Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Developed for McGraw Hill Higher Education Education UK, PRACTICE Marketing is a 3D turn-based Serious Game intended to teach college kids the principles of product marketing and competition. In the game, players are able to fully experience the seven underlying principles upon which to base marketing strategy and efforts: Image, Differentiation, Repeat Business, Ease of Doing Business, Networking, Likeability, and Emotion. Gameplay You’ve been selected to manage a company’s new entry into the backpack market. Your first step in the game is to create a strong product that appeals to a specific market segment and price it appropriately.

You are upfront presented with the info you need to analyze the market, provided by market research, who has narrowed the backpack market down to five potential segments for you to consider targeting, selecting the one that looks the most promising.

Once you have selected a target market, you can use the backpack builder to design a pack that meets the needs of its particular demographic.

University scientists are seeking to take virtual reality to a new level – with a view to helping sick people who cannot get access to the outside world. The researchers in Birmingham plan their new worlds to be “sensorily rich”.They are using large screen TVs, video projectors and head mounted displays to create virtual versions of soothing rural and coastal scenes. The initial development is re-creating a stretch of the coastline of south Devon and an area within Dartmoor National Park.The developers say there is research evidence that exposure to greenery, such as trees, can improve patient recovery and reduce pain levels. Tests on volunteers are due to start later this summer. Birmingham University has become involved because its local hospital provides specialist defence medical facilities and has a large number of trauma victims.Developer Professor Bob Stone, a multimedia specialist, said: “This technology could be made available to anyone who, for whatever reason, is in hospital, bed-bound or cannot get outside.  They will be able to get the benefits of the countryside and seaside by viewing the virtual scenario on screen. Patients will be free to choose areas that they want to spend time in; they can take a walk along coastal footpaths, sit on a beach, listen to the waves and birdsong, watch the sun go down and – in due course – even experience the smells of the land-and seascapes almost as if they were experiencing the outdoors for real.”

The Meaning of Being There is Related to a Specific Activation in the Brain Located in the Parahypocampus

Social Presence in Virtual World Surveys

“I’m Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear”: Combining Mediated Social Touch with Morphologically Correct Visual Feedback

Mollat Editions just reissued a book written by Victor Louis in 1782 about the Theatre of Bordeaux, France. “Salle de Spectacle à Bordeaux” is made interactive by the  numerous digital content offered through the book: videos, pictures, comments and 3D animations. Our partner Axyz  was in charge of Augmented Reality integration on this cultural project.

As a clinician fascinated by the use of new technologies to achieve outcomes, it’s hard to go past anything that is looking at bridging the divide between human emotions / touch and technology. Telenoid is one such project. It’s aim is to provide an effective way to transfer people’s presence. The research on telepresence is booming and it’s fairly widely accepted that videoconferencing is superior to teleconferencing and that platforms like virtual worlds provide even better telepresence sometimes. Telenoid is a step further again, providing a tangible means of interacting with someone remotely. In the second video below you’ll see its creator citing a key inspiration was the ability for remotely located grandparents to interact more with their grandchildren. That alone is laudable but for me the clinical simulation potentials stood out pretty strongly.

b. She consents to her next outpatient chemotherapy session being used for simulation purposes with third-year nursing students at a local university.

A specific example:

Bill Keller of the New York Times has just written a provocative piece lamenting that new technologies are eroding essential human characteristics. I would certainly agree that almost all technologies, especially those with a cognitive element, transform the way we organize, value and manage our intellectual and social lives–-indeed, such complaints were raised, most famously by Plato about how writing was emptying words of their soul by disconnecting them from their living speakers. However, Keller makes not one but at least three distinct claims in his piece. I want to primarily discuss the one that he makes least explicitly and perhaps has never formulated directly himself.

first, let’s clarify the other two which are explicit.

here are the parts of Keller’s comments which have intrigued me

Now Mobilizy, the leaders in augmented reality geo-location applications for mobile have taken the next major leap by combining augmented reality with GPS navigation software. Wikitude Drive is the award winning GPS navigation application for Android devices, it has already been awarded numerous prizes including the “Galileo Master 2010” of the European Satellite Navigation Competition, “Global Champion” of the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge and Winner of the “World Summit Award 2010”. Previously available for Austria, Germany and Switzerland the application is now available for Spain, UK, France and Italy. What’s different about Wikitude Drive from other navigation applications is it overlays the live route over the camera feed rather than using a traditional map view.  This new augmented reality view enables you to see exactly where you are going and the route without having to take your eyes off the road ahead. Having said sometime back that someday AR will change navigation, it’s been enjoyable playing around with the beta and testing the UK maps. As everything is stored on the server all the maps are up to date and I was even able to navigate to my house which hasn’t even made Google Street View yet. Turn by turn instructions are given clearly using a speech engine so you’ll always have the expected voice instructions.

“After carefully weighing our options for building a social rewards solution in-house versus integrating with a best in class technology provider, we selected Badgeville, a recognized leader in the space, for their comprehensive, lightweight and flexible platform,” said Larry Drebes, CEO, Janrain.

Badgeville jumped onto the scene when they won “Audience Choice” at TechCrunch last fall. Within two quarters they’ve captured 50 clients for their “white label” social rewards, loyalty and analytics platform.

Badgeville helps web publishers of all sizes increase audience engagement and unlock new monetization opportunities. The Palo Alto– based company provides platform that makes it easy for web publishers, to increase user loyalty and engagement. 

The Internet is a vast mosaic of economic activity, ranging from millions of daily online transactions and communications to smartphone downloads of TV shows. Little is known, however, about how the Net in its entirety contributes to global growth, productivity, and employment. New McKinsey research examined the Internet economies of the G8 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden. It found that the Internet accounts for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. Register to continue.

Post-revolution Egypt is in a state of flux overlooked by outsiders. New political parties are forming while various factions hustle for power. As Egypt gears up for free elections, tech-savvy geeks are betting that their projects will have a major impact on how people will vote.

A combination of academics and entrepreneurs recently worked with Egyptian activists on a “Hackathon for Egypt” that provides some interesting--and fascinating--clues.

Participants in the hackathon were organized by Cloud to Street, a project dedicated to aiding Egyptian activists through technology. Cloud to Street is headed up by a loose group of primarily Canadian scholars and diplomats. Approximately 75 programmers took part, as well as Egyptian activists who attended both in person and via teleconference

EBay and its online payment unit, PayPal, on Thursday sued Google and two executives for stealing trade secrets related to mobile payment systems. The two executives, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, were formerly with PayPal and led the launch on Thursday of Google's own mobile payment system in partnership with MasterCard, Citigroup and phone company Sprint. The suit highlights the growing battle by a wide range of companies from traditional finance to Silicon Valley trying to take a major stake in what has been described as a US$1 trillion ($1.2 trillion) opportunity in mobile payments. The mobile phone is seen as the digital personal wallet of the future. The eBay suit said Bedier worked for nine years at PayPal, most recently serving as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. He joined Google on January 24 this year.

For Google, the increasingly available broadband / fiber-optic / wireless network is oxygen. Smart phones are proof enough that thin clients can succeed in this early atmosphere, but it's not yet rich enough for them to become the technological equivalent of anything more complex than jellyfish. Which, not incidentally, ruled the seas of the early earth.

Denser, higher-bandwidth communications networks(more wi-fi hotspots; more numerous, smaller and faster cell towers) are the direct equivalent of a denser atmosphere. Google's Chromebook not only has the ability to take advantage of this ever-improving network, it also has the power to drive it, just as smartphone adoption has already forced cell carriers to invest heavily in their existing networks.

Bling's system, you may remember, worked by attaching an NFC-enabled sticker on the back of phones. Users could then tap the phone onto specialized hardware (the Blinger) at the register and Bling could debit the user's PayPal account to pay the merchant.

Unless you have a Sprint Nexus S 4G on Sprint, you'll be attaching an RFID tag onto the back of your phone if you want to try out Google Wallet this summer. Google Wallet is an Android app, so presumably even though the RFID hardware is a sticker, the system won't work on any non-Android phones. Even so, Google should be applauded for getting its program rolling without having to wait on the handset makers.

Ryan Kim on GigaOm has a good write-up detailing Google's partners in the effort and the likely gains to NFC as the dominant mobile payment platform.

May 24, 2011—CustomerIn Systems, a Canadian software-development firm located in Vancouver, B.C., is providing Near Field Communication (NFC) solutions for restaurants, bars and other entertainment establishments.

The first of what the company hopes will be many NFC solutions is a restaurant application dubbed the Connected Restaurant. This application, which has been deployed and tested, allows diners to use their mobile phones to request a table, order a drink and receive other services via their NFC-enabled phones.

known as SimpleNFC.com will provide developers with application software to build their own NFC solutions, and enable them to purchase software kits and tags.

Researchers Sean Gustafson, Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso-Plattner Institute have created a working prototype of a touch interface

A wearable depth camera tracks the user's movements on the surface of the palm of his or hand, corresponding to specific commands for an iPhone or other touchscreen phone, such as sliding to unlock and time settings.

Imaginary Phone allows users to control their mobile devices without taking it out of their pocket. Instead, users mimic the interaction on the palm of their hand. The interaction is tracked by a wearable depth camera which sends input events to the actual physical device. By mimicking the layout of the physical device, here an iPhone, users can operate the device based on spatial memory built up while using the physical device.

IDC’s Q1 scorecard for smartphones in western Europe is out. Nokia’s sales are sliding 10% year-on-year in a market for all phones growing at 5%, while the smartphone sector grew 76% (how long before we stop using the word smartphone, you might well ask). Nokia’s smartphone market share has gone from 57% to 19.6% in two years. Europe’s biggest handset maker is now Samsung and the fastest growing is HTC. The biggest platform is Android, with 35.7%, followed by Apple iOS on 20%, and then Symbian and BlackBerry OS.

4 out of those 5 companies are heavily committed to Android, and two are also committed to Windows Phone,

In the Android sphere, Sony Ericsson has announced the latest lot of Xperia phones. They’re keeping the Xperia Mini brand from the hit X10, and the Mini Pro gets a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Both run Android 2.3/Gingerbread and get a new Facebook app.

According to some interesting statistics, India has created more than 60,000 jobs with an investment of US $26.5 billion in the US over the past 5 years. This involves investments of US $21 billion by 239 Indian companies and 127 greenfield investments worth US $5.5 billion. The top three states for investments include Ohio, California and Texas. Investments have taken place in sectors like IT / ITes, biotech, chemicals, automotive, telecom etc. Indian organizations are increasingly opening up units in the US and also providing large scale employment opportunities in USA giving rise to a strong reverse outsourcing trend.

India has emerged as one of the largest FDI players in the US after the United Arab Emirates

The recent US $10 billion export deals worth for the US employers like Boeing signed by Obama with many Indian leaders is expected to create more than 50,000 jobs in Seattle.

A Week on FourSquare [wsj.com] by the Wall Street Journal deciphers the worldwide data behind the emerging location-sharing service Foursquare for the week in January 2011. The different visualizations available include an obvious heatmap of San Francisco showing where the most 'check-ins' occurred, a list revealing the distribution of the most popular venues world-wide, a line graph contrasting the differences between men and women in terms of their most preferred locations, and a categorically ordered list of the most popular locations by their absolute check-in frequency. You can read the accompanying news article here.