Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their

radiation.

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long

With the goal of creating a more powerful “prediction engine,” for forecasting everything from the price of gas in the U.S. to the nuclear capabilities of Iran, Stone’s research team is looking for individuals to contribute their knowledge in topic areas such as politics, the military, economics, science and technology, and social affairs. “This kind of enhanced predictive analysis capability will help the intelligence community provide early warning and leading indicators of events,” said Stone, who has published studies on the nature of expertise and how to make well-calibrated, non-overconfident judgments. “The idea is to combine individual judgments from a lot of people who all know a little to provide a tremendous amount of information.  Unlike the current process, our procedure captures, shares and combines expert opinions in a manner to make forecasts as accurate as possible.” The ACES process provides opportunities for anonymous sharing and deliberating before making forecasts and will provide participants feedback on their contributions and predictive successes.

According to ACES Principal Investigator Dr. Dirk Warnaar, “Some people know important details that can make the future predictable in many cases. They often do not share their insight with others. Our project is designed to find out what people know, have them share this knowledge with others, and ask them to make a prediction based on what they and others know.”

In a blog post on its site, the brains at Experian Hitwise claim startling information: there is one subsection of society where Google+ is gaining affection.

This subsection might be described as "miserable married people, stuck at home in the 'burbs with children." Naturally, Experian Hitwise doesn't describe them that way. It calls them the "Kids and Cabernet" group--"prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs."

The study contrasts another societal subgroup--"Colleges and Cafes"--which appears to be gaining some disaffection for Google's new social-networking foray.

oursquare has launched its Tip Lists features today, attempting to capitalize on people’s unending desire to create lists about locations, like Top Five Coffee Shops in SF, etc etc. Up until now your Foursquare Tips have sort of roamed free on the app, without rhyme or reason or real incentive to add more. Today the company is trying to improve on the Tips experience and get users to fancy themselves local experts. After all, you must know something about some place in the city you live in right?

Creating a list is relatively easy, as the entry field auto-populates with places. There is also a collaborative functionality, which lets people who you’re friends with edit a list.

The Tip Lists will also feed into Foursquare’s Explore functionality, which serves up recommendations for Food, Nightlife and Coffee based on your friends’ Checkins and Tips.

First Facebook, then Twitter and now Foursquare; Obama sure gets around (social platforms). As announced today on the White House blog, Obama will be checking in to the location-based service as he hits stops on his economic bus tour in the Midwest. Of course.

Google made a $12.5 billion bet on Monday that its future — and the future of big Internet companies — lies in mobile computing, and moved aggressively to take on its arch rival Apple in the mobile market.

The Silicon Valley giant, known for its search engine and Android phone software, rattled the tech world with its announcement that it would acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, allowing it to get into the business of making cellphones and tablets.

The deal, which requires regulatory approval, would also give Google a valuable war chest of more than 17,000 patents that would help it defend Android from a barrage of patent lawsuits.

Did you know that nearly 40 percent of all tweets come from a mobile device? Nearly 56 percent of Twitter users are women and 70 percent of Twitter accounts are based outside of the US. These and more fun Twitter facts can be found this infographic created by Touch Agency. via and via

Cities are experimenting with releasing more public data, engaging with citizens on social networks, adopting open source software, and finding ways to use new technologies to work with their citizens. They've been doing it through the depth of the Great Recession, amidst aging infrastructure, spiraling costs and flat or falling budgets. In that context, using technology and the Internet to make government work better and cities smarter is no longer a "nice to have" ... it's become a must-have.

That's the kind of "citizensourcing" smarter government that Tolva is looking to tap into in Chicago.

"This is as much about citizens talking to the infrastructure of the city as infrastructure talking to itself," he said. "It's where urban informatics and smarter cities cross over to Gov 2.0. There are efficiencies to be gained by having both approaches. You get the best of both worlds by getting an Internet of things to grow."

Internet traffic is booming, and something has got to give. Cisco reported this June that global IP traffic increased eightfold during the last five years, and is expected to jump by a factor of four, as we reach the rather ominously named "zettabyte threshold" by 2015. With the proliferation of millions of networked devices, and the popularity of Internet video, none of this data demand is expected to slacken.

Very few of those devices are going to require a cable. But Wi-Fi is only one (rather limited) option of getting Internet signals through the air to you. In the future, the Internet might come from the "white space" in your television spectrum, unused satellite signals, or the LED office lights overhead. Perhaps all of them. For the immediate future, your new lightbulb is a leading contender.

A German physicist has come up with a wireless Internet solution to send data through an LED lightbulb fluctuating in intensity faster than the human eye can detect. The invention, dubbed D-Light, can send data faster than 10 megabits per second--faster than the average broadband connection--simply by altering the frequency of the ambient light in the room. It has new applications in hospitals, airplanes, military, and even underwater.

With all the ephemeral and seemingly disconnected data that it holds on us, the company hopes to "one day tell people things they may want to know as they are walking down the street, without having to type in any search queries", reports Scott Morrison in the Wall Street Journal. "Think of it as a serendipity engine," said Google's Eric Schmidt at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference last September."Serendipity" is the latest holy grail in the Silicon Valley software zeitgeist: an ill-defined buzzword that developers use to describe services that will connect people with online ephemera they would not normally find on their own. Yet a website's success relies on delivering successes, and something that tries to predict serendipity will fail almost every time. "If you can plan it, how is it serendipitous?" asks reader ShockJockey on the Guardian's Technology blog. Indeed.

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are actually creating next-generation social experiences for their companies like Jeff Schick. The IBM executive doesn’t just leverage social business solutions, he and his team create them. “We started well over 15 years ago. We’ve been thinking about how to better connect people with people and people with information in terms of IBM itself,” Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”

At Big Blue, the company encourages the use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs to support their sales, communication, marketing and recruiting efforts.  While employee’s social interactions are not under a microscope, the experiments in social on a massive scale have led to a set of social business conduct guidelines that govern their employees’ social interactions. Schick advises that you need to establish behavior standards for employees to follow.

So why do they do it? Since they are both an early adopter and creator of social technologies, they’ve learned that content management, business process management, collaboration, commerce and analytics must all be combined with a social layer to create a universal and unified solution.

It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done. Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.

The worst thing about the Samsung RF4289HARS isn't that for $3,500, you get a little Android LCD touch-screen embedded above the ice maker whose 9 apps you can't even update. It's that it represents a missed opportunity. Samsung seems to be hell-bent on making all its appliances "smart" in the dumbest way possible. From users returning their "smart" TVs because their apps make them unusable to, well, gilded fridges that Tweet, the company seems to be designing from the perspective of "what can we cram into this device?" rather than "how can we enhance the experience of our users?" A really smart fridge, part of the Internet of Things, would know when you put that lettuce in the crisper, so it could alert you when it was about to become inedible. It would tweet its current temperature so you know when your kid failed to close the door all the way. A really smart fridge probably doesn't even have a display -- far better to control it from any other internet-connected device.

In his latest study, Berger measured how various emotional and physical stimuli designed to activate the autonomic nervous system affected the likelihood that subjects would share emotion-free news articles. In one experiment, he primed 93 respondents with pre-tested video clips to produce emotional states associated with high arousal (anxiety, amusement) and low arousal (sadness, contentment). Then, in what participants were told was an unrelated trial, Berger presented the respondents with neutral articles and videos, and asked them to rate how inclined they were to share these news items with friends, family members, and coworkers. The result: "Situations that heighten arousal boost social transmission," Berger concludes.

In Disneys Fantasia, Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice brings to life everyday objects such as brooms and buckets to help him with his tasks of cleaning - what starts as a good idea ultimately ends with terrible results as he fails to be able to control them.Whilst Mickey may have gotten out of his depth, this thinking of everyday objects being brought to life isn't just a fantasy.

Obviously not in the literal sense we see in the Sourcers Apprentice (although that would have been great!), but more in the sense that previously in-anmiate objects can now start to record their activities. Termed the "Internet of Things" this was discussed in part by a talk at DICE by Jesse Schell about gamification and how this may extend into everyday items and tasks. (The video is really worth watching if you haven't previously seen it)

What Jesse discussed in terms of earning points for brushing your teeth has now been enabled by start-up Green Goose. Using a combination of intelligent stickers or product add-ons, Green Goose claims to be able to track any activity, from cleaning your teeth to drinking a class of water.

Hyper-connectivity (Internet of things, people-centric networks, mobility): The world is becoming an interconnected network as the Internet expands outside of the web and into smart "things". Connectivity or as I've often referred to it, hyper-connectivity, driven by an increasingly mobile society that is always on, has far reaching business consequences. In a real time, always connected world, personal and professional blend or merge and the very definitions of workplace changes. The addition of the social web is creating a people-centric, interconnected network that is supported by real time access to data, content, and computational tools that change decision making and interactions. Business itself is moving to a business model where connectivity leads to a broad business network of partners behaving as an ecosystem. This ecosystem is the business of the future.

St. Louis-based mother-son team Spearhead Development has updated its QR Card Us product in response to customer feedback, cranking out a new iteration in just one week. We covered the launch of the mobile Web-powered business card provider on August 18. The new version of QR Card Us separates the QR link itself from the 'hard card,' or physical business card, so that customers can buy standalone QR Cards - mobile-friendly Web pages from which contact info can be saved - without worrying about their physical cards becoming outdated. It also adds Organizations, which allow a moderator to manage QR Cards for a company, club or any kind of group. Finally, the update adds Notes, which lets users attach any kind of text note about a new contact to their saved info.

Geofencing: As long as you're here ... One of the promises of mobile advertising — at least from the merchant's perspective — has been the potential to advertise to customers when they're near your store and can act immediately (and impulsively) on your offer. To make these location-triggered offers, merchants need to delineate a "geofence" around their retail outlets — a radius or polygonal area in which customers who have opted into a deal program can be notified on their mobiles that an offer is available nearby. Indeed, Groupon is working on adding such location-based deals to its daily offers, according to a letter sent from its general counsel David Schellhase to two U.S. Representatives who were asking about Groupon's privacy policies.

By some measures, 90% of all texts are opened within three minutes of receiving them.

Goodman said that location-triggered delivery is highly effective with "exceedingly high" response rates: between 11% and 60% of users are likely to visit a store when pinged with an offer if they're nearby, and up to 46% are likely to make a purchase.

When we spoke to Jiepang CEO and co-founder David Liu back in June, he told us that a second-round of in-the-field NFC trials was coming, and now we see what Jiepang and Nokia were cooking up. Impressively, Nokia has even released three new NFC-capable handsets to coincide with this – the Nokia 600, 700, and 701 (pictured above) – which would all work perfectly with Jiepang’s newest NFC poster check-ins. The three Symbian-Belle powered smartphones are aimed at developing countries where customers are looking for an affordable but powerful device. The 701 model will sell for 290 Euros (2,700 RMB), which puts it at about the same price as new Android-powered phones from HTC, such as the Desire.

Jiepang’s NFC posters – just put your phone up against one for an automatic, smart check-in – will appear in six cities across Greater China: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Hong Kong and Taipei. Actually, any NFC-equipped phone could make use of them, such as the Samsung Nexus S.