Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel launched an interactive dialogue on government mobile policy on Wednesday that he said would be the first step toward a governmentwide mobile roadmap due out in March. That roadmap, VanRoekel said, will address a range of issues from ways the government can save money -- such as by buying smartphones in larger quantities -- to serving citizens more effectively through public-facing apps

It also will include information about building internal mobile applications to help federal field officers, such as U.S. Forest Service workers and Border Patrol agents, do their jobs more efficiently. As things stand now, too many agencies and bureaus are putting time and effort into mobile projects without leveraging each other's gains, he said.

The dialogue will be open for 10 days and the mobile strategy should be out about two months later, VanRoekel said. Within six months, he hopes to introduce new procurement vehicles so agencies can buy smartphones and tablets more efficiently and cheaply

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL  ) filed a patent at the tail end of 2009 dubbed "Local Device Awareness," which describes automated connections between a number of close-range devices. Some potential applications could be device position targeting (think locating your keys) or proximity-based gaming.

If Apple's patent seems overly broad, patent hoarder InterDigital (Nasdaq: IDCC  ) has gone for specificity. It holds some 33 known patents covering machine-to-machine communication.

Motorola and Google seem to be behind in patents, with only one highly technical machine-to-machine patent showing up for Motorola Mobility, and none for Google. But as you'll soon see, the two companies might be hoping for a more open environment.

Building on its success with laptops designed for developing countries, the One Laptop Per Child project is set to unveil a long-awaited tablet at CES next week. Here's what you get for $100.

The OLPC has been kicking around the idea of a super-affordable tablet for over a year. Originally known as the XO-3, but now dubbed the XO 3.0, the tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024x768 screen with some models also offering a PixelQi 3qi display that mimics E-paper. A Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM reside in the tablet's ruggedized shell and will run either Linux Sugar or Android OS.

25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.

Along with “general assembly” and “99 percenters,” Occupy Wall Street has brought the phrase “live streaming” to the forefront. Rising-star reporters — known best by their Twitter and Ustream handles — such as Pool (timcast) in New York City and Spencer Mills (oakfosho) in Oakland are passionate, deeply embedded correspondents who provide live video reporting – sometimes lasting a dozen hours or more – of protests, general assemblies and other Occupy events. Instead of using a satellite truck, they broadcast live “TV” coverage from 3G- and 4G-equipped smartphones over video networks such as Ustream.com and Livestream.com.

The AR Drone is the first toy that came out,” said Sam Shapiro, a 24-year-old programmer from Brooklyn who’s helping Pool hack together an airborne news network.

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth, reports Kevin J. O’Brien in The New York Times.

The battle is not just about dividing up territories already occupied; it is also about finding new lands to conquer. Both firms are keen to stake claims on the largely uncolonised and still somewhat notional terrain known as the “internet of things”: the myriad processors in industrial machinery, consumer goods and infrastructure, ever more of which will communicate with each other and with distant computers. Cisco, a giant American maker of networking gear, estimates that by 2015 there may be almost 15 billion internet-connected devices, up from 7.5 billion in 2010. Whereas the market for more phones and other personal computing devices is limited by the number of persons the planet has to offer, things, being more numerous than people, provide a lot more long-term room for growth.

This year, NFC technology will finally make its way into the hands of millions of users. This will be spurred along by new smartphones, notably from Android, that have NFC capabilities baked into them. The technology industry is waiting to see if and when Apple decides to put NFC into the iPhone. Many pundits think that when Apple goes NFC, that will be the true harbinger of the heyday for mobile payments. As it stands, Apple's newest iPhone 4S is three months old and a new one will not be released till the third or fourth quarters of 2012, if at all.

It is still a cash world, with about 85% of transactions still being made with paper currency. It behooves the financial system and their technology partners to shift those scales. Even a 1% increase in digital payments means billions dollars flowing through the ecosystem.

Mobility will reshape the credit card and payment industry.

Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques: - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws; - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database. To put it another way, the system is transforming the vibrations transmitted from touch through a rigid body into waveforms that a computer can, in real time, recognize and either transmute into audible sound or use as a triggering mechanism for other sounds. It's an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it "hears" a tap.

will touch interfaces of the future rely on sounds as well as capacitance? Perhaps sound would be a cheaper, more-durable option for certain kinds of interfaces, making touch interactions all the more ubiquitous.

Just what might be possible is hinted at in this fascinating post by Andrew Fisher, entitled "Towards a sensor commons": For me the Sensor Commons is a future state whereby we have data available to us, in real time, from a multitude of sensors that are relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition and that data is freely available whether as a data set or by API to use in whatever fashion they like. My definition is not just about “lots of data from lots of sensors” – there is a subtlety to it implied by the “relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition” statement. In order to be useful, we need to ensure we can compare data relatively faithfully across multiple sensors. This doesn’t need to be perfect, nor do they all need to be calibrated together, we simply need to ensure that they are “more or less” recording the same thing with similar levels of precision and consistency. Ultimately in a lot of instances we care about trended data rather than individual points so this isn’t a big problem so long as an individual sensor is relatively consistent and there isn’t ridiculous variation between sensors if they were put in the same conditions.

What this boils down to, then, is trends in freely-available real-time data from multiple sensors: it's about being able to watch the world change across some geographical area of interest -- even a small one -- and drawing conclusions from those changes. That's clearly a huge step up from checking what's in your fridge, and potentially has major political ramifications (unlike the contents of your fridge).

The bulk of the post explores what Fisher sees as the key requirements for a sensor commons, which must:

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.