Over the coming decade, we're going to see a lot of new Internet-connected household devices that will literally change the way you live. A great example is a new device from a very well-funded startup called Nest Labs. At the end of 2011, the company released a Web-enabled thermostat called the Nest. Yes, a thermostat. It was designed by the man who invented the iPod for Apple, Tony Fadell.

The idea behind Nest was directly inspired by the revolution in smartphones, which transformed the mobile phone into a full-fledged mobile computer. Nest labs co-founder Matt Rogers explained in a blog post how he and Fadell aim to do the same for the thermostat:

"The gap between the consumer experience in mobile products and the ones in our homes is enormous. I've been a programmer my entire life and could not program a thermostat for the life of me. I looked at it and thought, this beige plastic box cannot be the best our generation can come up with. Surely, there must be a better way."

So other than the elegant design of Nest (another of the 5 signs of a great user experience), what makes the product different from the traditional thermostat? The main difference is that Nest is powered by 6 sensors and proprietary algorithms, which enables it to "learn" your living habits and adjust the temperature automatically throughout the day and night. The company claims that Nest will have created a personalized temperature schedule for you after just one week of use. Nest has WiFi, which enables it to monitor weather patterns. You can also control it via an iPhone app or on the Web.

Nest is a lot more expensive than the traditional thermostat you'd buy from your local hardware store. It costs $249, plus an installation fee of $119 if you want to get it professionally installed (which All Things D's Katherine Boehret learned is a good move). The idea is that Nest will save you money on your energy bills. Note that Nest is currently sold out, but you can add your name to an email list to be notified of availability.

The thermostat is the first home device out of Nest Labs, but it intends to expand to other devices. In a CES video interview with Techcrunch, Nest Labs co-founder Matt Rogers noted that "there are lot of things in the home that have not been changed in 20-30 years." The smoke alarm is one example of a device ripe for Internet connection, given that it operates via sensors.

It remains to be seen whether Nest can capture a large chunk of the thermostat market, especially given its high price relative to traditional thermostats. But there's no doubt that this is where household devices like the thermostat are heading.

Using data and the Web to learn your living patterns and change your life for the better. Get used to that, because it's what the next generation of home appliances will do.

Photo credit: Seth Frankel, via Nest.com

The BossTracker5000 from Michael Shirley on Vimeo.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

The Shift From Watching TV to Experiencing TV

We often talk about the Internet of Things here at ReadWriteWeb. Over half of the devices at the recent CES were connected, and more than 60% of those were not traditional computers, but more mundane, typically unconnected devices like home appliances and vehicle accessories. Richard explores the trend with an emphasis on the user experience. While user experience is vital on a PC, it may take on even more importance when you are waving your hands in front of a refrigerator trying to see how many eggs are in there. Over the coming weeks Richard will talk to user experience designers to understand how this will impact you in your daily life. He started the series off with a look at user experience design and the coming trends in television.

From our readers:

Robert Weller - Intensive users, even with Apple TV, have had to make this experience work. Apple TV does not allow surfing. Users can go only to Netflix, YouTube and other designated sites. Devices are appearing that make it possible to connect wirelessly. Apple has a device that will connect Direct TV to a Mac. But what we really want is an Internet TV. I want to be able to watch live news on French, Russian and other nations. Al Jazeera should be offered NOW on cable TV 24/7. Tired of stringing HDMI cables/couplers around house.

More Must Read Stories:

Source: Next Xbox Won't Play Used Games [UPDATED]

An unnamed source is telling video game news site Kotaku that the next version of Microsoft's Xbox will not play used games.

The person, identified as a "reliable industry source" also told Kotaku that Xbox 720 will be able to play Blu-Ray discs, an option not offered on current versions of the Xbox. The next generation of Xbox is expected to be released later this year or early in 2013. (more)

[Infographic] Increase Click-Through Rates For Your Tweets

HubSpot's resident social media scientist Dan Zarella released a new report on how to get the highest number of click-throughs for your tweets.

Some of the information (presented below in a handy infographic) is stuff we already knew: Tweets between 120 and 130 characters tend to get retweeted more often than longer and shorter tweets and tweeting links at a slow rate gets more clicks, for example. But other findings - including click-through rates for tweets containing the word "daily is out" by paper.li users - were surprising. (more)

Who's Using Pinterest? Yup, It's Mostly Ladies

Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right. (more)

Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon?

Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone. (more)

Today In Facebook Scams: Is Chuck Norris Dead?

Facebook scammers are spreading a vicious rumor on walls everywhere.

The headline reads: "[video] Chuck Norris dies at age 71! Not a Joke," and is accompanied by a video of the star. You may remember Norris from such films as "The Karate Kid" and "Karate Kommandos," and the CBS series "Walker, Texas Ranger." The Naked Security blog reports that this is in fact another Facebook scam, and that Chuck Norris is still alive. What's the deal behind this spam attack? (more)

Why Samsung's Galaxy Tabs Fail Against the iPad & Kindle Fire

One of the most entertaining aspects of studying the Android ecosystem is the fact there is just so much of it. It is overwhelming, especially for consumers that do not know what smartphone or tablet they are supposed to buy because a new device is released every other day.

Samsung is the largest culprit of the flood of Android devices to inundate the flood plains of the mobile coastline. Just look at its Galaxy Tab line of tablets. None have performed well on the market. (more)

Could You Ever Love An Ad?

Today, ads are something we skip. They coat everything we watch, read and listen to like a sticky film, blinking and shouting and shocking us into paying attention. Their value is measured in "impressions," how many people's eyeballs scan past them, and on the Web, a click on an ad is the holy grail. That's what passes for "engagement." (more)

There Is Opportunity In Diversifying Your Android Publishing Strategy

Mobile marketing company Tapjoy has had a tumultuous ride in the last year. It has been bounced around by Apple and its App Store terms of service, has gone to the Web to skirt Apple's policies, integrated mobile video ads and set up a fund for iOS developers to port their games to Android. It has been scattershot and frenetic but it appears that, finally, the company is starting to see some success. (more)

Angry Birds Crash Into Facebook

Asia Tech News reports that the smash hit Rovio game Angry Birds is coming to Facebook on Valentine's Day.

The release will happen fast, rolling out to all 800 million users at once as opposed to a slow Facebook feature rollout like Timeline, which first became available to New Zealand users, then to all - and now it's being forced upon everyone. The big launch takes place in Jakarta. Indonesia holds the world's second-largest Facebook population, trailing only the United States. With its entrance into the Facebook ecosystem, Angry Birds will transform into a social game complete with leaderboards so users can challenge their friends. (more)

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GSMA predicts there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world by 2020. That's up from 9 billion today. It identified car connectivity as an especially important product category to watch.

The trend towards increasing connectivity in devices will accelerate in upcoming years. As one example, GSMA predicts that more than 40% of vending machines will be connected by 2020. It estimates that connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020.

GSMA also listed some less traditional connected products seen at CES:

• A smart window pane with built-in apps, including computerized "blinds".
• Connected, roaming vacuum cleaners.
• Tablets built for underwater computing or designed for home and office video surveillance.
• A space-age personal work environment complete with a reclining chair, multiple computer monitors and a connected air filter.

GSMA has come up with a catch-phrase for this trend: "The Connected Life." It defines this as "a world where all technology devices intelligently connect." A more common term is Internet of Things. Either way, everyday products and devices are increasingly getting connected to the Internet.

There are approximately 9 billion connected devices today, according to the GSMA. About 72 percent of those are mobile devices. That figure will drop to 48 percent by 2020.

Put another way, by 2020 the GSMA predicts there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world and over half will be non-mobile devices. These will include connected home devices, healthcare devices and automotive technology.

GSMA is particularly bullish on the automotive sector, which it predicts will account for 1.4 billion connections by 2020. To put that into perspective, in 2011 just 1 percent of the world's 1.8 billion road vehicles were connected. However, by 2020 GSMA expects that figure to reach 14 percent. Car connectivity features will include new in-vehicle applications, phone features and navigation.

We knew the Internet of Things was slowly becoming a reality, but these new statistics and predictions by the GSMA show that commercialization of this trend will be driven by cars, home appliances and healthcare devices.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Internet of Things - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Alternatives to Google Reader? Don't Bother, You're Not Going Anywhere...

Google+ is getting added to lots of Google products and Google Reader, a favorite RSS reader, got plussed this week. The changes caused some readers to lament the loss of a beautiful workflow that was no longer possible sans multiple sharing options. And, by the way, sorry, but there are no real alternatives to Google Reader, though readers did point to several that were worth a look (see the comments on this thread).

Tristan's response sums up most of the comments I saw. It's long, but it's a good example of how people were using Google Reader and why they are disappointed with this change.

ReadWriteWeb Meetups Around the World

Our ReadWriteWeb worldwide technology meetup is on November 15! There are already some amazing meetups planned in Tokyo, Seoul, Vladivostok, Russia, Amsterdam, New Zealand, St. Louis, MO, Washington, DC and more. Don't see your city listed? Add it in one click!

Reach out to our community manager if you have any questions or need some help with promotion.

More Top Posts:

• IBM Open-Sources Potential "Internet of Things" Protocol
• Google Now Indexing Facebook Comments
• GitHub Launches Enterprise: Can it Avoid SourceForge's Mistakes?
• Facebook Timeline & The New Lifestreaming Era
• 6 Reasons Most Infographics Don't Cut It
• Wikipedia is a Mess, Wikipedians Say: 1 in 20 Articles Bare of References
• Stop Sharing Your Files When You Travel
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ReadWriteWeb Channels

Enterprise

• 6 Reasons Most Infographics Don't Cut It
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• Updated: Scott Berkun's "Mindfire" eBook Free Until November 3rd

Cloud

Follow ReadWriteCloud on Twitter and join the ReadWriteCloud LinkedIn Group.

• Alphabet Soup in the Cloud: Understanding "aaS"
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Hack

Follow ReadWriteHack on Twitter.

• Stop Sharing Your Files When You Travel
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• IBM Open-Sources Potential "Internet of Things" Protocol

Mobile

• Appcelerator Raises $15 Million, Begins to Expand HTML5 Developer Frameworks
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Small Business

• YourOfficeAnywhere Offers Cheap Web Conferencing

Start

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ReadWriteWeb Community

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• ReadWriteWeb on Facebook
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Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

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Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we thought it might be helpful to wrap up some of the most talked about stories. Assuming this goes over well, we're going to give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

Official Google+ plugins released today add a +1 to your browser and a red notification alert. The same functionality was released for IE users in the Google toolbar. No love for Firefox though.

From the comments:

Here are a few more must read posts, chosen by your fellow community members.

• Google Chrome Will Sync Multiple Browser Profiles

• Learn AI in Largest Google+ Hangout Tomorrow

• When Developers Can Build Once For All Devices, Users Win

• Smartphone Sweet Spot: Adults 25 - 44 Have Highest Adoption

• Embedded Audio Gets the HTML5 Treatment Thanks to SoundCloud

• Despite The Hype, Few Enterprise Workers Embrace Social Software

• UCSD Study: Not Enough Bandwidth for an 'Internet of Things'

• Manage Your Online Social Life All In One Place With MyLife

• It's Apple's Sandbox, Developers Just Play In It

ReadWriteWeb Worldwide Meetup

Make plans to be at the ReadWriteWeb Worldwide Meetup on November 15. Reach out to our community manager, Robyn Tippins, at robyn at readwriteweb.com if you have any questions.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we thought it might be helpful to wrap up some of the most talked about stories. Assuming this goes over well, we're going to give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

Scott is a popular speaker, and the author of a favorite book of many of the staff, Confessions of a Public Speaker. You only have a few hours left to grab a copy of his latest book, Mindfire, and all he wants in return is your email address.

From the comments:

Here are a few more must read posts, chosen by your fellow community members.

• Gmail for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch Now Available and then Google Pulls "Bad Version" of Gmail From iTunes App Store

• Generate HTML Forms From SQL On the Fly

• A Free Task Management Tool From Asana

• Wikipedia is a Mess, Wikipedians Say: 1 in 20 Articles Bare of References

• First Hadoop Platform Solution for Parsing Big Data

• Survey: 88% of U.S. Social Media Users Are Registered Voters [Infographic]

• IBM Open-Sources Potential "Internet of Things" Protocol

• Shop In Augmented Reality With Amazon Flow for iPhone

ReadWriteWeb Worldwide Meetup

Make plans to be at the ReadWriteWeb Worldwide Meetup on November 15. Reach out to our community manager, Robyn Tippins, at robyn at readwriteweb.com if you have any questions.

The technology has three problems at a pretty low level: smartphones are still an elite product, the scanning process can be clunky, and QR codes look more like robot barf than something meant for humans. The potential is there, though. How can we make a better link between the Web and the world outside?

Even if most people only use QR codes like old-school ads, we've seen some truly innovative uses here at RWW. There's Wikipedia's sci-fi museum service, QRPedia, and there's a great solution to the awkwardness of business card-based networking called QR Card Us. If consumers with smartphones would only get into the habit of using this technology, these kinds of interactions could be rich and engaging.

But QR codes still aren't easy to use. Software to read them isn't even built into the camera apps on popular smartphones, and scans using QR apps often fail or miss. And the robo-barf critique is more fundamental than that. Maybe people just can't get over how ugly QR codes are.

A very nice developer named Andras Nagy reached out to me today to show me a tool he and three other Carnation Group devs made called QR Hacker. It's free, requires no prior skills, and it lets you make QR codes that look totally wild just by using click-to-draw pixel art. Of course, talented artists like Nagy can make codes that actually look branded and nice, instead of like psychedelic cyborg vomit.

The point is, with only a little effort, it's possible to make QR codes that look human-made. Does that help? Will it make more people want to use this technology? I asked RWW fans what they think of QR codes and got some great responses. Please feel free to share more thoughts in the comments below.

"We need a new medium to communicate the idea of the Internet of Things, its challenges, its problems and its benefits; encouraging people to think about this new disruptive technology," writes Mirko Presser of the Alexandra Institute. "This 'comic book' is aimed at everybody."

This comic book isn't the first public awareness effort for the Internet of Things. We covered a great 5-minute video from IBM that describes a future "global data field" driven by sensors and networked objects. IBM told us more about its plans for smart cities at Web 2.0 last week.

Xerox is also looking at these problems. They even sponsored a RWW post about it. But tech behemoths are not the only ones in this game. There are also small startups working on the Internet of Things.

So where is it? Why isn't the Internet of Things cool already? What's not cool about fridges, lights and toasters that talk to your phone and your car? The answer is "nothing." Nothing is not cool about the Internet of Things. The idea must seem geeky to the average person, or something. Well, geeks, that's why we run the world.

Do you see the benefits of an Internet of Things? Or would you rather your fridge and your bathroom scale remain dumb? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What if everything were run like that, though? What if measurement and optimization were the fundamental strategic approach brought to bear on all kinds of endeavors? That may be exactly what's happening with the rise of what's called The Internet of Things, the emerging network of web connected streets, buildings, sensors, objects and devices expected to dominate the Internet in coming decades. But the same approach is also being taken with regard to some of our most fundamental human activities: growing up, healing our bodies and spending time alone. Three examples in particular help shed some light on the good sides and the bad sides of a Web that would make all things measurable and subject to optimization.

By the time a child enters school, experts say there are about 1,000 basic words that they need to know as a foundation to maximize their reading comprehension and intellectual growth. Studies show that children from more marginal social-economic backgrounds enter school already in a vocabulary deficit relative to others.

In order to optimize the preparedness that children bring with them into school, a new class of software is becoming available to parents that combines educational play with analytics reports. New mobile apps aim to help children learn new skills and report their measured progress to parents behind the scenes.

Two recent entrants into this space are Stickery, which this month announced funding from Google Ventures, and Footsteps2Brilliance, an iPad app that has already reported substantial increase in reading comprehension by pre-schoolers.

Stickery is lead by a team with extensive backgrounds in gaming, but Footsteps2Brilliance is already performing pilot tests of its more staid software for the iPad and getting good results. One pilot test of the call-and-response, assisted reading iPad app with pre-schoolers reportedly increased reading comprehension scores from 58.5 percent to 76.4 percent.

Stickery aims to offer analytics to parents as well. The company isn't ready to show off what it's doing, but in a world full of games - the Stickery says the popularity of "babysitting apps" represents a huge missed opportunity.

Not everyone sees it like this, though. In a recent write-up of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, in the heart of Silicon Valley but dedicated to avoiding technology's influence over children, a contrary perspective was articulated vehemently.

"The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that's ridiculous," Alan Eagle of Google's Executive Communications team told the New York Times.

Critics of this kind of approach have also raised concerns regarding lost connection to nature, to unstructured free exploration and creativity and to the parts of life that cannot ever be measured but that warrant substantial investment for the good of a whole child and adult.

It's hard to know how many of these critiques are really new, though, and how many of them are timeless, ideological and at risk of missing out on progress through tools. It would probably be just as big a mistake to reject all measured, technology driven education as it would be to presume that technology was sufficient for the whole of a person's education.

Heal Thyself

Insurance actuaries were some of the first people put out of work by computers. Where money and well-being come together has always been a place where numbers people have sought to measure and optimize. Historically, there's been an emphasis on mitigating risks. Today, preventative wellness programs are growing in popularity when it comes to minimizing health problems and insurance claims.

Where the rubber hits the road - in hospitals - numbers are playing an ever greater role as well.

Health care institutions are increasingly interested in adopting health care performance metric dashboards, industry watchers say.

In a recent article on HealthDataManagement.com, a survey of different institutions' use of health data dashboards offered a broad look into the control room experience of modern hospitals and other health related institutions. It's "a wave everybody is jumping on," on interviewee said.

Doctors, nurses and administrators are widely adopting real-time data dashboards from companies like McKesson, CareFX and Tableau. These dashboards integrate streams of information and alerts from multiple different data sources, making the information easy to quickly visualize.

Who doesn't love dashboards? Medical institutions use them to measure and optimize things like:

• How long each doctor's patients are staying in the hospital and what percentage of them come back within 30 days.


• Which hospital office workers can get the most patients processed in through the door and with the most complete initial information. Also, which of them can get the most money out of patients on their way out the door. "Bill me," is not a phrase hospitals like to hear because medical debts are so often ignored.


• Doctors report what medications they use in each procedure they perform, but those reports don't always match up with a hospital's inventory. Keeping an eye on both enables institutions to monitor for anomalous use of medications in order to maximize treatment efficacy and doctor accountability.

"Notice that none of those use studies focus on what health dashboards are supposed to focus on, health," says enterprise technology journalist Dana Blankenhorn. "Only $$$."

Indeed, optimization presumes a particular party's interests are being optimized for and while some critics might see in the aforementioned children's education app analytics something other than the best interest of children being served - the matter of measuring medical metrics seems even riskier for the interests of patients.

There's no reason why accountability, efficiency and institutional self-awareness have to be bad things from a patients' perspective though. To presume so seems superficial to me.

Solitude no More

What could be more archetypal a solitary action than curling up with a good book? Now that our books are backlit, of course, things are different.

New apps measure adult reading, too, now. Yesterday Alicia Eler wrote the first coverage of a new Betaworks company called Findings, which lets you import your Amazon Kindle annotations and share them in a stream with friends. Once the highlights of what you've read are captured in data form and published to the web, there's a whole world of recommendations, popularity contests and more than can be performed.

The forthcoming startup Hypothes.is brings that kind of paradigm to the whole web and beyond. It's team of Web-scale heavy hitters want to create a "peer review layer for the internet" complete with reputation scores and a rich set of feedback from readers about everything.

There's no doubt that such measurements could deliver some very real value - but what about the solitary relationship between a reader and an author's work? What about unaccountable, uncounted free and independent thought about the things we read? Reading has worked very well for a long time without being subject to monitoring, measurement and automatic recommendations.

Some people, many people, are likely to enjoy the value that a layer of quantification put over or beside their reading experience can offer.

None of these instances of the increasing measurement of life seem clearly and unconditionally good or bad. They have incredible potential but also seem to post some risk of alienation, of coldness, of dehumanization and of rendering our experiences less complete than we need them to be in order to be completely human ourselves.

Hopefully we can maximize the upside of this paradigm while guarding against its dangers.

Designed to reduce the need for skilled labor operating the machinery, the system would mean that farmers could do other higher-level planning work and operate the tractor all night long by itself. Presumably the whole thing is networked, collects data and will make some analytics available. Hello, Internet of Things, goodbye Old MacDonald? I'm not sure what to think of this - but large scale agriculture has probably been far enough from a city dweller's idyllic vision of farming to be creepy for a long time anyway. There's something about this video that feels especially creepy to me though.

In case you can't see it at this size, that is a John Deere in the video.

Of course all technology is about saving time and work so that greater, higher forms of work can be done. It's a beautiful thing, in many contexts. That which can be automated, networked and measured at scale can be performed more rationally, more efficiently and in standardized ways that offer a foundation for further inovations.

It's not as if farm labor done by underpaid seasonal migrants living in cramped conditions after fleeing Latin American economies crushed by CIA installed military dictators and death squads from the 50's through the 80's is necessarily anything to romanticize either.

Perhaps we should welcome our new, fully autonomous food production overlords.

One of Urbanscale's projects is developing an iOS application called Transitflow. It's in the design phases currently, with the goal of being a real-time transport notification and timetable app. It's fascinating to watch this app unfold, piece by piece. It's also an indicator of where the Internet of Things is heading.

Transitflow will be an iPhone app that helps you plan your travel in real-time. According to Greenfield, the aim is "to take a step beyond generic journey-planning and timetable apps, and offer people something that will reduce or eliminate the kind of experiential hassles the current generation of interactive services does very little to address."

It will do this by notifying you of relevant data at various points throughout your journey; for example telling you when to leave your home to catch a train and then, during the journey, advising you in real-time how long it will take to get to your destination.

I could've used this very app last Saturday, when I took a bus into the city to attend a friend's party. I'd checked the transit authority's website beforehand to plan my trip, then left at what I thought was the right time to arrive at the bus stop a couple of minutes before the bus. Guess what: the bus I'd planned on getting never arrived. I checked the transit authority's website on my iPhone - struggling with the site's not entirely mobile friendly interface - but found no real-time data. A bus eventually showed up about 20 minutes later, but the point is I had no idea what happened to the first one or when (or if) another one would arrive.

Chicago will apparently be the first city to get Transitflow. Sadly it will probably take a while for the app to arrive in my country, but even so I'm excited by the functionality it promises.

In his latest weekly missive, Week 34, Greenfield elaborated on the design philosophy of Transitflow:

"The philosophy that's emerging is straightforward and often-articulated, but seemingly surprisingly difficult for many design organizations to enact: Transitflow should strive, in all things, to provide users with exactly as much information as is actionable and relevant at a given point in space and time, no more and no less.

In practice, this means a map that's automatically adjusted based on the density of transit options in a given area, so there's no need to zoom and scroll it. It means providing enough information about what's happening at the stops and stations it depicts that, once one is selected, users will rarely find themselves hitting a "back" button to look at other options. And it means that if all goes well, once a user is notified that it's time to head out to catch a bus or train, he or she won't have to interact with the application again on that trip."

I look forward to tracking the progress of Transitflow, thanks Adam for keeping us all in the loop!

The new version of QR Card Us separates the QR link itself from the 'hard card,' or physical business card, so that customers can buy standalone QR Cards - mobile-friendly Web pages from which contact info can be saved - without worrying about their physical cards becoming outdated. It also adds Organizations, which allow a moderator to manage QR Cards for a company, club or any kind of group. Finally, the update adds Notes, which lets users attach any kind of text note about a new contact to their saved info.

While QR Card Us provides color, layout and typography choices for both the physical and Web cards, many prospective customers requested more control over their own brand. Thanks to the power of Web-based communication, the flexibility of the small team and the online core of QR Card Us, Spearhead Dev was able to iterate quickly to respond to these concerns within a week.

To learn more about QR Card Us, check out our initial post, in which 19-year-old co-founder Michael Schade describes his vision of "making technology accessible for everyone." Also make sure to visit their website at qrcard.us.

We've also covered lots of different ways mobile Web technologies have been applied to business and personal networking, which you can explore here.

Have you ever used a mobile business card reader for networking? Tell us about it in the comments.

"I believe that we'll look back in 20 years and 3D printers will be as ubiquitous as laser printers are today," Feld wrote this morning. "We aren't yet at the point that is equivalent to the first HP Laserjet in 1984, but I think we'll see a comparable product from MakerBot within a year. In the mean time, I'm going to keep downloading 3D things from the Thingiverse and keeping my Thing-O-Matic busy."

Below, MakerBot customer John Biehler shows how it's done in a fan video demonstrating his creation of a pencil holder.

As science fiction writer Bruce Sterling once said, "Plastic pirates, start your engines. Waiting now to see the first drop-out 'intentional community' created entirely with off-the-grid broken-open-source fabjects. If they can find a way to fuse gypsum dust, that might be Burning Man."

By moving from a direct vCard scan to a Web link, QR Card can now provide users with detailed analytics to measure the effectiveness of their networking. But if this sounds like some robotic, dystopian vision of the future, with people scanning each other's bar codes instead of shaking hands, you've got the wrong idea. Michael Schade, 19-year-old creator of QR Card Us, has designed this whole experience around getting the contact exchange out of the way, so people can concentrate on getting to know each other. "Existing technologies are great in their initial idea of making things automatic," Schade says, "but unfortunately, the technology tends to get in the way of real-world communication, and we want to get rid of that. It should make things better, not make it harder to connect."

"We want to make sure this technology is accessible," says Schade. Spearhead is used to customers with a range of experience with new technologies, and Schade expects many less savvy users "won't care about analytics." But the flexibility of the Web platform makes advanced uses possible, while the simplicity of the scanning and the interface accommodates users at all levels. "The mission of Spearhead as a whole," he says, "is making technology accessible for everyone."

QR Card Features
QR Card Us began in April as an experiment, Schade says, "to see how people react to the QR Card idea." The first version of the card was large, in order to embed the data from the whole vCard into the QR code, and Schade says the card's size was one of customers' most frequent complaints. The new version addresses that problem, but it's also much more powerful, since the Web link enables one-click connections to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as analytics. Anyone who scans the card can enter an email address to save the contact. For logged-in Spearhead users (accounts are free for anyone), the contact saves automatically, so all they have to do is scan. They can get right back to talking to the person and download the contact info later.

Another advantage of the Web service, Schade says, is that it allows Spearhead to quickly add new features via the Web form, without requiring customers to order new cards. On the order form, QR Card Us allows for a few customizable font, color, and layout choices that will match between the physical card and the Web form. At launch, there will be four layout choices available. A "Made with http://qrcard.us" tag is available to allow customers to "show their love" as well as direct new customers to the service, Schade says, but it's optional.

An Experiment With QR Codes
We've covered other digital business card solutions that use a variety of technologies, but no one approach has caught on in the real world. We've taken some apps for a test drive, and the results were okay, but the interaction was still awkward. There are so many barriers, from bad interfaces to required third-party applications, that can turn the encounter into more trouble than it's worth. By slimming down to just a Web link to a page of one-click options, QR Card Us can get the exchange over with in a snap.

Many existing solutions scan business cards using optical character recognition, just reading the text on the card, instead of QR codes. The main advantage of OCR is that no one has to get a new business card. But OCR can make mistakes, and it can't convey some data, like profile pictures, that QR codes and Web links can handle easily.

The use of QR codes in mobile computing is on the rise, but the latest studies show that they're still mostly being put to old-school use. Most businesses seem to be using QR codes to pick the low-hanging fruit, reaching wealthy young consumers with traditional marketing efforts, mostly as supplements to products.

But QR Card Us is built around the interaction, not just the newfangled technology. It's designed not to call attention to the futuristic barcode but to get it scanned, saved, and put away. Does this sound like a good way to network to you? Let us know in the comments.