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the Facebook newsfeed on your mobile phone would deliver to you everything you want to know: what news to digest, what movies to watch, where to eat and honeymoon, what kind of crib to buy for your first born. It would all be based on what you and your Facebook friends liked. Facebook’s algorithms would be refined so that it would all be sent to you — “pushed,” in Mr. Purdy’s words. You wouldn’t have to search for it.

What he didn’t have to say was that in this future world, you wouldn’t need Google. How would Facebook profit exactly? “There is a tremendous amount of value in here because we’re providing the user experience value,” he said. “That means users come back to Facebook. They come back again and again and again. That allows us to show advertising.”

Intuit wants to give its customers a glimpse of the future of mobile payments through an adaptation of its GoPayment service that eliminates the need for credit cards. Tapping into the growing field of NFC (near-field communication) technology, Intuit's reimagined GoPayment service would let consumers wirelessly pay for items on the go through just a touch of an NFC-enabled cell phone. With the necessary NFC hardware and credit card information stored on a mobile phone, consumers could leave their money and credit cards at home and use their phones to buy items and services at stores, restaurants, and other retail outlets. Retailers themselves would be able to send certain information back to the consumer's phone, including receipts, coupons, and loyalty programs.

With 2012 fast approaching along with it comes new mobile marketing opportunities that your business should follow as you consider efforts to spread the word about your brand and products and services through mobile. 

Mobile Visitation Grew 200% 

2011 has been a breakout year for growth in mobile visitation.  It featured a steep rise in text messaging, smartphone purchases and mobile advertising. Corporate use of mobile websites grew 210 percent in the last 12 months!

Dickson Chu, the high profile and often outspoken head of digital and mobile networks at Citi, has quit the bank to join daily deals outfit LivingSocial.

Chu joined Citi from PayPal less than two years ago with a brief to kickstart the bank's mobile payments programme. Unusually for the conservative banking industry, Chu was prepared to speak his mind and was an unashamed advocate of the Google Wallet venture.

Citi is currently the sole banking partner for the search giant's mobile payments operation, which is straining to make a mark on the high street ahead of the forthcoming launch of a rival programme by the Isis carrier consortium.

As part of BlackBerry Dev Con Asia taking place in Singapore right now, Wikitude has announced additional support for smartphones running on the BlackBerry 6. Bringing Wikitude to devices running BlackBerry 6 will help answer considerable demand expressed by users who want to experience Wikitude’s extensive content offering including more than 2,000 content Worlds consisting of approx. 150 million places around the globe. Users of the BlackBerry Bold 9700, 9780,9788 and BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphones can download Wikitude on BlackBerry App World starting today.

After being crowned “The Most Addictive Social App Using the BBM Social Platform” at BlackBerry DevCon Americas in October, Wikitude most recently won the BlackBerry® EMEA Innovation Award for “Best BBM Connected App”, awarded in Alicante 1stDecember. “Extending the Wikitude platform to millions of BlackBerry 6 smartphone users will make the BBM experience richer than ever before. We are extremely happy to finally bring this version of Wikitude to even more BlackBerry smartphone users,” says Martin Herdina, Wikitude’s CEO.

Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations, Research In Motion, said: “We’re delighted that Wikitude has integrated BBM support within their app. Integration with BBM can allow much greater viral discovery for apps, as well as enrich and transform the user experience with important social elements.”

Consumers will be able to pay for everything on the high street with their mobile phones in five years time, a new survey says.

Research by Forrester, commissioned by PayPal, found that “2016 will be the year when UK shoppers will be able to use their mobile phones to pay for things on the high street with digital money rather than cash, cheques or cards”.

The findings are based on interviews with 10 senior executives from major UK businesses, representing a combined 2010 turnover of £85 billion.

Mobile banking will continue to grow next year across a multiple fronts. Not only will more banks jump into mobile with optimized sites and application, but financial institutions will also build their existing mobile programs with a variety of new services.

Much of the interest in mobile banking is being driven by consumers, who tend to interact more with a mobile banking solution than they do Internet banking. On average, customers use a mobile banking app three times per week and only use traditional Internet banking two times per week, according Malauzai Software.

“We see a demand for mobile via the application and text messaging,” said Jim Simpson, vice president of information technology at City Bank Texas, Lubbock, TX, which has over 30 locations across Texas.

The battle is not just about dividing up territories already occupied; it is also about finding new lands to conquer. Both firms are keen to stake claims on the largely uncolonised and still somewhat notional terrain known as the “internet of things”: the myriad processors in industrial machinery, consumer goods and infrastructure, ever more of which will communicate with each other and with distant computers. Cisco, a giant American maker of networking gear, estimates that by 2015 there may be almost 15 billion internet-connected devices, up from 7.5 billion in 2010. Whereas the market for more phones and other personal computing devices is limited by the number of persons the planet has to offer, things, being more numerous than people, provide a lot more long-term room for growth.

Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques: - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws; - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database. To put it another way, the system is transforming the vibrations transmitted from touch through a rigid body into waveforms that a computer can, in real time, recognize and either transmute into audible sound or use as a triggering mechanism for other sounds. It's an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it "hears" a tap.

will touch interfaces of the future rely on sounds as well as capacitance? Perhaps sound would be a cheaper, more-durable option for certain kinds of interfaces, making touch interactions all the more ubiquitous.

Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.

the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.

Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.

A new Greek scientific study has demonstrated how frequency electromagnetic fields, namely cell phones, portable phones, WiFi, and wireless computer equipment, alter important protein changes in the brains of animals. Exposure to electromagnetic frequencies is the result of our advancing technologies, but it is important to study these effects so people know exactly what they’re dealing with in order to take the necessary precautionary measures.

The study, entitled “Brain proteome response following whole body exposure of mice to mobile phone or wireless DECT base radiation,” was published in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. Important areas of the brain such as the hippocampus, cerebellum, and frontal lobe are regions responsible for learning, memory, and other functions. These areas are negatively impacted by microwave radiation, even at levels below the safety guidelines put in place by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation protection

Researchers found that 143 proteins in the brain were negatively impacted by radio frequency radiation over a period of 8 months. A total of 3 hours of cell phone exposure were simulated over the 8 month time period, and the results showed that many neural function related proteins’ functional relationship changed the for worse.

IT has been said that Google knows more about what you like than your own partnerNow the search giant has given a glimpse on just how much information it has collected - and who thinks you are.But it seems the famed Google algorithms are far from infallible.

And people taking advantage of the facility that allows the public to view what kind of consumer Google thinks they are have been amused to find themselves listed with the wrong age and even sex.Nevertheless, the knowledge that Google works so hard to profile its 350m account holders is bound to intensify the debate about privacy which flared up again this week with the announcement that the company was going to start tracking users across all of its sites, including YouTube.

The detailed personal 'profile' sums up many of a user's interests, along with age and gender.Google builds a detailed profile by harvesting the history of its account holders' visits to sites in its advertising network.But your age and gender are decided by those of other Google users who have visited the sites you visit, leading to the mistakes

When people receive food or pharmaceuticals, the smart tag will display the temperature record. This method will be less expensive and more accurate than placing alarm sensors in shipping containers, ThinFilm said. ThinFilm's technology, which has been under development since the 1990s, is a printable memory device that stores the ones and zeros of digital information by changing the orientation of polymer chains when a voltage is applied. Last year, ThinFilm partnered with Xerox company PARC to combine its ferroelectric memory with PARC's printed transistors. Adding computing logic allows the device to not only read, write, and process data, but also to store more data.

The computing and storage are very limited on this sort of device and will work for less than a year but it is low power and, because it's printed on plastic, low cost. Data can be stored many times and is not lost with loss of power. By partnering with companies that have made a battery, display, and sensor for its memory system, ThinFilm has created smart tags which can be used for many different applications, said CEO Davor Sutija.

The company sees integrated printable electronics replacing silicon processors and enabling the Internet of things. For example, the company has deals to supply smart tags that add interactivity to toys and games. It has also had discussions with auto companies to use tags to gather data on vehicle brakes and notify drivers when they need service. In 2013 or 2014, the company plans to add a wireless networking module to its smart tag. That will allow everyday objects to communicate with the near-field communications in cell phones, said Sutija.

In the Business901 podcast, What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 1 of 2 we looked at a more strategic view. In today's podcast, we looked at the more tactical practices and how they related not only to a political campaign but to a typical marketing campaign. Derek A. Pillie has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana’s Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions. After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports. Related Information: Preview of Political Campaign Marketing Podcast Political Campaigning – Strategy Update What political campaigns can teach business Lean Six Sigma for Government