Looks like Nokia are sponsering a maemo.org device program giving away a total of 100 Nokia N9s and N950s for Coding and Community activities.

One of the goals of this program is to help reducing the list of missing apps (or alternatives & related features)

 

Read on for the full information and links:

As discussed in the [maemo-community] list,

http://wiki.maemo.org/Summer%2712_Device_Program

Nokia is sponsoring a maemo.org device program consisting of 60 Nokia N9 + 40 Nokia 950 with free delivery.

One of the goals of this program is to help reducing the list of missing apps (or alternatives & related features).

The devices will be distributed through 4 activities:

• 25 devices for the maemo.org Coding Competition.
• 25 devices for the maemo.org Community Awards.
• 25 devices for existing community apps being published at the Nokia Store.
• 25 devices for Qt 5 mobile projects.

75% of these devices should be in the hands of their new owners by the end of June. The Coding Competition runs through the Summer and the prizes will be awarded at the end.

The details of each of these programs are being discussed as we speak.

The Coding Competition planning can be followed here. The discussion about the Community Awards started mildly in the mailing list but it seems that it will be one of the tasks taken by the newly elected Council. I will start the discussion about the New Apps @ Nokia Store + Qt 5 Mobile Projects in this thread, right away.

PS: I just invented the name, feel free proposing anything better if you feel the urge.

Source Maemo.Org

Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April.

That’s a nice little bump but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to lock-up period. Plus, shares may pop tomorrow and their value will probably fluctuate a lot by the time six-month lock-up date hits. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.

Originally, Facebook said the deal was going to close by the end of June, according to its IPO filing. But now it appears that it may take longer because of a more thorough FTC investigation. There’s a requisite investigation if a deal is more than $66 million. But because of the more than $1 billion price that Facebook paid and the reach of both companies, the commission is said to be looking a little bit more closely at the deal, a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. The FTC usually doesn’t publicly confirm investigations until they’re over, and hasn’t publicly confirmed if they’re doing one on this deal.

But there is evidence that it’s taking longer than expected. Facebook changed its IPO filing earlier this month by amending a sentence projecting a second quarter close for the Instagram deal. It now forecasts a close sometime by the end of the year. If the government blocks the deal, Facebook has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million kill fee, according to its IPO filing.

Because of this, Instagram’s dozen or so employees haven’t even started at Facebook. They’re still in limbo and they’re working from their San Francisco headquarters on the app, instead of Facebook’s Menlo Park office. Meanwhile, Facebook is also trying to improve its own mobile offerings; it recently boosted the size of photographs in the mobile news feed, making the overall experience more Instagram-like.

While the deal is ultimately expected to go through, a Facebook-Instagram acquisition poses several challenges for the FTC. For one, the FTC’s merger guidelines happen to focus a lot on pricing power, and how a merger would affect a company’s ability to raise prices and decrease output. But both Facebook and Instagram give their products away for free.

The other components of the FTC and Department of Justice’s guidelines have to do with market share. They’ll add up the square of different market shares for competing firms, creating a number called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. If it’s above 2500, then the market is highly concentrated. If it’s below 1500, then it’s unconcentrated.

But again, it’s not clear how this applies in a market where companies can rise and fall so quickly. Instagram basically appeared out of nowhere. It racked up nearly 40 million users in about 18 months. Plus, the time it takes for any given company to gain millions of daily active users is declining, partly because of the virality of the Facebook platform itself and then because the iOS and Android platforms are finally reaching scale.

So how do you apply a formula like this when changes in market share are so dynamic? The last time the FTC took a close look at a consumer web deal of this size, it was back in 2009 with the $750 million Google-Admob acquisition. The commission unanimously closed it after Apple entered the competitive field with its acquisition of rival mobile ad network Quattro, which became iAd. However, there hasn’t been a smartphone app deal of comparable size to Instagram — yet.

Technology and innovation simply don’t stop. Taking over more “human-performed” tasks every day, software is making our everyday lives easier when it comes to performing repetitive and time-consuming tasks. But could the day when technology gradually replaces us in the artistic and intellectual tasks be upon us? Can a photographer be replaced by software? The debate is now open…

 

Well, the sun came out where I live this week, and to celebrate I’ve jumped into Emanuelle’s shoes to bring you this Week in Pictures. There’s a heap to bring you, so let me get cracking!

via timesunion

1. Cannes Film Festival

The 65th Cannes Film Festival started this week in the sunny (presumably) South of France, and to celebrate a massive building-size poster of Marilyn Monroe was unveiled (continuing the Marilyn theme that Emanuelle started last week).

2. Wax Queen

No, someone isn’t painting the Queen’s nose while she sits motionless. It’s one of the best and most detailed waxworks I’ve seen, produced by Tussauds to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. This is the 23rd waxwork that they have made of Her Majesty, and cost a staggering £150,000. That’s one expensive candle.

via Guardian

3. Merry-Go-Round

A little joy in an otherwise not so happy story for these children who have been displaced from their homes due to fighting in their villages. The juxtaposition of having a makeshift entertainment park in the middle of a refugee zone is a very moving image.

via Globe and Mail

4. 121-megapixel Earth

Captured in a single image (as opposed to previous efforts that have been composites) this image is a single shot, 121 megapixel photo that used both visible and infrared light sources. Areas that would usually be green are seen using infrared as brown, hence the unusual coloration. Neat though, right?

via News To Talk

5. Lightning/Rainbow Combo

Snapping a photo of lightning is notoriously difficult, and this pic from China not only manages to capture twin bolts spreading their fingers but also includes a rainbow. The patience, positioning and speed of shutter finger to take this image must have been phenomenal. Or extremely lucky.

via Daily Telegraph

So that’s the week in pictures. If you want to see any event featured here next week (or the week after), or you see a snap in the next days that you think deserves a place, drop me a link in the comments.

Hey, we’re all creative, right? But what differentiates my papier-mâché Halloween masks or your colourfully crocheted undergarments from the Nobel Prize-winning artworks of somebody like, say, Ernest Hemingway? Well, maybe Ernest was just a little stranger than you or me. New studies show that both creativity and eccentricity may be the result of genetic variations that increase the brain’s ability to filter out useless distractions and just get on with it. Well, Papa certainly got on with it – but just how peculiar was he?

Get Up, Stand Up

Hemingway had a study, sure – a specially-made square tower, if you don’t mind – but he did most of his writing in his bedroom. Half of that room was given over to his desk, but even that’s not where he worked, oh, no: Hemingway’s trusty typewriter actually sat on top of yet another bookcase – what he called his ‘work desk’. And lest you think he pulled up a chair to pound the keys, think again: Hemingway preferred to work standing up, spending hours and hours at a time on his feet, moving only to shift his weight from one leg to the other. He’d wear down seven pencils in a good day’s work. And who says writing isn’t manual labour?

 Mind Your Defence

When he wasn’t writing, Hemingway was fishing – and nobody better mess with his catch. During one fishing trip in the Bahamas in 1961, he – rather unconventionally – opened fire on a shoal of sharks with a Thompson submachine-gun to stop them scavenging the humungous fish he’d just landed – but ended up shooting himself in both legs instead. Oops.

Eye Spy

Graham Greene wasn’t half the Man in Havana as our Ernest. In 1942, Hemingway, known for his anti-Fascist politcs, set up a real-life intelligence network, nicknamed the Crook Factory, to keep an eye on pro-Franco and pro-Hitler agents in Cuba. The FBI disbanded them after less than a year, but still – how’s that for fieldwork?

Ready, Aim

Hemingway’s about as famous for his hunting exploits as he is for his fishing (or his books) – but did you know that, in 1940, just after finishing For Whom The Bell Tolls, Papa went out with his third wife and two of his kids and killed four hundred jackrabbits in a single day? And, at just the tender age of three, he not only killed a porcupine, but also ate it at the bequest of his father. Now that’s commitment.

Get It From Your Parents

Speaking of parents – if it’s genetic variation that’s knocking out these eccentric geniuses, their elders surely ought to be examined, too. Hemingway’s mama had her own quirks: determined to get young Ernest playing a musical instrument, she once kept him out of school for an entire year to learn the cello. Did it work? Not a chance. Hemingway says, ‘That cello—I played it worse than anyone on earth’.

Good thing he ploughed on with the prose, eh? But how about you? Have any strange habits, which fuel your creativity? Let us know in the comments below.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier’s new data share plans.

In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work.

First thing’s first — Verizon still intends to make those pesky (for them, anyway) unlimited data plans a thing of the past, they’ll just be doing it more gradually than originally anticipated.

That said, subscribers currently clinging to their unlimited data plans can actually keep them in certain cases. If you’re a customer who just upgraded from a 3G to a 4G device with that older data plan intact, congratulations — you’ll be able to hang on to it until the next time you waltz into a Verizon store to upgrade your smartphone.

Furthermore, customers who pay the full outright price for their handsets will be able to keep their unlimited plans as well, though that’s hardly anything new for them — by buying the device outright, you’re able to dodge another multi-year contract extension. As far as Verizon seems to be concerned, you’re fine unless you take them up on the offer of a discounted device (and the contract that goes with it):

“When we introduce our new shared data plans, Unlimited Data will no longer be available to customers when purchasing handsets at discounted pricing.”

That little “discounted pricing” proviso is an interesting one — does that mean customers would be able to hold onto those unlimited plans if they opted to pay full price for devices from now on? It certainly seems that way, though I can’t imagine too many people would be eager to take them up on that deal considering how damned expensive smartphones are without that nifty little subsidy to help out. Still, the option seems to be there for anyone who doesn’t mind spending gobs of money to prove a point.

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Outbox is a new service that is changing the way we think about snail mail. Currently in Beta, Outbox intercepts your mail from the United States Postal Service, discreetly opens it and then scans it for you to see immediately. The beautifully designed site helps you organize your mail by any category you want to create: bills, cards, taxes etc. They will even scan entire catalogs and upload them for you to flip through. To sign up just go to their website and request an invite. What do you think? Would you use a service like this, or would you feel uncomfortable letting other people go through your mail? Be sure to let us know your thoughts below.

We’ve all heard of recycling, but now there’s a new phenomenon sweeping the world – upcycling. What is this strange word, you ask, and what am I supposed to do with it? Read on and all will be revealed…

Felt hearts made from upcycled woollen jumpers, via quinceandquire

Upcycling is, quite simply, the process of turning old materials or waste products into a new product that is of better value than the original. You’ve probably seen those bags made of newspapers and sweet wrappers (if you haven’t, where have you been!), but what is this new phenomenon, and how can you get involved? I spoke to Italian designer Gianluca Gimini about his upcycling project to turn toothbrushes into coloured pens – here’s what he said:

What is upcycling?

‘Upcycling is a way of helping a product directly into a second life. Many products are made of compound materials which will eventually need to be separated and sorted, then brought to a mouldable state so they can go back into the production process from its very beginning. Giving things a second chance before they have to go through all this is poetic and – if properly done – also environmentally friendly.’

What inspired you to start upcycling?

‘I started the rethINK project I was living in Shanghai… Consumerism is really big over there and at the time I used to walk through two rubbish dumps every day on my way to work and in one of them they used to sort all kinds of scrap material from iron to plastic bottles and used-up fireworks. So I started looking at all my rubbish from a different point of view and decided I would keep my used toothbrushes just because the handles were still brand new: initially I had no idea what I was going to do with them.’

Pens made from upcycled toothbrushes, via gianlucagimini

Is upcycling an alternative to recycling?

‘I don’t see upcycling as an alternative to recycling: you can’t upcycle for ever. But still, it can help postpone that (energy consuming) moment. In my opinion it should be done only if it’s really worth it both from an environmental point of view and from a “designer’s” point of view: if it can’t be turned into a useful/desirable object  or if it takes too much of an effort to do so, it should just be taken to the recycle-bin.’

What advice would you give someone who wanted to start upcycling?

‘The main risk is probably ending up with something that looks as if it were made with garbage… My advice is to look around you and see what is available. When you have spotted two or three candidates then you can start thinking about what can be made with them based on the characteristics of the material. For example I had some small colored toothbrush handles that were very suitable for writing from an ergonomic point of view: colored pens seemed logical and it didn’t require much work, actually just a drill and some refills for ball point pens. So my advice is to always try to exalt the properties of the object you are starting from, never to hide them!’

There’s pretty much no limit to what you can upcycle – old clothes, furniture, packaging, food waste, mobile phones… You could even turn used umbrellas into waterproof dog coats like this one here:

via Taryn Zychal

Inspired? Have you tried your hand at upcycling? Send us your pictures of upcycled items @Nokia_Connects!

 

For those of us who are looking at the stars wondering why gravity is keeping them so far from their intergalactic dreams, well a team of researchers from the MIT might have come up with part of a solution. Using fine-tuned electromagnetism allows manipulating levitating orbs. You might be thinking, what’s the point? Many applications could derive from this innovation including next-gen UI… Click the link above for the full story!

 

 

Everyme, the Y Combinator-backed mobile startup that helps users create groups for private sharing, is launching a whole bunch of new stuff today.

For starters, it’s releasing apps for both Android and the Web. Co-founder Vibhu Norby says both products have the same features as the iPhone app. On the Android side, Norby says “worked really hard” to create an app that was designed for the platform, rather than just porting over the iPhone app.

On the Web side, Norby notes that it’s unusual for “mobile-first companies like ours” to build more than a bare bones website pointing to the mobile app. But Everyme isn’t a normal mobile company — even though its initial product was a mobile app, it also allowed users to participate in groups through text messaging and emails. Norby says it was important that someone who got an Everyme email on their desktop or laptop computer could follow the link and join the conversation right now.

The company also made some improvements to the iPhone app too. Groups on Everyme are called Circles, and Norby says the process for creating them was “pretty bad.” Now the process has been streamlined, so you can add or remove people from circles with just a couple of taps. The invite process has been too. Previously, if you added someone to a circle who wasn’t already a member of Everyme, they wouldn’t know about it until they joined the app, or until someone shared a story in the circle. Now if you add a non-member to a circle, you can turn invites on to notify them by email or text.

One of the cooler features is something called Magic Stories, where the app automatically generates Everyme updates based on updates from your other social networks. Today it’s adding Instagram integration, so if you post a popular photo on Instagram, it will be shared in Everyme too.

Last month, Everyme’s team said that there were 200,000 people in Everyme circles. Now Norby tells me there 400,000. You don’t need to be a registered user to be added to a circle, so that doesn’t necessarily reflect the app’s current activity levels. In fact, I was a little skeptical since the circles I’ve created or joined are pretty barren, but Norby says it’s more designed for “non-tech folks” who don’t want to share everything on public social networks. For those users, Everyme seems to take the place of texting or calling. And they’ve shared 100,000 stories and 30,000 photos.

 
The waiting is over, the Beta to Wazapp has been released. Wazapp 0.1.6 for the Nokia N9 is out as a public beta and downloadable from http://www.wazapp.im 

Please report any bugs to tarek[at]wazapp[dot]im and join the Discussion at Talk Maemo.

Some screens:
 

 
Some FAQ:

How long do I have to wait if registration fails? 
Registration failure error has a number like “fail-too-recent::X”, X is the number of minutes you have to wait before trying again.

Will I still receive notifications when I close it?
-If you close wazapp by swipe down or from tasks window, it will remain running in background and you will receive notifications normally. If you close wazapp using the “Quit” button, it will totally exit and you won’t be notified about new messages

Does it support media sending (images,sounds, location ..etc)?
-Not yet. If someone sends you media it will not show up on wazapp, and the sender will not receive a “delivered” receipt from you.

Does it support group conversations?
-It supports group conversations partially. If you already belonged to a group, you will be able to send and receive messages on it. Buy you cannot create a group and yoou can not join new groups. Oh and you won’t be able to identify the message sender in a group as well

Does it create an internet connection by itself?
-It uses the current internet connection and does not issue a new one automatically. If you disconnect, reconnect, Wazapp will restore its connection automatically.

Does it support emoji?
-No. And if someone sends you an emoji (smiley face), it would appear most probably as boxes. You might have seen similar behavior if you used Whatsapp on Symbian before it supported emoji

How does whatsapp fee and account expiry work on wazapp?
-Currently if your account expired you won’t be notified. Wazapp will not be able to connect without giving a reason.

Can I choose or change my password?
-No

How do I edit pushname ?
-From accounts settings in accounts manager

So here is a list of missing (and upcoming) whatsapp features:

• Fully functional group conversations
• Sending and receiving Media
• Sending emoji
• Blocking/unblocking

Known issues with this version:

• Splash screen is not swipable
• Auto registration code handling doesn’t always work
• Notifications won’t go away until you click it
• Chat item text max length is according to screen orientation where it was initially calculated
• Received duplicate messages are not discarded
• Chat bubbles don’t scroll correctly on virtual keyboard open/close

 
Thanks to @RobertHall for the headsup

Here’s an iPhone app for those moments when you’re wondering, “Okay, I’ve got some free time right now — what should I do?”

Weotta Go is actually the latest product from Weotta, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. At the time, the company had built a website that helped people make plans, such as figuring out where to eat dinner tonight. The iPhone app, on the other hand, is more focused on spontaneity — say you’re at work and want to find somewhere nearby to grab a sandwich, or you’ve just met up with some friends and don’t know where to head next.

So when you open up Weotta Go, the results are tailored to the time and location. For example, when Grant Wernick came by the TechCrunch office on Tuesday afternoon, the app showed us lots of nearby lunch spots. Then he changed the clock on his iPhone to later in the day, and we started to see happy hour recommendations. When I opened the app this morning, it listed coffee shops near my apartment in Noe Valley. You can also filter the results based on how far you’re willing to go (the narrowest filter is “2 blocks”), the price, the category (activities, attractions, coffees and sweets, food, and sporting events), and the context (is this just for guys, girls, kids, or a couple on a date?).

Even better, the app changes the results on-the-fly. Its recommendations are delivered as a stack of photos, which you can tap on for more information, drag down to save in a list, or swipe across to say that you’re not interested. As you do that, the list will change to show you more items in the categories that you’re interested in and less of everything else. After you’ve created a list of things you find promising, you can also share it with your friends via email.

Wernick says Weotta Go is built on top of the same platform that powers the company’s earlier products. (Eric Chin, a partner at Weotta investor Crosslink Capital, describes the company as sitting “at the intersection of a large and growing market…mobile, local, real-time, and big-data algorithms.”) The platform pulls unstructured data from across the Web, allowing it to create a more complete and accurate picture of a location. For example, Yelp can give you a star rating, plus a few basic descriptions and facts about a restaurant, but after that you have to just read through all the reviews and draw your own conclusions. Weotta, on the other hand, can look at the reviews and generalize about what type of restaurant it is and what kind of person/event it’s appropriate for.

The app also offers integrations with other services, like purchasing tickets from StubHub for a sporting event or from Fandango for a movie. However, Wernick says the affiliate model probably won’t be a big moneymaker. Instead, he sees partnering with enterprises who want access to Weotta’s data as the real business model.

You can download Weotta Go here. As for the planning product, Weotta Make Plans, Wernick says it has been taken temporarily offline in advance of the launch of a new version.

INTRO, the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is how it’s angling to become the “LinkedIn” of the social/local people-stalking space, is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With the iOS app‘s most recent update, due to roll out any day (minute?) now, INTRO is adding features that will allow members of groups to connect with each other, even going so far as to shut off networking with people outside of their preferred groups.

The company, which was already focused on professional (not social) networking, is integrating Meetup, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn groups for improved matching in the new app, as well as support for private groups, like membership clubs and entrepreneur networks, for example.

Explains INTRO Labs founder Anthony Erwin, “some people - particularly the power players, maybe’s it’s a top VC in New York, for example – still potentially want to network, but don’t want everyone jumping at them,” he says. “When they add themselves to a private network [in INTRO], they can switch off all other types of people connected to them.” In other words, INTRO will now help the big-time players do the networking on their own terms. That’s not a bad idea, actually.

The interesting thing about the introduction of this private networking feature is how it’s being rolled out. Instead of putting the burden on the user to configure this stuff in the settings, INTRO works with the network in question to automatically add INTRO users to the networks they’re a member of. Although seemingly a simple idea, doing so involves matching the user’s name, LinkedIn profile, email and location to the network’s private membership roster. Once a match has been made, a new section appears in the user’s profile section showing the badges of the networks they belong to.

(Note: if you’re interested in having a network set up for your organization, Anthony says he’s taking requests via email here:  ant@introlabs.net.)

Upon its initial launch, there are already 40 private networks available, mainly in New York and Londdon, which have the potential to reach to some 1.5 million members.

Also new with the app’s update is support for Twitter SSO, and, just in case the ambient location crown goes to another app (if such a crown ever exists), the company is working on an API, too. This could give INTRO more room to grow – for example, companies and organizations building their own apps for events or conferences could integrate ambient location features to connect attendees.

The update isn’t live in the App Store at the time of writing, but should be rolling out soon. In the meantime, you can grab  the current version of INTRO here.

T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they’ve got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers.

Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets.

The plans aren’t too shabby — longer term users can shell out $25 for 1.5GB of access per month, while paying $35 and $50 will net them 3.5GB and 5GB of sweet sweet wireless data per month respectively. On the other hand, if a user really doesn’t need to lean on an HSPA+ connection for very long, there’s also a 300MB pass that lasts one week that’ll set you back $15. Without that contract in tow though, expect to pay a bit more for the corresponding hardware (unless you’ve already got said gadgets laying around).

It goes without saying that T-Mobile offers slightly better deals to people willing to sign their wireless allegiance over the for the long term, but that’s the game you play when you don’t want a bill sitting in your mailbox every month for two years. At the very least, these new plans make their older prepaid counterparts look lousy in comparison — I wouldn’t be too thrilled if I had to pay $30 for one measly gigabyte of monthly bandwidth.

Parking lots are ugly. They are vast stretches of concrete and asphalt that are, frankly, an eyesore. What if you could beautify them with greenery and vegetation by turning the parking space dividers into a veritable Hanging Garden of Babylon? That’s exactly what Kevin Hsieh, an industrial design student at the California College of Arts set out to do. Hsieh created ParkPark, a series of vertical trellises that are capable of growing vegetation. Hsieh was inspired by the difficulty he found parking in a particular lot at his college. According to his personal portfolio site: “I decided to design a cheap and quick to deploy [sic] vertical gardening system that not only physically divide the parking spaces according to average U.S parking space dimensions, but also allows the students to “adopt” a spot. Each student is responsible for the vertical garden’s vegetation, and therefore making beautifying the parking lot a collective effort.” ParkPark is a uniquely simple and elegant solution to the parking lot problem. What do you think? Do you think something like this would work? Would people come together to help beautify a parking lot? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

TweetGLOBAL – In the old days I thought it was exciting that you could ‘get the news’ on your mobile. Little did I know that it’s much more fundamental than that. Now, like most people, reading on a mobile has transformed what I know, and how I find it out.  

Sometimes its great to filter through feeds and social networks to read about everything from mobile tech in Africa to moment by moment reports of WW2, but its also a bit overwhelming. 

There’s no longer some ‘news editor’ telling me that I need to read something important – I’ve got the freedom to judge that for myself. But the downside is that I’ve sometimes got to wade through all the boring and irrelevant stuff too.

My6sense isn’t the first newsreader app, but it does have an interesting ‘digital intuition engine’ that monitors the content – not just the headline – of what you actually open and read, and so should give you a more sophisticated output.

You can import all your feeds and favourite websites as well as Twitter and Facebook – and select the topics that you like.  

It’s easy and straightforward to use and add your social network accounts.

My6sense also filters by date, so you don’t get the same old information, and let’s you split your feeds and tweets into different areas – so you can separate out history, from current affairs, or sports.

If you read something you like, the app makes it easy to share it with everyone else on one of your social networks. 

It’s like flicking through a personalized digital magazine, with a content engine that’s fine-tuned to figuring out what you actually like to read, and if your preferences are changing. That takes a little time – the more you read on my6sense the quicker the ‘digital intuition engine’ gets to know you, and reaches ‘Lord of the Senses’ status.

My6sense says they aim to guide you through the “flood of content” until you reach the “jewels of the land.” Maybe it’s not quite like that, but it is like reading your own curated content, without having to do any of the heavy lifting.

By now, we’re pretty familiar with the term 4G LTE. But that in and of itself is somewhat surprising. It took 12 years for GSM wireless technology to reach one billion connections, and WCDMA took 11 years. But LTE will hit the same mark in just seven years of existence, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a brief explanation would be that LTE (or Long Term Evolution) is a fourth-generation wireless standard that provides users with faster data speeds, all the while making more efficient use of a carrier’s wireless spectrum.

We’ve already seen a plethora of LTE devices hit the U.S. market, and now that the technology is established in major markets like Korea, Japan, and the U.S., the growth trajectory for LTE will only continue to rise. Strategy Analytics expects over 90 million LTE connections to be activated before the end of 2012, and that figure should reach the 1 billion mark by 2017. This is far and away the fastest implementation of new wireless technology to date.

At the same time, however, previous technologies were born into a world with far fewer overall connections. LTE launched with over 6 billion connections in existence in the world, whereas CDMA was first revealed at a time when less than 1 billion connections had been activated.

“The race is on for mobile operators to reduce cost per GB to match the rate at which revenue per GB is falling,” said director of service provider analysis Sue Rudd, in a prepared statement. “LTE is one of the key tools to deliver this improvement, with the early volume in LTE devices an encouraging sign for operators looking to maximize return on their LTE investments.”

To her point, we certainly wouldn’t mind a reduction in data costs, considering that we’re more data hungry than ever and unlimited data has basically been nixed across the boards.

It was a stroke of marketing ‘genius’ that ensured some people (including none, some or all of us here at Nokia Connects) were talking about Dr. Dre’s performance at Coachella a few weeks ago for a short while – but what purpose did ‘reincarnating’ Tupac Shakur serve, and what can we expect from this technology in the future?

via Riverfront Times

It was great, yes, but you may have noticed the word ‘Hollowgram’ in the title of this post. That’s because it was a sham, a magician’s trick using (almost literally) smoke and mirrors. It wasn’t even real footage of Tupac but some (very expensive) CGI whipped up especially for the occasion. It wasn’t even true 3D as the ‘trick’ involved projecting the image onto a flat piece of glass. Hollow.

But, on the plus side, it made all these memes possible. My favourite (of course):

via Know Your Meme

So what’s next? How many more deceased artist reunions are we likely to see? Queen are going to try it, but what about The Beatles reunited? Nirvana? The Doors? Seriously, there could be a whole weekend festival line up. But Jason Rosenbaum over at Riverfront Times reckons that there is a whole legal minefield to be negotiated before anything like this could happen. Image rights issues, trademarks, copyright and more have to be cleared before anything like the Tupac stunt could happen again. But what about appearances from historical (non-musical) figures? Einstein delivering lectures, or Malcolm X?

What do I think? I think it might well have been a one-off, a gimmick that got the attention it was meant to. Job done, move on to the next innovation to get people celebs talking (warning: NSFW language). Anyone that does this now will be tarred with the ‘Yeah, but Dre and Snoop did that back in 2012′ brush. Maybe it will open the doors for something better, more lifelike (although I think the fans at Coachella were kind of impressed). Who knows? Only time, and the future, will tell….

Where do you see this technology taking us? Or do you think it’s dead already, a one-trick pony? Let us know your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments below, and see where the discussion takes us.

Eduardo Saverin may no longer be a U.S. citizen. But that’s not stopping him from investing in American companies.

In fact, he just closed a deal. He’s backing Crowdmob, a startup that’s blending app promotion with discounts from local merchants. The startup’s long-term ambition is to play in the mobile wallet space, where phones may eventually become a mainstream way of paying for real-world goods and services. (That is, if they can become easier to use than a credit card or cash.)

The company, which already took some earlier seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz, has a couple products up its sleeves. One is something they’re calling ‘Appy Meals,’ which combine a paid app for free with a discount on a real-world good like the Starbucks Frapuccino below. It kind of mimics the way you’d buy a hamburger and a get token toy, except that toy is now a digital one like a game.

Crowdmob’s co-founders Damon Grow, Alex Han and Matthew Moore, who is an ex-Googler, say that games are a good way to lure in consumers, who are already comfortable with using their phones to pay for apps or virtual currency. Games and social networking apps have the highest engagement on iOS and Android, according to research from mobile analytics companies like Flurry.

They’ve built several variations on the same idea of mixing real-world commerce with virtual goods. With another product, they take the same “appy meal” mechanic and apply it to in-app purchases instead of paid apps. Gamers can buy virtual currency and gift cards for real-world goods like Starbucks or movie tickets inside an app (see below).

Yet another variation on the concept called Loot lets gamers watch video ads in exchange for virtual currency that can be redeemed for gift cards. Loot was built because the team knew that only a small percentage of mobile app users actually pay for things in games. So there had to be a free alternative.

“Not everybody is going to pay because many users have limited budgets,” Grow said. “So we knew that we had to disrupt ourselves  by having a feature where consumers didn’t have to pay and that was Loot.”

All of this goes toward building a payments network. Whenever a user makes a purchase, they’ll be able to pay with their credit card or PayPal. Then they can redeem the deal with their phone, which will show a barcode, confirmation number or send an SMS (whatever the merchants’ preferences are). They’ll have to create a CrowdMob account, so that’s how the company picks up payments information on consumers to grow out a network for a mobile wallet. Users manage their rewards in this mobile wallet and it’s synchronous across all the user’s CrowdMob accounts, whether they earned a gift card through watching ads or purchased it as part of a virtual happy meal in another game.

“We want to win consumer mindshare,” said Moore. “Doling out all of these gift cards will help us get on more phones. When consumers redeem these, we’ll be able to show the merchant that we drove them to the store.”

Then there’s an open API lets any partner create tasks for users to earn credits. Merchants and gift card providers can also create their own rewards for users to redeem. Crowdmob earns a cut whenever they drive installs or purchases for a mobile developer or whenever they drive sales for a merchant.

The race to build a ‘mobile wallet’ is incredibly complicated right now. Google Wallet’s team fell apart over the last several months as the original technical team that built the product chafed with newer middle management brought over from Paypal. The carriers are collaborating on their own wallet offering called Isis, but when have the carriers ever cooperated on a successful consumer product? Then Visa recently introduced V.me and Mastercard launched its PayPass Wallet Services in the last month.

Saverin shied away from doing an interview for this story, but he did pass us this statement: “I really like the team at CrowdMob and their vision to create a mobile wallet that is embedded in an overall social loyalty platform where virtual and real goods can be exchanged; this platform is an important next step in a fully integrated mobile society.”

He did do an interview with The New York Times yesterday where he said his decision to relinquish his U.S. citizenship had nothing to do with the lower tax rates that Singapore has. Saverin has amassed a little bit of a portfolio here in the U.S. with investments in Jumio, ShopSavvy and Qwiki. Since all of these investments have happened in the last year or two, it’s still too early to tell how his deals will pan out. It will be nearly impossible to top the investment that made him a billionaire, but you can never rule anything out in this business..