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Global Internet traffic is expected to quadruple between 2010 and 2015, according to data provided to Mashable by Cisco.By that time, nearly 3 billion people will be using the Internet — more than 40% of the world’s projected population. On average, there will be more than two Internet connections for each person on Earth, driven by the proliferation of web-enabled mobile devices.Internet traffic is projected to approach 1 zettabyte per year in 2015 — that’s equivalent of all the digital data in existence in 2010. Regionally speaking, traffic is expected to more than double in the Middle East and Africa, where there will be an average of 0.9 devices per person for a projected population of 1.39 billion. Latin America is close behind, with a 48% increase in traffic and an estimated 2.1 devices per person among a population of 620 million.The rest of the world will experience more moderate growth in terms of traffic, but the number of devices per person is forecast to increase significantly. By 2015, there will be an average of 5.8 devices per person in North America, 5.4 in Japan and 4.4 in western Europe.

Somewhat surprisingly, it is neither mobile phones nor tablets that are expected to grow the most in the next four years. Rather, flat panel televisions will experience the greatest production increase globally, up 1063% from 2010, followed by tablets (750%), digital photo frames (600%) and ereaders (550%). The number of non-smartphones and smartphones is expected to increase by 17% and 194% worldwide, respectively

Paul Bradshaw, visiting professor, City University and founder of helpmeinvestigate.com used the principal of toys to give ideas on developing the data story and explained the importance of  “future proofing the information we are gathering”, saying “that’s one of the big commercial imperatives”.

Conrad Quilty-Harper, data mapping reporter at the Telegraph, explained how creating maps adds to a story by using the example of a map on bike sharing schemes he created (though did not publish) using “Google Fusion Tables and a bit of javascript”. He recommends Google Maps and says the trailblazer of a news site using Google Fusion tables is the Texas Tribune.

My proudest example” was a live interactive Royal Wedding map which “worked brilliantly for three hours”. It showed some of the best tweets and were geolocated on the map. “We’ve got the data and we’re going to analyse it and do something with it in the future,” he said. “It tells you what people in specific locations were thinking”. The Telegraph would like to use the technology in a crisis news story, such as an earthquake or conflict.

In the modern web, Google and Facebook are the feudal lords and people are the peasants — at least when it comes to control of the photos, comments, 'likes' and other data that each person posts online.

"The users contribute their own content to you for free. You sell it back to them with banner ads put on there. And on top of that, you spy on them to gather profiling data," says Michiel de Jong, of the Unhosted project to decentralise user data.

As your friends talk to each other, they feed Facebook data about how information flows between its users. It's likely that your friends will have their own friends and will talk to them as well. Every time these first- and second-level contacts interact, it gives Facebook more pointers to where you fit within your network. To you, it's a bunch of your mates; to Facebook, it's an expanding cloud of data to be harvested.

In an age when everything is going virtual and digital, we could be looking at a future where wallets may be as uncommon as Filofax organizers and paper address books.

While loyalty cards should be baked right into Google Wallet, the chances are not every single retailer will be included in the equation. The cross platform app Key Ring is the perfect solution to get rid of all those loyalty cards crowding your wallet (or key chain) and put them all on your phone.

Rather than use traditional business cards, there are several virtual options that can replace the need to print out a stack of cards. It’s more environmentally friendly and you won’t have to worry about forgetting your cards. CardCloud, which we’ve written about in the past, is available for both iOS and Android and allows you to email your business card to users who don’t use the app, and record the location where you exchanged business cards – making it the most well-rounded app of its kind.

Those freaked out by facial recognition technology have fresh fodder: a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which researchers were able to predict people’s social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam.

For those participants who had date of birth and city publicly available on their account, the researchers could predict a social security number (based on the work from their 2009 study). The researchers sent a follow-up survey to their student participants asking them whether the first five digits of the social security number their algorithm predicted was correct. One problem with this part of the study was that “60% of the CMU students were foreign and don’t have social security numbers,” said Acquisti. Though researchers were still able to tell them all about their interests and favorite movies based on what they got from their Facebook profile pages.

Geofencing: As long as you're here ... One of the promises of mobile advertising — at least from the merchant's perspective — has been the potential to advertise to customers when they're near your store and can act immediately (and impulsively) on your offer. To make these location-triggered offers, merchants need to delineate a "geofence" around their retail outlets — a radius or polygonal area in which customers who have opted into a deal program can be notified on their mobiles that an offer is available nearby. Indeed, Groupon is working on adding such location-based deals to its daily offers, according to a letter sent from its general counsel David Schellhase to two U.S. Representatives who were asking about Groupon's privacy policies.

By some measures, 90% of all texts are opened within three minutes of receiving them.

Goodman said that location-triggered delivery is highly effective with "exceedingly high" response rates: between 11% and 60% of users are likely to visit a store when pinged with an offer if they're nearby, and up to 46% are likely to make a purchase.

Facebook is now getting even more personal, announcing that starting late Tuesday it will begin calibrating how it presents its News Feed feature

The company says the new News Feed is made to “act more like your own personal newspaper”

presenting the most interesting news that has been published since the last time a user signed in

Banjo has three main goals. One is to connect you to your social networking friends you didn’t know were nearby – for example, a friend from Facebook or Twitter, killing time at the airport, only a few gates away from you. It also wants to hep you find out what’s going on nearby by providing access to status updates and tweets from everyone around you, in a radius you specify. And it provides you with a way to virtually visit other locations, even when you’re far away, to see what’s going on with the people there.

The people Banjo finds don’t necessarily have to have “checked in” using a location-based networking service like Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook Places. While that helps, of course, Banjo is designed to also pull in locations from geotagged tweets, uploaded photos, and other media from all social networking services. Wait – all? Yes, that’s the plan. Patton says they have 22 services they’re focused on integrating now, but the company’s goal is to become a federation of all social networks, big and small, from around the world.

Third Eye, a new free Android game from Viewdle, uses a combination of augmented reality and facial recognition technology to make a whole new kind of mobile game.

Basically, everybody is either a Vampire or a Slayer and this "relic"--the Third Eye--can tell you which category you fall into by reading your "faceprint." You might be familiar with Viewdle's other Android app, SocialCamera, which uses facial recognition to automatically tag photos of your friends. The objective of the first part of Third Eye is to build your army and establish alliances. The second and third parts, which will come out later this year, pits your assembled clans against one another in all-out war.

Next, you'll want to start recruiting people for your army. Third Eye uses the same facial algorithm on your friends (or random strangers, if you're bold) to identify if they are a vampire or a slayer. You simply hold your phone up toward their face and the app will scan it to determine their fate. If they're a slayer and you're a vampire, you can either "Feed" aka suck their blood or "Ghoulify" and make them join your army.

Their solution to competing with their larger (more supermarkets) competitor was to create virtual stores using large wall spaces in subway stations that are full-size photos of their supermarket products. Customers use thei smartphones to scan QRcodes to a virtual shopping cart. Once the order is complete, the items are delivered directly to them after they arrive at their homes. Homeplus: Virtual Subway Store (WeLoveViral) More than ten thousand customers visited the online store using their smartphones. New registered members rose by 76% and online sales rose 130%. This marketing and sales technique increased their sales without increasing retail store space. And, it made shopping more convenient for busy people. Thanks to Megan O’Neill for the pointer to this great mobile story.

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.

PlateMate's calorie estimates have proved, in tests, to be just as accurate as those of trained nutritionists, and more accurate than the user's own logs. The research was presented at the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, a leading conference on human-computer interaction.

“We can take things that used to require experts and do them with crowds,” says Jon Noronha ’11, who co-developed PlateMate as an undergraduate at Harvard and now works at Microsoft. "Estimating the nutritional value of a meal is a fairly complex task, from a computational standpoint, but with a structured workflow and some cultural awareness, we've expanded what crowdsourcing can achieve."