Airline to Speed Check-ins with Stickers; NFC App Likely to Follow

Scandinavian Airlines will issue contactless stickers to its top frequent fliers, enabling them to check in faster at the airlines self-service kiosks, lounges and gates.

SAS plans to issue the passive contactless stickers to 50,000 of its "EuroBonus Gold members" starting in September 2011. They could attach the stickers to the back of their phone and tap them on readers at the kiosks, lounges and boarding gates or other check-in points to automatically transmit their membership numbers. The system would be able to identify the customers and call up their flight details more quickly.

Airline to Speed Check-ins with Stickers; NFC App Likely to Follow

LightSquared may seek FCC deadline extension

LightSquared appears to be looking for a two-week extension to file its report with the Federal Communications Commission on interference issues. The company appears to think it needs until July 1, 2011 to file the report, because all the information required for the report had not yet been submitted.

'There's a lot of work to be done today," said LightSquared spokesman Chris Stern. "We don't have all the data." Apparently, eight different working groups are involved in putting the report together.

LightSquared may seek FCC deadline extension | Reuters

SoLoMo (social, location, and mobile) is About Annotation of the Real World

"Location," like "social," is one of those buzzwords whose implications often are missed. Location isn't just a point of interest on a Google map. The next generation of mobile will be capable of interacting with every aspect of a consumer's experience in store, factory, or business process. In other words, the location information will be used to correlate online resources to real people as they move about, outside or inside a retail location, some believe.

The same sort of thing will happen as software becomes more social. Lots of people think "social" means "social networking." Sometimes it does, but the larger point is that collaboration and history are the key elements of a "social" application. Rankings, ratings, reviews, visits, "likes," bookmarks and retweets are some of the ways people indicate that something is valuable, useful or interesting. It is annotation of the real world.

And that's the important thing about location and social. Mobile happens to be important because the mobile device is both a sensor and a display that always is with a person, allowing the annotation to be activated.

A survival guide to SoLoMo

How to Encourage Mobile App Discovery

Mobile apps are used as marketing tools by many brands, but they need to be marketed themselves in order for app users to find and then download them.

Mobile app users depend heavily on word-of-mouth and social media. May 2011 research from MTV Networks found that recommendations from people they know and user reviews or recommendations were nearly tied as the top factor in discovering a new entertainment app for purchase or free download.

How to Encourage Mobile App Discovery and Usage - eMarketer

Gary Vaynerchuk: “99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns”

Most of us would not go this far, but entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk believes "99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns.” That's a logical consequence of his belief that we are i the early stages of a social media bubble.

Gary Vaynerchuk: “99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns”

Americans Watching More TV, Mobile and Web Video

Americans are spending more time watching video content on traditional TVs, mobile devices and the Internet than ever before, Nielsen reports. (Click twice on the image for a larger view).

Overall TV viewership increased 22 minutes per month per person over last year, remaining the dominant source of video content for all demographics. In addition, Nielsen data shows that consumers are willing to pay for high-quality TV content, with broadcast-only homes less than a tenth of U.S. TV households.

Though still accounting for just a handful of hours per month, mobile video viewing continues to see marked gains, increasing 41 percent over last year and more than 100 percent since 2009.

Timeshifted TV continues to grow, both in the penetration of DVR devices in the home and the time spent.

Internet video streaming also saw increases in time spent; this behavior is the highest among a younger and diverse subset of the population.

Cross Platform Report: Americans Watching More TV, Mobile and Web Video | Nielsen Wire

Search is Increasingly Social

SEOmoz has released their 2011 search engine ranking factors and while some facets of ranking well remain consistent, social seems to be emerging as an increasingly crucial part of the search rank formula. That's one argument for increasing use of social features and networks as part of an overall effort to improve search rankings.

The Future of Search is Increasingly Social