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"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)."

Who cares about ancient history? If you're a gamer you should, because it's happening again. This time, though, its console gamers lobbing the same lamentations at Angry Bird players, Words With Friends addicts, and ever-sneaky Fruit Ninjas. As smartphones and tablets get more powerful, the dedicated gaming machine looks more and more quaint. Where once software supported hardware in one big, happy family, it's all becoming rather more... disjointed. For a gamer like me, that's a little troubling. If app gaming does for consoles what those consoles did to the PC scene a decade ago, a lot of big game studios are going to be in trouble, and a lot of gamers are going to be pining for the good 'ol days.

It's hard to tell at what point mobile gaming became a serious threat to the console scene, but surely nobody at Nintendo lost any sleep when Snake crawled its way into the hearts of many a Nokia user back in the late '90s. Then, just a few years later, Steve Jobs started comparing iPod sales to those of dedicated gaming machines. I initially thought the very notion was preposterous; that an iPod didn't hold a candle to the DS and PSP I took with me on every flight. In the ensuing months, however, I've changed my tune.

In recent years we haven't exactly seen a lot of innovation on the console gaming front. Sure, there was a giant rush to jump on the motion gaming bandwagon -- Microsoft with the Kinect and Sony with the Move, even Nintendo sauntering back in with the MotionPlus -- but none of those technologies have delivered the new gameplay experiences that even grizzled veterans like myself secretly hoped they might. Nor have they succeeded in whetting my appetite for something truly new. As someone whose youth was punctuated by a three-year console cycle, booting up the same 'ol hardware almost six years later feels wrong.

It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers: the smartphone could be described as a PC for your pocket. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.

The mobile banking phenomenon spread quickly to other countries in the developing world. Uganda's largest telecom company, MTN Uganda, created its own version, MobileMoney, in March 2009. Within a year, 600,000 Ugandans had signed up. Now, thanks to aggressive recruitment drives to win more subscribers – MTN agents trolling the streets for new customers are known as "foot soldiers" – the service has more than 1.6 million users.

Mobile phones carry huge economic potential in undeveloped parts of Africa. A 2005 London Business School study found that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a developing country, GDP rises by 0.5%. As well as enabling communication and the movement of money, mobile networks can also be used to spread vital information about farming and healthcare to isolated rural areas vulnerable to the effects of drought and disease.

This is the world of web 3.0, or what we call the ‘transcendent web’, and it will bring profound changes to people and businesses alike. The benefits it will provide users include the creation of a much more personalized web experience and the automation of many of the services already in use. Businesses too, will benefit from vastly greater amounts of information about consumers and thus the opportunity to market and sell to them much more directly. They will also be able to take advantage of the greater operational efficiencies brought about by technologies that will keep people, processes and products much more tightly connected. The transcendent web will play a critical role in the digitization of industries as wide-ranging as telecommunications, financial services and healthcare.

The Internet of Things: More and more things are being made Internet-enabled — houses, cars, appliances, even clothing — allowing them not just to be located through technologies like radio frequency identification but to communicate richer amounts of information about themselves; all of this becomes not just possible but also visible to web users.

In 2010, $8.1 billion was spent globally on smart technology in cities in the US, and within the next five years, that number is projected to jump to $39.5 billion, greatly expanding the capacity for smart city projects around the world. Currently, there are 102 smart cities in the world. Europe has the most at 38, with North America following closely with 35. Asia has 21, the Middle East and Africa combined have six, and South and Central America have two. The “smartness” of a city is determined by these aspects: economy, environment, government, lifestyle, transportation and community.

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.”

Are mobile payments the new speech recognition technologies?

One of the bigger stories in mobile this year has been the growing investment and hype behind the idea of using one’s mobile phone as a method of payment, but it’s pretty clear that the details of how any one company or organization will build a mobile-payments system are still very much up in the air.

a sizable number of people and companies believe that the smartphone can be a natural evolution of the credit card in just a few years.

QR code technology arrived late to North America for numerous reasons, and with Near Field Communication (NFC) fast emerging, it is a valid concern that it may not tip the adoption needle in time to establish itself as a household communication tool.

With the release of the Google Wallet, Google has been building a lot of support for NFC. This may explain why they replaced QR codes with NFC for Google Places. Another reason may be because the stickers they distributed to the retailers were intended to be permanent, in which case NFC makes more sense. They may be a bit ahead of the market on this, but if they are distributing millions of these stickers across North America, it pays to plan ahead. Following their announcement, a vast number of articles surfaced with some variation of “QR codes are dead”. This in my opinion was a bit excessive considering Google Places is the only implementation where they made the changeover.

Getting away from Google, let’s briefly look at the expected rate of NFC adoption. Smartphones have been available on this continent for at least 4 years and they currently hold approximately 33% of the market. Google’s Nexus S is one of the first phones to be available with NFC technology and it was released only this spring. Blackberry will start releasing models this fall, and Apple has yet to confirm whether they will include NFC support in the iPhone 5. It’s not unreasonable to expect NFC gaining mass adoption no sooner than 2-3 years.

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.

According to calculations by Cisco, 50 billion devices will connected to the Internet by 2020. Top technology infrastructure companies like IBM, HP and Ericsson are investing big in the Internet of things. IBM envisions a smarter planet, Ericsson envisions the social web of things.  But when I look at these visions I get the feeling something is missing—the consumer. Well, she's there, but always in a passive role. These visions are more about automation and efficiency. An exemplifying scenario can go something like this one, from Cisco: Imagine your morning meeting was pushed back X minutes, and your car knows there has been an accident on your driving route causing a Y minute detour; this is communicated to your alarm clock which allows you Z extra minutes of sleep and signals to your coffee maker to turn on the appropriate minutes later. Or, from Ericsson: You call your wife on your way home in the car, asking what she wants for dinner. When you arrive home the oven has calculated with precision the time it should turn itself on and at what temperature, depending on the groceries you got from the store. I'm sure these are plausible scenarios, but I don't think the killer apps of IoT will be the connected car or Internet-oven. 

I'm much more interested in big questions like: What will be the iBeer moment of Internet of things? What will be the Farmville of connected devices? These are the seemingly silly applications that always pop up in the wake of new technological possibilities. The simple, cheap, entertaining stuff. Humans are a curious species, and we don't always make rational decisions.

In a matter of hours, Facebook is going to host f8, its annual developer conference.

My sources are telling me that the company is going to make some sort of announcement around NFC technologies at the event as well.

The Places product will have some NFC elements built into them, and the social network is working closely with some hardware vendors.

Should enterprise applications be as addictive as Angry Birds? A true believer in gamification would say yes, if you want people to actually use them.

[Social media is a powerful tool to connect with customers, but it can create big problems for your company if it's not done right. Learn more at 10 Social Networking Don'ts.]

Most of all, gamificiation is about understanding that "if you can make something more fun, and include notions of play, you can get people to do things they otherwise might not want to do."

Augmented reality has been touted as the "next big thing" for a while, yet mainstream success has proved elusive. So what can be done to turn it from a gimmick into a commercial necessity?Imagine being able to watch miniature versions of Kings of Leon or Lady Gaga play on a table right in front of your eyes.

One company - String, in partnership with tech firm Digicave - has developed and demonstrated a system that creates the impression of a 3D figure mapped onto, for example, a book shelf. Such technology opens up the possibility of having a pop star appear in your bedroom, performing as if they were on-stage.

The idea of augmented reality was first mooted as far back as in 1965, with Ivan Sutherland's now famous essay Augmented Reality: The Ultimate Display. In it, he said that "with appropriate programming… a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked," stating that digital handcuffs would be able to actually restrain users, and those shot by digital characters would be killed in real life.

Without so much as a whisper from the retailer itself, Amazon’s Android tablet is heading our way. Rumoured to launch at the end of the third quarter in time for the holiday season, Amazon is hoping it can steal a little of Apple’s thunder and steal a little of its market share.

Amazon’s decision to launch an Appstore was a surprising one, especially because there was no shortage of alternative Android marketplaces at the time. Incorporating its patented recommendation system and its “Free App A Day”, the third-party application store won many fans in the US primarly because it has been providing customers with downloads of some of the most popular Android apps and games.

Amazon is one of, if not the world’s number one Cloud storage and service provider and is seen by many to have led the march towards the Cloud, with affordable and reliable online services that even the most bootstrapped startups could afford. Asserting itself in the hosting market has helped the company make the best of its other web-based services, namely online music downloads and its new Android Appstore.

Boring conversation? Accessories that decipher emotional cues could save your social life – or reveal that you're a jerk

The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?

Some of our body's responses during a conversation are not designed for broadcast to another person - but it's possible to monitor those too. Your temperature and skin conductance can also reveal secrets about your emotional state, and Picard can tap them with a glove-like device called the Q Sensor. In response to stresses, good or bad, our skin becomes clammy, increasing its conductance, and the Q Sensor picks this up.

Let's take a closer look at some of the arguments being thrown about as evidence that Steve Jobs is wrong about Android: Android Existed Before iOS Was Conceived

I have no idea when Jobs or Apple actually conceived iOS, but Android--the company--was founded in 2003, and bought by Google in 2005. Based on that simple chronology many Android loyalists and Apple bashers jump to the conclusion that Android couldn't possibly infringe on Apple patents for iOS that wasn't made available until 2007.

Android Isn’t an Exact Copy of iOS Nobody is claiming that it is. Apple (and Microsoft) assert that key portions of Android infringe on technologies and concepts it owns patents for. If Android were an exact replica of iOS it would make the whole court battle thing much easier, but Android doesn't have to look anything like iOS in order to violate specific patents

Crowdpark, a Berlin-headquartered game developer, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from top German venture capital firms, Target Partners and existing investor, Earlybird Venture Capital. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the investment. The new round of funding brings Crowdpark’s total to $8 million. Why should you care? Well, Crowdpark is aiming to give gamers their fix of legal gambling, er, betting. Using its patented “dynamic betting” technology, Crowdpark enables forecasting in realtime for social gaming in much the same way the brave among us play the stock market. Unlike its social gaming competitors, the German startup allows gamers to compete against each other in betting events using virtual currency. This includes the opportunity to bet on real world events taking place in everything from sports and entertainment to news and technology.