Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Apple has not removed any apps from its App Store for violations related to location-based services, Apple executive Guy Tribble told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday. In most cases, Apple tries to identify potentially troublesome apps before they are admitted into the App Store or work with the developer to resolve any issues that arise, Tribble told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law during a hearing on cell phone location services.

Described as a location-based, real-time commerce platform that “makes the buying and selling of g

How Zaarly Works • According to the company, consumers can post what they're looking for on Zaarly, describe how much they're willing to pay for it, and announce how soon they need it. • Zaarly will immediately share that request in the local community through the Zaarly platform. Users may also use Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to find what they're looking for. • Nearby people or businesses will see what you want and connect to Zaarly to fulfill your request. • Zaarly allows buyers and sellers to “anonymously message and talk on the phone to facilitate the logistics of a transaction, enabling an in-person or virtual meeting to complete the transaction,” the company says.

• To pay for the transaction, Zaarly features an integrated credit card payment system, “all within a safe and secure platform.” Users can also pay with cash

Nearly one in five smartphone users are tapping into check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla, according to a ComScore report released yesterday. A total of 16.7 million mobile-phone subscribers used location-based services on their phones in March. That amounts to about 7.1 percent of the entire population of mobile users. But among smartphone users specifically, 12.7 million checked in with such sites during the month, representing 17.6 percent of all smartphone owners, ComScore said. For the purposes of its study, ComScore included such location-based check-in services as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places.

Compared with most smartphone owners, those who used location-based sites on their phones also proved more likely to access other types of mobile content. More than 95 percent of them used their mobile browsers or mobile apps. Almost 62 percent grabbed the news on their mobile devices. And in a stat that will make retailers happy, almost one third of the users browsed to online retail sites on their phones, while one fourth accessed online shopping guides. Users of check-in sites also got a heavier dose of advertising. Almost 40 percent of respondents said they remembered seeing an online ad during March, compared with just 27.5 percent of all smartphone users who said the same thing.

The series of events will be launching in Paris, Brussels, Madrid, London, Milan and Berlin on the 18th of May, the aim of this high-tech outdoor treasure hunt is to encourage people to rediscover the environmental treasures hidden in these great cities by harnessing every day technology in their search for geocaches, rewards and fun. For all those taking part the rewards are multiple: besides the satisfaction of discovering beautiful outdoor locations, the geocaches, the give-aways and the joy of adventure, Timberland is offering a hiking trip to Iceland

his ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important cat

This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

some members of the startup and funding communities are looking for the next wave. “I’m really searching far and wide for new ideas,” Rosa said. “There seem to be a lot of clones. ... There’s this behemoth ball of social and apps and mobile, and they’re just tacking onto this ball and rolling along. We’d like to see some more snowballs.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy on Tuesday unveiled an overhaul to a 25-year-old digital privacy law that would require the government to obtain warrants before accesssing email and other cloud-based data. The update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), would also extend to location-based data, and allow private companies to collaborate with the government in the event of a cyber attack. The ECPA was first enacted in 1986, well before the Internet, email, or smartphones. As a result, it is "significantly outdated and out-paced by rapid changes in technology and the changing mission of our law enforcement agencies after September 11," said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. As a result, Leahy's updated 2011 version of the ECPA would apply to technologies like email, cloud services, and location data on smartphones. If the government wanted an ISP to hand over emails on a particular customer, for example, they would need to first obtain a warrant. At this point, the government abides by a rule that provides access to email after 180 days, depending on the circumstance.

One in five smartphone users currently use location-based "check-in" services on their phones, representing 16.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers, or about 7 percent of the nation's total mobile phone population, according to a recent study from comScore, a Reston, Va., audience measurement service. That's quite a jump from the piddling 4 percent figure announced after the results of a Pew Research Center survey were released just last November. But for small business owners who've been looking to geolocation services to put them on the map in front of new customers, that growing propensity for check-ins is certainly welcome. The comScore study found that 16.7 million mobile phone subscribers accessed retail sites and shopping guides on their phones during the one-month test period. Further, 12.7 million of those participants said they did so on a smartphone -- a figure that represents 17.6 percent of the nation's smartphone users. That's an impressive growth statistic when you consider that companies like Foursquare and Gowalla launched in 2009 and 2007, respectively.

(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/f92935/global_mobile_br) has announced the addition of the "Global - Mobile Broadband - Location Based Services Insights" report to their offering. Despite the hype regarding this technology since around the year 2000; we have just recently begun to see applications for this technology become available to mass audiences. This is thanks to services like FourSquare and Facebook Places offering users the ability to check-in. The future of mobile Location Based Services will continue to emerge as handsets with smarter capabilities, new apps and user interfaces continue to permeate the market. This report provides a broad global overview of trends and developments in the mobile location based services industry, including a brief overview of GPS.

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/f92935/global_mobile_br

AND Chief Executive Officer Maarten Oldenhof says the company experienced a challenging start of 2011. “We are in close contact with various big companies, however we depend on the decisions of these parties and their long approval procedures. We see opportunities in the strong growing Smartphone market and social networks, such as Facebook, Groupon and Twitter. Social media on the smartphone is very powerful and location-based services are a must.” Revenue in the first four months of 2011 has declined, which has led to a loss in the first four months of 2011. Given the current size of AND, the development in revenue and results are greatly influenced by whether or not closing orders in a given period, both large and small. Further, big companies in the market are very careful with making decisions because of quickly changing market developments and especially the influence on their business models.

Outlook for 2011 The economic climate, market developments and business models are all very uncertain in the market for digital maps. The development of the results in 2011 will depend on the strength of the economic recovery and developments in the market for navigation and location based services. Therefore, AND is not in the position to provide an outlook for the full year 2011.

Ituran Location and Control Ltd. (NASDAQ: ITRN, TASE: ITRN), today announced its consolidated financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2011. Highlights of the First quarter - A 40 thousand year-over-year increase in net subscribers to a record of 615 thousand as of March 31, 2011; - Gross margin at 49.3% and operating margin at 21.8%; - EBITDA of $13.4 million or 33.1% of revenues; - Generated $10.1 million in operating cash flow; ended the quarter with $66.1 million in net cash (including marketable securities and deposits for short and long term); First quarter 2011 Results Revenues for the first quarter of 2011 reached $40.4 million, representing 15% growth over revenues of $35.0 million in the first quarter of 2010. 75% of revenues were from location based service subscription fees and 25% from product revenues. Revenues from subscription fees grew by 16% over the same period last year. The increase in subscription fees was mainly due to the increase in the subscriber base, which grew to 615,000 as of March 31, 2011, as compared with 575,000 at the end of March 31, 2010. Product revenues grew 15% compared with the same period last year. This increase was driven primarily by the increased sales of products in Israel.

the Ctrip team has once again delivered the strong results in the first quarter, marking an encouraging start to the year 2011. Our net revenues grew 30% year-over-year and net income grew 23% year-over-year. With the solid execution, Ctrip has further enhanced its strategic partnerships, improved operating efficiency and elevated its customer service level. The Ctrip team has continued to build the brand’s strength and demonstrate industry leadership. Our hotel [ph] supply network continues to expand to satisfy the growing needs of travelers, reaching approximately 18,000 hotels by the end of March 2011 compared to 10,600 hotels at the same time in 2010. The number of hotels with guaranteed allotment rooms accounted for approximately 75% of the total hotel supply. We rolled out more options for making hotel reservations to keep for different needs of our customers. For example, Ctrip has launched the most expensive hotel group buying platform in China, with the daily participants reaching over 100 hotels. Our hotel group buying 2.0 platform features the most convenient booking process elevating service levels industry wide. Thanks to the great effort and strong execution on the product of IT, Ctrip has continued to outpace industry growth in the air ticketing sector growing far ahead of the industry average.

If you are already familiar with AR you’ll notice that String lives somewhere in middle of fiduciary markers and natural feature tracking. Tracking images combines the high contrast black border of a marker and a complex natural image in the centre. This mix actually works well. With a marker users can identify it as having special significance when presented to a camera (much the same way users identify QR Codes as having significance). With NTF images the challenge is telling the user that the image as has significance without providing a large amount of instructions. Combining the two therefore goes someway to solve the identification problem. The String SDK which is currently available for iOS with an Android version in the works is powerful enough to build some pretty amazing solutions. I normally say that any AR demo is only as good as its 3D objects, that’s still true as eye candy sells, but String does an amazing job of recognising the markers even in poor lighting.

While tablet computing may in future transform the whole computer industry, it is already changing the way we look at augmented reality. And this is not only because of the big display. More and more different devices for multiple OS platforms are expected to appear on the market, equipped with advanced sensors such as high-resolution cameras. The cost of data roaming is likely to drop and considering the millions of people expected to buy such a device in the next few years, there are incentives enough for optimizing augmented reality (AR) tablet software and to start creating really useful and fascinating applications taking full advantage of the promising, new capabilities. metaio, with its junaio 2.6 release, a junaio plug-in for third party app integration, and the revised mobile AR SDK Unifeye 2.5, is well prepared and ready to go for the next generation of AR applications. If you want to learn more about mobile AR in general and on tablets, everything is summed up here: http://www.metaio.com/specials/augmented-reality-on-tablets/ And here you can find a movie with almost everything we´re working on: 3D tracking, markerless 2D tracking and image processing, virtual manuals, interactive TV, smart packaging, advertising as a service, context sensitive product visualization, AR gaming and so on. By the way: to my knowledge it´s the first AR demos running on the Android 3.0 based Xoom!

Adding realism to AR by using real world surrounding information (HDRs panoramas, IBLs) is a thing we all want to have sooner than later! We have seen a cool demo of Suomi’s VTT on this, where they fake the surrounding information using the background and scanning a ping pong ball for lighting information. Now we have another candidate porting a similar approach to our beloved mobile devices. The paper of the University of Münster (Germany) has been published already in 2004 (titled “Virtual Reflections for Augmented Reality Environments”), but now it’s time to hit the mobile world with it!

If you are interested in some tech talk, please read on! :-) Their approach can create CubeMaps for all reflective or lighting purposes in real-time using only the information from the background video frame: they not only flip and stitch the frame six times and mirrored together, but do a pretty smart estimation, that yields in plausible neat-looking reflections (although obviously fake): they project six regions of the background frame (see below) onto the new six sides of a Cube. The general idea is to have reasonable regions to map from

This way they get to simulate glossy and diffuse reflections already. Lighting/shadow influence will probably be the next step, since the CubeMap is already there…

For Apple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike that of religious devotees, according to a BBC documentary series that cites neurological research. The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says. The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London. Observers and Apple critics have long accused fans of the tech company of taking their infatuation to an extreme. People have gone to great lengths to prove their love of Apple with tattoos, bumper stickers and home shrines to outmoded Mac computers. Apple's cult-like following was highlighted in a 2009 documentary called "Macheads." A blog, aptly titled Cult of Mac, wrote on Thursday about Oakland, California, resident Gary Allen's cross-country pilgrimage to Apple's first store in Virginia to celebrate the retail chain's 10th anniversary this week.

pple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike

Sales of digital e-books have outstripped real books for the first time, according to Amazon.Four years after the launch of electronic novels, the firm announced it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books over the past six weeks.While e-book sales have previously outsold hardback books, never before have they exceeded sales of all books, in both hardback and paperback forms.

LinkedIn, a trailblazer in the online networking craze, went public with a roaring stock offering. Within minutes, shares were trading at twice the value set by the company. Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper. The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares. All this for a company that skeptics say amounts to an online Rolodex, a place on the Internet for professionals to post resumes and connect with one another and potential employers. It was enough to remind some people on Wall Street of the heady late 1990s and the debuts of companies like Netscape Communications — and, more infamously, long-forgotten names like Pets.com and Webvan. Investors wondered whether LinkedIn will be a precursor to another financial frenzy in Silicon Valley

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? It may be too early to say for sure. The latency period or time between exposure and recognition of a tumor is around 20 years, sometimes longer. And, cell phone use in the U.S. has been popular for only  around 15 years. Back in 1996, there were 34 million cell phone users. Today there are 9-10 times as many. Keeping that in mind, it is worth taking a more detailed look at the results of Interphone, a multinational study designed to try to  answer this question. The headline from this study was there was little or no evidence to show an association between cell phones and cancer. Though, if you went to the appendix of the study, which interestingly was available only online, you found something unsettling. The data showed people who used a cell phone 10 years or more doubled the risk of developing a glioma, a type of brain tumor. And, across the board – most of the studies that have shown an increased risk are from Scandinavia, a place where cell phones have been popular since the early 1990s. For these reasons, the whole issue of latency could become increasingly important.

Cell phones use non-ionizing radiation, which is very different from the ionizing radiation of X-rays, which everyone agrees are harmful. Non-ionizing radiation won’t strip electrons or bust up DNA. It's more like very low power microwaves. Short term, these microwaves are likely harmless, but long term could be a different story. Anyway, who likes the idea of a microwave, even a low-powered one, next to their head all day?

And, what about kids?

Long-awaited data from an international study have shown no evidence of increased risk of brain tumors associated with mobile phones, except in people who have the most exposure. But design flaws of the Interphone study, which is partly industry funded, suggest that the latest results cannot be taken to mean that cell phones and brain cancer are unrelated, critics say. "I'm not telling people to stop using the phone. I'm saying that I can't tell you if cell phones are dangerous, but I can tell you that I'm not sure that they are safe," said Dr. Devra Davis, professor of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. The study itself, to be published Tuesday in the International Journal of Epidemiology, acknowledged that the findings were not definitive and called for more research. But Daniel Krewski, professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa in Ontario and one of the Interphone collaborators, said the study went to "great lengths to make sure that the results were scientifically sound."

At the highest exposure levels -- using a mobile phone half an hour a day over a 10-year period -- the study found a 40 percent increased risk of glioma brain tumors. With adjustments for statistical biases, that turned into 80 percent. But Krewski and colleagues say that there is not enough evidence to show a causal connection, and the group of participants using their phones this much was relatively small.

"Verizon will be eliminating its unlimited smartphone data plan this summer. No longer will one be able to pay $30 a month to have unlimited data. This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to pay more for mobile data.'"