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New from a company called Clever Sense is an app called Alfred (iTunes link) that provides personalized recommendations for restaurants, coffee shops, nightlife, bars and clubs, and soon, hotels, salons, spas, shops, attractions and more. The interesting thing about how the app does so is the technology it is uses behind the scenes. Instead of relying primarily on collaborative filtering, a technique found at sites like Netflix and Amazon ("people who like this also like that"), Alfred uses model-based learning, a type of artificial intelligence.

In Alfred's case, the app uses its smarts to understand the way that people talk about places, and then creates personalized interest graphs that grow and change with each action a user takes and each decision they make.

Last Fall I wrote about Geoloqi, a bootstrapped geolocation platform that points to where I hope location technology will go in the future. The service offers an app and today launches an API that uses persistent location tracking to trigger notifications tied to real-world places. Maybe it's a note you or a family member left for you at the grocery store or maybe it's part of a set of geolocated data that you opt-into subscribing to as a layer because it was of interest to you. Some users use Geoloqi, the company says, to let their co-workers know how quickly they are getting through traffic to arrive at work. The company also announced that it has raised investment capital.

Location tracking is likely to become a part of all kinds of mobile apps and there's a world of potential in the technology - from lifelong education to augmented commerce.

Young women face the highest rate of dating violence and sexual assault, with nearly 19% - one in five - women reporting they have experienced sexual assault while in college. The Obama Administration believes that one way to help combat sexual abuse on college campuses may be through mobile phone apps, and with the Department of Health and Human Services, has announced a contest to help develop these tools to help promote student safety.

The contest is called Apps Against Abuse and its part of the administration's Challenge.gov program, whereby the federal government issues a challenge and people build apps and crowdsourced solutions.

The challenge, in this case, is to develop apps that will give college students and other young adults "a way to connect with trusted friends in real-time to prevent abuse or violence from occurring." Noting that these apps can serve a social function - staying in touch with friends, the emphasis should be on being able to let your friends know your whereabouts with frequent check-ins, particularly when in situations that put you at risk. Apps can also be designed to give potential bystanders the ability to get support from friends as well as resources to help them intervene safely and effectively before any abusive behavior happens.

So you want to buy a tractor? Build a house? Scrabble? So do the more than 62 million other gamers who play Farmville daily. That's why keeping its communities humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and responding to issues in real-time is no game for Zynga.

To get the job done, the company turned to Vertica, which is now owned by HP. Says Ken Rudin, VP of Analytcs at Zynga: "With over 40 million players, 3TB of new data a day and 230 nodes spread across two clusters, Zynga's columnar data warehouse from Vertica is no analytical windup toy."

American Express' new digital payments and commerce platform Serve has just announced its first carrier deal since its launch in March of this year. The company's new partnership with U.S. operator Sprint will allow Serve's mobile wallet application to be made available in the Sprint Zone for customers using select Android phones.

This week at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference the company made its tablet strategy more clear. As reported by Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Windows Phone President Andy Lees said: "We view a tablet as a sort of PC. We want people to be able to do the sorts of things that they expect on a PC on a tablet, things like networking to be able to connect to networks, and utilize networking tools, to get USB drives and plot them into the tablet."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said in the past that tablets won't run Windows Phone 7. The reasoning is now more clear: Microsoft wants the full version of Windows on tablets, not the Phone version. This might not be the only reason - the company might also be worried about cannibalizing Windows license sales with tablets.

Is the decision to focus on putting one version of Windows everywhere a mistake?

In a new report titled Mobilize Your Collaboration Strategy Forrester outlines its vision for the mobile enterprise, and it all revolves around native apps and cloud providers.

With the numbers of smartphones being brought to work (Forrester thinks as much 18% of the workforce is using their own smartphones for work, but Unisys and IDC indicate that number may be much higher) collaboration apps are more important than ever. Which collaboration apps matter most on a smartphone or tablet?

Building mobile apps with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript may be easier than picking up new languages like Java and Cocoa, but you're still going to need to know how to do some programming. So what skills do you need to make good apps? O'Reilly Radar writer Howard Wen talked to Programming HTML5 Applications Zachary Kessin about what you need to know.

About 20% of information workers report that they have conducted work-related activities from a mobile device while driving. That's just one of the findings reported in a Unisys and IDC survey on the consumerization of the enterprise, released today. The survey has a number of expected findings - employees are using their own devices for work, IT sees mobile support as a priority, etc.

But the survey also puts some numbers on the current "always on" nature of work in the post-PC era.

A software update being sent out to Sprint's Nexus S 4G phones today will enable the device's NFC chip - the same chip that allows the upcoming Google Wallet mobile payments service to operate.

NFC, which stands for near field communications, is a wireless technology that allows you to send and receive data over short distances just by tapping or waving your phone. Google will use NFC in its Google Wallet service to enable mobile payments at the point-of-sale, as well as to deliver coupons and offers directly to users' phones.

With Sprint's update, we're now one step closer to seeing Google Wallet go live.