Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

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.”

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

“You know,” said a good friend of mine last week, “there’s really no such thing as big data.” I sighed a bit inside. In the past few years, cloud computing critics have said similar things: that clouds are nothing new, that they’re just mainframes, that they’re just painting old technologies with a cloud brush to help sales. I’m wary of this sort of techno-Luddism. But this person is sharp, and not usually prone to verbal linkbait, so I dug deeper.

And this was his point about big data: that given how much traditional companies put it to work, it might as well not exist. Companies have countless ways they might use the treasure troves of data they have on us. Yet all of this data lies buried, sitting in silos. It seldom sees the light of day.

Small, agile startups disrupt entire industries because they look at traditional problems with a new perspective. They’re fearless, because they have less to lose. But big, entrenched incumbents should still be able to compete, because they have massive amounts of data about their customers, their products, their employees, and their competitors. They fail because often they just don’t know how to ask the right questions.

John Jainschigg, Virtual event, 3D, web, social media,...

I've been reading Jane McGonigal's 'Reality is Broken,' and despite my agreeing with much of her thesis, I think she omits confronting a few troublesome ideas about gamification that _some_ (by no means all) game developers find chilling. For example:

- The emotional complex she wants to evoke through gamification is the same potent combination of intense engagement, flow, esprit-de-corps, loop-reinforced sense of accomplishment (fiero) and surrender to a higher purpose that inflames all True Believers. I'm not sure how you can seriously talk about gamification at world-changing scales without thinking about how scary the present crop of True Believer games can be (e.g., Unbridled Capitalism, Globalization, the Tea Party, Al Quada, etc.)

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit. Gamification is bullshit. I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically. More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway. Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.

The traditional internet is oriented towards person-to-person connection, whereas the Internet of Things is oriented towards connection of inanimate objects. As such, the Internet of Things covers a larger range of connections and involves more semantics. Internet and telecom networks are focused on information transfer, while the Internet of Things is focused on information services. By combining sensor networks, the Internet, telecom networks, and cloud computing platforms, the Internet of Things can sense, recognize, affect, and control the physical world. The physical world can be unified with the virtual world and human perception. This opens a whole new media market yet to be explored to see which is the killer applications.

the Internet of Things will allow physical objects to transmit data about themselves and their surroundings, bringing more information about the real world into the online realm. Imagine getting precise, live traffic data from all the local roads; trains that tell your smartphone that they’re full before they arrive; flowers that email you when they need watering; maybe even implants in your body that give you real-time updates about your health that feed into a secure online ‘locker’ of your personal data. All this and more is possible with the Internet of Things, helping to transform what we expect from the Web and the Internet.

This is the world of web 3.0, or what we call the ‘transcendent web’, and it will bring profound changes to people and businesses alike. The benefits it will provide users include the creation of a much more personalized web experience and the automation of many of the services already in use. Businesses too, will benefit from vastly greater amounts of information about consumers and thus the opportunity to market and sell to them much more directly. They will also be able to take advantage of the greater operational efficiencies brought about by technologies that will keep people, processes and products much more tightly connected. The transcendent web will play a critical role in the digitization of industries as wide-ranging as telecommunications, financial services and healthcare.

The Internet of Things: More and more things are being made Internet-enabled — houses, cars, appliances, even clothing — allowing them not just to be located through technologies like radio frequency identification but to communicate richer amounts of information about themselves; all of this becomes not just possible but also visible to web users.

Smartphones are addictive, according to a study from the British telecom regulator Ofcom, which, like many other studies on the topic, emphasizes that people do things like using handsets in bathrooms in lieu of talking to their children and points out how they are changing social behavior. The press release on the research, issued Thursday, uses the word addiction in a variety of forms five times, including when it says 37 percent of adults and 60 percent of teens admit they are “highly addicted” to the devices.

Of the 65.2 million tablets predicted to be shipped in 2011, Apple will continue to dominate the tablet market with 40 million iPad shipments and hold a 61% share of the market, a new research report from Digitimes reveals. In the first six months of 2011, tablet shipments increased more than 420% from the previous year, with sales expected to increase into the second half to boost the number of shipments by 150% from a year earlier. Apple is expected to contribute more than 25.5 million iPad shipments in the second half of the year alone, up 76% compared to the first half of the year.

Recent developments suggest that mobile payments at scale is getting close

There has been a flurry of activity in the mobile payments space lately

While these developments are helping to enable mobile payments and build awareness, it still is not clear which solutions are likely to drive the most usage

his week Google announced the launch of their Google News Badges. Google heralded the launch with the following description: The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

Similarly, Google has created a way to make some fun and competition out of what you already do – that is, read the news. They’ve created categories with badges that allow you to level up and share your achievements if you wish. But, being acutely aware of many peoples’ need for privacy, they’ve also given you the option to turn the feature off. To me, this still makes it a viable system because there’s an element of self-competition here as well. We all like to see our own achievements, whether or not we want to share them with the world.

We've written extensively about QR codes, including a story that ran earlier this week about using them as a virtual tourism activity. But an announcement from Hipscan.com caught our attention about how you can actually use these curious codes to generate hard cash money. Hipscan's Web site can be used by anyone to generate their own custom QR code, and what is interesting is how you can alter the referring location that the code leads to quite easily, with just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Focus has been largely placed on volume and reach of an individual’s ideas versus the implications of their actions. We’re so focused on growing our own brands that the megaphone has become more important than the message.

The Whuffie Manifesto further states that “when reputation is wealth, only those who do good and well unto others are the richest.”

Sites like DailyFeats have created models in which people self-badge positive actions that then aggregate their overall “Life Score,” which CEO and co-founder Veer Gidwaney says “is a reflection of the good that you do every day.”

The market is primed for the right game to galvanize interest in experiences that combine the real and virtual worlds. Just as FarmVille put social gaming on the map and Angry Birds brought attention to mobile gaming in general, we could see a wave of smartphone owners flood the application markets looking for similar experiences. This will present a valuable opportunity to marketers that want to foster emotional connections with their audiences, so keep a close eye on new releases and brace yourself for the next big thing in mobile gaming.

Nielsen reports a 39-percent Android platform market share across the major smartphone manufacturers, while Apple’s iPhone operating system claims a 28 percent stake.

A new app storefront forecast by Strategy Analytics says the app economy is strong and getting stronger. Paid downloads are expected to drive nearly $2 billion per quarter by the end of 2012. They predict the Android Market will overtake the Apple App Store in quarterly volume by the end of 2012. Android will be helped with additional assistance from third party distribution outlets such as the Amazon App Store, GetJar, Nook App Store and others.

Sparks are a very simple taxonomy right now, but do have persistent URIs, which you can find by hovering over a Spark and looking in the left of the status bar at the bottom of your screen.

This warrants more dissecting and attention. Will they eventually use all or some of the hierarchy of Google Directory? Will they become hierarchical? Will the algorithm improve as we click on links that interest us? Can we add our own information? Are we creating new entities for Google as we search for and add Sparks to our items of interest – it seems that way. It’s not an ontology yet, but it’s a start. Lots of people creating persistent URIs for entities they’ve dreamed up – I hear that evil cackle again!

Google, by nature of its founding, is in a prime position to address the challenges that many enterprise technologists have when thinking about semantic data – how do we handle unstructured data? We have metadata: in schema, in taxonomies, in ontologies even. We have loads of content. With no metadata. How do we get them together? We can’t afford to hire a small army of indexers to apply the metadata to the content. The system metadata is insufficient and poor. We have a pretty good search tool, and have put some effort into data dictionaries, entity extraction and rules-based classification. We have tools that do latent semantic indexing and latent semantic analysis.  Make sense of unstructured information? Sure, Google can do that. Hopefully they will not reduce efforts in these areas too much to focus on other projects. Many of us can execute a search and return nothing useful; crowdsourcing tagging in G+ may re-vitalize  components of the search algorithm.

The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects having an Internet presence. We're not just talking about your computer, laptop, cellphone or even your TV here - we're talking about everything. This includes your light switches, your fridge, even your toilet.With an Internet presence, all of your devices can start talking to each other and reacting to each other.Imagine a house that detects that a toilet hasn't been flushed for two days. It uses this to assume that the owners must be on vacation, but notices they left their heat cranked up to 22C, their TV running and all their lights on.Automatically, it adjusts all of these to an appropriate state (that might have pre-defined for being on vacation), and sends a text message, tweet or email to let the owners know. A text from the owners in return, or a tweet with #LightsOn, and the house will respond.

A lot of what is being done right now is by interested DIY (do-it-yourself) programmers and hobbyists through sites such as ThingSpeak.com and Pachube.com. It's a world of experimentation, twittering toilets, and home energy monitoring.

Newly formed Singapore-based start-up YFind is the latest location-based start-up in the country. It has nothing to do with check-in or badges. Rather the team has a vision to make buildings “location intelligent.”

YFind’s mobile app uses WiFi signals to detect the position of a mobile device. So what’s that good for? Melvin Yuan, one of the co-founders of YFind explained via email:

If you’re a customer, this means you can now easily find amenities like the nearest toilets and the right ATMs. If you’re a retailer or mall operator, it means you will be able to engage your customers more effectively – telling them what’s available around them, immediate and relevant promotions, and what else is happening in the mall at any point in time. It’s real-time, contextual customer engagement at its finest.