Sunday, December 19, 2010

Social Adoption by Enterprises

What social technologies and tools do enterprises view as most important, and what kind of investments do organizations plan to make in Web 2.0 in the future? This McKinsey presentation tries to answer the questions.  The survey examines business use of 12 technologies and tools: blogs, mash-ups (a Web application that combines multiple sources of data into a single tool), microblogging, peer to peer, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.


http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431?pagenum=1#interactive

Is 2011 the Year for Social Commerce?

Facebook has 600 million users worldwide, and about 140 million of those users in the United States. Facebook reports that about 50 percent of those users check the site every day.

Time on Facebook represents about 25 percent of time spent on line (11 hours a week for the average user), now cannibalizing time spent on line doing things like reading news and other online media, instant messaging and emailing, thanks in part, to entrepreneurs who have developed applications that keep users on the site more of the time.

Brands already use Facebook for branding and customer interactions. Can mobile and online commerce be too far away?

Is 2011 the Year for Social Commerce?


One Wonders Whether Many Charging Methods Will be "Legal," after Dec. 21

Packet priorities obviously raises hackles in some quarters, but there also is no question service providers are anxious to add value to their broadband access services, or services provided by their partners. One wonders how many of the possible techniques will be permissible after Dec. 21, 2010, at least temporarily, while the legal challenges are sorted out.

This webinar highlights the benefits of deep packet inspection, policy management and new differentiated charging solutions, especially in the wireless domain. In principle, some of the techniques are borrowed from the ways service providers have created incentives for users to shift some voice usage to non-peak hours.

Orange leads NFC charge in Europe - Rethink Wireless

Orange, the key France Telecom brand, has announced that it will roll out near field communications-enabled handsets across its whole European Union footprint starting in the second half of 2011.

These phones can be used to pay for goods by wanding the devices near special retail terminals. Orange will kick off its initiative in its home base of France, and among its postpaid user base. It expects to have 500,000 French customers equipped with NFC by the end of 2011.

Orange told handset vendors at a meeting that it aimed to see NFC included in over half the new smartphone models it buys next year. Orange is the first European operator to make such a clear commitment to the development of mobile contactless services.

One Reason Online Privacy Rules Are Coming


An examination of 101 popular smartphone apps by the Wall Street Journal show that that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Not everybody would think that especially intrusive.

Some 47 apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

Apple says that iPhone apps can’t transmit user data without approval, but the WSJ’s findings reveal many apps that don’t follow that rule. Google leaves it up to app makers to make users aware of the data their apps reveal. Android also gives users specific notes about the phone resources (including hardware and data) apps will use before they’re downloaded.

Unfortunately, there’s little users can do to protect themselves from data-sharing apps, aside from avoiding many popular apps entirely, the report suggests. Many mobile ad companies let users opt-out of their website tracking, but those opt-out lists don’t apply to apps, according to the WSJ. The ad company Jumptap says iPhone users can opt out of app data sharing by emailing their phone’s user ID to them. Apple says its iAd opt-out also applies to apps (but doesn’t prevent iTunes data from being collected).

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them, and suggest why there will be growing political pressure to toughen online privacy, and mobile privacy by extension, if not formal and specific rules relating to mobile data.

read more here if you aren't a Wall Street Journal subscriber.

Anonymous Anything Is a Problem

Washington Post readers constantly complain about the excessive use of anonymous sources in the newspaper. But the problem is even worse online, according to the newspaper's ombudsman.

"Staff-written news blogs are replete with violations of The Post's long-established and laudable standards governing confidential sources," Andrew Alexander, Washignton Post ombudsman says. "These unnamed sources often are cited without providing readers with even a hint of their reliability or why they were granted anonymity."

In the first two weeks of December alone, Post news blogs included more than 20 unnamed sources without any explanation of their quality or why they warranted confidentiality, says Alexnder. Many blogs referred only to 'sources' or 'those close to' a subject or situation.

In some ways, use of such sources is an occupational hazard. Some sources will say things only if they are not quoted or identified, and the technique remains an important way some news gets out. But such leaks typically always have an agenda.

Some might say the problem is even worse for anonymous comments and posts online, which tend to encourage rude behavior. Some will argue anonymous comments, posts or statements, though sometimes useful, are overused.

Visa Talks About Mobile Payments

Zoom Wants to Become a "Digital Twin Equipped With Your Institutional Knowledge"

Perplexity and OpenAI hope to use artificial intelligence to challenge Google for search leadership. So Zoom says it will use AI to challen...