not sure that they are safe," said Dr. Devra Davis, professor of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. The study itself, to be published Tuesday in the International Journal of Epidemiology, acknowledged that the findings were not definitive and called for more research. But Daniel Krewski, professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa in Ontario and one of the Interphone collaborators, said the study went to "great lengths to make sure that the results were scientifically sound."

At the highest exposure levels -- using a mobile phone half an hour a day over a 10-year period -- the study found a 40 percent increased risk of glioma brain tumors. With adjustments for statistical biases, that turned into 80 percent. But Krewski and colleagues say that there is not enough evidence to show a causal connection, and the group of participants using their phones this much was relatively small.

Gartner has just released its Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users report for 1Q11, and results confirm the expectations: Android keeps growing and is with no doubt the number one platform, while Nokia is still the strongest manufacturer even though at its minimum level since 1997. The other great winner is the Taiwanese HTC, which sells almost triple amount of handsets thanks especially to its Android smartphones.

Nokia keeps loosing share but keeps first position, with Samsung holding number two with a slight loss in percentage but growth in sales. LG loses ground too and is now pushed by Apple and RIM. ZTE keeps growing, and just behind it HTC passes two of the bigger names from the past that are today relegated to bottom positions: Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Huawei closes the top ten thanks to its low-price devices. Can we expect HTC to pass ZTE and maybe even RIM before the next report? With amazing superphones such as the Sensation and the Thunderbolt that’s very possible! “Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85 percent year-on-year”, said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This share could have been even higher, but manufacturers announced a number of high-profile devices during the first quarter of 2011 that would not ship until the second quarter of 2011. We believe some consumers delayed their purchases to wait for these models”.

The smartphones report shows a huge growth by the Android OS, which is now firmly the platform to sell the most, with Symbian dropped to number two, and iOS third after surpassing BlackBerry OS. Microsoft OSs (both Windows Phone 7 and the older Windows Mobile, combined) mantains the same sales level of last year but halving its percentage; experts say Microsoft’s alliance with Nokia will bring Windows Phones back to the top replacing Symbian,

re creating smartphone loyalty, determining which OS and device a consumer may buy. At least that’s what a recent Gartner report will have you believe. The sales report ranks Android, Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone sales in the first quarter of 2011, noting the impact of mobile apps on the market share of new sales. It seems the mobile device market is only gaining in strength, Google (GOOG) taking 36 percent market share, leading with 36.3 million unites sold. Symbian comes in second, with 27.4 percent market share at 27.6 million units, leaving Apple (AAPL) at 16.8 percent market share with 16.9 in sales. RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry comes in fourth, with 13 million and a 12.9 percent take of the market.

“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform,” notes principle research analyst Roberta Cozza. “This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google. As well as putting their devices in the context of a broader ecosystem, manufacturers must start to see their smartphones as part of a computing continuum.”

Apps have certainly created an expansive ecosystem for mobile industry, but just like the mighty dinosaur, this era may one day become extinct. The death of mobile apps has been predicted by MIT writer Christopher Mims, pegging web apps as the future. It’s their potential ubiquity across platforms that extends access to web users, instead of drawing lines in the sand around mobile browsing versus the web you access on a PC laptop. Mims calls for a browser-based utopia where offline access and standards like HTML5 harmonize our desperate web experiences, but notes that offline access is far from perfect. Things still boil down to business, where Google’s marketplace has lower operating costs than Apple’s, with a broadening reach.

"One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they've taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don't share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn't speak their language."

"We all know about the growing popularity of collision avoidance systems. As recently as this week, we've even heard about developments on the autonomous car front. Problem is, most of those systems depend on vehicles going it alone, using radar and other technology to avoid hazards in their way. But what if cars could talk to one another and the surrounding infrastructure? Wouldn't that be even better — and safer? The US Department of Transportation thinks so, and it's hoping to prove it in a new series of 'talking car' experiments taking place in six locales across the US. These technologies may potentially address up to 82 percent of crash scenarios with unimpaired drivers, preventing tens of thousands of vehicle crashes every year (further research [PDF] will incorporate heavy vehicle crashes including buses, motor carriers, and rail)."

For Apple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike that of religious devotees, according to a BBC documentary series that cites neurological research. The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says. The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London. Observers and Apple critics have long accused fans of the tech company of taking their infatuation to an extreme. People have gone to great lengths to prove their love of Apple with tattoos, bumper stickers and home shrines to outmoded Mac computers. Apple's cult-like following was highlighted in a 2009 documentary called "Macheads." A blog, aptly titled Cult of Mac, wrote on Thursday about Oakland, California, resident Gary Allen's cross-country pilgrimage to Apple's first store in Virginia to celebrate the retail chain's 10th anniversary this week.

pple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike

After completing a two-year project involving the use of an active RFID mesh network to track conditions that could degrade its stone walls and artwork, the Tower of London continues to utilize the technology to track the environmental cycles of ambient and surface temperatures, as well as humidity, at two towers. This information could then be compared against the conditions of the tower walls and a painting located within the stone structure. The system, known as FlatMesh and provided by Senceive, was put into place in 2009 as part of a research project that the fortress' caretaker initiated, seeking wireless solutions for environmental monitoring in areas in which thick walls can obstruct transmissions.

Customer support rules are rapidly changing, as unprecedented numbers of customers use social media channels to express options, seek assistance and purchase products. Customers have quickly adopted Facebook, Twitter and Google, as their primary means for gathering information regarding a company’s products and services. In many cases social media customers receive support from multiple departments within a company but are isolated from the contact center. This is because the traditional contact center is generally not ready for reaching out to the social customer or will only provide secondary support when its telephone agents are free. Regardless of how companies choose to market and support their social media customers, they should apply the same basic procedures found in contact centers to positively engage their customers

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New research by electrical engineers at Oregon State University has confirmed that an electronic technology called "ultrawideband" could hold part of the solution to an ambitious goal in the future of medicine -- health monitoring with sophisticated "body-area networks."

Such networks would offer continuous, real-time health diagnosis, experts say, to reduce the onset of degenerative diseases, save lives and cut health care costs. Some remote health monitoring is already available, but the perfection of such systems is still elusive

"This type of sensing would scale a monitor down to something about the size of a bandage that you could wear around with you," said Patrick Chiang, an expert in wireless medical electronics and assistant professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "The sensor might provide and transmit data on some important things, like heart health, bone density, blood pressure or insulin status," Chiang said. "Ideally, you could not only monitor health issues but also help prevent problems before they happen. Maybe detect arrhythmias, for instance, and anticipate heart attacks. And it needs to be non-invasive, cheap and able to provide huge amounts of data.

Earth is expected to be home to over nine billion people by 2050. That’s a lot of people for Mother Nature to manage.

Space issues aside, the biggest concern on an over-populated planet is whether or not there will be enough resources to go around. Last week, British investor and Co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO) Jeremy Grantham offered what Business Insider called a “startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.”

the purpose of this piece isn’t to tread well-worn ground about the planet’s perils. So forget about fossil fuels, drinking water, crops, ice-caps, trees and animals for now. What we’ll be looking at is all those elements that go into helping you do what you’re doing right now. Whether you’re reading this on your laptop, smartphone, tablet…or any other digital device, the natural environment has had a huge part to play in this experience.

Smartphones are addictive, according to a study from the British telecom regulator Ofcom, which, like many other studies on the topic, emphasizes that people do things like using handsets in bathrooms in lieu of talking to their children and points out how they are changing social behavior. The press release on the research, issued Thursday, uses the word addiction in a variety of forms five times, including when it says 37 percent of adults and 60 percent of teens admit they are “highly addicted” to the devices.

Of the 65.2 million tablets predicted to be shipped in 2011, Apple will continue to dominate the tablet market with 40 million iPad shipments and hold a 61% share of the market, a new research report from Digitimes reveals. In the first six months of 2011, tablet shipments increased more than 420% from the previous year, with sales expected to increase into the second half to boost the number of shipments by 150% from a year earlier. Apple is expected to contribute more than 25.5 million iPad shipments in the second half of the year alone, up 76% compared to the first half of the year.

With the goal of creating a more powerful “prediction engine,” for forecasting everything from the price of gas in the U.S. to the nuclear capabilities of Iran, Stone’s research team is looking for individuals to contribute their knowledge in topic areas such as politics, the military, economics, science and technology, and social affairs. “This kind of enhanced predictive analysis capability will help the intelligence community provide early warning and leading indicators of events,” said Stone, who has published studies on the nature of expertise and how to make well-calibrated, non-overconfident judgments. “The idea is to combine individual judgments from a lot of people who all know a little to provide a tremendous amount of information.  Unlike the current process, our procedure captures, shares and combines expert opinions in a manner to make forecasts as accurate as possible.” The ACES process provides opportunities for anonymous sharing and deliberating before making forecasts and will provide participants feedback on their contributions and predictive successes.

According to ACES Principal Investigator Dr. Dirk Warnaar, “Some people know important details that can make the future predictable in many cases. They often do not share their insight with others. Our project is designed to find out what people know, have them share this knowledge with others, and ask them to make a prediction based on what they and others know.”

So what’s making gamification so popular today? Consider these four factors.

1. Consumers Want It

consumers are looking for new ways to entertain themselves — 40% of U.S. online adults have expressed this interest in a recent survey. What’s more, consumers want game elements everywhere. 60% of consumers play a video game online in a typical week. Consumers (especially Gen Yers) are increasingly accessing games online and on mobile devices.

Research group Gartner issued a special report on Thursday, noting that Apple will have a "free run" in the tablet market this holiday season as rivals continue to lag. The group sees worldwide media tablet sales as on track to reach 63.6 million units this year, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010.

Gartner predicts Apple will hold on to a dominant 73.4 percent of the market this year, though down from 83 percent in 2010. Android is expected to remain in second place, with the firm assuming that no other platforms will manage a 5 percent share of the market in 2011.

By the end of 2015, the company's tablet share is expected to slide to 46 percent.

Judith Cherry, Head of Research and Insight at the UK-based organization Opportunity Now and author of the report “Out of Office: Solutions for an Agile Future” [PDF] explained, “We’re moving the debate away from flexwork – because we’ve come to the understanding that we’re all flex workers. What we’re doing now is “agile working.”

The distinction is important, she said, because agile working is about more than working from home, or using mobile devices. It’s a whole new system of management.

She explained, “Technology allows us to work after hours, across time zones, at home, at the airport – we can manage this, so how come it is so hard to let people work three days out of the week? The psychology of work has not caught up with the technology.”

Payments company PayPal wants to make sure that it stays in the conversation when it comes to mobile payments.

In the last couple of weeks we have heard from innovations coming out of MasterCard and Intuit. PayPal is one of the leaders in mobile payments, especially on the peer-to-peer front.

PayPal is predicting that mobile payments is going to boom come time for the holiday shopping spree

Earlier this year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) classified radiation emitted by mobile phones as a possible cancer risk, with a similar threat to lead and the banned pesticide DDT. And the European Commission also issued a warning saying that individuals should be protected from low-frequency radiation emitted by cell phones, masts and Wi-Fi systems.

Mr Stein, the chief group executive of Samworth Brothers

began suffering the effects of low-frequency radiation six years ago when he experienced pain when using his mobile phone. “I began getting weird sensations in my ear if I went near a computer or TV, any electrical equipment with a microchip” he said. “I took the view that I was a freak and kept quiet, but it was difficult because I couldn’t drive a modern car with computers on board.” Mr Stein’s research eventually led him to the diagnosis that he is electro-sensitive, a condition he shares with several thousand people in the UK. Electro sensitivity is caused by the thousands of magnetic fields that surround us, from mobile and cordless phones to other wireless devices, including car sat-nav kits. The symptoms include sleep problems, headaches, tinnitus and earache, chest pains, loss of memory, poor concentration and depression.

The Internet has a short attention span. According to research by link-shortening service Bit.ly, click rates drop by half after about three hours for links posted on Twitter, Facebook, and regular Web pages (direct). For hot news stories, the dropoff is even faster -- within the first five minutes, those links get half the clicks they'll ever receive. YouTube has a much longer half-life -- around 7 hours. That's probably because watching a video requires more time and concentration, and can't be done as easily at work.