The calculating methods used by recommendation systems, which place products deemed most pertinent to a user’s profile at the top, need to be simplified, according to researchers at the University of Utah.

The most common approach, called “multidimensional,” consists in analyzing multiple types of user data simultaneously: their age, tastes, contacts and previous purchases, for example. The more data criteria, the better the results. But this also makes the task more complex. Each new criteria multiplies a system’s calculations exponentially.

To address this, University of Utah’s researchers created a method that groups the data into the main outlines that characterize an individual. Rather than analyze all of the data, the system focuses on these outlines.

“Each piece of data has a numeric value,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, one of the researchers, told L’Atelier. “If you look at this data like points on a graph, each with its own coordinates, the distance between the points allows us to find certain similarities.”

The researchers are more interested in the relationships between data than with the data itself. For example, if you think about the height and weight of someone, there’s a good chance that a taller person is heavier than a short person. Thus, rather than measuring the height and weight of a person as independent variables, you need to look at the correlation between them.

“Our approach is not interested only in the relationship of data represented by points on a graph,” Venkatasubramanian said. “We do this by decreasing the respective coordinates of each of them, while preserving the same distance.” The objective? Reducing the “dimensionality” of data.

“Prior methods on modern computers struggle with data from more than 5,000 people,” the researcher said. “Our method smoothly handles well above 50,000 people.”

The advantage of this method is not only an increase in calculation speed, but also a reduction in the amount of memory required for recommendation systems.

“Mobile and Geolocalization are the third chapter of the Internet revolution, after Search and Social,” Robert Scoble said during his keynote at Geo-Loco 2010 in San Francisco this Wednesday. Location-Based Services (LBS) are at the peak of the hype cycle, especially with Foursquare, and we are still in the industry’s infancy.

The emergence of dozens of LBS startups has been enabled by great progress on the infrastructure side in the last few years. But according to the event’s speakers, pure geodata applications will not be relevant soon and still have to add real value: context. Real time geodata is not just a feature but something which could be tremendous when combined with information: for example, friends with location or buses with location.

In fact, the LBS landscape will soon split: the services which add really compelling experiences (Booyah with Mytown for example) and those who will provide nice back office white-label databases like Simplegeo.

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures identified privacy as the biggest issue for the LBS startups. There is a total lack of comprehension of people’s needs in term of privacy, but we want to be very careful about what we are sharing with whom. A question from the audience illustrated this: “Can you be fired if your employer knows you go to bars four times in a week?”

As always from the VC point of view, there are plenty of business opportunities for startups in this area as we will need more and more capabilities for filtering our sharing with our communities and the web.

Context and privacy are definitely the new keywords for LBS industry, as well as plenty of web and mobile businesses (ask Facebook). The question for the LBS industry is: will companies have time to develop their business before Facebook launches its own check-in feature?

The Federal Government is broadcasting an open call to technology professionals to help Washington make cities and public sector organizations more efficient. In the Code for America Fellowship PSA, industry spokespersons such as Tim O’Reilly and Aneesh Chopra describe how cities have less money and more bureaucracy hindering the work it needs to do.

Tech celebs elaborate upon the concept - Mark Zuckerberg asks, "What if city hall spoke with citizens the way citizens speak with each other?" and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posits, "What if some of the most talented designers and technologists in the country applied those talents to building Web apps for cities and citizens?"

Jen Pahlka, Founder of Code for America wants to find out. The project will give selected individuals expenses, benefits and a $35,000 stipend during the eleven-month duration while they build technology that makes local government "more open, efficient and responsive." Working with industry leaders, the Web apps will be spread to cities across the country. The application deadline to try to become a CfA Fellow is August 15, 2010.

Code for America’s first blog entry is dated June 17, 2010, and includes documentation of some posters that feature quotes from United States historical figures like James Madison (System Architect, 1787) and Susan B. Anthony (Accessibility Expert, 1873) in binary.

Earlier this month, the full-time staff of the project grew from one person (Pahlka) with Alissa Black as City Program Director, and Dan Melton as technical director. Previously, they had a team of volunteers, part-timers and a board of directors, including Tim O’Reilly, Pahlka’s mentor.

Black is the Business Analyst Supervisor for the City and County of San Francisco, aided in the Open311 API launch and drove the business analysis process to decide which cities will be involved in CfA’s first year. As for Melton, the Public Affairs and Economics doctorate holder was based in Kansas City.

Touted as the first “social media magazine,” Flipboard for the Apple iPad launched yesterday and is currently available free on the iTunes store. Differentiating itself form standard social media and feed aggregators, the application connects to various networks like Facebook and Twitter, collects shared stories, images and videos, and reformats them into a magazine format.

In addition to pulling from friends and followers as media sources, the user can also specify popular news sources and curated categories from Flipboard itself for more content. These news categories are collections such as FlipStyle, FlipPhotos, FlipTech and the like. Though the media comes from disparate origins, the app creates an interface that seems consistent, with a page-flip navigation.

Flipboard has launched with much support - as reported by Mashable, the Palo Alto-based startup received $10.5 million in a Series A round with “including KPCB, Index Ventures, The Chernin Group, Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s creator), Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook’s co-founder) and Aston Kutcher.” Additionally, it acquired real-time Web intelligence startup Ellerdale. The co-founder of this company is now Flipboard’s CTO. Ellerdale’s semantic analysis technology was employed upon large-stream data to extract relevant and valuable information which will now be used as a relevancy engine for Flipboard.

With its release has come scaling issues, as CEO Mike McCue’s update letter explains. While users can download and use the app, browsing material that Flipboard has linked to. But due to maxed-out capacity, users are not able to setup their social networking connections. As of this morning, users are being invited in waves to connect their Facebook, etc. as the service becomes available.

While Facebook and Twitter are the only currently supported social networks, McCue does mention that they plan on incorporating Flickr and LinkedIn in the future on Kara Swisher’s BoomTown interview

A study released today shows adoption of mobile banking has surged compared to last year, particularly for the 16-24 age demographic. The fourth annual Global Consumers and Convergence survey covers US consumers as tracked by audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP on the usage of mobile devices - “cell phones, smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) for financial transactions and payments.” Of the general population, nineteen percent of US consumers have conducted some sort of mobile banking, up from nine percent in the last survey eighteen months ago. About one third of the younger category have participated in these financial activities.

As significant as adoption rates are reasons for not adopting, and the most significant is security and privacy concerns - over half of US respondents who have not conducted mobile banking cite this reason. But Carl Carande, a principal in KPMG LLP’s Banking and Finance Advisory practice believes that this perception will quickly change. Mobile banking is becoming more successful as the public learns it is useful as well as safe. ”To continue to spur adoption, banks may need to continue to educate consumers about the security of the mobile banking environment and further promote the availability of this vehicle that helps make banking more accessible and convenient.”

Just as significant, nearly three-quarters of this same group do not have or do not know if their bank offers this service.

Comfortable mobile bankers increased six percent since the last survey, to sixteen percent. Those not comfortable with using their mobile devices for banking dropped eleven percent to 55 percent. But though our rates have improved, the rest of the world enjoys a one-third comfort level with mobile banking.

“U.S. consumers are warming up to the ‘mobile wallet’ concept in which the mobile device will function as a payment and financial transaction instrument,” said Mitch Siegel, director in KPMG LLP’s Banking and Finance Advisory practice.  ”Banks are actively engaged in developing platforms and interfaces that will make this concept seamless and familiar for the consumer, while also developing business relationships with players involved in developing the end-to-end eco-system.”

Closely related to mobile finance is commerce growth trends, which are running parallel to the former. Ten percent of US consumers use their mobile devices for e-retail, double the rate from 2008, but still far behind the 28 percent of the global rate. Investment also had a ten percent share of US consumers, though nearly thirty percent of global consumers buy or sell stock on their mobile device.

What is the future of geolocation? A Geo-Loco 2010 panel this morning responded to predictions collected by moderator Dr. Phil Hendrix, which attempt to predict what the ecosystem will look like 2014.

Here’s the second half of the predictions. Read the first part here.

Prediction 6. Mobile devices scanning QR and bar codes will revolutionize how consumers access information.

Not as much agreement on this one. Ron noted that getting business owners to use QR codes will be painful. “Any model that requires a business owner to take an action is difficult,” he said. “Things like Google Goggles that require no intervention by business owner will be much more scalable.”

Liebhold worried that the physical world will create digital noise. “Codes are physical spam,” he said. “We don’t want to pollute the environment with a bunch of gross data.”

7. LBS will be integrated with social networks.

The panelists agreed on this, as it has pretty much already happened. What was surprising is the amount of concern the panelists expressed about the potential dangers of this union.

“We need to educate people and make sure they want to have control over their location info,” Eisnor said.

“There are going to be really horrible stories about stalking,” Liebhold said. “Politicians will go crazy and legislate something. Facial recognition is probably the most dangerous technology — you can’t opt out of having your face scanned.”

8. Location will enable and foster better relationships. The equivalent of a local web will emerge.

Another mixed reaction.

“This is one of the best things that can happen with location,” Gannes said. “The incentives are aligned.”

“I’m very excited about local commerce,” Eisnor said. “Even twitter allows me to have a commercial p2p transaction. I can trade my bamboo for your lettuce over Twitter.”

“Location and geo-info foster existing communities; they don’t create new ones,” Ron said.

9. Users will be reluctant to pay for LBS.

One thing’s for sure: people will pay for games. “Location-based games will explode,” Liebhold said. “Video games will jump out of console into real world.”

Paid models are needed for evolution, Eisnor said. “Subscription and payment models will force us to create more value,” she said. “Static information that doesn’t change will get commodified.”

Gannes kind of put the good and evil into a single phrase: “Despite awful spam, this will be great for advertising,” she said.

And of course, as with everything, there’s the business-model problem.

“How to make money is a challenge,” Ron said. “We don’t have a scalable business model that will flow the money.”

10. What are the panelists’ own predictions?

Eisnor: We’ll navigate more based on time, not location. “We need a search engine based on location,” Ron said.

Gannes: I’m really excited about real-world gaming.

Liebhold: We’ll have the 1st gen AR glasses by 2014, but they’ll be bad. Will create mini boom

Scoble: A lot of these silos will stitch together.

What is the future of geo-location? A Geo-Loco 2010 panel this morning responded to predictions collected by moderator Dr. Phil Hendrix, which attempt to predict what the ecosystem will look like 2014.

Prediction 1. Geo-data will be free, with OpenStreet Map and other crowd-driven open-source data eclipsing commercial vendors.

Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor, who has been in the geo-mapping space for years, said that it is amazing to watch maps go from being created by a few – mainly for political purposes – to now being created by individuals.

Other panelists thought that, while crowdsourced data will become increasingly relevant and available, some data will always be commodified.

“There’s a lot of high quality analytics, marketing, and scientific data that will always cost money because it costs to collect,” said Michael Liebhold, Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future.

“There’s not enough crowdsourced people providing data right now, so I don’t see this being free in next 2 years,” Robert Scoble said. “But in the long term, yes.”

“I disagree with eclipse of vendors,” said Lior Ron, lead for Google’s products in the local space. “If you want a route, or to conserve fuel, those customers won’t be satisfied by 2014. We need to combine commercial efforts with crowdsourced efforts.”

2. Location-awareness will be integral to any mobile app.

The panelists mainly agreed with this statement, with the observation that not all mobile apps will need LBS.
“For me, this is obvious,” Eisnor said. “With increase in precision, we’re moving towards an ecosystem of location-aware devices.”

“We’re going to have way too many devices in 2014; we will need to know where they are,” said GigaOM’s Liz Gannes.

3. More than half of all mobile advertising in 2014 will be location-based.

Not as much agreement on this one, as the panelists maintained that advertising is difficult to predict.

“Advertising always lags behind data and users,” Ron said. “There’s a long ramp-up.”

Of course, many mobile users will do what they can to block advertising on their devices, especially on smaller screens.

“Aside from tablets, users will do what they can to block ads, so banner ads will have nominal impact,” Liebhold. “Advertising on larger things like the iPad will be more successful.”

4. Virtually all user-generated content will be geo-tagged.

In Ron’s words, “That’s already happening today,” but some of the panelists had reservations about a totally geo-tagged world.

“We’re going to find situations where location-sharing can be very weird,” Scoble said, noting that a recent deal between Rackspace and NASA could have been discovered before it was announced if observers had been tracking both organization’s locations.

“We’re getting to the point where journalists could know what the intelligence community does,” Liebhold said.

5. Proximity will become a critical filter for content.

The panelists agreed that future search engines will need to consider location.

“The most important role of proximity will be filtering information,” Liebhold said.

Part of proximity is a symbiotic relationship, Scoble pointed out. “There are too many silos that don’t talk to each other,” Scoble said, a refrain he would return to later.

Another refrain that would be repeated is that a lot of geo-info will be noise. “The biggest problem is what is relevant,” Eisnor said. “With better filtering and proximity, we’ll get closer to what is relevant.”

Facebook ranks even lower in customer satisfaction than IRS e-filers, according to a report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, produced in partnership with ForeSee Results (pdf). Facebook ranks in the bottom 5 percent of all measured private-sector companies, at the same level as airline and cable companies.

“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

“At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience,” Freed said. “Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution.”

This is the first year that social media was rated by the ASCI. Wikipedia leads the category at 77, followed by YouTube at 73, Facebook at 64 and MySpace at 63. Twitter wasn’t rated because of the amount of people who access it via 3rd party tools.

The media complains about Facebook, and some individual users complain about it as well, but among mainstream audiences, Facebook continues to grow, and not even looking at the numbers it’s easy to argue that user engagement is higher than ever, unless you don’t trust observation.

What the findings do indicate is that if there were another service that would come along that replaced Facebook’s popular functionalities without having the privacy and PR issues, some users may jump ship.

At this point, it’s obvious that removing Zuckerberg would be the fastest and easiest way to improve brand image. Investigations into Zuckerberg’s ethics and motivations are damaging the company and threaten to put it into continual crisis mode.

In other tech categories, Google dropped 7 percent, but continued to lead search. At 80 percent satisfaction, Google scored only three points better than second-place Bing.

“Bing’s first measure is impressive and could put some pressure on Google. The new search engine is already making gains in market share and using clever marketing and advertising to distinguish itself from the market leader.”

In order to grow their social networking presence and strengthen their audience of potential customers, companies must know how to elicit the aid of internet users, believes Pixazza.

The company is launching an online service that crowdsources marketing. Their tool allows companies to renumerate “publishers” who tag photos of products on personal sites.

“With this tool, any internet user can transform static images into content that is useful for the brand, while at the same time profiting financially from the action,” the company says.

“The main goal is to put the consumer at the heart of the process,” web marketing consultant Laurent Dijoux told L’Atelier.

Having the consumer in this position allows brands to lessen marketing’s intrusiveness, while at the same time entering the privileged space of the consumer. In this case, users sign up on Pixazza’s online platform, receiving a code that they embed on their own sites. The code allows them access to a widget with which they can tag their photos. The tag brings up a product page when users mouse over the image.

The publisher is paid according to the ranking of their tagged products.

“This tool can only be used in certain cases,” Dijoux said. “Especially in terms of social engagement: the brand needs to work with users and engage them in a conversation.”

Outside of legal considerations, which must be expressly stated, it is also important to track usage to see what objects are tagged, and to see if they fit well with the brand’s product needs.

This week, Pixazza announced that it had raised $12 million in Series B funding from Shasta Ventures, August Capital, CMEA Capital and Google Ventures.

Smartphone and 3G growth in South America will create an ecosystem that is capable of supporting mobile banking, according to a Pyramid Research study, “Smartphone, 3G Growth Creates Mobile Banking Opportunity in Latin America.” Banks and telecom operators will be the principle beneficiaries of this growth.

“8.6 percent of all the new units sold in Latin America in 2010 will be smartphones,” said Pyramid’s David Noe.

“”However, this percentage will grow dramatically during the forecast period; our estimation is that almost one-third (32.2 percent) of the new handhelds sold by 2014 in Latin America will be smartphones,” Noe said.

The advanced functionalities of smartphones will enable better access to mobile banking services. According to the report, the mobile payment market should spread across low and high-income populations, as well as among more advanced users. Financial institutions can not miss this opportunity.

To succeed, financial institutions need to take vary their strategies according to the customer.

“The needs, mobile phone capabilities and education levels of end users vary wildly,” Noe said. In an earlier report by Frost & Sullivan, mobile services are set for strong growth in South America. In 2009, the region accounted for $2.5 billion in revenue, and accounted for more than 60 million customers.