Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Take a moment and imagine a future where every object you own has a presence on the internet. Your car would have a Facebook status (“just hit 3,000 miles, need an oil change”), your shoes would appear on Google Maps, even your toothpaste would tweet (@shoppinglist you’ll need more of me soon).

Zoosh is a new technology that brings NFC-like payments to any phone with a speaker — i.e. every smartphone on the market.

Using the almost-inaudible 20,000KHz range — which almost every cell phone speaker is capable of — Zoosh technology can then send data to a receiving microphone. The end point can either be a point of sale — a shop, a ticket machine — or it can be another mobile phone. Apparently the technology has been successfully used in noisy environments — and it’s also fairly safe to assume that a technology like Zoosh would be designed to incorporate as much redundancy and error checking as possible.

Narrate, the company behind Zoosh, envisions two main use cases for its ultrasonic payment system. The first is just like Google Wallet: for $30 — a third of the price of NFC hardware — Narrate says that points of sale can be upgraded to accept Zoosh payments.

Craig Mod dreams of a different sort of book: Imagine a future where instead of lending someone a book, you lend them your bookmarks. Where your notes, annotations and references are synchronized across platforms and applications. Where your bookmarks belong to you, and a record of every book you read is saved and stored securely, no matter how or where you read it. Kevin Kelly envisions how the publishing industry will adapt. Alexis Madrigal explores how the New York Public Library has moved beyond books, existing now as a social network with three million active users.

The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market. The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions.

The report "integrates data from a wide range of existing sources to provide a comprehensive picture of the African mobile industry. These include public sources such as the ITU, World Bank and research by National Regulatory Authorities as well as commercial providers such as Wireless Intelligence, Informa, Gartner, Buddecomm and ID." Africa now has 620 million mobile connections, passing Latin America Regional penetration has risen from 2% in 2000, to 57% this year Over the last decade, the number of mobile connections has grown an average of 30% per year, forecast to reach 735 million by the end of next year Mobile provides 3.5% of African GDP Highly competetive sector has resulted in price decreases of up to 60% in some areas, with an overall average of 18% decrease in the last year 96% of is pre-paid with voice services currently dominating, however data is increasing rapidly - Kenya data revenues, for instance, including SMS, have increased at a 67% annual growth over the last 4 years, representing 26% of total revenues in that country

With NFC baked into Symbian Belle (and a few Anna builds!), the number of applications with NFC capability keeps on growing. The latest addition to the number is Foursquare, as detailed in the NFC blog post quoted below. You can now just walk up to a Foursquare check-in poster at an event, tap your phone to it, even if the application isn't already running, and bang, you're checked in. 

From the blog post: The latest addition to the growing number of NFC enabled apps like Angry Birds Magic, Poken, Bounce and Asphalt5 is Foursquare. With the newest version of the application you can use your NFC enabled phone to check-in automatically by just tapping and NFC enabled/tagged poster. No more tedious steps of launching an application waiting for location fix, connecting etc... With NFC this is all done with a simple tap. Furthermore, the developer made it even easier for the user to check-in - without the need to have the app running - just tap and the app starts automatically and checks you in. Pretty awesome and again demonstrating the convenience of NFC! In a separate post Andreas explains how as a developer you can implement application autostart .  Foursquare with NFC support is available in the Nokia Store for Symbian NFC enabled phones (download Symbian version here, N9 support coming soon) . And the best thing about it is that it is not a separate application just for NFC sake. Developers simply added the support for NFC to the existing application version!

Symbian phones with NFC currently number six: the Nokia C7/Oro/Astound, plus the 700/701/603, and all future Nokia smartphones going forwards will also have NFC baked in.

Money is just information, a way we measure what we trade, nothing of value in itself. And we can make it ourselves, to work as a complement to conventional money. Just a matter of design.We believe that the problems that come from conventional money can be resolved with open money systems.- where conventional money is scarce and expensive, the new money is sufficient and free.- where conventional money is created by central banks, new money is issued by us, as promises to redeem - our money is our word.- and where conventional money flows erratically in and out of our communities, creating dependencies that are harmful to the economy, society and nature, the new complementary money re-circulates, enabling business and trade.So let’s fix the money problem and for the rest of the problems that we face in our world, let’s see what follows.Read more at www.openmoney.org

But bubbles can pop with a bang or deflate with a long, slow hiss. There is a growing feeling that an eight-year boom is over. It is one thing when non-tech Neanderthals guffaw at the very idea of Twitter, but quite another when those blessed by the Valley’s recent success worry that the gig is up.

To create a successful tech company, he wrote, “you have to find an idea that 1) has escaped the attention of the major internet companies, which are better run than ever before; 2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5m, the typical seed plus series A investment; and 3) is protectable from the onslaught of those big companies once they figure out what you’re on to. How many ideas like that are left?”

To build a significant tech company in a new space, you cannot be trivial. Yet this is exactly how many start-ups and some big tech companies now feel. Ten of the top 15 paid apps on iTunes this week are games. For all of Apple’s commercials showing people doing clever, scientific-looking things with their devices, most people are using them to play Angry Birds rather than solve the world’s problems.

Outstanding research group that sees the future in a very different way. The entire site is worth a day’s reading and I’ll probably wind up Amplifying a lot of it here….its that good

See more at www.ingenesist.com 

Name one social platform that is focused on enabling long form conversations.

Collaborate with Customer Support to Build Conversation MuscleIt’s a point worth underscoring, especially for marketers.  From the data we’ve gathered via our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic, we know that Marketing and/or Corporate Communications are leading the social media charge in large (i.e., Fortune 1000) enterprises 65% of the time.  But when it comes to Customer Support involvement, more than 40% of large companies don’t involve support peers at all!  In another 50%, they are only moderately involved. That’s a huge problem.We need our customer support brethren to build the right muscles for social media.  Let them spot you. Read more at mlcwideangle.exbdblogs.com

learn how you can use stats from your blog in order to improve traffic and page views. http://onlinemoneywithgoogleadsense.blogspot.com/2010/04/statistics-to-monitor-on-your-blog.html

Currency: A formal system for shaping, enabling, and measuring currents (or flows)Currencies involve a number of functions, each of which can be modified independently: unit of measure, store of value, token of status, medium of exchange, etc. Monetary Currency or Money is just a common way of bundling those functions as a medium of exchange for a commercial economy. It is a minuscule part of the full spectrum of possible currencies. In this expanded sense, currencies are tools for seeing and changing flows.One specific way we use them is to create collective intelligence at the level of our social entities and institutions. At the individual level, we see humans born, growing, learning, walking around and dying. However, the state “sees” humans created through birth certificates, their activities and accounts woven together by social security numbers, their communication patterns via cell phone bills, and their discorporation via death certificates.Read more at newcurrencyfrontiers.com 

21 Tips for Using Twitter

1. You don’t have to jump immediately into hiring a social media expert.

2. You don’t have to spend on high-tech gadgets.

3. To help you maximize your allotted time for social media marketing, don’t spread yourself too thin.

Dorai Thodla, CEO of the US-based iMorph Inc. (http://bit.ly/F4TThodlaD), speaks frequently on the emerging trends in IT.

This Internet of things will cause another fundamental shift. The shift will be at several levels – at the chip level (hundreds of cores), at the device level (smart phones more powerful than your current laptops), at the interaction level (smart devices talking to each other), application level (smart applications leveraging all these sensors for different uses), and interaction level (caused by touch, gestures and voice inputs).

In which areas of emerging IT do you see India playing a major role? India can play many roles both as a consumer of the technology and a producer.

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value.

Life is silly, the whole world is damn mad, bonkers infact, nothing surprises me anymore, putting scannable 2D codes on pimpley golf balls seems so normal, glad you pointed it out - rant over! :)

P Diddy has announced its first-ever location-based service but can also be used as an simple desktop chat system.Once registered, it gives a location marking for each user showing their geographic region and location (within a 10-mile radius) and provides a map to help identify fellow chatterers nearby.  The fledgling provider, based out of New York, says it is gaining 50,000 new users a day and is "second only to Skype for live-streaming web chat." Currently, it boasts 8 million daily users and is growing at a rate of 700 per cent y-o-y, since its foundation in 2009. However, this pales into comparison to VoIP darling Skype, which has around 145 million monthly users on average and another 400m registered. Nonetheless, it seems the market is ripe for other online chat providers. The new location service will also respect user anonymity, it insists, and users can opt in or out, to build a private or public chat group, or join live interactive online community. As part of its update, the chat site has developed widget versions of the service are available as well for use with all the leading web browsers, including: Firefox, IE, Google Chrome and Safari. Although it doesn't require any downloads to use, it does require Flash.