The company demonstrated today how its technology, which is currently in pre-production in China, lets a user put a sticker containing a tiny sensor and a year's worth of battery power, on the handle of a toothbrush, for example. The motion of the toothbrush sends a message to the Green Goose base station which then publishes a record of the activity online. A wide range of everyday activities can be tracked and the whole system was a big crowd pleaser at Jason Calacanis's Launch conference. Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.

ReadWriteWeb wrote about Green Goose in February of last year (those investors should read RWW more closely, apparently, might have got better terms) when the company was framing itself as a tool for ecological and financial responsibility. It's based in both San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

The company seems to have shrunken its sensor design substantially and reframed itself as a health and wellness instrumentation service. It's all about actualizing your intentions and measuring your behavior as a game, according to the service's site.

Water bottles, tooth brushes, bikes, pill bottles and other objects can be turned into sensors that track our interaction with them and then publish that data online. All thanks to a simple sticker or other attachable sensor. It's the simplest and most pleasing example we've seen yet of the widely anticipated trend called The Internet of Things.

All kinds of formerly disconnected devices will be brought online in the coming months and years, their activities and interactions no longer ignored by their users but now tracked, stored and analyzed for patterns, thresh holds and opportunities by web based applications and interfaces. A more measured world will in theory be a more rational, more just and more sustainable world. It looks like it may be a world with better dental hygiene, too.

The health angle is a strong one and the healthcare industry knows it. "Insurance companies are really trying to figure out how to reinvent all this stuff," Web 2.0 forefather and sensor-lover Tim O'Reilly told me about Green Goose today. "They're all looking for things like this that will drive wellness. The biggest question about it is whether it's too early. As the old VC saying goes, being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. But this is defiitely on the right track."

The Launch conference Grand Jury members on stage tonight thought so too. Shervin Pishevar and Jay Levy each said on stage that they'd put in $50,000 investments (pending due diligence), after host Calacanis and the crowd cheered louder and louder at the prospect of their doing so.

Calacanis had to admit that the conference's front line selection committee made a mistake when it neglected to select Green Goose to present at the main event. Fortunately Grand Jury members found, selected and promoted the company from the demo platform tables out in the hallway. They'll leave much happier birds.

Beltzner came from IBM Canada almost 6 years ago. At Mozilla, he helped build one of the most important pieces of software in the world. Firefox broke Internet Explorer's stranglehold over the browser market and forced Microsoft to support universal internet technical standards. Firefox has an estimated 30% world wide market share among browser users, a remarkable achievement.

None the less, Firefox did its job changing the world. Now it's time for Beltzner to go poke at rocks underground, apparently.

The Internet can't thank you enough, Mike, for all you've done for it and us.

Photo by Kieran Huggins.

Called The Locker Project, the open source service will capture what's called exhaust data from users' activities around the web and offline via sensors, put it firmly in their own possesion and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data. Miller's three person company, Singly, will provide the corporate support that the open source project needs in order to remain viable. I'm very excited about this project; Miller's backgrounds, humble brilliance and vision for app-enabling my personal data history is very exciting to me.

Where data extraction is made easy already by APIs or feeds, Lockers will pull it that way. Where the data is appealing and the Locker community is motivated to do so, data connectors will be built.

Searching those data archives has been a technical challenge for many other startups, but the Locker team says it is trivial for them - because they only have to build search to scale across your personal data and the data you've been given permission to access by members of your network.

Seach and sharing across a user's network will be powered by Miller's eagerly-anticipated open source P2P project called Telehash, described as "a new wire protocol for exchanging JSON in a real-time and fully decentralized manner, enabling applications to connect directly and participate as servers on the edge of the network."

The team was not yet willing to disclose the identities of its investors on the record.

Apps on Your Platform

Building a developer ecosystem is going to be the team's biggest priority. What will apps look like in the Locker ecosystem? They'll be pieces of software run locally on top of your personal locker and across any of your network connections that give them permission.

The app model is a compelling one and provides a logical source of revenue for Locker and Singly. Presumably they will monetize sales of apps.

The team is collecting video testimonials from industry luminaries about what kinds of apps they'd like to see built on top of their data. Singly won first prize in the startup competition at the O'Reilly Strata conference and Tim O'Reilly himself later gave the project a shout-out in a panel on data ownership.

The team behind the project say they fantasize about apps like:

• food recommendations in neighborhoods they've visited from restaurants their friends have checked in at


• a newsfeed filtering out what their click-stream history shows they've already read


• pre-diagnosis of possible medical conditions based on personal medical and other history.

Your personal data will likely be of interest on its own, as a type of diary, but it's probably going to be much more interesting and useful when cross-referenced with other sets of data. Those other sets of data will provide context, surfacing correlations and patterns that would otherwise be invisible. Recommendations, personalization, alerts, benchmarks, social and self assessment: the types of value adds that can be built on top of a good data set are just beginning to be explored. And there are few data sets as interesting, to you, than you.

Part of a Big Picture

Kaliya Hamlin, long-time online identity expert and now Executive Director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Collaborative Consortium, is enthusiastic. Hamlin says Miller's project is "a great development from the perspective of this emerging market/ecosystem happening. Others are looking at getting into the personal data store market as well, personal.com is coming to market for example, services businesses too - this is really happening."

In a blog post on the sector in general earlier this week, Hamlin put it this way:

"A nascent but growing industry of personal data storage services is emerging. These strive to allow individuals to collect their own personal data to manage it and then give permissioned access to their digital footprint to the business and services they choose--businesses they trust to provide better customization, more relevant search results, and real value for the user from their data."

She also expects the personal data market to become subject to extensive regulation soon.

Miller says that some ad industry people he's spoken with hope that an independent system for data stores under the control of consumers themselves will help create an atmosphere concerning liability more amenable to innovation on top of that data than exists today. Advertisers are interested of course, but far more app developers will likely seek to build on top of that data once it's accessible and properly permissioned.

The people behind The Locker Project will have no shortage of issues to tackle trying to take a distributed, open-source, app-centric approach to leadership in an emerging era of data. It wouldn't be the first time that Jeremie Miller has managed to change the world though.

I love Everyblock and haven't paid enough attention to TeachStreet before, it looks good too. MSNBC owns Everyblock and it's an invaluable service, but each time a new data source gets added, a fundamental flaw in the user interface rears its head again. None the less, this is an exciting dataset to see added to the hyper-local news.

I really believe that increased granularity would greatly increase the frequency with which I and many other people visited Everyblock. The prospect of surfacing continuing education courses in my neighborhood is quite exciting.

According to "two people familiar with the plans," Google may launch the new mobile payments service, which allows consumers to tap or wave their mobile phones at a cash register to pay for their purchases, sometime this year.

Well, surprise, surprise.

Google getting into payments? This isn't as crazy an idea as it sounds. The company's newest version of its Android mobile operating system, the revision code-named Gingerbread, has added support for Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Although new to the U.S., many parts of Asia and Europe have long been using NFC to enable transactions, including everything from paying for subway tickets to purchasing Cokes from vending machines.

NFC works by way of a small chip embedded into mobile phones or other devices (or even stickers!) that allows the device to transmit data over short distances.

At the moment, the NFC support in Google's Android software allows for one-way, read-only transmissions, but that limitation is only temporary. NXP's Jeff Miles, the company's director of mobile transactions, recently confirmed that Android would be updated to include both read/write support in a future version of the mobile software. The update is expected to show up in Gingerbread itself, instead of in an entirely new software version, like the forthcoming Honeycomb version, due out later this year.

With read/write support in place, phones running the Android software and that include the necessary hardware would be NFC-, and therefore mobile payments-enabled.

Google Goes Local with NFC Stickers, Hotpot Program

In addition to the technological support for NFC transactions in Android phones, Google has also launched a local advertising program called Hotpot. The program is focused on allowing businesses - primarily restaurants, bars and cafes it appears - to advertise themselves to customers by way of NFC-enabled window decals. Hotpot, still in its pilot phase in Portland, Oregon, lets a passerby wave an NFC phone at the sticker, which in turn takes them to a mobile Google Places Page for that business via their device's Web browser.

These Places Pages serve much of the same function as services like Yelp do - they provide a location's name, address, phone number and other details alongside user-generated ratings and reviews. And you can see which establishments your friends liked, too.

Google Acquires Mobile Payment Company, Tried to Get Groupon

Another recent Google acquisition, which flew under the radar until some eagle-eyed analysts at the 451 Group spotted it, was of mobile payments firm Zetawire. The small Canadian company had one thing going for it: a patent app for mobile banking, advertising, identity management, credit card and mobile coupon transaction processing. In other words, a complete mobile wallet solution.

Google's other recent, but failed, acquisition attempt - that of local couponing service Groupon - could have also tied into this mobile wallet initiative the company reportedly has in the works.

Bloomberg's article didn't deliver much new information about any of these services, only confirming that indeed, the dots are being connected and something big from Google is well on its way.

It also noted that NFC phone shipments are expected to rise to 220.1 million units by 2014, a figure that indicates that the mobile phone-toting world is ready for such a service to exist.

Challenges to Google's Mobile Payments: Carriers, Other Manufacturers, Credit Card Companies, More

But Google won't be without its challengers. PayPal is expected to dabble in NFC payments, too, this year. Apple hired an NFC expert and both Apple and RIM have filed NFC-related patents. Complete services from the likes of Visa and the mobile phone carriers themsevles have also either launched or will be launching this year. Even startups like Bling Nation are getting in on the action, NFC-enabling old phones by way of stickers.

Google will have to walk a fine line if it wants to avoid the "creep" factor. People are already sensitive about the amount of data the Internet search company has on file. In fact, that issue is now being used as a marketing technique for the upstart search engine DuckDuckGo, which touts its privacy features by way of a website at donttrack.us ("When you search Google...your search term is sent to that site, along with your browser and computer info, which can identify you.")

How will people feel about a Google service that tracks their jaunts about town, their favorite local businesses, their couponing habits, their financial information, their bank accounts, their spending habits and their purchase history? Technology aside, that could be the biggest hurdle Google has to overcome to make their mobile payments business a successful one.

ReadWriteWeb's Related Coverage on NFC Developments:

What's Google's Interest in Zetawire? An Android Mobile Wallet

Nexus S and Gingerbread Phones to Get Full NFC Support Soon

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile Join Forces in New Mobile Payments Venture Called "Isis"

Google Aims to Replace Credit Cards with Addition of NFC to Android

Apple Hires NFC Expert, Mobile Payments Coming to iPhone?

How exactly Bit.ly will be used in the upcoming News.me service is still unknown, but we do know that it will debut in the form of an app for the Apple iPad. And now you can request to be first on the list to try it out.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick wouldn't disclose the Times' stake in Bit.ly at the time of the partnership, but the equity is supposed to be payment for the work the Times' R&D group put into the project prior to Betaworks' involvemet.

The little we do know of News.me comes via this NYT article from September, which revealed that the service had been in development for six months, will initially debut as an iPad application with a possible Web-based app coming later on and that its name should provide a fairly good hint as to what it's all about.

Borthwick also had said the service would launch by year-end. (OK, folks, you now have 2 days.)

Bit.ly, in case you're unaware, is the URL-shortening service that takes long Web addresses and shortens them into more manageable links, mainly for the purpose of social sharing, such as on sites like Twitter where a 140-character limit on updates is enforced. Because Twitter has now emerged as a social news platform, the data Bit.ly has access to - 30 billion links this year as of September - is a veritable goldmine for determining what news and topics are popular across Web.

It only makes sense for Bit.ly to turn that data into a news service of sorts, or even a standalone iPad app, as it is apparently now planning to do. However, News.me will face stiff competition once it lands, as several other companies have already done just that.

News.me's Stiff Competition

Earlier this year, another social news startup called Flipboard delivered on the promise of a well-designed, magazine-like social news reading app for iPad. (Our ongoing coverage is here).This app looks beyond Twitter, allowing users to integrate both it and other networks like Facebook, Flickr, Google Reader as well as RSS feeds from popular websites. For now Flipboard just takes the content and makes it "pretty," but its acquisition of semantic technology startup Ellerdale means that it will soon begin to highlight items of importance to you, through algorithms that learn of your interests, allowing it to separate the signal from the noise.

Flipboard, while one of the more popular applications, is not alone in this space. It joins other interactive, thoughtfully designed news-reading applications like Reeder and Pulse, the latter of which allows you to browse Facebook in addition to blogs. Twitter itself also revamped its iPad app earlier this year, making it a more usable tool to consume flows of information.

What will News.me do that's unique? Well, it's possible that it may get the jump on Flipboard as being the first to discover trends in new and innovative ways through the use of semantic technology, perhaps. Since Flipboard has yet to launch its semantic integration, News.me could appeal to those who need more than just an attractive layout of the news, or even popular trends, but need to find the news that's highly relevant to them.

But these are just guesses. In the meantime, we've requested our invite. You should too.

Disclosure: NYT is a syndication partner with ReadWriteWeb.

Now available on 10 campuses around the United States, Student Spill provides a simple method of offering support and of gathering information about what kinds of support a school's students really need. "Usually universities are wrong in their assumptions," Allstop says. "They have no way to get insight into what is bothering students, to know what students are crying on their pillows about." Spill-using schools can leverage the data the service provides for student retention, risk mitigation, suicide prevention and to develop recommendations for services they should consider. It's an excellent example of value created through analysis of aggregate social app user data.

Above: One school's report for one semester.

Allstop says that sales to schools are led by students who discover the service and ask that schools budget to engage it. Users are required to have an .edu email adress and their "spills" are responded to by student volunteers. Those volunteers are trained in effective listening and writing empathetic responses. Four to six volunteers send a response to each Spill. "This gets the student supporters more engaged," Allstop says, "and offers multiple perspectives for the Spiller to deal with their problem.

Allstop's alma mater, sees the heaviest use - generally between 6 and 12 spills submitted per day. That seems very small by general interest consumer web standards, but as Allstop says that makes schools happy. "If you're changing 6 to 12 peoples' lives a day, that's all it takes," she says.

Spill tells schools how their students' lives compare to the lives of students at other schools and Allstop says she thinks those analytics will become all the more valuable as her service scales. She hopes to move into corporate and other markets as well.

"Fifteen to twenty percent of students feel comfortable enough with a counselor to seek out that kind of help," Allstop says. "Schools are getting all their data from that small group. 82% of Student Spill's users indicated embarrassment or fear as the number one factor that had prevented them from utilizing campus counseling facilities in the past." Allstop argues that her service is a non-threatening way to gather more representative data about actual student concerns, while also providing direct support to students in distress.

That model of service-based analytics being used to power recommendations to institutions is likely to become far more common in the future.

Suleiman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, was sentenced in 2006 to four years of jail for insulting religion and the leadership of Egypt on his blog. He was critical of, among other things, Egypt's treatment of women and of its Coptic Christian minority. Supporters report that during those four years, Amer was tortured, beaten, attacked by other prisoners, disowned by his family and had his books, letters and personal effects taken away. His case is of international interest not just because of his humanity, but because of the political conflict between authoritarian states and a new world of freely self-published bloggers who would challenge them with new Web technology.

Amer's supporters say he is declining interviews while recovering from his detention.

Part of a Larger Trend

Though Kareem Amer was the longest-imprisoned blogger known, detained for most of the history of this young phenomenon called Social Media, he was not alone.

A report by international media watchdog organization Reporters Sans Frontières last year found that there were 151 people in prison around the world because of the contents of their blogs in 2009, a nearly three-fold increase over 2008.

Iranian cultural satire blogger Omid Reza Misayafi is believed to be the only blogger killed in prison to date. He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 months in prison for "insulting Islamic Republic Leaders" but died under mysterious and allegedly abusive circumstances after just six months of detention.

With brave bloggers in mind who are free, imprisoned and deceased around the world, we leave you with the moving short video Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, about just one of many places where disruptive social media and authoritarian tradition clash, and where the stakes are at their highest.

In 2008, Baio posted online, and refused to take down, the grainy video tape of Sarah Palin's participation in the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant. He's received cease and desist letters from lawyers representing Disney, the Beatles and Bill Cosby. He made millions co-founding the early social calendaring website Upcoming.org and selling it to Yahoo. He interviewed the mysterious Italian factory worker whose video shattered all YouTube records without explanation, before its author deleted it. He commissioned an 8-bit cover of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on the 50th anniversary of the album's release (Kind of Bloop). What else was left for Baio to do? Go to Washington, of course.

Andy Baio announced on his blog today that he is joining the web technology think tank Expert Labs, along with Director and blogging forefather Anil Dash and Gina Trapani, former founding-editor of mega-blog LifeHacker.

Baio says the group's goal is "to help government make better decisions about policy by listening to citizens in the places they already are: social networks like Twitter and Facebook."

Trapani built an open source software product called ThinkUp, which collects and analyzes responses to questions posted on social networks. Dash brought it to Washington, partnering with the Obama Administration early this year. Now Baio will hack on ThinkUp, the social media conversation and Washington.

"There's tons to do," he wrote this morning, "but I'm particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp's ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters. I'm planning on building some fun hacks on top of ThinkUp, as well as keeping an eye open for other vectors to tackle our core mission."

Baio says he rarely feels engaged enough to write about his political opinions, but he believes technology could be key to solving the country's biggest problems. "To tackle our most serious national issues, we need better communication between government and citizens," he says. "I want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn't feel disconnected and disillusioned by government, and I want government to meet the needs of the people, rather than favoring those with the most money or the loudest voices."

Look out Washington, Baio is already among your ranks. It's sure to be interesting.

Audio Interview: Andy Baio - A Master of Crowdsourcing

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/geeks_in_dc.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/geeks_in_dc.php Government Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:50:27 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Can the iPad save the magazine star? It might, if Portland, Oregon startup Urban Airship has anything to say about it.

For all their dreams of success in a medium that privileges big pictures, multi-media and a touch interface, publishers of periodical content have been frustrated by the lack of subscription sales options on Apple's iPad. Urban Airship is a small startup that has begun to power iOS subscription to content for publishers including NewsWeek, the Atlantic and a major sports league. The company, which was founded with the help of a unique government unemployment program and online bacon sales (seriously), announced tonight that it has raised a second round of venture capital, $5.4 million from the Foundry Group, True Ventures and the Founders Co-op.

]]> Push

In the Spring of 2009, we wrote about Urban Airship's just-launched push-notifications and in-app sales as a service - a service the company built by the seat of its pants when push notifications came to the iPhone much faster than anyone expected. The founders had been building their technology with funding from one special Oregon unemployment fund for people whose employers shut down without paying them (they were told to take their computers home in lieu of a last paycheck), another fund for unemployed people working full-time building their own companies and from revenue from Bacn, an online bacon shopping site and URL shortener. (They've since sold Bacn to a competing online bacon retailer.)

The team quickly put together an impressive roster of clients for their push notification as a service technology, most famously for Tapulous, the makers of popular iPhone rhythm games Tap Tap Revenge. Users of the game can challenge each other and the challenges are sent as push notifications, powered by Urban Airship.

Then, this Fall, Verizon announced that it had selected Urban Airship to offer power push notifications for all the apps in its very ambitious new app strategy.

Many of Urban Airship's early customers were brought in by its high-energy CEO, Scott Kveton. Kveton has helped usher into the contemporary computing era technologies including OpenID, the Firefox web browser and the Linux kernel.

Subscriptions

Now Urban Airship is doing subscriptions. And why not? Apple made a magical device that almost feels like a magazine of infinite variety you might find in a Harry Potter book, but there's no ability to subscribe to serialized content on it.

Subscriber Information?

One of the biggest complaints magazine publishers have about Apple's policies is that they don't allow the gathering of reader demographic information. That information has been essential in selling advertisements for print magazines.

Can Urban Airship solve that problem? Product Manager Jason Glaspey says no. "Apple doesn't allow it, and we don't get in the middle of that debate," he says. "That's not part of what we solve. We just solve the in-app purchasing, content delivery, and user-authentication. We really don't want to say one way or the other on that because we don't want to criticize Apple's policies, nor say the publishers shouldn't get it."

That sounds like a tough position for Urban Airship to be in; but blind subscriptions on a wildly popular new platform are presumably better than no subscriptions at all.

With Urban Airship's new subscription feature, "you buy a subscription for a specific amount of time, then you get all the updates during that period," explains Product Manager Jason Glaspey. "We also use a unique identifier so you keep your subscription even if you change devices (within iOS). That can be both new content downloads (which we power) or simply unlocking gated content."

"It is no easy feat to add in-app subscriptions that work within the Apple guidelines and practices," writes Jessica Davis, Communications Director, on the company's blog. "One of our engineering team members described the task as 'Herculean,' which is apt, given the amount of code required to make it work."

The Future is Cross-Platform

Urban Airship is best known for its work on the iPhone, but its push notifications can be sent to Android and Blackberry phones as well.

Glaspey says the team is hard at work building out subscription options for Android and Blackberry, as well as keeping its eye on Windows Phone 7.

Just like the startup's push notifications service made it easy for any app publisher to add the compelling user experience of push, at least in theory increasing user engagement with apps, the new subscription feature is aimed at unlocking the potential that the iPad has offered to publishers of magazines and other serialized content.

"It's still up the the media to deliver content that matters in this new paradigm and in a format that's worth paying for--all at a convenience and price point that subscribers respond to," says Glaspey. "The battle isn't over, but it may have gotten easier."

And why stop at magazines?

"One of the big hurdles is that using an app for customer payments is pretty new - a lot of people who could use this haven't yet imagined expanding their revenue this way," Glaspey says.

"One of the things I'm working on a lot this Fall is visiting advertising agencies and doing speaking gigs at conferences talking about the opportunities of mobile: to try and expand the imagination of people beyond magazines and streaming content (the obvious use cases) while also reminding people that their marketing messages are already irrelevant. They need to provide value and not just make a mobile 'micro-site.'"

A platform that makes it easy for mobile developers to add engagement-driving push notifications, in-app sales to make their development financially viable and now a subscription infrastructure to kill the unwieldy problem of downloading a new app for every issue of a periodical; that's what Urban Airship has built so far. With a fresh infusion of cash, it will be interesting to see what they do with it, and what they come up with next.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ipad_subscriptions_made_easy_by_freshly_funded_sta.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ipad_subscriptions_made_easy_by_freshly_funded_sta.php News Tue, 02 Nov 2010 22:31:16 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Google has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior for requiring that messaging technologies must be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite in order to be considered for procurement. The well-respected blog TechDirt reported first on the suit and says it "seems like they've got a decent argument there."

The Department of Interior justified its preference for Microsoft in part because of the company's "enhanced security," but it was Google's first version of Google Apps for Government that became this summer the first cloud solution to win the Federal government's Federal Information Security Management Act certification.

]]> Likewise, Google Apps were good enough for now-U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra when he was the CTO for the District of Columbia in 2008 and switched the government there to Google.

"It's certainly going to be interesting to see if a comparison of 'enhanced security' and 'unified email' from Google and Microsoft makes it way into the court systems," says Alex Howard, Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent at O'Reilly Media. "I can't think of the last time I saw that depth of discussion about the relative capabilities of cloud applications in the court."

The U.S. Department of the Interior, meanwhile, has long had security problems of its own. Its highest leaders have been ruled in contempt of federal court multiple times for failing to account for and reconcile hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Native American land trust documents, most recently in 2001.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_sues_us_government_agency_over_using_micros.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_sues_us_government_agency_over_using_micros.php Government Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:53:19 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Apple is believed to be working with SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto to develop a SIM card built into the iPhone, making it easy for phone owners to use a carrier of their choice. Gemalto is the company that sued Google, Motorola, HTC and Samsung on Monday over alleged patent infringement in Android.

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham reports today that sources tell her the device is being built for European markets, where carriers are more competitive and the iPhone has largely lost its exclusivity already. Imagine, though, if such technology were to come to US markets. Built-in choice of carriers could increase competition, drive down data prices and potentially impact limitations on what kinds of apps are allowed on the iPhone, in as much as carriers object to things like VOIP and tethering.

]]> Higginbotham writes:

The Gemalto SIM, according to my sources, is embedded in a chip that has an upgradeable flash component and a ROM area. The ROM area contains data provided by Gemalto with everything related to IT and network security, except for the carrier related information. The flash component will receive the carrier related data via a local connection which could be the PC or a dedicated device, so it can be activated on the network. Gemalto will provide the back-end infrastructure that allows service and number provisioning on the carrier network.

How realistic is this? Leading wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma tells us it's really a business problem more than anything. "Technology for this is easy," he said. "[The] business execution is hard. Carriers won't give away the control that easily. The chances of this working first are higher in the prepaid markets vs. the postpaid markets like North America. This will happen eventually though."

Does an Apple-built SIM card become non-removable and thus hinder consumer choice on that level? That may be yet another matter to consider. "Riiight," teased Tom Lee of Washington D.C. on Twitter today, "Making the SIM nonremovable will make switching carriers *easier*. As usual, the consumer can't lose!"

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_apple_building_own_sim_card_for_fast_carrie.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_apple_building_own_sim_card_for_fast_carrie.php News Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:17:57 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Dennis Crowley, co-founder of location based social network Foursquare, told attendees of the Picnic conference in Amsterdam today that the company has built a feature that recommends new locations users ought to visit, based on their past activity, their to-do lists and what's popular at the moment. The system is being tested internally by Foursquare staff and Crowley hopes that Foursquare user data will be used by outside developers to build even more kinds of recommendation services. Recommendations, generally, are like searches you hadn't thought yet to perform - in Foursquare they could be a great way to foster new experiences for users and additional activity for businesses.

Crowley's talk was first reported by watchdog blog About Foursquare, where a video of the 20 minute presentation from Picnic can be found.

]]> Crowley also discussed prospective features further in the future, including passive location tracking and push notifications of nearby recommendations (recommendation + geofencing), and identification of topic experts based on check-in behavior.

"Users would be awarded experience points as a sushi expert or skiing expert based on their checkins in those categories, for example," About Foursquare writes. "Their recommendations could carry more weight and be used to suggest places other users should visit."

Data about real-world behavior, combined with social connections, geographic locations, annotations of locations via tips and to-do items - that's a potent mix for possible innovations in any number of features for this service, or services built on top of it.

Recommendations: High Risk, High Reward

Recommendation is low-hanging fruit, but whereas recommendation of online content from other services is relatively low-impact, recommendations that a person set foot in a particular venue probably carries a lot more weight. For better and for worse. If Foursquare recommendations are unsuccessful or feel counter-intuitive to users, users may be very unhappy about that.

No doubt the company is testing the feature thoroughly among its New York City staff, but whether recommendations can succeed outside a venue-dense city with intense support for an otherwise small social network remains to be seen.

Foursquare claims to have approximately 3 million users, neither the biggest (that's Facebook) nor the smallest player in the location based social networking market. It may be the most consistently innovative competitor in this space, though.

In addition to recommendations, the company has long talked about incentivization of real-world behavior. Today, for example, Foursquare announced a partnership with CNN, which will give a "healthy eater" badge to anyone who checks-in at one of ten thousand farmers markets. It's unclear whether a dorky apple badge with CNN emblazoned on it is going to incentivize anyone to do anything - but it's a start and an interesting idea.

Imagine checking in at a farmer's market, then later receiving recommendations to restaurants that cook with locally-sourced food when you check-in nearby. It's got to be just a matter of time before big companies like McDonald's start incentivizing fun and Happy Meals lest we all get too many farmers market recommendations.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/foursquare_recommendations.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/foursquare_recommendations.php News Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:37:48 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Twitter's Corporate Development lead Jessica Verrilli disclosed the opening of a new Twitter "HQ in NYC" today, meaning the fast-growing new media company now has a beachhead in the center of the old and big media world.

Confirmation of the office's existence came in a perhaps typically laid back San Francisco style. Twitter communications team member Carolyn Penner told us by email, "We have some sales folks who work from NYC, and we thought it'd be nice to give them somewhere to sit. :)"

Update: Despite my reading of the statements from these two Twitter team members, and Twitter COO Dick Costolo's May statement that New York or Los Angeles were the next places Twitter would probably set up offices, the company wrote to say that they have not in fact set up a New York office yet. "To clarify...," Penner wrote us, "We just have the one office - in SF. In NY, we have a temporary area in rental space for a handful of people who are based there." That space may be temporary, but we're hearing people are being hired in NYC to sell ads out of it. Twitter execs have every right to speak casually without nosy bloggers taking them too literally, though. We regret any misunderstanding.

]]>

After years of hearing "but what's the business model?" as Twitter acquired millions upon millions of users, Twitter is clearly taking revenue, advertising and business innovation seriously. Opening an official office in New York City is probably the most traditional thing the company has done yet in terms of advertising and media.

You may think of Twitter as a social network, but it grows increasingly clear that Twitter also thinks of itself as a new kind of media company.

Web analytics company WebTrends reported on the statement and offered details based on an interview with Hoffman on its company blog today. We reported first this Summer that such a product was coming "soon" and was based on the word of a startup Twitter had acquired called DabbleDB/Trendly. Twitter's PR lead Sean Garrett person said our report was incorrect, but it appears we may only have been wrong about the timing.

"The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept," Justin Kistner writes on the WebTrends blog, "in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more. The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics."

"This is a big announcement from Twitter," Kistner opines, "as analytics is critical to not only justifying marketing budget (something Twitter marketers have struggled to prove), but also to improve marketing efforts."

Twitter is working hard and fast on monetization, and a solid analytics offering should help make more companies comfortable with use of the service. Further comment from Twitter is forthcoming, the company says. Will it really be free to everyone? If not just to users of the elusive "business toolkit," that would be huge. If just to that group, it would still be a big deal long term, as access to Twitter's business offerings slowly opens up.

Update: Twitter's Carolyn Penner responded to our inquiry as follows: "We've been talking about providing analytics since last December, but have nothing to add at this time."

Beta Testers Approve

Andrew Nystrom, "social media Dude" for RedBull, and Brad Nelson, social media at Starbucks, both confirmed on Twitter in response to this report that they are beta testing the analytics service and are finding it "very useful."

Note that both of these companies are participants in Twitter's sponsored Tweets program. If only advertisers are allowed to use Twitter analytics, instead of analytics being open to everyone in order to encourage advertisement, that's going to make a whole lot of people unhappy.

Beyond Broadcast

Those Twitter-using companies will be served poorly, however, if they focus exclusively on a quantitative analysis of Twitter's business worth as a broadcast mechanism. As a living, breathing real-time conversation, participated in by leading innovators and business people throughout many sectors, Twitter probably offers the most business value as a listening and business development tool.

None the less, many organizations will be very excited to see an analytics dashboard if it is implemented well.

It's not hard to imagine an analogy that works like this: Twitter analytics for Free is to Twitter advertising, as Google Analytics for Free is to Google advertising.