Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

A recent interview takes a look at what Facebook’s recent platform changes mean for businesses. It begins, “Recently at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ and ‘Listen,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a ‘language for how people connect.’ The one missing word, of course, was ‘Buy.’ That’s really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users.”

The interviewer “sat down with Gi Fernando, an expert on social-networking data, to help explain what Facebook’s platform changes mean for brands, consumers, and marketers.

When asked about the single biggest change that Facebook is making, Fernando replied, “The biggest change is Facebook driving toward becoming the semantic web. The semantic web is making sure that the Internet has a dictionary and a grammar that can be understood by consumers, yes, but also by advertisers and brands. It’s also understanding how people behave on the Web rather than just clicking on stuff: what are they actually doing? You read, watch things, you get instant feedback, your friends can read and watch with you, but then the brand knows what you and 13 others are reading, watching, listening to as well, and you can target advertising based around that. It’s a beautiful feedback loop both for the consumer and the brand.”

Technology will also transform our daily urban existence in a myriad number of small ways, says Philip Sheldrake, director of Intellect, which represents the UK technology industry. He believes 2011 is the year the ultimate in connectivity – the "internet of things" - will finally take hold: "It is almost like we have got a perfect storm coming. There are a number of technological innovations and a number of calls on this technology coming together at the same time."

Urban areas are ultimately likely to be transformed by sensors that transmit data on conditions such as energy consumption, pollution, and temperature, which can be used to create a "smart grid" system. Such a grid could automatically turn on domestic devices such as washing machines at night when consumption is low and regulate heating, water supply and air conditioning systems. And as we negotiate our way around urban transport systems, sensors will also track our movements sending information back to bus companies or electric car hire schemes.

We are in the early stages of the Internet of Things, the much anticipated era when all manner of devices can talk to each other and to intermediary services. But for this era to achieve its full potential, operators must fundamentally change the way they build and run clouds. Why? Machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions are far less failure tolerant than machine-to-human interactions. Yes, it sucks when your Netflix subscription goes dark in a big cloud outage, and it’s bad when your cloud provider loses user data. But its far worse when a fleet of trucks can no longer report their whereabouts to a central control system designed to regulate how long drivers can stay on the road without resting or all the lights in your building turn out and the HVAC system dies on a hot day because of a cloud outage.

The current cloud infrastructure could crumble under the data weight In the very near future, everything from banks of elevators to cell phones to city buses will either be subject to IP-connected control systems or use IP networks to report back critical information. IP addressability will become nearly ubiquitous. The sheer volume of data flowing through IP networks will mushroom. In a dedicated or co-located hardware world, that increase would result in prohibitively expensive hardware requirements. Thus, the cloud becomes the only viable option to affordably connect, track and manage the new Internet of Things.

That is critical, in turn, to mitigate growing latency risks for mobile connectivity resulting from the wild proliferation of IP enabled devices on mobile networks coming in the new era of the Internet of Things.

Location-based check-in service Foursquare released a new version of its iPhone app today that adds a new feature called Radar, which takes full advantage of the latest version of Apple’s iOS 5 update.

Using iOS 5′s new region monitoring functionality, the Radar feature sends alerts to users about things they are interested in whenever they are physically near the area.

“Radar is a big step in the direction of Foursquare’s vision,” wrote Foursquare Head of Product Alex Rainert on the company’s blog.

Libraries Fight Back: Ebook Checkouts Up 200%

Ebook checkouts increased by more than 200% in 2010, according to a recent study from OverDrive, the leading distributor of ebooks and digital audiobooks to libraries.

This adds to the more than 12 million ebook checkouts so far in 2011, paidContent reports

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed speech interface technology that enables users to retrieve a variety of information by simply speaking into a smartphone, without having to look at the smartphone’s display.

After listening to a synthesized speech read the latest news and other information, users can articulate the information that they would like to learn more about. The software will then read details about the topic and other related information

In recent years, by employing devices to remotely access data centers, where an abundance of computing resources can be utilized, it has become possible to develop speech recognition and synthesis technologies that handle a larger lexicon than has previously been possible on stand-alone devices. This has led to high expectations for the delivery of new and innovative services.

Singapore-based Bubble Motion is offering a voice-based version of Twitter.

Sequoia Capital, the bluest of blue chip Silicon Valley venture capital firms, brought Clayton in to salvage Bubble Motion in early 2008 after it had burned through $30 million in capital.

Clayton rather quickly saw that instead of continuing with its original offering — a peer-to-peer voicemail service, it could grow fast by providing a voice version of Twitter.

Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold.

Quora’s founders and their first hire—designer Rebekah Cox—created the core of the most impressive “subjective knowledge extraction” machine ever constructed.

By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet. What’s more, Quora is also using humanity’s collective wisdom to rank it.

With the excitement surrounding the arrival of undersea cables in Sub-Saharan Africa and the prospects of the smartphone revolution in bringing mobile connectivity to most parts of the continent, it is easy to forget for instance that the continent still has 1 domain per 10,000 users.

In education, there are the vast prospects that e-learning provides for students, but doing this in a way that scales is difficult in Africa’s low bandwidth environment. There are also prospects in various sectors ranging from agriculture to finance each with its own unique set of challenges.

Amidst this backdrop, the obvious respite for bridging the access gap appears to be through smart phones. However, majority of Africans can only afford the cheapest of phones which are typically low end phones. To truly expand access, smart phone prices will need to crash drastically and rural connectivity would need to expand dramatically. Save for these two actions, revolutionizing the continent via the Internet will continue to remain a pipe dream.

Nuance Communications (NUAN) CEO Paul Ricci must have taken copious notes in class because his company's recent purchase of Swype has catapulted it from a voice recognition company to an input organization.

I think this is a big move for the company because it expands what it, as an entity, does.

To "swype," a person traces across keyboard letters in a continuous motion to comprise a word. Swype says its input method lets people do more than 40 words a minute, and says the application is meant to work across not just phones and tablets, but also game consoles, kiosks, televisions and other screens.

Smart Grid deployments are not only delivering improved energy security, grid reliability, and consumer control to us, they are bringing the Internet of Things closer to reality.  The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined in the Smart Grid Dictionary as a conceptual description of the ability to connect any objects with an IP address and some level of embedded intelligence to the communications network.  Embedded intelligence can include localization, sensing, identification, security, networking, processing, and control. 

“We want to build tools that change the way all the people in this room experience the real world,” said Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at the Web 2.0 Summit today, as he described his company’s retreat from the game mechanics that first made the check-in service a success. With more than 10 million downloads, Foursquare is the category leader for location services, even as it moves away from its initial offering. Crowley said Foursquare is about much more than check-ins, and features such as Foursquare Radar and Foursquare Explorer are going to power even stronger user adoption in the future.

“We have a very narrow focus on building features that help people experience the real world,” Crowley said. “How we were able to survive the Facebook onslaught — that was a big motivating factor for the entire company.”

In spite of banner user adoption, Crowley said he can identify with newcomers who are still struggling to understand why they should use a check-in service at all. Crowley said when he first downloaded Twitter, it was 18 months before he really understood why the product was worth using, because he hadn’t discovered that “thing” which made it special.

Damage control: Internet discussion about the service outage that struck Amazon Web Services in April spiked as soon as problems began (April 21st) and again when Amazon explained the cause (April 29th). The data is based on selected mentions on Twitter, blogs, and in online media. Alterian

Just ask Jeff Malek, cofounder of BigDoor, a Seattle company whose game software is hosted on the public servers of Amazon. Last April, problems in a Northern Virginia data center crippled Amazon's northeast operations, affecting many cloud-based businesses. Spotty service over four days left BigDoor scrambling to find technical solutions and issuing a steady stream of apologies to its 250 clients. Since then, BigDoor has joined a growing number of companies that are seeking new ways of building outage-resistant systems in the cloud, often at additional expense and inconvenience.

Even though outages put businesses at immense risk, public cloud providers still don't offer ironclad guarantees. In its so-called "service-level agreement," Amazon says that if its services are unavailable for more than 0.05 percent of a year (around four hours) it will give the clients a credit "equal to 10% of their bill." Some in the industry believe public clouds like Amazon should aim for 99.999 percent availability, or downtime of only around five minutes a year.

Crowdpark, a Berlin-headquartered game developer, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from top German venture capital firms, Target Partners and existing investor, Earlybird Venture Capital. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the investment. The new round of funding brings Crowdpark’s total to $8 million. Why should you care? Well, Crowdpark is aiming to give gamers their fix of legal gambling, er, betting. Using its patented “dynamic betting” technology, Crowdpark enables forecasting in realtime for social gaming in much the same way the brave among us play the stock market. Unlike its social gaming competitors, the German startup allows gamers to compete against each other in betting events using virtual currency. This includes the opportunity to bet on real world events taking place in everything from sports and entertainment to news and technology.

GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

The trick is in the filtering, to be sure: you don't want to plow through irrelevant searches or receive too few alerts about the things that you want to track. "The quality of content I receive is unbeatable. I now spend less time searching for stories about prospects, competitors and my industry and more time engaging my audience," says Kelly Morgan, director of marketing at HealthRx and an early user of the GageIn service.

It tries to pull information about companies, people and actionable events such as personnel changes to a single place and doing so in real-time, too.

LocalResponse, a new startup in the social media mobile ad space, is using semantic analysis to capitalize on real-time social data: “LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round… Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.”

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley doesn’t think that you should have to open up a mobile app to interact with it. I caught up with Crowley a couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, where he was a speaker. In the video interview above, he compares Foursquare’s newest feature called Radar to the Siri personal assistant on the new iPhone 4S. For Crowley, it’s all about getting mobile apps to push relevant information out to you at exactly the right place and time. “If you have a problem to solve with your phone, you don’t have to go to the search box.”

Radar taps into Foursquare’s Explore recommendations and pushes them out to you automatically via notifications. “What we have been doing with Radar is finding a way for people to use the app really without having to actually use it,” says Crowley. It runs Explore in the background, which tells you when you are near a place on your to-do list, where someone you know has left a tip, or where a lot of your friends are at that moment. Siri is similar in that it pushes out reminders and other information to you without you having to tap on the screen.

In part II of this interview, coming up, Crowley talks about how Radar fits into his overall strategy and plans to make money.

Why are brands killing the Facebook conversation? I read this post by Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, writing on Econsultancy, about the lack of interaction of brands have on their own Fan pages. Apparently only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand – shocking really! It’s really shooting yourself in the social foot – first it’s plain rude, second the more interactions you have, your brand updates get wider exposure in streams due to the way Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works.

The sensors inside modern smart phones present a range of security threats. An attacker who compromises a phone can, for example, track the owner's location by GPS, use the camera to see the phone's surroundings, or turn on its microphone to record conversations. At a conference in Chicago on Thursday, a group of computer researchers from Georgia Tech will report on another potential threat. The researchers have shown that the accelerometer and orientation sensor of a phone resting on a surface can be used to eavesdrop as a password is entered using a keyboard on the same surface. They were able to capture the words typed on the keyboard with as much as 80 percent accuracy.

canning that mysterious QR code sticker that someone stuck on the wall in a tame but oh-so-technophilic act of modern vandalism.

Instead, the nasties are using QR codes to lure people into downloading Android malware. While some users are likely to assume that QR codes are unique to the Android market and thus be comfortable scanning them, these codes actually take you to an Android install package hosted on some third-party server. The QR code itself isn’t bad — but the link it’s obfuscating is.

Once downloaded, the dirty app (which, in the most recent case, was a hacked version of the Russian ICQ client, Jimm) begins firing off text messages to a premium number. Each text it sends (without your knowledge) sets you back around $5+. You can find an outline of the method by Kaspersky Labs here.