Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

From Libelium: Libelium, a technology leader in wireless sensor networks, announces the completion of its Smart Cities platform. The new sensor board measures noise pollution, dust quantities (PM-10), structural health (cracks detection and propagation) and garbage levels in bins in order to improve the waste management. This board may be combined in a network with previously available sensor boards for gas monitoring, radiation detection and Smart Parking. System integrators can now create a comprehensive range of services based on the Smart Cities platform. Read more here.

Both of these hacks were fully fledged platforms, another great project was more of a utility. ScanCampaign allows users to generate their own QR codes, which the author hoped could be used for donations to charity or for campaigns such as UK Uncut – to quickly share information.

Taking disparate data sources and giving them a unified view is tricky: do the data sets match? can you link the concepts contained? and so on. These guys did a great job doing those things and provided plenty of hooks for further thought.

Master tinkerer [Ryan Rusnak] created the very popular BEER ROBOT. With a press of button on Ryan’s iPhone, the mini fridge armed with an air cannon and webcam fires a beer at him with deadly accuracy. Ryan linked the controls to the iPhone using the ioBridge IO-204 module. So, in reality he could control his creation from anywhere in the world via the Internet. Less exciting and deadly are Ryan’s ability to remotely monitor and control the temperature of the refrigerator also via ioBridge. The Mini Fridge Beer Robot is featured in Popular Science magazine in the June 2011 issue: Inventions of the Year. In this PopSci, you can learn how-to create your very own beer firing robot with a step-by-step guide. The beer robot, dubbed the ioFridge, is the perfect connection between man and machine! And, when we created ioBridge, you better believe we saw a future of armed machines that are web-enabled. Congrats on making PopSci and getting us one step closer…

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.

For years, scientists have kept track of who’s who by attaching colored bands to birds’ legs and then keeping a vigilant eye out for the marked bird to return. Now, a technology called RFID (radio frequency identification) is automating that vigilance, and yielding more detailed information than scientists ever dreamed possible. A recent study at the Cornell Lab kept track of 129 separate songbirds on a staggering 650,000 individual feeder visits over a period of 5 months (see “What We’ve Learned Already,” below). Instead of pulling 24-hour vigils, the scientists needed to spend only about 6 hours per week tending these wired feeders.

According to the Current Analysis report, AT&T's strengths include: Providing "custom solutions" for companies, including expanded professional services, targeted to specific business needs Offering cost-effective services to global customers, with expanding global M2M footprint Developing key relationships with platform providers to provide enhanced services for M2M customers Excellent traction with 12 million Connected Devices in Q1-11 "AT&T continues to add value to its M2M solutions," wrote Kathryn Weldon, Principal Analyst, Current Analysis. "AT&T has made a number of recent alliance announcements with application platform providers, which adds to its arsenal of solutions."

Because NFC tags are more expensive than barcodes or RFID tags (just under $1 in volume) they will make their way into high-end retail products first: Cars, electronics, consumer appliances.  As more products start to include NFC tags, this will drive the price down even further.  As the price goes down, NFC tags will make their way into products $20 and above (clothing, wine, shoes, Costco-sized purchases). And then there are the phones. With almost 100 million NFC-equipped phones estimated to be shipped just over the next year and more than 1 billion predicted for the next four years, shopping, comparing, and purchasing via NFC-equipped smartphones will become commonplace.

Rymble is an object connected to Internet social networks, merging the real and the virtual worlds. It is a “social compass” that, instead of pointing to the north, moves in different directions as news and alerts happen in the user’s social network, in the web page of a company, artist, sports team or any other subject.

China's inland and maritime rivers and canals are now part of the Internet of Things. The Chinese maritime authority has outfitted cargo and passenger ships with RFID chips and has placed RFID readers at strategic locations. Now, keeping track of the identify of ships, their speed and what they carry is automated, at least for a segment of the populous country's water traffic. Almost all waterways Grade IV and higher have been equipped, according to the People's Daily. The Maritime Safety Administration of China made this announcement recently, explaining that the tags use the Automatic Identification System, a maritime Internet of Things platform designed to track waterborne traffic.

The EPC network, using tiny RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags, will enable computers to automatically recognize and identify everyday objects, and then track, trace, monitor, trigger events, and perform actions on those objects. The technology will effectively create an "Internet of things." RFID will fundamentally impact the industries of manufacturing, retail, transportation, health care, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and government, offering an unprecedented real-time view of assets and inventories throughout the global supply chain. And in the process, whole new vistas (and challenges) will open up to software developers.

A research team at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has come up with a new optical amplifier that can help boost the efficiency of backhaul optical networks, a move that could have a big impact on the overall economics of bandwidth.

Chalmers’ new breakthrough is more efficient and allows optical signals to be sent over longer distances 4,000 kilometers as opposed to 1,000 kilometers – which in turn would make the cost of building and operating the networks cheaper.

“The entire optical telecom industry is our market. But the technology is generic, and scalable to other wavelengths like visible or infrared light, which makes it attractive in areas such as measurements, spectroscopy, laser radar technology and any applications where detection of very weak levels of light is essential”, says Peter Andrekson.

By nearly every indicator, Russians are embracing social and digital media in ways deeper and more impactful than most other countries around the world. For those looking to do business in the former Republic, significant opportunities now exist to leverage this new wave of social adoption.

Consider that in the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly. Nearly three-quarters of those making the switch from homegrown social platforms such as Vkontakte (with tens of millions of members) to Facebook are under 27, signaling a generational desire to engage in global communities and interact with brands, celebrities, friends and politicians in decidedly new ways. Twitter usage, while still in its infancy in Russian, grew three-fold in 2010.

And while it should come as little surprise that nearly 80% of the Russian population owns a mobile device, the dramatic adoption of smartphone technology and advanced mobile usage are beginning to change the way in which businesses — and the government — communicate. According to Nielsen, Russians under 24 are the third-largest users worldwide of “advanced mobile data,” behind only China and the United States.

A handful of not very descriptive top-level domains, such as .com, .net, .org, as well as country-specific TLDs are what the web is currently made of, but this is about to change drastically

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the international authority over top-level domain names, has approved the expansion of generic TLDs which will allow companies and organizations to create domains for their branda (such as .coke) or simply create generic names (such as .car or .green).

The option won’t come cheap, though: The application fee alone is $185,000, and the annual fee is $25,000. Still, we can imagine large corporations spending millions on these very soon. If you’re in the business of making phones, owning a “.phone” TLD sounds like a great idea — if you can afford outbidding other phone manufacturers.

What will it take for mobile augmented reality to become mainstream? Big brands are starting to experiment with AR features in their own apps and partnerships with startups such as Layar, Wikitude and Metaio, but there was a strong sense at yesterday's AR Summit conference in London that much work remains to be done to take the technology beyond early adopters."One of the worst things about this industry is the name," said Nick Brown, chief executive of AR technology provider Crossplatform. "Augmented reality? What does that mean to the public?"Layar's AR strategist King Yiu Chu suggested that the key may be a shift in the way people think about AR. "Augmented reality is not a technology: it's part of everyday life," he said. "It will be embedded in televisions, cars ... everything that has to do with vision. You don't want to be aware of that, you just want to experience."

SINGAPORE - With the help of an iPhone app, Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) has brought to life - through augmented reality (AR), location-based gaming and interactive features - its exhibition on the terracotta warriors.Said to be the world's first museum app, it resurrects characters from the story of Li Si, the prime minister and architect of the Qin Dynasty, and his son.The exhibit, which has 100 artefacts from Shaanxi, China, and includes 10 life-sized terracotta figures, spans seven interactive chapters and visitors can engage characters from each chapter in AR and gaming modes when prompted.

while workers want autonomy and flexibility, they also want social connection. In an interview, Yosh Beier of Collaborative Coaching summed this up, saying, “people want to have control over the where and when of their work experience, but they don’t necessarily want to isolate themselves.” How will this tension be resolved in the future?

Many point to technology to keep people connected across physical distance, tools “that will make the remote less remote,” in Beier’s words. He points to the mania for Foursquare in the consumer space as an example of people who are physically distant but use tech to “locate themselves.” The same is true for Facebook, which provides a virtual social connection and is a bit like a remote social gathering. Beier sees this trend of using tech to overcome the social isolation of web-enabled distance moving from consumers to web workers:

But instead of substituting virtual spaces for real ones (the Matrix model), some folks are focusing on substituting virtual selves for physical presence and meeting in real spaces (the Avatar model). Just look at our recent piece on robot avatars you can send to work or events in your stead and control over the Internet. Commenters on the post were skeptical, but Trevor Blackwell, CEO of Anybots (he’s also a partner in Y Combinator), which makes the robo-avatars pictured above, insisted in an interview that the idea wasn’t science fiction:

Earth is expected to be home to over nine billion people by 2050. That’s a lot of people for Mother Nature to manage.

Space issues aside, the biggest concern on an over-populated planet is whether or not there will be enough resources to go around. Last week, British investor and Co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO) Jeremy Grantham offered what Business Insider called a “startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.”

the purpose of this piece isn’t to tread well-worn ground about the planet’s perils. So forget about fossil fuels, drinking water, crops, ice-caps, trees and animals for now. What we’ll be looking at is all those elements that go into helping you do what you’re doing right now. Whether you’re reading this on your laptop, smartphone, tablet…or any other digital device, the natural environment has had a huge part to play in this experience.

The internet is a tool which contributes to the "progress of humankind as a whole" and should be available to all.That is the view of Frank La Rue, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

Mr La Rue was tasked with writing a report looking into global access to the internet as a medium for freedom of opinion and expression.

In the final document [PDF] presented to the Human Rights Council this week, he concluded that the removal of an individual's internet access should only take place in "few, exceptional and limited circumstances prescribed by human rights law".

Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?

Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it.

We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free.

With a pool of nearly 1,000 college students in ten countries over five continents – including the US, the study sought to witness the effects of abstaining from social media and ALL media for a period of 24 hours.

The word “addiction” while not clinically relevant was surely on the minds of the students as this word came back repeatedly in responses. “I was itching, like a crackhead, because I could not use my phone.” – US studentFacebook is the social media “drug” of choice. “There is no doubt that Facebook is really high profile in our daily life.” – Hong Kong studentBut “Texting is the glue of social life.” “I found it hard not to text my boyfriend as I am so used to doing that as our main way of communicating during the day.” – UK studentA sense of isolation and loneliness came over many. “When I couldn’t communicate with my friends by mobile phone, I felt so lonely as if I was in a small cage on an island.” – China student Envy led to hostility. "I realized that I was having hostile thoughts towards those students who were walking around texting. I was jealous of them and it literally felt like some sort of withdrawal.” – US student

My first reaction after reading over all of the findings was ‘I think much of this is applicable to ALL social media and media users as a whole.’