Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

The coins will be limited edition and will be produced in silver as well as gold. The silver 5€ and gold 10€ will be issued on June 22, 2011.

The Royal Dutch Mint has produced what is the first QR coded coin to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the mint in Utrecht.

The Royal Dutch Mint has produced what is the first QR coded coin to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the mint in Utrecht.

Wal-Mart’s social and mobile plans are starting to take shape only two months after acquiring Kosmix of Mountain View, Calif.

When Kosmix was purchased, it was building a database called the social genome project, which kept track of what people were interested in and what products people were talking about.

the executives say they are hard at work defining how the mega-retailer — with $419 billion in sales and 1.5 billion online visits a year to its Web site — will address the two very disruptive platforms: social and mobile.

In New York, at the Mobile Marketing Association forum, Google presented sponsored research on global smartphone user and marketer behavior. The data come from two related studies. The first is an “an online survey of thousands of mobile consumers in 30 countries.” The second is based on “a telephone survey of 1,000 marketing decision makers,” with a focus on US, UK, Germany, France and Japan.

More than Half of Smartphone Users Online Daily In the US smartphone penetration stands at about 36 percent according to the most recent Nielsen data. In Western Europe, on a percentage basis, the numbers are higher in several countries. The Google research showed that increasingly smartphone users go online daily and that many are on the mobile internet multiple times a day: US — 58 percent (online) 53 percent (multiple times) UK — 55 percent (online) 49 percent (multiple times) France — 59 percent (online) 47 percent (multiple times) Germany — 45 percent (online) 42 percent (multiple times) Japan — 78 percent (online) 68 percent (multiple times)

Almost All Local Info Seekers Take Action Here’s what the data showed about local-mobile information seekers and then the percentage who have “taken action” after a local search/lookup: US — 90 percent (search/lookup) 87 percent (took action) UK — 81 percent (search/lookup) 80 percent (took action) France — 83 percent (search/lookup) 83 percent (took action) Germany — 85 percent (search/lookup) 79 percent (took action) Japan — 90 percent (search/lookup) 80 percent (took action)

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Tools for collaboration The Internet of Things will introduce new smart objects to our homes. One challenge is to find effective solutions to enable different products to work together. Currently no standardised tools or distribution platforms exist in this area

A group of Norwegian researchers have been addressing this issue. In the research project Infrastructure for Integrated Services (ISIS) they have created a platform for developing and distributing applications for the Internet of Things. The platform encompasses a programming tool for developers, called Arctis and the website ISIS Store for downloading applications. The project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway's Large-scale Programme VERDIKT

"In a 'smart' everyday life objects and applications often need to be connected to several different communication services, sensors and other components. At the same time they need to respond quickly to changes and the actions of users. This requires very good control over concurrence in the system, which can be difficult to achieve with normal programming," he explains. Dr Kraemer believes that the tool will make it easier to create new applications, adapt them to existing applications and update software as necessary.

New research by electrical engineers at Oregon State University has confirmed that an electronic technology called "ultrawideband" could hold part of the solution to an ambitious goal in the future of medicine -- health monitoring with sophisticated "body-area networks."

Such networks would offer continuous, real-time health diagnosis, experts say, to reduce the onset of degenerative diseases, save lives and cut health care costs. Some remote health monitoring is already available, but the perfection of such systems is still elusive

"This type of sensing would scale a monitor down to something about the size of a bandage that you could wear around with you," said Patrick Chiang, an expert in wireless medical electronics and assistant professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "The sensor might provide and transmit data on some important things, like heart health, bone density, blood pressure or insulin status," Chiang said. "Ideally, you could not only monitor health issues but also help prevent problems before they happen. Maybe detect arrhythmias, for instance, and anticipate heart attacks. And it needs to be non-invasive, cheap and able to provide huge amounts of data.

Big news today in the world of mobile payments: the three largest operators in the UK have announced a joint venture to offer mobile wallet services to its customers, in the hopes of finally kick-starting a service that has been long on discussion but painfully short on execution up to now. O2 UK, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK and Everything Everywhere (itself a joint venture between France Telecom’s Orange UK and T-Mobile UK ) are banding together to form what they call a cross-platform, single solution. The operators say that this will create a simplified, one-stop shop for banks, merchants, advertisers and other marketing partners in the mobile payments value chain.

And perhaps most importantly: with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Visa and to a lesser extent Square looking to spearhead mobile payments with themselves in the center of the transaction, it’s clear that that mobile operators have decided that scale, and control of those all-important SIM cards, is their best weapon.

“We’ll be customers of the venture, anyone can be,” explained Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2. “[O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere] have actually built and developed capabilities and we’re putting this together [and] creating a market for those who don’t have the scale to do it. The JV makes it easier to access this.”

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.

A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.

"With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers."

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.

For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, has renewed concerns about how digital life has led children off the playground and into the computer room… permanently. The study concludes that the average 10-year-old today

For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.

Although the study found that Body Mass Index (BMI) had remained constant, BMI is notorious for not factoring in the composition of muscle and fat ratios in its results. According to Dr Gavin Sandercock, a fitness expert at Essex University, a constant BMI is all well and good but the results are still “worrying from a health point of view” because they show that “pound for pound, [children are] weaker and probably carrying more fat,” he told The Guardian.

Entrepreneurs who incorporate LinkedIn into their B2B online marketing initiatives will likely be ecstatic to hear the social network has been deemed the most important social site. According to a survey conducted by Performics, which polled nearly 3,000 active social networkers, 59 percent said it is the most important to have a LinkedIn account. Half of respondents (50 percent) say they visit the social network at least weekly, while 20 percent log in daily.

Customer support rules are rapidly changing, as unprecedented numbers of customers use social media channels to express options, seek assistance and purchase products. Customers have quickly adopted Facebook, Twitter and Google, as their primary means for gathering information regarding a company’s products and services. In many cases social media customers receive support from multiple departments within a company but are isolated from the contact center. This is because the traditional contact center is generally not ready for reaching out to the social customer or will only provide secondary support when its telephone agents are free. Regardless of how companies choose to market and support their social media customers, they should apply the same basic procedures found in contact centers to positively engage their customers

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Pitney Bowes also noted that 12 percent of respondents added mobile marketing in the past year, and another nine percent added QR codes. Thompson-Van said this wasn’t bad for marketing methods that weren’t even being discussed 12 months ago.

55 percent of Americans are interested in working for a company that uses gamification to increase productivity, according to a new survey by consulting firm Saatchi & Saatchi S. In its report titled "Engagement Unleashed: Gamification for Business, Brands and Loyalty", the agency found that around half of online Americans play social game during a typical day -- 28 percent of them who work play them more than 30 minutes a day at their jobs.

37 percent of survey respondents said they prefer to hear about a new product via online game experiences, versus the 44 percent who said they prefer email and the 3 percent that prefer TV or radio advertisements

Among smartphone owners, 75 percent of participants want to play clues-based challenges from brands, and 85 percent would be willing to play them for at least half an hour for the chance to win a $100 cash prize