It’s curious that Near Field Communications (NFC) payments, so popular in Japan, have not taken off in regions outside of Asia.

Sure, the mobile ecosystem in Japan is more mature and complex than in other countries, but vendors and consumers in other regions have been slow to pick up on this trend, even with the radical changes in use that have come about with the iPhone’s stunning last two years.

NFC payments will grow, albeit slowly, according to Juniper research which predicts that global NFC payments will exceed $30 billion by 2012 and reach $110 billion by 2014. The research company projects this year’s NFC revenue to be $9 billion.

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The recently released State of the Blogosphere feature from Technorati shows the constitution of the contemporary blogger population, as well as some basic features of same. With a series of articles spread over five days, the framework was charitably condensed by our dear eMarketer.

While our recent coverage analyzes bloggers’ relationship with traditional media, these writers are different from traditional journalists in important ways. Primarily, most do not make money from their self-publishing activities, but find other ways to create value.

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It’s still somewhat hard to wrap your head around the fact that we’re entering the personal-robot age.

While innovation in robotics is mainly in industrial and military sectors, the commercial market will quadruple in the next four years, growing from $1.16 billion in 2009 to 5.26 billion in 2015.

“Advances in military and commercial robots will continue to trickle down to the consumer market, and components will see price declines driven by their use in other markets (e.g., laser rangefinders in the automotive industry),” according to the press release.

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Smartphone sales will overtake laptop sales this year, causing PC makers to look to this rapidly developing market, according to a new report by Gartner.

The analyst firm predicts that all major PC vendors will break into the smartphone market by the year’s end.

Smartphone sales will grow 29 percent, reaching 180 million units sold year-over-year in 2009.

While smartphones make up only 14 percent of the mobile device market, they will account for 37 percent of sales in 2012, with revenue reaching $191 billion. PC sales, on the other hand, are forecast to only reach $152 billion in 2012.

As PC vendors move into this increasingly competitive market, they will be navigating in a very different market.

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The best source of traffic is Facebook.

The social networking site’s users are the most loyal referred visitors, according to an analysis of 33 million September internet users by the ad network Chitika.

More than twenty percent of Facebook users loyal are loyal visitors. For the purpose of the study, users were considered loyal if they visited a referred site four or more times per week.

Digg and Yahoo! were second to Facebook, with 16 percent of each site’s users considered loyal.

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Venture-backed IPOs continue to be almost nonexistent for the second straight year, as the number of exits in Q3 2009 was only three, according to new data from Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

Overall, IPOs are up over 2008, but don’t start celebrating yet, the NVCA cautions.

“The fact that the many in the media are classifying three IPO’s as resurgence is evidence of how low our expectations have become,” said Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA.

The three exits, worth a total of $572.1 million, fell short of Q2’s five exits worth $720.7 million.

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New Hampshire is the fastest state in the union. At least in terms of internet speed.

The home of Mount Washington — which, incidentally, holds the record for highest recorded winds on Earth — had an average connection speed of 6.4 Mbps in Q2 2009, dropping the previous leader, Delaware to second with an average speed of 6.3 Mbps, according to Akamai’s Q2 “State of the Internet” report.

New Hampshire is the only state with more than 50 percent of its connections averaging 5 Mbps.

As on the global level, so at the state scale: what ultimately dictates broadband speed is the size of the territory you need to cover. Which is why the seven fastest states are in the Northeast.

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Behavioral marketing is one of the cornerstones of Web advertising, but most Americans do not like it, a joint study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology finds (PDF).

Sixty-six percent of Americans do not want advertising that is geared towards their perceived interests and generated by captured information.

The amount of public distrust of behavioral marketing is so high that 63 percent of Americans believe that advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete user information.

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Between June 2008 and June 2009, 224,100 high-tech jobs were cut, representing 3.7 percent of the workforce, but in the first six months of this year job loss has slowed to 2 percent, according to a report by the TechAmerica Foundation using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Overall, high-tech job loss was lower than the national average of 5.1 percent across all industries for the year.

In the first half of this year alone, between January and June, 115,000 jobs were cut, and tech losses now outpace the private sector, though high-tech decline slowed to 2 percent from January to June 2009.

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A few years back, at an old job in a state far, far away, one of my fellow co-workers was fired because of a post she made on MySpace.

Wherein she threatened to put laxative in our coffee.

A long HR battle ensued, the main point of contention being whether what she had MySpaced (didn’t it look like I just wrote in Sanskrit there?) was technically in the public or private realm.

A few years later, we all know the answer to that question. Every week there’s a new Facebook/Twitter firing or faux pas, the latest that I know of being when a California Pizza Kitchen employee criticized his company’s uniform switch.

With human resources departments increasingly having to deal with social-network-related problems, there still isn’t any consensus on how to treat social-networking job infractions.

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