Tuesday night, Atelier hosted our latest TechRadar event, which focused on the latest in mobile innovation.

From location-based gaming and discovery to real-time traffic analysis (and new models of crowdsourcing) to mobile app design, the companies presenting at Tuesday’s TechRadar highlighted some of the many computing innovations brought about by the mobile revolution.

We thank Booyah, Aloqa, Waze and Bamboudesign for presenting their wonderful products at the event. A huge thanks goes out to Cathy Brooks for moderating the event, as well.

We’ll follow up with posts on each of the presenting companies.

Atelier’s TechRadar series explores the latest computing innovations, presenting companies that we believe highlight the best of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

The theme of our next TechRadar will be payments. Please check back – or feel free to contact us – for more info.

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.

Yesterday was the day Yahoo! decided to take part in the great real-time battle.

The company, which has more than 600 million people in its network, signed a partnership with the social network, Twitter. We don’t yet know the financial agreement behind the deal.

Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo!search, Yahoo!mail, Yahoo!homepage or Yahoo!sports will carry Twitter feeds, and Twitter users will be able to update their status from Yahoo!.

This partnership is a great thing for Twitter, which will benefit from Yahoo!’s extensive network, and probably reach new internet users. 
This kind of agreement is not something new for Yahoo!, as they reached a similar agreement with Facebook in December.

Yahoo! is trying to be close to social networking users, whose number is growing every day. By doing so, it attempts to challenge the all mighty leader, Google. 


This agreement is not one-of-a-kind. Google and Microsoft have already made similar deals.

Image via CrunchBase

The abundance of location features in social networks, such as FourSquare, Brightkite and more recently Twitter and Google, raise the problem of privacy. Many experts think that these privacy issues will disappear as the localization trend becomes more and more common. Defenders of localization features claim that they don’t raise any privacy problems as users themselves made the choice to participate and share private data with their friends.

This is where Google may be crossing the line, as it chose an “opt-out” solution rather than an “opt-in” solution. Meaning that users are automatically enrolled without being asked and have to “opt-out” if they don’t want to participate.

Indeed, when enrolling in the location-aware mobile app Google Latitude, all of your Google contacts will receive notifications about where you are even though they didn’t sign in to get them. Google sends these alerts automatically if one of your contacts opts in for the service launched early February 2010. As Google explains on its website:

“Alerts are sent to both nearby friends if they are sharing their location with each other, even if only one of them has enabled alerts.”

To prevent being harassed every minute by these kinds of notifications, Google will notify you only when your friends are in “unusual places.” In Google’s words: “Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute.”

Google Latitude is so intrusive that if you refuse to receive this kind of notification you’ll have no choice but to opt-out of these emails by visiting its website.

The intrusiveness of Google is even more worrying when remembering last week’s Google Buzz, again an “opt-out” solution in which people saw themselves following friends and being followed without being asked. Consequently they were sharing private information with people they didn’t want to.

These new and intrusive products don’t seem to match Google’s corporate motto of “don’t be evil.” On the contrary it makes the giant of the Internet industry even more disturbing…

Your TV network and entertainment company is now on the main social networks. You have a dedicated page on Facebook, an active account on Twitter. On YouTube your clients watch selected videos. You might be present on MySpace or Last.fm, Amazon, Craigslist or eBay. Your community manager brings content to your social network accounts on a regular basis and you constantly monitor your online brand reputation.

The point is now to give a sense to this global strategy and have the best tools to analyze it.

Trendrr is a new company that focuses on helping entertainment companies manage their online community and reputation. The goal of the application is to provide managers the best information in order to give them a global view of what happens and how successful their strategy is.

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SecondMarket, a site that allows you to trade stock in private companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga and Tesla, announced today that it received $15 million in funding.

The New York and Bay Area-based company allows people to sell startup stock as if the company has gone public.

“We have monitored this market closely, and SecondMarket has clearly emerged as the industry expert,” said Mark Heesen, President of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). “We believe that SecondMarket has the right model to help fill the gap that exists in the capital formation process as a result of the systemic issues that have arisen in the public markets over the past decade.”

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Intel and a group of corporations and VCs are investing $3.5 billion in U.S. technology companies. The Invest in America Alliance, announced today in Washington D.C. is an effort to make U.S. businesses more competitive on a global level.

“Strong, enduring economies grow out of a culture of investment and a commitment to innovation,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini.

The Alliance will complement state and federal job-creation programs. It will focus on current segments in IT, clean technology and biotechnology, but will also target newer markets like molecular diagnostics, bioinformatics, electric vehicle ecosystem and wireless infrastructure

“We simply must have a clear, consistent strategy to promote innovation, investment and start-up companies,” Otellini said.

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Cyberattacks cost businesses an average of $2 million per year, according to Symantec’s 2010 State of Enterprise Security (PDF) study. For large companies, the average loss was $2.8 million a year.

Seventy-five percent of surveyed companies had experienced cyber attacks in the last 12 months. Forty-one percent of these attacks were “somewhat/highly effective.”

Twenty-nine percent of companies saw an increase in cyberattacks in 2009, and every single one of the 2,100 companies surveyed by Symantec experienced cyber losses in 2009.

The most common attacks were theft of customers’ personally identifiable information, downtime of environment, theft of intellectual property and theft of costumer credit card information. In 92 percent of the cases, this led most commonly to loss of productivity, lost revenue and loss of company trust.

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U.S. consumers are not ready for wallet phones, a study by Kansas State University marketing professor Esther Swilley concludes.

Survey respondents said they were hesitant to put sensitive financial information on mobile phones

“It was the risk that was involved, and people didn’t want to take the risk,” Swilley said.

Swilley concedes that, even if consumers do not want wallet phones right now, it might be a question of training them towards it.

“I think what’s going to happen for consumers to accept a wallet phone is that it’s going to have to go in stages,” Swilley said. “So now we have everybody’s telephone number on our phones. Next you will be doing airline tickets and things like that on your phone. Next thing you know, everything in your wallet is going to be on the phone.”

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Surprising news yesterday from Facebook: the social network officially signed a strategic agreement with PayPal to become one of the alternative methods to pay for Facebook ads and Facebook credits. Neither the length of the contract nor the sharing ratio is specified but it’s a 180° shift in strategy on Facebook’s part.

The announcement was not expected as Facebook had its own payment system in beta for years (see here and here) which will still exist for virtual goods.  One simple fact can explain this decision: already 70% of Facebook users live outside the US, as do the advertisers.

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