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Badge winners get a one-year Foursquare Friends Membership at the library that comes with exclusive member-only perks such as the opportunity to win free NYPL event tickets and participate in behind-the-scenes tours

The library has also designed an app-based overnight scavenger hunt called “Find the Future: The Game.” On May 20, 500 pre-registered participants will complete tasks during a special launch event, before the game goes live to the public on May 21. The tasks encourage players to explore the library and historical objects such as the Declaration of Independence.

JetBlue Airways In January 2011, JetBlue Airways became the first U.S. airline to announce an integration between their frequent flyer rewards program and Facebook Places. JetBlue GoPlaces participants receive 25 TrueBlue frequent flyer points every time they check in to an official JetBlue airport location using Facebook Places. Those who accumulate 5,000 or more points can trade them in for free flights. While this is not exactly immediate gratification — it takes 200 airport check ins to earn a free flight — it’s still noteworthy.

The network will soon connect 92 cities and reach 90% of the urban population in Ceará (where only 10% live in rural areas.) As for the maximum speeds, they could vary  between 30 and 70 Mbps depending on sources. In Fortaleza, the CDC will be integrated with existing infrastructure to enable speeds of up to 2 Gbps.

“Computing is moving onto mobile,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview. “Even if I have a computer next to me, I’ll still be on my mobile device.”

But it is far from clear that Google, a $179 billion business largely built on sophisticated search algorithms and online advertising, can transform itself into a device maker. The business is costly, and the margins are slim, said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus.

“This is an emphatic exclamation point that Google is a mobile company,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Capital. “It shows how important Android is to Google.”

Shares of Google fell 1.16 percent on Monday, to $557.23, while shares of Motorola Mobility added 55.78 percent, to $38.12.

Indeed, Stump says only one thing is 100 percent certain when it comes to the cloud: "You always have to architect your systems under an assumption of failure."

IBM sees the Internet of things as a source of growth, and it recognizes that the best way to capitalize is to make it easy to adopt. Keeping the underlying framework open-source will undoubtedly improve competition and encourage startups, much as the growth of the public Internet led to an explosion of newly public companies. Let's hope that the growth of this new industry isn't hampered by patents, but we should also be wary of any new bubbles that might inflate.

Twenty-two EU member states signed the treaty at a ceremony in Tokyo on January 26. Other nations interested in signing the agreement have until May 2013 to do so. According to Wikipedia, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement “creates a governing body outside national institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.” The scope of the agreement includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, and pirated copyright-protected works.

The provisions of ACTA grant copyright holders direct powers to demand that ISPs remove material from the Internet, without the requirement of a court order, and permit foreign influence over ISPs in the United States. Advocates of the treaty seek to give copyright holders the ability to demand that users who do violate intellectual property rights have their Internet connections terminated as a punishment. To enforce such a system would require the creation of an individual Internet ID.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports: The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes”/Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers.

The EFF has been vehement in its opposition to ACTA, particularly regarding the secrecy surrounding the treaty negotiations. Likewise, Michael Geist, in writing for Copyright News, asserted that ACTA was “shrouded in secrecy.” He pointed out that ACTA negotiations did not include civil society groups or developing countries, noting also that “reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty’s provisions leaking to the public.” The European Commission denied this allegations in 2008, arguing, “It is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public and that negotiators are bound by a certain level of discretion.”

As noted on Wikipedia, opponents of ACTA also assert that it will impinge upon freedom of expression and communication privacy. A large number of the World Trade Organization’s 157 members have voiced concerns that the treaty would have a negative impact on trade. Others have pointed out that ACTA does not include provisions for legal safeguards protecting ISPs from liability for the actions of their subscribers. Without such provisions, ISPs will be forced to invade the privacy of their subscribers in order to protect themselves. Aaron Shaw, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, stressed that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”

The technology news and information website ArsTechnica.com argues that ACTA encourages ISPs to collect and provide information about suspects by providing for those ISPs “safe harbor from certain legal threats.” In protest against the treaty, the hacktivist group Anonymous hacked into the Federal Trade Commission’s cybersecurity advice website on January 24, replacing the homepage with the Anonymous logo, a rap song, and a message threatening more attacks if anti-piracy legislation in Congress were to pass. According to The Next Web: The message left temporarily on OnGuardOnline referred to the Stop Online Piracy Act, The Protect Intellectual Property Act and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. If they pass, the message said, "we will wage a relentless war against the corporate Internet, destroying dozens upon dozens of government and company websites."

One blogger from tech site Mashable found this week that Google's Ad Preferences page assume that she was middle-aged - and a man, simply because her interests included technology and computing.  The profile page, called Ad Preferences, is hidden away inside a settings menu in Google Accounts, but can be accessed directly here. This sort of in-depth profiling raises alarm bells with privacy activists. 'Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day,' says Rainey Reitman, activism director for privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today.'You can opt out of the tracking, or manually edit your details. Google also  does not store information on controversial subjects such as pornography. The Ad preferences page came to public attention following a sweeping change to 'privacy policy' which comes into effect on March 1, although the preferences page was launched some time ago. YouTube data, Gmail information and search data will all be used to build up ever more accurate advertising profiles and also the company claims it will make searches more personalised.

This is a much bigger deal than it may seem, as World Payments Report 2011 informs: -- 15% of all card transactions will be mobile by 2013.-- 20 billion credit card transactions take place each year.

PayPal should be shaking in its boots. And as for Google Wallet? One day, you'll be paying for your public transit fees using iTunes and your iPhone.

There's three ways Apple may choose to create a payment infrastructure. It is possible there are more, but we'll settle on three for now:

-- NFC support in the iPhone 5Advantages: NFC is fully supported by the credit companies.Disadvantages: NFC isn't yet ready for prime time, but is expected to reach a much wider market by 2013.

-- Bluetooth-based payments: Advantages: It is possible now to use Bluetooth to make secure payment exchanges.Disadvantages: There's no agreed financial Bluetooth-based transfer standard, meaning there's no back-up or insurance in case of fraud.

-- Over-the-airAdvantages: Does it matter if you wave your device across a terminal? Why not pay from where you are? You could buy goods and services in this way.Disadvantages: I would argue that Apple's devices would still require RFID tags in order that payment status be easily verified. If RFID is required, then NFC makes sense.

What makes Apple's iTunes approach effective is that by using its existing credit service as a bank, it achieves an immediate potential user base of hundreds of millions of people, while also offering an extra layer of protection between banks and customers. If fraud takes place, Apple's insurance should protect a customer, reducing the risk to the banks.

Tie these NFC systems up with Apple's other in-development mobile technologies and there's lots of potential scenarios.

Some statistics may be of interest:-- 50,000 Dutch nurses now use NFC  to track and manage home healthcare visits.-- The Museum of London already offers interactive NFC services.-- Over 60% of manufacturers plan to put NFC in cars.

The GSMA has published interoperability standards for SIM-based NFC application programming interfaces (APIs) and protocols based on the Pay-Buy-Mobile specification for secure NFC mobile payments. Such standards pave the way for the development of contactless services across a variety of devices irrespective of their operating system (OS) while providing more detailed implementation protocols for the Java and Android platforms.

IHS Screen Digest research indicates that the 45 operators involved in the announcement serve 50.7 per cent of the world's mobile subscriptions. Since the NFC module is embedded in the SIM card, the operators expect users to be able to use existing handsets for contactless services without the need to switch to a high-end smartphone. Users of smartphones currently lacking NFC capabilities will also benefit from this technology.

The 45 operators involved account for nearly 3 billion subscriptions worldwide, and include China Mobile, Vodafone Group, América Móvil, Telefónica Group, China Unicom, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T.

There is also the issue of cost. IHS Screen Digest estimates current SIM-based NFC modules to be a hundred times more expensive than traditional SIM cards. This would deter most operators from venturing into offering SIM-based NFC as an option to customers in emerging economies until economies of scale bring the associated costs down.

It is unlikely that operators will allow third-party "over-the-top" services outside of their value chain. As the implementation of some contactless services (e.g. mobile payments, public transit) depends on a close collaboration between operators and local third-parties, it is expectable that contactless services deployments and uptake will vary greatly across markets.

IHS Screen Digest does not foresee rapid adoption of SIM-based NFC mobile payments. Users will likely become acquainted with the contactless technology by way of other use-cases, as NFC experiences in Asia and Europe suggest--most notably the Octopus transit and stored-value card in Hong Kong, and the London Oyster transit card.

If NFC payment and transit cards schemes prove successful in more locations, the likelihood that such services will be increasingly incorporated into mobile devices will also increase.

With support from the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, the DOR and Azavea’s software engineering team were tasked with exploring these questions and publishing a white paper to present the findings of this research.  The white paper is free to download at http://www.azavea.com/augmented-reality

While the $50,000 research grant has yielded a more complete application than originally anticipated, the project team encountered a number of limitations with the current state of the technology.

The Department of Records and Azavea expect to seek additional funding in order to develop solutions for these limitations as well as bring the technology to a broader array of devices including tablets.

Second, Keller argues that “there is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.” This line of argument, that our social ties are being hollowed out by digital sociality, is also fairly common. I’d like to start by saying that it is not supported by empirical research.

Increasing numbers of people even make connections online which then they turn into offline connections (See Wang and Wellman, for example), so that even actual “virtual” connections –which I have just argued are less common—are valuable for many communities who otherwise do not have abundant peers around them, say cancer patients or gay youth in small towns.

First Keller talks about how we no longer need to remember everything and how his father used to use a slide rule and now there are calculators and who knows their multiplication table anymore… This is a familiar argument from cognitive replacement and I believe it is worth discussing not necessarily because there is something inherently wrong with machines making certain cognitive tasks easier, but I do deeply worry about what this means for valuing humans. Cheaper computers increasingly capable of taking over human tasks means that we face a profound human problem: how will we deal with the billions of people who will be potentially redundant if the only way of measuring a human’s worth is their price on the labor market? For me, this is an important political question rather than a technological lament. It’s not about what machines can do, it’s about the criteria by which we judge the worth of our fellow human beings, and how advances information technology increasingly leads us to devalue each other

If the latter were the case, his ire would be more about Google; instead, most of his frustration is directed against social media, and mostly Twitter, the most conversational, and thus most oral of these mediums.

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

Then along came the Mark Zuckerberg of his day, Johannes Gutenberg.

But this comparison between Gutenberg and Zuckerberg makes little sense unless you realize that Keller is actually trying to complain about the reemergence of oral psychodynamics in the public sphere rather than about memory falling out of favor.

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect.

The key to understanding this is that while writing did displace the value of memory, the vast abundance of printed material it did something else also, something less remarked upon, both to the shape of our public sphere and also to our psychodynamics. It replaced the natural, visceral human oral psychodynamics with those of literate and written ones

Facebook clearly understands that the media and public opinion form part of the competitive playing field. But they seem to have forgotten Business Ethics 101: Don't do anything that you'd be embarrassed to see on Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. That's not just good ethics advice; it's good PR advice, too. Rosanna Fisk, chief executive of the public Relations Society of America, commented that Facebook's actions were "unethical and improper," adding that the affair had become a "PR nightmare."