Google Wave Extensions Gallery was rolled out today, in hopes to make it easier for users to discover and utilize the extensions that developers have been building on the real-time based collaboration platform. Google Wave got serious attention when it was first released, but invite-only access and limited usability slowed the spread of usage quickly.

The gallery contains extension installers which are visualized as puzzle pieces on the Wave navigation bar. To use an extension, the user must first install it, and it then appears as an icon in the editing toolbar or adds a drop-down area to the “New Wave” menu.

At this writing there are eighteen available extensions, including Sudoku, a Yellow Highlighter, Goo-gly URL shortener, gadgets for entering images and polls, and lot of other little games and creativity encouragers/time-wasters.

This trails the release of Robots API v2, a part of the Google Wave API announced on Tuesday, that gives developers tools that can push information into waves without relying on a user’s action, such as when the weather changes or a stock price falls. The tools, or robots, as they are referred to in the Google Wave developer blog, can be also be deployed based on context, filtering, error-reporting or by proxy from another non-Wave system.

Google Wave has too limited a user base for any marketing strategy to exist in earnest. It is possible that it may never be a stand-alone platform in the manner that Twitter became. Whether it does or not, the usability that is currently being developed for it can definitely be useful for brands.

The Take-Out Gadget extension, for example, currently lets a group of people in an office, classroom or dorm plan an order together. It also has a timer so that people know how much longer they have to make up their mind. This extension could easily be connected to corporate Wave account holders, so that the group connects with a restaurant in a Wave, and know what items are sold out, or a daily special.

In technology as in culture, when the traditional players take a page from the innovators’ playbook, one of two things generally happens.

The traditional player’s adoption of innovation can be so successful that it co-opts or even bests the innovators (remember back when Google’s acquisition of Twitter was inevitable? Remember Google Buzz?).

Or the opposite can happen, and traditional actors become plot points on the way to the paradigm shift (see: AOL, MySpace).

We don’t know if either of these scenarios will play out with Visa’s entry into PayPal’s space with Rightcliq, but PayPal, debit cards, waning customer confidence, micropayments, new legislation and even Gen Y are certainly chipping away at the credit card industry.

Visa’s Rightcliq “is an online shopping tool targeted to consumers that assists online shoppers by offering the ability to browse multiple merchants and select items consumers are interested in looking at in one central location, making comparison shopping easier,” Joseph Saunders, Visa’s chairman and CEO, said in an October 2009 conference call.

Rightcliq is essentially a place to collect your payment and delivery information. It allows users to collate a “Wishspace” where they can bookmark their desired purchases, comparison shop and e-mail product images to friends. In essence, it’s an emulation of PayPal, which has 81 million active accounts and whose recent partnership with Facebook brings aboard more than 300 million potential customers.

Rightcliq is currently available in beta. Not many details are available right now from Visa, but analysts expect a more robust version to be available in Spring.

Analysts see the move as an attempt to take a share from PayPal, according to Internet Retailer.

“It’s too early to tell if Visa is going to be a challenger,” said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp . “They can get the consumer usage piece, but working with SMBs and the stored-balance piece remain to be seen.”

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton today broke the news that Facebook will be incorporating location-based updates into users’ news feeds beginning next month.

According to Bilton’s sources, the social networking site will debut the location-based service at next month’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

The battle of location-based services is supposed to be one of the highlights of next week’s South by Southwest (SXSW), where Foursquare famously got its first bit of major buzz last year. Now, along with duking it out among themselves, Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown will have to take on the major players in social networking.

While Facebook’s move could definitely affect traffic to the other services, Bilton’s sources say that Facebook’s move is aimed not at other location-based social networks, but at Google’s local ads.

As far as Facebook goes, most of its audience are not early adopters, but have proven eager in the past to try out features culled from other services. One-quarter of Facebook users are already using the site on their mobile phones, so the user base for location-based social networking is already there. And since people are already logging in on the go, so there’s no extra steps required on their part.

Also built in is the market for any Facebook games that could be built on top of the technology.

While they’ve been getting a lot of buzz in geekier circles, location-based services have not yet caught on with mainstream users. As with Twitter last year, it’s only a matter of time before they do, and Facebook is perfectly positioned to bring location-based services to critical mass.

One of Facebook’s main strengths is that it acts as a clearinghouse for new social-networking technologies, so expect location-based services to accelerate in adoption when users of the one of the most powerful sites in the world start to play around with them.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who spends time in Society: people get addicted to iPhones.

Such is the conclusion of Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, based on a survey of 200 undergrads.

Twenty-five percent replied that the phone was “was an extension of their brain and being,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. Ten percent said they were ‘fully addicted,’ and a further thirty-two percent expressed concern that they could become addicted one day.

“One of the most striking things we saw in the interviews was just how identified people were with their iPhone,” Luhrmann told the Mercury News.

“It was not so much with the object itself, but it had so much personal information that it became a kind of extension of the mind and a means to have a social life,” Luhrmann said. “It just kind of captured part of their identity.”

Seventy-five percent said that buying the iPhone made them feel cool.

According to Luhrmann, many of the respondents have received complaints from their friends about their iPhone usage, and 7 percent replied that a roommate or partner had said they’d felt abandoned for the phone.

More and more studies are being published that claim that internet addiction exists, that it sort of simulates real addiction in that the thought of using it activates the pleasure centers in users’ brains in anticipation of reward – rewards that come increasingly fast with real-time.

The thing about smartphones is those potential rewards are always with you.

“I think we have not begun to understand the cognitive impact and the social impact” of these devices, Luhrmann said.

(Via: TechNewsDaily)

Digital distribution platform Steam has been dropping hints that they will be expanding support to Macs. The Valve Corporation’s online game store is one part of a company made famous for such popular video games such as Half-Life and Portal, the latter’s sequel recently announced. Boing Boing’s prediction, while not irrefutably verified, is that the release of several images of Valve-themed Apple-advertisement parodies points fairly clearly to just such an expansion. With the Game Developers Conference looming, such a suspense-provoker would be an ideal build-up to the event.

The images include altered dancer-silhouette iPod posters, a Half-Life character inserted into the 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial, a Portal robot and a Team Fortress II turret in an "I’m a PC" tableau, etc.

Not only are gamers excited about such a possibility, its a positive move for Valve. With a consistently rising market share, Apple is not just the underdog anymore. At nearly eleven percent of US users, according to analytics from Quantcast via Ars Technica this week, Apple does best domestically. But MacWorld believes that there are other reasons to why now is a good time for Steam to come to OS X.

For certain, the move from the G-processors to the Intel chips that are now being used made compatibility a great deal simpler. As shown for Netflix streaming and anything using Microsoft Silverlight, support is best left for PCs and Intel-based Macs, not for anything older. Games are cheaper to port to Macs, which means that they are available quicker.

Additionally, game consoles have become more popular among casual and hardcore gamers alike, leaving less profitibility in the computer game category. If Valve acts now, says MacWorld, it has a chance to become the dominant source of Mac games. This would be a different market than those available on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch, potentially under-tapped.

Online fashion marketplace Bellaga launched Thursday, a site that connects shoppers to independent fashion designers with Bellaga-based boutiques. While sites like Etsy give anyone with a crochet hook or a silkscreen the opportunity to make a little cash on the side for indulging in their hobby, Bellaga is for serious seamsters only.

For designers and shoppers alike, the site is 100% percent free for the time being, says co-founder and systems lead George Shammas. The Brooklyn-based site will eventually adopt a sales commission business model. The shopping cart is powered by the Amazon Payments system, so Bellaga is US-based only for now. Sellers only need an Amazon Payments Business account, and when an item sells, a seven percent transaction fee is charged [updated: since Bellaga is not yet charging, only the Amazon minimum of three percent is currently charged per sale].

For now Bellaga wants more styles and more members. With only about 45 pieces and seven designers at last count, they have yet to reach one-stop-shopping status, but the perks for indie labels are enticing - featured designers get top billing on the homepage, and each brand gets their own shop analytics - and according to Shammas, that’s "[s]omething no other marketplace on the Internet gives you."

The focus of the site is to create dialogue between seller and buyer, as the Bellaga launch blog post explains. "The direct connection between buyer and seller on this platform creates a level of communication that accentuates the style, exposure, precise comprehension and attention to details that may otherwise be lost in an online environment." Bellaga’s success will be due to its focus on the individuals that will make up its community - creating an ideal interface for fashion-lovers, giving powerful tools to the creatives, and encourage conversation between these groups. "The boutique approach allows sellers and buyers alike to have a place to deliver and discover unique fashion and style that may otherwise go through a lengthy process to reach consumers directly."

What if you could feed a monkey, donate a meal to the homeless, plant a tree or deliver a life-saving vaccination to people just by adding an app to your smartphone?

CauseWorld was designed for that. Owners of iPhones and Androids open the app, go to nearby stores (indicated by GPS) and earn “karma points,” which they can donate to the charity or the cause of their choice — even if they don’t buy a thing at the store. Since the app’s December launch, companies like P&G, City Bank and Kraft have donated more than 400,000 dollars for causes, which is huge.

Some skeptics will say that this is just another way for multinationals in need of good publicity to make themselves look good. We can’t say the skeptics are wrong, but still.

This simple application is unique. It is the only one to add a charity dimension to geolocalization and shopping apps by using virtual money. Causeworld converts its currency, “karmas,” into real dollars with real impact. So why use Foursquare, Gowala or brightkite to communicate your location and find stores if you can do the same, and much more, with this app?

Causeworld has a very simple business model. Its monetization is based on a background in the retail industry: companies are ready to pay a little to have clients entering their shop.

The app seems to be quite a success, as in two months more than 300,000 people have downloaded it. It is one way  to do something good while you shop and for the retail companies to convert individuals into customers. But what’s important at the end is more than the click on your phone, it’s that you helped.

Hulu often seems to be at the mercy of its network and cable television content providers, as when Comedy Central pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - the shows will cease to be streamed by Hulu on March 9th.

While this could lead to an uptick of questionable content that involves prehistoric prepubescents, Hulu seems to have gone in a more mainstream-constructive direction.

If I Can Dream is Hulu’s first foray into original content, and the project has a fairly solid backing of established creator Simon Fuller and big name branding with Pepsi and Ford.

The main If I Can Dream site features a 3D rendered map of the house, and promises an immersive experience with different ways to interact with the "dreamers" and the 60 cameras.

The "Just Watch" option does provide a classic Web cam meditation on banality. A quiet moment with cast member Ben folding and putting away clothes while singing "O Canada" probably won’t make it into the edited version.

So far there is one full episode on Hulu, "The Journey to Hollywood Special." It’s somewhat like network TV, as Mashable says, in the aspiring performers are not going to be the only people of interest on the reality show. In the future, auditions for new places in the house will be ongoing, culled from the MySpace upload page.

The show could be successful, though it takes a handicap for its lack of celebrities or originality, as it is deemed by the Huffington Post. As they quote Robert Seidman of TV By The Numbers, "in general it would need to average about 4 million adults 18-49 for the duration of the show to be considered a success."

While there was no translation to a success threshold on an Internet-based show, if this program were to reach such levels, we could at least expect to see even more perky hopefuls on the Internet, now in HD.

Freescale Semiconductor says that its i.MX508 applications processor will drop e-reader prices to $150 this year. In addition to lower prices, the processor will result in faster page turns, longer battery life and will enable developers to build richer features.

The San Jose company’s processors power 90 percent of all e-readers.

While there are still people out there who claim the printed book has something inherent that e-readers lack – most often it’s the smell – the most prohibitive factor is price. $200 and up is just too much for many consumers to pay for a single-function device. $150? Getting warmer.

“There’s a big unsaturated market out there, and price is a big factor,” Freescale marketing director Glen Burchers told Bloomberg. “We do see the price of e- readers [sic] coming down this year, and Freescale is trying to facilitate that. That’s a lot of what this chip is doing.”

The potential big threat to e-readers right now is the iPad, which will have e-reader technology. Not only is the iPad (while more expensive) more functional, it also has something that Amazon and Sony do not: the rabid consumer base.

We’re seeing more and more e-readers being used by the public, but the danger is that if the price doesn’t continue to drop, demand could be replaced by multi-function devices like the iPad and other devices yet to be launched on the tablet/smartbook market.

Analyst firm DisplaySearch predicts that e-book and e-reader shipments will triple this year over 2009, reaching over 14 million units.

“Key to this growth will be improving the quality of the digital reading experience while simultaneously making it affordable,” said Dr. Jennifer Colegrove, director of Display Technologies at DisplaySearch. “The results coming from Freescale and E Ink collaboration are very encouraging,”

In "The Future of Money," Daniel Roth of Wired offers a brief evolution on the flow of cash, and describes how the credit card is poised upon the brink of decline. With the current system of point-of-sale card readers, banks and credit card companies, businesses are at the mercy of an antiquated queue of fees, transfers, and other headaches.

The Internet, Paypal, and the 21st century have a tendency of disrupting other poorly aging industries (see: music, film and art), and are currently putting an expiration date on credit card company executives’ heads. While we observe the inexorable extinction (unless they undergo some fundamental re-inventing) a small panoply of streamlined payment services are lining up to shorten the wait.

A few of Roth’s "New Ways to Pay" highlights:

Twitpay - according to this article, when PayPal opened its code to developers, Michael Ivey used it to link Twitter users’ to their PayPal accounts. The input boxes on the site do the work, tweeting the cash from one Tweeter to another.

Zong - "Frictionless Mobile Payments." A business applies for a Zong account, and once accepted, their customers pay by giving the business their mobile phone number. Zong bills the customers through their moblie carrier, who pays Zong when they pay their phone bill. Because more people globally own a mobile phone than they do a credit card, the Zong site claims that conversion rates are much higher than credit methods.

Square - Using a small piece of card-reading hardware that plugs into anything with an audio-input, anyone can accept credit cards with Square’s service. Square emails receipts, uses card holder photo verification, has a repeat customer rewards program and donates a penny of each transaction to a charity of the customer’s choice. The project was started by glass artist Jim McKelvey, Twitter creator and co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as a host of other Silicon Valley somebodies.

Also mentioned were GetGiving and Hub Culture.