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“While other vendors are fighting over no monthly fees, but higher processing costs for mobile transactions, we’re still saying ‘no’ to mobile transaction surcharges,” said Hammermaster. “With Sage Mobile Payments, businesses have the option to pay no more than they would to process regular credit or debit card transactions on a standard credit card terminal.” 

Enhancements built into Sage Mobile Payment 2.0 include an updated user interface, signature capture capabilities, a tax and tip calculator, and a free Sage Mobile “app store” download.

“In 2011, 25 percent of worldwide mobile PC shipments were tablets, and upwards of 75 percent U.S. small and midsized businesses plan to purchase tablets in the next year,” said Greg Hammermaster, president of Sage Payment Solutions, the payments division for Sage. “Mobility has truly become a must-have in today’s business world. Businesses using Sage Mobile Payments have a great opportunity to expand their sales and customer service opportunities, and with the confidence of a commercial-grade mobile payments solution. Sage Mobile Payments will help businesses evolve into this next phase of mobile payments.”

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 yellow-handled hammer, which the eBay CEO purchased at Home Depot using PayPal, signals that the company’s plans for entering the mobile payments business has entered the construction phase.

The company also announced fourth-quarter results yesterday, solidly beating both the company’s internal guidance and analyst expectations. One of eBay’s big initiatives over the past year has been to find ways to work more closely with physical retailers by providing them with the technology they need to operate more efficiently online and offline. Over the past year, that has included buying 13 companies, for a total investment of $3.4 billion.

“We are right at the intersection of something that’s really cool,” Donahoe said. “This isn’t something that everyone sees, like social networking three years into it, when only the early people knew about it.”

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit. Gamification is bullshit. I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically. More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway. Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.

American retail company REI ventures into augmented reality (AR) promotions by creating an AR app to give prizes to consumers and at the same time encourage traffic inside its new location in New York.

The app is named “Find Out NYC” and may be used by consumers to scan more than 400 specially-designed REI posters located around New York City, which serve as portals to six virtual scenes. Upon finding one of these posters, they can use their smartphone at the poster to scan and capture its respective headline. This will take them to an AR page that projects the virtual nature scene along with pictures of outdoor gear prizes that they can tap to win them. Apart from winning the outdoor gear prize, customers are also given the chance to win a trip for two to Costa Rica.

From REI: REI is now in New York City! We’re located in the historic Puck building near Manhattan’s SoHo district. Drop in and explore our 39,000-square-foot, three-level store. REI offers top-brand outdoor gear and clothing for camping, climbing, cycling, fitness, hiking, paddling, skiing, snowboarding and more. We’re also a complete New York City bike shop, offering professional bike shop services to help keep you biking the streets and trails year-round. Come by, meet our friendly staff of outdoor experts, and gear up for your next adventure. Find out about all of the REI events going on now in the New York area, and be sure to download our new FIND OUT NYC app! Use your phone to scan and unlock specially designed REI posters around the city which serve as portals to six virtual scenes. Use the map functionality on the app to find the posters nearest you. Get Find Out NYC app details.

Contrary to the many rumours in circulation on-line, the ‘Nozomi' or Xperia HD was actually only the codename for the first in the, now only Sony, Xperia range of mobile phones. The Sony Xperia S is now the official name of the device, which was launched this week at Las Vegas' Consumer Electronics Show.

Sony has been eager to show off the high definition display of the newest Xperia on the block, with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. The phone has two front-facing cameras; one with 12MP camera that is capable of 720p video recording and a front-facing version, for video calling. The Exmor ‘R' sensor also makes a welcome return, which is essentially an image sensor with enhanced imaging characteristics. Introduced to the original Xperia series, this feature helps you to capture high quality, bright pictures especially under poor light conditions. In order to further heighten the camera's specification, there is a 3D-sweep panorama feature and low aperture value - allowing more light to reach the sensor.

The Xperia S is also NFC enabled, and offers up 32GB of internal flash storage space, as opposed to the widely considered 8GB that came close to causing mass uproar. The device itself weighs in at 144grams, which is only fractionally more than the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This is actually quite impressive, given the bulk of the design

SAN JOSE – September 15, 2010 – VeriFone Systems, Inc. (NYSE: PAY), today announced that Global Payments Inc.,(NYSE: GPN), leader in electronic payment processing services, will distribute and support VeriFone’s PAYware Mobile secure card payment system in Canada. Global Payments is the first payment processor to offer Canadian customers VeriFone’s unique card processing solution for the iPhone mobile digital device.

Global Payments will begin immediately to make the PAYware Mobile card encryption sleeve available to merchants. VeriFone’s sleek and durable card reader slips over iPhone 3G and 3GS to accommodate secure card swipes and allow individuals and businesses with new or existing merchant accounts to qualify for lower-cost “card present” transaction fees.

“VeriFone has created a market-leading mobile payment solution that will expand electronic card acceptance to a broad range of merchants and small businesses for which a payment-enabled, multipurpose smartphone is the best option for electronic payment transactions,” said Jeff J. McGuire, Vice President, Product Development and Marketing for Global Payments Canada. “We’re delighted to be first to introduce this first-class payment solution for iPhone into the Canadian market.”

4. Offers, Offers and More Offers With the daily deals craze dying down post-Groupon IPO, mobile offers are springing up. Google Offers, Google's response to Groupon's daily deals, continues to expand and personalize its deals. It recently stepped into the mobile commerce space with an Android app. Amazon entered the daily deals space with Amazon Local. Mobile commerce isn't a part of the story, but with Amazon's hefty investment in Living Social and an infrastructure far more mature than Groupon's, Amazon may be waiting for just the right moment before really making its move. Meanwhile, daily deals superhero Groupon moved further into the location-based mobile commerce space through a partnership with Loopt. Soon after the Loopt announcement, Groupon launched Groupon Now, which inserts real-time, location-based offers into the daily deals game. Such offers are usually only available for a few hours, do not include the typical Groupon tipping point and are meant for impulsive mobile users.

5. Shop Till You Sit: Tablet Commerce Tablets are all the rage this year. A recent study by eMarketer.com predicts that one in three online consumers will use a tablet at least once a month by the year 2014. Appel iPads are positioned to dominate the tablet market until 2015. So what are people doing on their tablets? Shopping, naturally. And thus the boom of tablet commerce. Amazon.com, the top revenue-producing Internet retailer, naturally leads the pack with a strong tablet-optimized site. Couch commerce, the act of sitting on one's couch and shopping from a smartphone and tablet, saw a strong increase this year - especially after Thanksgiving dinner and on Black Friday. Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet on September 28. ReadWriteWeb Writer Jon Mitchell calls it a store with a screen, quite literally suggesting that its sole purpose is to be a media consumption device. As the Kindle Fire continues to gain consumer mindshare and more developers flock to the Amazon Appstore (don't call it the App Store, OK?), we expect more tablet commerce growth in this area. Shopping catalogs designed specifically for tablets will add to the tablet commerce experience. Google launched a shopping catalog app for tablets back in August. Google Catalogs, as they're called, are like "window shopping with your iPad and Android tablet." The only potential problem for retailers? Now they won't have catalog readers' home addresses on hand.

6. Location and Local Groundswell: Chicago to Des Moines to Boston and Back Again The partnership between daily deals service Groupon and location check-in Foursquare was a big one. The two got together and made it happen. Or, as the Groupon blog says, "when we think of mobile addiction beyond Now! we think foursquare, and many of you guys do, too." The idea of positioning daily deals on Foursquare as an "addiction" doesn't exactly insure longevity; rather, it signals imminent burnout. But hey, we'll forgive Groupon's marketing team - with Groupon's stock prices slumping, the company is needs to keep looking for new ways to hit up consumers. Dwolla, mobile payments system based in U.S. mobile payments capital Des Moines, Iowa, seeks to completely sidestep credit cards. Unlike its main competitor PayPal, Dwolla does not snag a percentage of the transaction; instead, it asks for a shiny silver quarter, regardless of the transaction amount. LevelUp from Boston-based SCVNGR brings location-based gaming to the daily deals space. The idea is simple: Users will receive better deals the more they use the system. Much like the "unlocking" of Foursquare badges, LevelUp users will unlock new "levels" of awesome deals with particular merchants as they continue buying. Like its competitor Dwolla, SCVNGR recently began building local mobile payments into LevelUp.

You hear things about Facebook. You see things. As its audience matures, a subtle shift might be under way. Of course, numbers remain staggering. Facebook is heading toward the 800 million users mark, mostly by conquering new markets. The growth is distributed as follows: Middle-East Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America grow by about 60% a year; Europe by 35% to 40%; and North America by 25%.

It now seems Facebook's usage is undergoing a split. Active Facebookers become increasingly engaged, spend more time doing more stuff, while "reasonable" users (over 25) become more reluctant and careful.

older people are joining in western markets, while a younger audience grows in emerging ones. More changes are under way as the internet spreads on both landlines and mobile devices: over the past three years, China added more internet users than exist in the US today. Furthermore, in the fastest growing markets, Facebook captures more than 90% of all social network traffic. So, for the near future, Facebook doesn't have a growth problem.

New technologies, apps and add-ons let smartphones both receive and make payments, and the next generation of phones in the coming years will go further than ever to letting your mobile replace your wallet.

Cash transactions are getting rarer with debit and credit cards being accepted nearly anywhere, but you still run into places that stubbornly remain cash-only, whether it's a lunch wagon, a little independent café, or even an artist selling paintings at a market.

Lately, several solutions have popped up for small businesses - or anyone, really - to accept card payments by attaching a card reader to their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, or other smartphone.

With almost a million users and six million songs shared daily, Schematic Labs’ social music sharing app SoundTracking is today announcing that it has raised $4.75 million in Series A funding led by Accel Partners, True Ventures and Softbank Capital.

SoundTracking co-founder Steve Jang tells me that he plans on using the new funds for hiring and for furthering integration efforts with services like Spotify and Rdio, “We think connecting SoundTracking to consumption services helps take the music moments into your lean back consumption experience,” he says.

“We felt that people have music moments every day, and we wanted to build an app they could take out of their pocket to capture and share the soundtrack of their lives,” says Jang, “We want to continue to simplify that experience and make it more meaningful with the popular music consumption services and social networks.”

SoundTracking, a social mobile application that allows people to create “musical postcards” that can then be shared with friends on social sites,  announced Tuesday that it had received $4.75 million in financing.

To use SoundTracking, people take pictures, log their locations and attach the songs they are listening to at that moment.

“We are making sharing the core experience and discovery is a bi-product.”

The race to replace your wallet with mobile payment options is on.

Consumer demand for smartphones, combined with near-field communication, or NFC, technology that enables everyday purchases, is fueling the shift from credit card swipes to mobile payments. With smartphone sales expected to increase 50% this year, mobile payment services are in a mad dash to capture market share, and the growing competitive space has sparked strategic partnerships among big names.

Meet the contendersMobile payment sales in the U.S. are expected to increase at a 68% compounded annualized growth rate over the next five years. It's no wonder that big players like American Express (NYSE: AXP  ) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) want in on the action.

9.6 Trillion dollars was spent to educate every American. Just because a “corporation” does not exist to employ them and utilize their talents to the highest productivity level, does not mean that the talent and value does not exist. According to the 1:1000 rule, The GDP of the US in Social Currency is a minimum of 9,600 Trillion. What deficit?The dollar has a 1:1000 control leverage over social currency. It is not at all surprising to see social media expand at the rate proportional to that which the doom-gloom crowd predicts that the financial system will collapse. They are related, they hedge each other. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwisethe dollar will no longer control the value; that is, the social value wedged between people’s ears is free to be capitalized and securitized directly. We need to capture social currency in a new financial paradigm.Read more at www.ingenesist.com

his ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important cat

This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

some members of the startup and funding communities are looking for the next wave. “I’m really searching far and wide for new ideas,” Rosa said. “There seem to be a lot of clones. ... There’s this behemoth ball of social and apps and mobile, and they’re just tacking onto this ball and rolling along. We’d like to see some more snowballs.”

“After carefully weighing our options for building a social rewards solution in-house versus integrating with a best in class technology provider, we selected Badgeville, a recognized leader in the space, for their comprehensive, lightweight and flexible platform,” said Larry Drebes, CEO, Janrain.

Badgeville jumped onto the scene when they won “Audience Choice” at TechCrunch last fall. Within two quarters they’ve captured 50 clients for their “white label” social rewards, loyalty and analytics platform.

Badgeville helps web publishers of all sizes increase audience engagement and unlock new monetization opportunities. The Palo Alto– based company provides platform that makes it easy for web publishers, to increase user loyalty and engagement. 

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:

In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

Fysx writes with recent comments from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell about how he thinks the traditional video game business model is flawed: "The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products. What you really want to do is create the optimal pricing service for each customer and see what’s best for them. We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content. An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community."