ReadWriteWeb

Handset maker Nokia today announced the creation of an experimental app called "Nokia Situations" that can automatically adjust the phone's behavior for various situations and contexts. For example, the app could shut off the ringer whenever you go into a meeting, without you having to explicitly change settings on the device.

According to the application's description, Nokia Situations is able to "sense" things like the time of day, your location, what networks you're connected to, and then adjust one or more phone settings accordingly.

Curation is currently one of "the chosen" buzz words in the social media zeitgeist (that's another). But as abundant as the talk of curation is, actual curation tools have been in relatively short order.

In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with some newly released curation platforms. The first, Curated.by, lets you capture tweets around a specific topic using a plug-in that's installed on your Twitter.com profile. You can then easily tag and sort tweets into "bundles," which can then be embedded in a blog post for some additional context to whatever you're reporting on.

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Since the launch of the contextual link advertising product on ReadWriteWeb, we at Hakia have been anxious to see the results and evaluate the success of our contextual advertising product, Contexa. The Contexa system matches the semantic context of a blog post with a sponsor's criteria on the fly to deliver relevant ads to the reader. Participating ReadWriteWeb sponsors have provided the contextual engine with up to three "trigger phrases" that define their business. As a reader of the blog, you may have seen the product's implementation at the bottom of certain blog entries, as shown below. You can see another example here.

You've probably seen lots of services that put pop up windows on top of links in web pages - usually for advertising and often in unhelpful places on the page. Could something like that be done well, though? Serial entrepreneur Craig Barnes believes it can be, and he's been working on it for more than 9 years.

Barnes says his new service Panels.net gets reader engagement numbers above 10% - an astonishing number in advertising. He says that's because his Panels are genuinely useful. At first blush they strike us as a little awkward but the potential here is big. Well selected, up-to-the-minute info about any link we see online sounds like a great idea - if it works.