Touchscreen shipments will double this year, according to Gartner. The analyst firm predicts that 362.7 million mobile touchscreen devices will ship in 2010, a 96.8 percent increase over 2009’s 184.3 million units

Gartner expects that by 2015 more than 80 percent of mobile devices in North America and Western Europe will be touchscreen. Globally, 58 percent of all devices will be touchscreen by that time.

What makes reading the mobile touchscreen market difficult to read right now is that great hypothetical on the horizon – the iPad.

If Apple’s tablet is a success – and all indicators are that it will be an enormous one – then touchscreen computing will accelerate exponentially, and will perhaps be the near-future of computing, as many people not named Bill Gates expect.

The belief is that the iPad will mainstream large-screen touchscreen computing like the iPhone did for phones. Don’t bet against Apple’s ability to change user habits and behavior. Granted, that change in behavior is less dramatic than would be the case with other disruptive devices, thanks to Apple’s marked skill in ‘incremental disruption.’

Apple’s iPad, which according to reports is having slight delays in production -  delays which could limit the amount of devices initially available, which would be great for Apple, getting it into the hands of early adopters and influencers while maintaining the buzz in the general public – is expected to ship between one and five million units this year.

It’s no secret that the future of computing is in mobile. The secret is that the change will happen faster than many people – and brands – think. Despite the success of smartphones and apps, more traditional companies, some of whom are still learning to trust the internet, are hesitant to lead their brand into that market.

But some companies expect mobile to become the primary computing platform by 2013.

Google’s Vice President of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, predicted yesterday that desktops will be dead in three years, killed by mobile devices.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy said at the Digital Landscapes conference in Ireland. “Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible.”

Zenph Sound Innovation currently uses music analysis technology to create new recordings from deceased musicians. As reported this week in Wired, the process analyzes aged, damaged recordings for a musician’s style, and creates a virtual personality that can replay the piece just as the original person would have.

Zenph has already succeeded in creating new versions of previous pieces that are too distorted to appreciate, as if these musicians had access to contemporary recording technology. These new, clear recordings can be licensed to films, and software could let musicians play virtually with famous artists on a level way past Guitar Hero.  In Buskirk’s example, a guitarist could one day run his solo through an Eric Clapton program that would shape it to sound as if it were played by the latter.

Once the tech has evolved enough, it should be able to take an analyzed style, and feed a new composition through it, one that the original musician never played. In effect, a virtual artist could play any available song, whether he was alive or not when it was composed. The artist, or the estate of an artist, would give permission for the style, not the work, of a song to be licensed.

Additional concerns manifest when industry professionals try to define the new licensing terms. While musicians have been influenced by others for as long as the art existed, the imitation was done with a human brain. Now, style is being analyzed by a computer, and the machine must license that particular person’s personality in order to do so.

Eric Singer, creator of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) is not in favor of extending copyright, and even less in favor of extending copyright to style. “It basically means that the entire history of music, where people have listened to other musicians and been influenced by their style is basically up for grabs. Whether a brain is doing it or a computer is doing it, how are they going to make that distinction?”

Gen Y is rapidly adopting mobile banking, finds a study by Fiserv, a provider of financial technology solutions

As would be expected, Gen Y is already very comfortable with online banking. Forty-eight percent of Gen Y with a credit card signed up for that card online. Eighty percent used online banking in the last month, and most prefer to keep financial information on their computers rather than on paper.

When it comes to mobile banking, looking at Gen Y’s adoption of this relatively new sector shows just how bright its future will be.

One-third of Gen Y has used mobile banking in the last month, compared to only 11 percent of Baby Boomers (we wish Fiserv had compared populations slightly closer in age). Forty-three percent of Gen Y users plan on trying mobile banking in the next year.

While the most common form of mobile banking that Gen Y plans on using is checking balances (32 percent), a healthy 15 percent plan on receiving and paying bills via mobile. This represents more than 1.5 million Gen Y households.

Much of remainder of the study regards off-line stuff, but here are a few other findings that concern the Web:

Twenty-five percent of Gen Y relies on bank websites for information and 11 percent rely on financial forums for information, “indicating a growing importance for financial institutions to maintain and grow online communications,” according to the study.

Less than half of Gen Y trusts their financial institution, but they do recommend to others more than older generations do.

“Elevating their satisfaction rates can amplify referrals made within social networks,” according to the study.

Also interesting is that Gen Y seems to be trending away from credit cards and towards debit cards, and that overall, they are more responsible financially than older demographics.

Waze is crowsourced navigation and real-time traffic app. In addition to updating information on things like traffic congestion and police activity, users build the map itself.

Waze starts with a Tiger map (a visualization of U.S. Census data) as a base map that users build the navigation map on top of by running Waze’s free app while driving.

“What we’re doing is building an entire geostack, from the base map itself – of which traditionally there are only a couple of providers – all the way up to the levels of social information,” explained Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor while presenting the company at last week’s TechRadar.

With crowdsourcing, it’s hard to reach critical mass at the scale that’s going to give you good information; typically in a crowdsourced endeavor, one percent of users actually contribute.

“That’s not going to cut it for the kind of work we are engaging in,” Eisnor said.

Waze is able to generate participation among 25 percent of its users by incorporating gaming features into the app.

For example, when users go down a road that hasn’t been mapped, their icon turns into a Pac-Man-like character that gobbles up the route for points, thus mapping the data for Waze.

“This kind of playfulness has never been available in navigation before,” Eisnor said.

This gaming element helped scale Waze’s usage very quickly. Users like this function so much that they ask for Waze to recommend the route that will give them the maximum points.

Users also get major points by fixing map errors. The Tiger maps that Waze builds off are non-navigable, display only. “There could be a one-pixel disconnect in the map, and we won’t know whether you take a right turn or a left turn,” Eisnor said.

In order to encourage the community to correct these map errors, geocaches of points (“road goodies”) are placed where there are problems with the map. Waze has also started giving away prizes from local sponsors, as well.

Right now, accumulating points gives users more editing control over the map

The app’s social element not only meets expectations of today’s user, “It creates a sense that it’s not just you out there creating this information, but that there’s a community around you, working on it,” Eisnor said.

For example of how well Waze’s crowdsourcing model works, look at its first implementation:

Waze launched in Israel in January 2009, but had no base map to start with.

“Our users built the entire map, including the road names, including the address numbers, the parks, landmarks, everything,” Eisnor said.

“Now we have one of the best maps in the country, and hands-down the best traffic source in the country,” Eisnor said. “We’re already being able to monetize it. It’s being used by all the naysers who said, ‘Oh, you can’t crowdsource a map,’ like the Ministry of Transportation [which is] now using our traffic data.’”

Waze currently has 570,000 users in 85 countries. The service launched in the U.S. in August 2009 and rolled out globally that November.

Waze’s business model is a combination of map licensing, geo-ads and coupons, and global map partnerships.

“We see [these partnerships] as a global alliance and the days of only a couple of people owning our map data really being over,” Eisnor said.

Waze plans to release its API in the next few months. The app is currently available for the iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile OS’s and others.

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,”

Saturday session "On the Edge: Reducing Stigma Through Social Networking" rounded out the SexTech conference afternoon. In it, three women head projects that give formerly alienated individuals a place to share their life-shaping, controversial commonalities.

Kristen Schultz Oliver created Exhale, a site for women to support each other after abortions. The site runs on the Ning social network platform after extensive customization. Since removing all the public sharing features and external linking to Facebook and Twitter, it has become an anonymous sanctuary. Strict criteria is employed to create a completely supportive environment where only women who have had an abortion can join. No politics, rudeness or personal attacks are allowed, and personal stories, mutual support and gratitude proliferate.

St. James Infirmary is a clinic for sex workers in San Francisco, and in 2007 created an industry podcast called Renegadecast. Executive director Naomi Akers heads the staff who were recruited from the clinic and were trained using a Social Media Advocacy toolkit.

At first, RenegadeCast was produced by the founders of the clinic, "addressing the benefits and challenges of sex worker organizing on health outcomes." Later they switched to current or former sex workers who were able to speak more credibly to their audience of peers. Instead of the rescue ethic that many government or organization initiatives adopt, St. James promotes and provides risk reduction practices.

Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman uses her short documentary "The Line" to create a space to discuss sexual assault. The 24 minute film is designed to stimulate discussion of not only Schwartman’s personal assault experience, but to encourage college-aged women and men to ask themselves and others where their "Line" is, where consent ends and rape begins.

For the participants of WhereIsYourLine.org, it is critical to expand the dialogue from teaching girls to protect themselves to include the responsibilities of boys and men.

On the opening day of SexTech 2010 yesterday, the afternoon Plenary Panel showcased national prevention programs from organizations that are developing tools for their local communities. Individuals from Planned Parenthood Online, MTV’s GYTnow, inSPOT, and SexReally.com discussed the challenges of balancing a country-wide presence with a local resource destination.

Tom Subak of Planned Parenthood talked about how their online strategy brought them from a fragmented online experience made it extremely difficult for Internet searchers to find what they were looking for. Some were looking for information on contraception, STI/HIV testing facilities, or other information and services. Instead of a centralized hub, the different clinics in cities across the US were basically competing in search results.

Now, the organization has a site that connects to all of the smaller communities, but also gives resources that are relevant for teens, health centers, educators or parents. Not only is there information, but they also developed widgets that can be posted on articles, blog posts and Web sites. In the example above, users can search directly on this page in English or in Spanish for a local health center based on zip code or state.

There are also widgets that help people decide whether they should get a STI test, or determine what type of birth control suits them best.

SexReally.com’s Lawrence Swiader is very focused on Twitter, with account and search term feeds on the main page. But they also are basing much of their awareness-promoting strategies based on information from the Fog Zone. This report was released by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and shows the huge gap between the intent and behavior of is full of videos that package humor with accessible messages on relationship and sex issues. Titles like "What’s a threesome?" and "One Night Stand" hope to pique interest in young adults that subscribe or visit the site.

The smartphone is not a PC, but we still use it as if it were, says Sanjeev Agrawal, CEO of the location-based recommendation service, Aloqa.

“This whole idea of a phone being a smartphone will not be realized until you stop using the browser all the time to type things in,” Agrawal said at Tuesday’s TechRadar. “That pull-based usage of the phone is not the way Mr. Bell intended it.”

Aloqa tracks static and moving objects in real time and notifies users of nearby events and people.

“What we capture are very deep user and location analytics. The idea of ‘who are you and what are you doing and what does your usage fingerprint look like?’, but also ‘what does San Francisco between 6 and 7 on a Tuesday look like, over time?’” Agrawal, former Head of Product Marketing for Google, said.

Aloqa is both a multi-OS stand-alone app and a platform that can be integrated into other applications. The app is composed of interest-based channels, and the app’s centerpiece is its Hotchannel, “An always-on, local mobile inbox.”

Aloqa’s Hotchannel gives “recommendations across a loca, based on your usage over time and who you look like most, plus the location fingerprint piece,” Agrawal said.

“It’s like an email in-box of stuff coming in,” he said. “As you move, it constantly refreshes, saying new stuff that you can be doing right now.”

“Think about it as a collaborative filtering for locations, not for people,” he added.

In addition to its stand-alone feature, Aloqa can also be integrated into other apps. “So if Keith [Lee, MyTown] comes to me and says, ‘I never want people to leave my game and go to Google Maps or fire up a browser,’ we could just be a tab inserted into his app, so that in addition to playing his game people can get recommendations for restaurants and bars and stuff like that in addition to the core purpose of the app,” Agrawal said

Agrawal describes calendars that can plan your weekend, address books that organize contacts by their proximity, services that show if electric car-charging stations are available in real time, or context-sensitive sales, like a salon offering 50 percent off haircuts on a rainy day.

Aloqa’s vision, in Agrawal’s words:

We think the world will be going a little more in the direction of going away from just search and pull-based ‘I’m typing something in and looking for a Starbucks,’ to [the phone saying] ‘let me proactively tell you.’”

And going from this whole world we live in now, where 95 percent of the opportunities that are surrounding us are never brought to our attention, to one where textually-relevant information is being pushed to us at the right place and the right time.

Wherever I am, there is a bunch of stuff happening around me. There’s tons of stuff that’s both static and dynamic. The most static stuff is places; the most dynamic stuff is people moving around. Everything else is a spectrum in the middle.

Aloqa is just the things relevant to you, chosen, and then pushed to you. It’s taking all this stuff that’s happening around me and organizing it for me.

The company’s business model is based on its recommendations, for example a hotel channel that locates nearby hotel deals. Aloqa’s most popular channel is the real-estate channel, which shows the closest homes and large properties for rent or for sale; Aloqa gets a cut of every lead they send to realtors.

“The way we make money is very straightforward,” Agrawal said.

Aloqa began at the University of Munich, and is based on the doctoral work of two of its co-founders. It was a nominee at the Mobile Premier Awards 2010 and was winner of the 2009 MobileBeat Tesla award and Motorola Best Android App.

Aloqa went live in Q4 2009. It currently has about 400,000 users in 6 countries, and is growing by about 4-5,000 users a day.

Companies are changing the way that they interact with consumers by shifting marketing strategies from pushing out to pulling in. These strategies, called "Inbound Marketing," are characterized by techniques that use the Internet and media to determine what products and services best meet consumers’ needs.

"Inbound marketers offer useful information, tools and resources to attract these people to their site," while they use the web to develop relationships with customers. These inbound marketing tools include blogging, content publishing, search engine optimization, social media and social networks.

Hubspot’s 2010 State of Inbound Marketing, released February 16th, determined these key findings:

Inbound marketing results in far lower cost-per-sales than outbound channels.

When marketing budget majority goes to inbound marketing, responses showed a sixty percent lower cost-per-sales than those who spent more on outbound marketing. Businesses are shifting their budget allocations in respect to this, so that 37 percent is now dedicated to inbound marketing, and only thirty percent is dedicated to outbound marketing efforts. Hubspot expects the difference to increase over time.

Blogs are more important to businesses than other social media categories.

That cost-per-lead effectiveness showed 55 percent of company blogs to be less expensive in 2009. 48 percent of organic and natural search engine optimization rated below average cost-per-lead, while only 32 percent of paid search or AdWords performed similarly.

More companies that use inbound marketing have acquired customers from these channels.

From between 41 and 46 percent of companies that used social media marketing channels had acquired a customer this way. For business-to-business firms, LinkedIn performed higher than any other site - 45 percent, with the company blog, Twitter and Facebook in declining order. For business-to-consumer companies, Facebook performed best (68 percent), followed by the company blog (57%), then Twitter (51%), and last by quite a bit, LinkedIn (26%).

In the location-based app space, Foursquare gets all the press. But Booyah’s MyTown, which launched as a free app for the iPhone in December 2009, already has three times as many users spending more than ten times as many minutes per day on it than Foursquare.

The reason for MyTown’s success is simple: made up of former members of Blizzard Entertainment (Diablo, Starcraft, World of Warcraft), Booyah brings a game-design savvy to the location-based space.

“We’re gamers,” Booyah CEO and co-founder Keith Lee said at Tuesday’s TechRader at Atelier. “We care most about engagement and retention.”

“The biggest problem right now, especially in the mobile space, it that you only have small pockets of time, small time spurts, because you’re waiting in line in Starbucks or you’re at the gate at the airport,” Lee said. “So the most important thing for us is to find ways to engage and retain users.”

On average, people spend five minutes on an iPhone app, Lee said, and after 30 days the average retention rate is around 2 percent. MyTown users, on the other hand, spend an average of 65 minutes per day on the app, and the retention rate is above 40 percent after 30 days.

Lee describes MyTown as a Farmville for mobile or a real-world Monopoly. Basically, it places an economy sim on top of location-awareness. You can buy locations, upgrade and rent them out to others, level up and look for power-ups.

“We’re bringing video games into the real world,” Lee said. “Our goal is to get people to level up in the real world.”

Do people want to level-grind in the real world, or are they content just becoming someplace’s mayor? The numbers tell the tale:

Foursquare has 300,000 users who use the service for 5 minutes a day; MyTown’s 1.1 million users — 150,000 new ones sign up each month — spend 65 minutes per day on the app, spending an average of 10-15 minutes on it every time they log in. MyTown has 3.5 million check-ins per day while Foursquare has 87,000.

Not only was growth seemingly easy, coming up with a revenue model was simple as well: “We take the playbook of the stuff on Facebook,” Lee said.

“Twenty percent of our users contribute about 80 percent of our revenue through in-app purchases and virtual goods,” Lee said.

The virtual goods could be especially successful, since the location-based aspect provided strong opportunity for brand engagement. When logging into MyTown while near H&M, for example, users might be offered an H&M-branded virtual item.

“The whole idea is that you can get completely branded virtual items that drop, that are part of the game,” Lee said.

Thirty to 40 million MyTown virtual goods are consumed each week.

MyTown’s biggest disadvantage is that, while Foursquare and Gowalla are available in over 30 countries, MyTown is currently available only in the US. Booyah, which  has raised $9.5 million in Series A and B funding from Kleiner Perkins, is currently working on entering the European market.