Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Verizon Wireless and financial management company Intuit announced today a partnership that will bring Intuit's mobile card reader to 2,300 Verizon retails stores across the country. The partnership is yet another big move in the mobile card reader industry that has been popularized by Square and includes Verifone, Erply and PayAnywhere among others. Intuit operates QuickBooks, a system used by merchants to manage finances. As such, GoPayment fits well in Intuit's product line. Verizon will be able to put the Go Payment in front of millions of people looking for mobile payment options. It is a win for both companies and a strike to Square, which is putting up a big fight against the large financial companies that are rapidly entering mobile payment industry.

The GoPayment card reader will be "free" to Verizon customers granted activation of a GoPayment account and a mail-in rebate of the $29.97 purchase price. The app itself is free and has no monthly transaction or cancellation fees with a 2.7% rate for each swiped transaction. A paid version of GoPayment is available that lowers the per swipe transaction rate to 1.7% with a $12.95 monthly fee, which will be good for retailers with high volume.

Square sells for $9.95 at the Apple Store but consumers get a $10 credit from the company when they sign up for an account. Square also has a 2.7% fee for swiped transactions

Joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC (Internet Relay Channel)-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream from Twitter.

you’re trying to engage in a conversation with someone on Twitter that goes beyond a few “@ replies”, you’re either forced to DM or take the conversation elsewhere. Joint allows users to easily join a group chat, as well as discuss notable or popular hashtags. For instance, of late “#irene” has become a much-used hashtag, as Hurricane Irene is poised to hit the East Coast. Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location.

because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about having public conversations (about more private issues, especially) on Twitter.

Four major credit card companies are working with the Isis mobile wallet venture to install mobile payment security applications on upcoming NFC-ready smartphones in the U.S.

Visa expects to license its own software, called PayWave, to the upcoming near-field communication (NFC) smartphones sold by the three wireless carriers in the Isis consortium, a Visa spokeswoman said yesterday.

All four of the credit networks offer contactless payment software, which today is more widely used on cards containing chips than in smartphones. Isis officials said in July that having all four on board will increase consumer and merchant acceptance of NFC-ready smartphones used to make point-of-sale purchases.

a Silicon Valley tech firm named Jumio has rolled out a program called Netswipe that lets anyone with a webcam — including bloggers, thanks to a new WordPress plug-in that was just introduced — accept credit cards.

With Netswipe, the merchant uses a computer’s webcam (or the built-in camera in the smartphone version) to “read” a customer’s credit card, using sophisticated technology that can perceive details like the raised lettering on the card to authenticate the purchase.

For small businesses, Mattes says he’ll charge 2.75 percent of the cost for processing the transaction. While this is steeper than the average processing cost for credit or debit transactions, the merchant doesn’t also have to pay monthly fees, as they do to ordinary network processors.

Those freaked out by facial recognition technology have fresh fodder: a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which researchers were able to predict people’s social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam.

For those participants who had date of birth and city publicly available on their account, the researchers could predict a social security number (based on the work from their 2009 study). The researchers sent a follow-up survey to their student participants asking them whether the first five digits of the social security number their algorithm predicted was correct. One problem with this part of the study was that “60% of the CMU students were foreign and don’t have social security numbers,” said Acquisti. Though researchers were still able to tell them all about their interests and favorite movies based on what they got from their Facebook profile pages.

I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.

The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing.  eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The  rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.

Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity: - Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide. - Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide. - Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world. Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for  information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.

What kind of services is Schmidt referring to when he says that Google is looking at Google+ as an identity platform that could support other services? Dave Winer thinks that the company wants to effectively become a bank — something he also suspects that Apple and Amazon are interested in as well — and that’s definitely a possibility. Apple and Google both seem interested in NFC technology (near-field communication), which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets, and having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy. Ross Dawson says Google wants to build a “reputation engine” using Google+ as a platform.

It’s like a Hollywood political thriller come true: a handful of people lurking in the shadows, controlling the minds of millions. New research reveals that it’s possible for a few individuals to enslave an entire network, even if they aren’t highly connected themselves.Scientists have figured out how to identify the nodes — the points that link to other points in a network — that when tweaked can control the entire network. The research, published in the May 12 Nature, might lead to more secure power grids, tricks for controlling the metabolic processes of cells and marketing campaigns that spread like the plague.

The Internet has a short attention span. According to research by link-shortening service Bit.ly, click rates drop by half after about three hours for links posted on Twitter, Facebook, and regular Web pages (direct). For hot news stories, the dropoff is even faster -- within the first five minutes, those links get half the clicks they'll ever receive. YouTube has a much longer half-life -- around 7 hours. That's probably because watching a video requires more time and concentration, and can't be done as easily at work.

Kaggle is an Australian company that crowdsources predictive models. How does Kaggle do this? By hosting competitions of prediction models. Clients post their problem and correlating data promising a prize money for the most reliable prediction model provided by the community.

Kaggle’s community consists of data analysts from all over the world and from a wide array of fields, with the majority of users coming from computer science (15.6%), statistics (11.6%) and economics (10%) but also from physics, engineering and even social sciences. According to a recent blog entry, Kaggle’s community is reaching 13,000 data scientists.

I don’t disagree with the headline (see full article here).  The problem for NFC payments has little to do with the state of NFC technology, or the road-map of NFC-enabled handsets, or the POS integration required at merchant sites.  Those issues are either solved (or solving).The main hurdles for NFC payments are twofold:a highly complex payment ecosystem of banks, merchant acquirers, and payment processors who must demonstrate regulatory and PCI compliance, flawless security, and adequate payer authenticationand customers’ proclivity to adopt a new mode of payment, e.g. from ‘card-swipe’ to ‘phone-touch’Ask yourself – would I have to use my phone to complete a payment vs. my credit card? Personally, I think the experience will be novel but only really offer nominally more convenience.

people want work and have to act like they’ve got work to get it. And more often than not, people won’t settle for work that’s matched to their experience. They want the big names because what do we honour in our social media circles? Names. The reality is that if these scores of people spent as much time projecting as they did actually humbling themselves to take work at their level and do it, they wouldn’t have to project having work in order to get the work they so desperately need. Right now I know of dozens of people who need work, some famous, some not, who if they would just stretch their hand out and ask, without searching for the big brands, the

I had a friend who told me the truth when he couldn’t tell others. His name was Trey Pennington, and when we lost him this month (and there was more to his loss than most know), we became determined to help others who felt equally unable to get the help that they needed

I know that most self employed and company owners within our Like Minds community are on the edge of their finances. They are startups in tough times, and the consultants especially are struggling to get work. I venture that together we could help a whole lot of people get the work they need if they told the truth and could be open with one another.

NFC tag scans for connection sharing, social networking and marketing are increasing at a rate of 22 per cent per month, according to new research carried out by Kimtag. Kimtag, a UK based connection hub, analysed the visits to 10,000 selected Kimtag connection pages over a six month period ending in August 2011. The company compared QR Code, NFC tag, direct and referral hits from visitors around the world. 

During the research, Kimtag regarded a successful visit as a user reaching and fully downloading a Kimtag connection page via an address assigned specifically for NFC tags and then subsequently visiting a connection such as a social network or website.  The research revealed that the number NFC tag scans grew by an average 22 per cent month on month. Over the whole six month period, NFC scans increased by over 170 per cent.

Phil Coote, Kimtag’s CEO, commented, "The research illustrates that while a lot of the current focus within the NFC industry has been on payment systems, the use of NFC to empower the new ‘internet of things’ is likely to play an equally important role in it’s growth." 

Instead of thinking about the buttons on a phone or a laptop, manufacturers and designers need to think about what will happen when computers are embedded in everything and connected all the time. Instead of computing confined in a box on a desk or in the hand, computers will be everywhere pulling data from a variety of places.

Of those three elements the patient input screen is likely gathering the least important information and must convey complicated information simply.

How will a machine know when someone waving their hands while they talk to a friend becomes someone trying to tell a computer to do something? Of course, when a device can watch us and interpret our movements and commands effectively it essentially gives computers the illusion of humanity. That’s the illusion Rolston apparently is trying to create.

In an interview, David Messenger, American Express’s head of online and mobile, tells me they have identified a major pain point among teens and others who are still using cash and checks to conduct a majority of their transactions.

The conversation got heated when a woman raised her hand to say she didn’t understand why she would ever adopt mobile payments: Seriously, how could a phone be easier than swiping a card?

He said the benefits are obvious when splitting a check at a restaurant, divvying up rent and utilities among five roommates every month, or being the person who fronts the money to buy tickets to a concert for a group of 10. Those transactions today are largely conducted with cash and checks.

Qualcomm boss Paul Jacobs has outlined his vision of the future at the company's Innovation event: a world where mobile devices supplant PCs, with his company's chips at the heart of the ecosystem.

"The fundamental trend that we all know is that mobile is now the dominant computing platform," Jacobs told attendees. "That's not the future - that's now. The install base of smartphones has already surpassed PCs."

That's a sea change which shouldn't be overlooked, Jacobs argued. "There were limitations to how computing happened in the past - now we do it when we're moving around," he explained. "Mobile is everywhere with you - you take it wherever you go. It's about doing things when you have the time."

NFC still isn’t too common in the US, but it looks like it’s going to be a standard feature for all future mobile devices. Manufacturers have been slowly implementing NFC functionality into their phones and tablets recently, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 will ship with native support for NFC. For those not in the know, NFC (Near Field Communications) is a method of communication that two mobile devices can use to communicate with each other just by being in each other’s presence. It can be used for a whole range of functions such as making payments, to collecting information. Today at the BUILD conference, Microsoft also demonstrated the usage of NFC on its Windows 8 tablet. Using an NFC-enabled business card, the demonstrator could simply collect the website address from it by pointing the corner of the tablet towards the card and tapping the notification. It sure beats launching a QR code scanner or manually typing it in. Check out the video after the break:

(OR): I think one of the things that’s a coming disruptor is the concept of machines becoming aware – the Internet of Things (IOT). Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication will take off. There are more machines than humans. Smart grid is a subset of this. Eventually in the consumer space, this type of communication and volume in network connectivity will outstrip what’s happening today. Even though it’s still nascent, we should pay attention to it.

Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.

In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,

Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.

In working with thousands of clients, IBM has established that businesses and the world at large have become more interconnected and certainly more intelligent. Just to toss out a few factoids – data is growing at 6 trillion bytes per second, IP traffic will accelerate in 3 years to over a trillion gigabytes, and as of 2010, there were an estimated 30B RFID tags across the global ecosystem. Almost 162 million smart phones were sold in 2008, surpassing laptop sales for the first time. Soon there will be one trillion connected devices in the world, constituting an “Internet of things.” This environment provides both the individual and the organization the opportunity to adapt their thinking and actions to address the challenges of the new world.

Clouds are now seen as an element of a transformative process. Organizations spend time looking at their business processes and deciding which ones to change for competitive advantage as they move into the cloud. More efficient workflows that incorporate “outsiders,” such as customers, contractors, and suppliers can be created.

The ability to allow outside partners to connect to a legacy application via the cloud is an important consideration.