Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

With big bets by the titans of technology and consumer finance, 2011 is becoming the year that American business got serious about jumpstarting the “Internet of things“—a broad web of digitally enhanced locations that consumers can navigate the same way they now use smartcards to pay their bus fare or open security doors at work. For Seattle startup Iota, that transformation isn’t happening fast enough. This team of former T-Mobile employees is aiming its considerable experience in the mobile sector at a new type of device that it says is ready to go right now. They believe it can be made cheaper, easier, and more open than expensive new radio frequency ID-enabled smartphones controlled by the big market players. Their mission is to put the futuristic promise of what’s called “near-field communications,” or NFC, into the hands of anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone, or wants to spend less time digging around in a field of apps. The company, based in Seattle’s hip Capitol Hill neighborhood, has raised $1.4 million so far and is currently about $600,000 of the way through a $1 million convertible-note round, founder and CEO Russ Stromberg says.

Researchers for the Chetan Sharma Consulting group have put together a 2011 State of the Global Mobile Industry mid-year assessment and have come up with some very interesting results. The entire global mobile market weighs in at about $1.3 trillion or close to 2% of the world's gross domestic product. Of that giant $1.3 trillion pie, about $300 billion is expected to be through data revenues. That means that people are starting to use data at much higher rates and Americans are on the forefront of data usage even as India and China are the fastest growing mobile markets in the world.

"Mobile is fundamentally reshaping how we as consumers spend from housing and healthcare to entertainment and travel, from food and drinks to communication and transportation. Mobile not only influences purchase behavior but also post purchase opinions. When the share button is literally a second away, consumers are willingly sharing more information than ever before. Mobile is thus helping close the nirvana gap for brands and advertisers who seek to connect advertising to actual transactions. The long-term battle is however for owning the context of the users. Having the best knowledge about the user to help drive the transaction is the simply the most valuable currency of commerce."

There will be more than six billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2011. According to the report, it took 20 years of mobile development to reach one billion connected devices. The jump from five billion to six billion took 15 months.

Boring conversation? Accessories that decipher emotional cues could save your social life – or reveal that you're a jerk

The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?

Some of our body's responses during a conversation are not designed for broadcast to another person - but it's possible to monitor those too. Your temperature and skin conductance can also reveal secrets about your emotional state, and Picard can tap them with a glove-like device called the Q Sensor. In response to stresses, good or bad, our skin becomes clammy, increasing its conductance, and the Q Sensor picks this up.

Mobile games are the most popular type of apps amongst smartphone users, according to the latest report by Nielsen.The report shows that 64% of users who downloaded an app in the past 30 days have downloaded a game.Weather, social networking and apps that fall into categories of maps/navigation and search are also very popular apps, followed by music and news apps, as you can see in the chart below.

Eyeing a shift in consumer habits, eBay has announced it is buying Zong, a provider of payments through mobile carriers, for $240 milllion.

“Commerce is changing. With mobile phones, we walk around with a mall in our pockets. PayPal helps to make money work better for customers in this new commerce reality –- no matter how they want to pay or what device they’re using,” said Scott Thompson, president of PayPal. “We believe that Zong will strengthen this value by helping us reach the more than 5 billion people who have mobile phones, giving them more choice and security when they pay.”

Google Ventures has quietly invested in a stealth startup called Wingu, reports StrategyFacts (subscription required). Indeed, while the Google Ventures website lists four career opportunities for one of its portfolio companies located in Cambridge, Massachusetts without naming Wingu, the stealth startup published the exact same job openings on its job board, leaving nothing to the imagination. Wingu is building a enterprise-grade cloud platform dubbed Elements that will enable research teams to collaborate more effectively and use data in ‘new ways’. Here are the four main selling points of Wingu’s platform, according to its website: MANAGE: Unify your cross-discipline teams on a common platform to share data and ideas. ANALYZE: Drive decision-making with our analytical workflows and discovery tools. SHARE: Connect your researchers across silos and geographical divides for better collaboration, coordination and communication. PROTECT: Breathe easy knowing that your data is backed and protected by leading systems and security experts.

Paypal has updated its mobile 2011 projection to $3 billion – marking the third time it has had to change its mobile predictions for this year. The news comes after a study from Forester Research predicted that mobile commerce will total $6 billion in 2011 and hit $31 billion by 2016. Therefore, Paypal will be responsible for half of all generated mcommerce revenue.

Mobile payments In addition to the new projections, PayPal also said the company sees up to $10 million in mobile total payment volume a day, an increase from the $6 million Paypal reported in March.

4,500% is the increase in the number of scans in Q1 2011 versus the same period last year 1,200% is the growth in the scanning of QR Codes over the last 6 months of 2010 87% of people are scanning QR Codes to get additional product information 68% of the QR Code scans come from iPhones 64% of scans are done by women 50% of Americans will have a smartphone by December 2011 25% of people scanning QR Codes are between 35 and 44 years old

“Context-awareness can make computing devices more responsive to individual needs and help to intelligently personalize apps and services. Using self-learning mechanisms, sensor inputs, and data analytics, Intel research teams are engaged in a number of projects that promise to take machine learning beyond the lab to practical, real-world applications.”

Most interestingly, the site goes into some depth on Intel’s current projects that explore the boundaries of context-aware computing:

Online Semi-Supervised Learning and Face Recognition: Use face recognition in place of a password to log in to any protected site. The self-learning techniques being refined by this project can be adapted to many areas of context awareness.

Mobile payments have taken off in the last few years, and are now poised to grow from $240 billion this year to $670 billion worldwide in 2015, according to Juniper Research. Fueled in part by the nascent near field communication (NFC) market, which is expected to be worth $50 billion by 2014, the overall mobile payments market is also expected to rise quickly thanks to mobile ticketing, money transfers and purchases of physical goods. Mobile payments are more reliant right now on digital goods purchases, which is expected to double by 2015 and will account for 40 percent of the market. But the faster growth will occur with NFC, which can be used in retail and merchant locations to buy physical items. Juniper said 20 countries are expected to launch NFC services in the next 18 months.

David McCullough has connected up into Pachube’s public platform, to share, store and visualise weather sensor data, using the Opengear ACM5000 smart device server

Pachube is a global data brokerage platform for the Internet of Things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals, organisations and companies around the world. By sharing data feeds from and between physical Things, such as environmental sensors, smart meters, building management and process control systems, Pachube provides a globally distributed data ecosystem and application development platform.

The Opengear ACM5000’s Linux system under the hood made integrating Pachube API support quick and easy using the free Opengear Custom Development Kit. The ACM5000’s legacy as an industrial-grade, rugged device that is proven and reliable in harsh environments, and wide array of network and data ports, make it an ideal solution to provide network connectivity and data telemetry for things such as weather stations.

For example, way back in 1961, cinematographer Morton Heilig patented his Sensorama machine, an immersive multi-sensory device that looked like a giant arcade game, except it emitted aromas, environmental elements such as wind and it also vibrated and played stereo sounds. Whilst some have referred to this as the earliest example of augmented reality, it probably leans more towards the virtual reality world.

Other key advances that helped blur the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds include American Computer scientist Ivan Sutherland’s development of the first head-mounted display (HMD) in 1968. It was primitive and bulky, but it was a sign of things to come:

Moving forward, computer artist Myron Krueger built what was called an ‘artificial reality’ laboratory called the Videoplace, in 1974. The Videoplace combined projectors, video cameras and special purpose hardware, and onscreen silhouettes of the users, placing them within an interactive environment.

The cool kids of today - yes, the same kids who will be voting in the 2012 election - don't want to talk about infrastructure. Instead, they want to talk about mobile devices, crowdsourcing real-time data and collaborating via high-tech RFID sensors. They don't want to think about massive government expenditures and cheap bank loans for new construction projects. They think about cool ways for The Internet of Things to empower everyday citizens.

New technical standards and consumers’ extensive use of mobile media put us on the cusp of an explosion in mobile payments.

Long rumored and heavily used in Asia, mobile phones have the ability to be used as payment devices similar to credit cards.

Now, the growing penetration of smartphones, the widespread use of phones to comparison shop, share price or product features or accept discount and coupon offers makes mobile payments the next high demand phone function.

The majority of Canadians would be happy with a cash-free future using digital forms of payment instead of carrying currency, according to a new PayPal Canada survey.

Leger Marketing polled 1,512 Canadian adults online and found 56% would prefer using a digital wallet.

Thirty-four per cent would rather carry a smartphone than a pocket full of change to make a payment and 36% would use their phone to pay for something as inexpensive as a $5.50 latte or as big ticket as a $272.30 iPod.

A 2009 analysis from Juniper Research (News –Alert) of the $110bn NFC opportunity forecasted that one in every six mobile subscribers (about 17 percent) globally will have an NFC enabled device by 2014. Adoption was expected to be highest in the Far East,with use very limited outside of that region.

The latest forecast from Juniper Research suggests that at least 20 percent of smartphones will support NFC by 2014,about 300 million phones.

By 2014,Juniper now predicts that North America will account for just under half of NFC smartphones,followed by Western Europe.

Traditionally, the most valued content was original. This emphasis developed within a content model of constrained distribution and expensive production costs. When there are only a handful of distribution points for content — some magazines, books, a handful of TV station and radio stations — the way to build audience was to deliver original and exclusive content experiences.

Into this explosion of information comes the concept of Curation. Long-time tech journalist Paul Gillen weighed in on the value of taking a curatorial approach to content in a post about the Chile earthquake. No longer is our problem lack of information; it’s that we’re drowning in information. That’s why curation is so important. Trusted curators who point us to the most valuable sources of information for our interests will become the new power brokers.

Gillen points out that the concept of curation shouldn’t be limited to media brands. Marketers should take this trend into account. Creating new content is important, but an equally valuable service is curating content from other sources. This demands a whole different set of skills as well as a new delivery channel. It also means ditching the “not invented here” mindset that prevents content creators from acknowledging other sources.

Google today launched a “limited field trial” of the long-in-the-works social initiatives it is now calling the Google+ project. Google has been rolling out lots of little social products, but this is the first time it has bundled them into a sort of unified vision. The new features are: Circles, a product that helps you segment friends, family, coworkers and other people into different groups; Sparks, a personalized recommendation service; Hangouts, a video chat product; and Huddle, a group chat application.

When it comes to mobile Augmented Reality technology, Qualcomm is the top dog. The San Diego company has the biggest AR R&D unit in the world and the message from its recent Uplinq conference in California was clear - it thinks that AR is going to play a significant role in shaping the mobile media horizon.

Qualcomm's senior director of business development Jay Wright

"For Qualcomm, we think the technology is interesting, we follow it closely but it's not on our near to mid-term horizon. This is beyond the five to eight year window," he said.

Augmented reality has been touted as the "next big thing" for a while, yet mainstream success has proved elusive. So what can be done to turn it from a gimmick into a commercial necessity?Imagine being able to watch miniature versions of Kings of Leon or Lady Gaga play on a table right in front of your eyes.

One company - String, in partnership with tech firm Digicave - has developed and demonstrated a system that creates the impression of a 3D figure mapped onto, for example, a book shelf. Such technology opens up the possibility of having a pop star appear in your bedroom, performing as if they were on-stage.

The idea of augmented reality was first mooted as far back as in 1965, with Ivan Sutherland's now famous essay Augmented Reality: The Ultimate Display. In it, he said that "with appropriate programming… a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked," stating that digital handcuffs would be able to actually restrain users, and those shot by digital characters would be killed in real life.