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One of the emerging trends of the Mobile Web is using your phone to interact with the real world. We're not just talking about 'checking in' to locations, either. There's a world of more practical functionality that hasn't yet ramped up in the West - using your phone as a payment device (for example mobile ticketing ), getting special offers from retailers, downloading data from the Web via 'smart posters' on the street, and more. A key technology driving some of these interactions is NFC, which was one of Gartner's 8 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2010 . It's a technology that you ought to become familiar with; whether you're a technologist, a marketer, or a consumer looking to make the best use of your smart phone (and aren't we all!). So in this post we give you an overview of what to expect from NFC. Sponsor What NFC is & Why You Should Care As we explained earlier this year , NFC (Near Field Communication) is a short-range communication technology for mobile phones. It's similar to Bluetooth and has a range of about 10 centimeters. There are three main use cases, according to its Wikipedia entry : Card emulation: the NFC device behaves like an existing contactless card; Reader mode: the NFC device is active and reads a passive RFID tag, for example for interactive advertising; P2P mode: two NFC devices are communicating together and exchanging information. Using the phone to emulate a smart card means that it can be a deployed as a payment device (similar to a credit card), identity card, security device, and more. This type of functionality is already common in Asia, but it hasn't yet taken off in the States. Using the phone as a reader allows the phone to interact with RFID-enabled objects in the real world, for example posters embedded with chips that connect to mobile web sites or applications. NFC in Mobile Phones & Services For these use cases to become a widespread reality, an NFC chip must be pre installed in most mobile devices. According to Dan Butcher from Mobile Commerce Daily , this probably won't happen until 2011 at the earliest. One issue is that NFC is not a current feature of the iPhone or Android, the tools of choice for many Web early adopters. However one handset manufacturer is showing the way with NFC: Nokia . Its Nokia 6131 NFC phone can be used as a credit card, travel card, loyalty card and a "multi-purpose smart card." Along with NFC handsets, NFC-enabled services will arise for applications such as mobile payments. As BusinessWeek reported recently , Alcatel-Lucent has announced a new mobile payment hosting service for mobile operators, in partnership with payments systems specialists Clear2Pay and PingPing. However, the article noted that other emerging mobile payment services aren't using NFC - including Nokia Money and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's new business Square ( our review ). NFC Has its Issues, But Also The Momentum... There are issues with NFC, perhaps the biggest being its limited range. In order for NFC to work, you need to hold your mobile phone close to the RFID tag or reader device. An alternative that has a longer range is DASH7 , which we'll review in an upcoming post. However NFC holds the most promise for delivering contactless mobile payments to consumers, along with other real world use cases. Image credit: nicolasnova Discuss
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NFC: Never Mind Credit Cards, Pay With Your Phone
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Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today. Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways. Sponsor We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark ) Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report: Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics. Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots. Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010 , even a year and a half after it launched. We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web ( our coverage ) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move. A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages. Take that, semantic web doubters. We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Discuss
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Paul Allen Backed Semantic Service Evri Has Been Acquired
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In just a couple more days, a healthy section of the RWW team - and a good number of our friends and fans - will be convening in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. A couple of us have been asked to speak on panels; we wanted to share that information with you and ask you to share your panels and talks with us (and the rest of our readers, too). Leave a comment telling us - and the rest of the world - about your SXSW Interactive panel. Let us know who's going to be talking and what you're talking about, plus where and when to show up. We're sure you'll find a few kindred spirits who'd love to attend and ask questions - and maybe offer some pre-show feedback for tweaking your notes! Sponsor Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick will be moderating a panel with Scott Raymond of Gowalla, Brett Slatkin of Google, Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft and Jack Moffitt of Collecta - talk about an all-star cast! - on real-time technology. Marshall's especially suited to this task since he's the man behind RWW's mammoth state-of-the-industry report, The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Here are the gory details: Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? "The emergence of the real-time web enables an unprecedented level of user engagement and dynamic content online. However, the rapidly growing audience puts new, complex demands on the architecture of the web as we know it. This panel will discuss what is needed to make the real-time web achievable." When : Saturday, March 13, 11:00 am Where : Hilton H And I, Jolie O'Dell, will be moderating a panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and startup incubator-types on whether or not startups need traditional, Sand Hill Road VC in the first place. Sure to be contentious, this panel is something I've been looking forward to for a while, and I hope you'll make it out! I'll be talking with Mike Trotzke of SproutBox, Mitch Lasky of Benchmark Capital and Dave McClure of the Founders' Fund. Who Needs Venture Capital? "Only a fraction of business financing comes from Sand Hill Road. Yet entrepreneurs still obsess over traditional big meeting/big money Silicon Valley venture capital. This heated panel debates what types of companies actually benefit from VC and reviews concrete examples of alternatives to traditional venture capital." When : Monday, March 15, 12:30 pm Where : Hilton D Also, for those of you who read along last year during my cross-country travels through the tech scenes in Nashville , Omaha , Chicago , New York and beyond, there's the RoadTwip core conversation with our brothers-in-tech Dave Delaney and Kurt Daradics (also a co-founder of CitySourced ). RoadTwip "Last Spring, three kids set out in one car for two weeks. Their mission was to discover the emerging future for a new America, one town at a time. While they captured and produced plenty of content along their roadtwip.' The most valuable thing was the relationships they established. This panel is about getting out of dodge, it's about going offline - where true friendships are solidified. In the flesh." When : Friday, March 12, 5:00 pm Where : Austin Convention Center 8A Those are our panels! What do you think so far? And please do share the details about your - or your friends' - panels in the comments. Discuss
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Open Thread: Pitch Your Panel for SXSW!
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Socialtext is one of the smarter companies we cover in the enterprise space. The people there have an intellectual bent. Co-Founder Ross Mayfield is a thought leader and one of the original pioneers of the social Web. He's one of the thought leaders. And the CEO, Eugene Lee, is one of the more eloquent people we run across in the interviews we do. Socialtext came into the market in 2002, long before blogs bloomed and years ahead of what we know of as the real-time web. As a result, they have an established client base. They were one of the first, if not the very first, to offer wiki technology as an enterprise product. Sponsor Today, they announced a new version of its software: Socialtext 4.0. It's a far cry from its original technology. This is the era of the real-time web. And Socialtext has had to adapt. Socialtext has done a pretty decent job of keeping up with the pace, which seems to be quickening in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Most noteworthy is its new group capabilities. It's like a threaded, real-time stream. Groups can be organized so there are main group hubs with additional groups that come out of it. Group can be public or private. We are seeing this kind of approach more often from companies like Yammer, Socialcast and Jive Software. It just makes sense. A real-time stream is useless if it is one river of news. You need to channel the real-time flow so you can see its context. It's why people use desktop products like Tweetdeck to follow Twitter. By setting up channels, you can follow specific communities and keep in context the real-time stream flowing by you at any one moment. In the enterprise, the needs are different. You need more capabilities so groups can interact and people can move quickly between conversations. Mayfield takes it a step further. He says Socialtext is making it ridiculously easy to add groups. Of course he has a vested interest in promoting Socialtext. But true to his roots, he traces the concept back to the early days of the social Web, providing context for where we are today: "Back around the time in which social software was defined and when we started enterprise social software, Seb Paquet introduced the notion of Ridiculously Easy Group-Forming . Weblogs have a potential for group-forming like no other medium. However I'm convinced that much of it to this day remains untapped. I'd like to explain an idea that I have been bouncing around for a while. It might well be a reformulation of what others have said previously. I believe that implementing this properly would give a nice boost to the blogosphere's social aggregation capability. Basically the goal is to push the threshold for group creation to an unprecedented low. I think Reed's Law should be refined to state: The value of a group-forming network increases exponentially with the number of people in the network, and in inverse proportion to the effort required to start a group." That's a context for anyone to consider in the enterprise space these days. Discuss
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Socialtext, Groups and the Context of the Social Web
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Today, Twitter took the wraps off a new feature of the site. When logging in, it prompts the user to set defaults on being discovered with their email address or mobile phone number. It's called "Be Found on Twitter". Our contact at Twitter told us that, like many new features, this will show up for some users today and others soon. Up to this point, Twitter allows people to create a persona for themselves that may not be directly correlated to the real world. You can't do that on Facebook (assuming that you're following the terms and conditions). This change in settings - even if it is optional - represents a shift in how the service is working behind the scenes to connect people that already know each other. Personal data is moving in between the social networks and becoming a key part of cloud services. Sponsor Do You Want Followers? Default Settings Make it a Reality So far, Twitter hasn't offered a way to make this kind of connection easy. We believe the reason this service is being offered now is simple: Twitter wants to take your email inbox and turn it into relationships. Below is the screen that popped up for Web client users of Twitter that are being offered this enhancement. (Note: Those are my personal email and mobile phone digits, but I chose to opt-out of the service. In case you want to contact me , email is still an option.) Thinking a bit into the future, perhaps Twitter will offer to take my email folders and auto-magically create lists of users from the email accounts and phone numbers in them. This all gets interesting in the context that Twitter lists are viewable to the outside world - and inbox settings are not. There still seems like more work to do to make this all make sense, but for now, it seems to be somewhere between Buzz and Facebook's approach to connecting users to their intimate relationships. The Reverse of Buzz, or, Do Memes have Cellphones We can see the motivation for Twitter to launch this feature. One of the challenges the service has is also its greatest feature: no rules. Anyone, anything can have an account today: devices, dogs, spacecraft, germs, conferences. All of 'em are out there somewhere and are one button away from being in your feed. Something to think about in this mixed model of accounts, is that although the settings on Twitter are now moving towards discovering email and phone numbers for our contacts, we don't expect the Cassini Saturn spacecraft to have a mobile phone number. Although Twitter is amazing for finding information about the world in real time, one of the things that Twitter has lacked is stickiness with intimate contacts. Trying to get folks use Twitter to connect to their real friends, people they work with, and family members is a part of the battle for the real-time Web. Facebook has unique features and momentum in this area (e.g. requiring your real name), and Google Buzz made a big move in connecting the inbox for millions of Gmail users to its social service. API Makes it Harder to Create Harmonized Settings for Users This is a great example of where Twitter, being so decentralized, has to rely on partners to roll out these types of features. Traditional Web users see these features offered by the company, but others - Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Tweetie - may not ever offer this feature in their client. One thing to watch will be how Twitter evolves the terms of service and default settings as it ramps up its efforts to compete further for mind share in the real-time web. Taking this all into consideration, do you want to be found on Twitter? Discuss
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Be Found on Twitter: Connecting Our Dots in the Social Graph
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