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.

Researchers at the University of San Diego have developed cheap, 3D and tactile virtual reality, using consumer 3D HDTV panels.

The Heads-Up Virtual Reality device (HUVR) uses the 3D HDTV and a half-silvered mirror to project tactile images onto a user’s hands or the space around them.  A haptic device allows for physical manipulation of the image, and a head tracker can be included to generate the correct perspective.

The researchers see the device being used in disciplines where images of objects would have to be manipulated, like medicine, engineering instruction and archeology. They imagine how it would work with an MRI:

“By using HUVR’s touch-feedback device - which is similar to a commercial game control — a physician could actually feel a defect in the brain, rather than merely see it,” said research scientist Tom DeFanti. “This can be done over the networks, sharing the look and feel of the object with other researchers and students,” DeFanti said.

Without the head-tracker, the each HURV would cost around $7,000 per device, with $2,300 of that going towards the TV. The availability of consumer 3D HDTVs has driven the cost of production down from the $100,000 comparable technology used to cost.

The major expense that remains is the head-tracker, which costs up to $20,000. The UCSD researchers are working towards a cheaper replacement.

This week we spoke with Vinnie Mirchandani, former Gartner analyst and founder of Deal Architect, about his new book, The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations. Mirchandani will be in Paris to speak about the book next Friday, July 23, at Delaville Café.

What is/should be government’s role in innovation?

I give examples of the Chinese, for example. A very, very speed-driven investment economy. They are starting to make investments in clean tech and we kind of consistently underestimate them, and how in fact they’ve become – or will soon become — one of the biggest players in clean tech. Their image is one of polluters and all that, but in fact they’ve been making a number of [clean tech] investments. I give the example of how Germany, through subsidies and so on, encouraged the development of its own Solar Valley. In the GE case study I point out how GE is collaborating with various universities and other academic and government bodies. In the BP case I point out how they were a little sensitive about that, but you can imagine a multi-national like BP talks a lot to government agencies on a whole variety of topics. I think government is an important player in all this. I have numerous examples where the government, either at the state, local or federal level is helping along all these innovations.

One of the messages from the book actually is that I’m really concerned that Silicon Valley doesn’t realize what is going on both in corporate America and around the world. Silicon Valley has this very internally focused view – Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter are God’s gift to Earth. As much as we all respect it, it’s just a small part of the overall innovation.

What kind of challenge does this pose to Silicon Valley?

Having made that statement, I’ve got Kleiner Perkins as a case study in the book. They’re a Valley-based firm that is investing heavily in clean tech. I have Plantronics as a case study, which is an audio-device company; I have Salesforce.com, which is a SaaS company, as a case study. So don’t get me wrong: it’s not like Silicon Valley is dead by any means, but I also point out a lot of corporate examples, GE, BMW, Nike. There’s plenty of corporate examples, and in the government realm I’ve got a whole case study of the National Hurricane Center, how they analyze a bunch of data to be able to track storms and so on. I pulled out smaller examples in Macedonia, Rwanda and Estonia. These are all national examples. To me innovation is not just shipping two million iPads in a month – it’s about moving the ball forward no matter where you are. And so that could happen in Estonia, which was communist 20 years ago and now is probably one of the most digital societies per capita there is. That’s a huge amount of innovation.

What are the barriers to innovation?

I don’t think you can generalize. I give examples of big companies like GE that are innovating quite a bit. On the other hand, I’m very hard on the big telecom companies. I start off by talking about France Telecom, all the suicides there. They probably didn’t want me to, but that is one organization that is struggling with change. You look at AT&T and Verizon here, you look at BT in the UK – these are dinosaurs, for the most part. I’m not really kind to them; I’m not really kind to 2 or 3 of the software vendors like Oracle and SAP. These are 20, 30, 40, 100-billion dollar companies that are really not innovating. They’re just milking what they’ve developed 10, 15, 20 years ago.

So I don’t think you can generalize and say ‘big is bad,’ and ‘small is nimble’ or that ‘Asia’s where it’s coming from.’ I started with certain hypotheses [like] “All big companies are too fat, dumb and happy,” and then I went to GE and I said “Wow.” It’s amazing, the amount of innovation that’s going on in its different business units. Much more so than Google or Apple. They would run circles around most of the Valley, based on the 1800 researchers they have; in every discipline there, they have Ph Ds. These guys are into some basic, but certainly a lot of applied, research that very few other companies are. And this is a $200 billion company, so you can’t generalize. I saw examples at BP which unfortunately, because of the spill, is getting all the negative press, but they have a group of 12 people – just 12. It’s remarkable, the amount of innovation they’ve delivered in the last 10 years. So this is a small group within a big company that – you know, you could say the big company is dodgy or whatever – after the oil spill you can call it whatever you want. But that small group stood out; it’s like a diamond in the rough there.

You talk about left-field thinking in your book, the fringe where the ideas come from. Can organizations develop that, or does it have to grow organically?

I think most big companies, and even small companies can. I think the Valley has it in spades also, where if you’re successful – the justification usually is ‘I’ve survived 10 years and I’ve grown to 3 billion, or 20 or 100 billion. I must be doing something right.” So you tend to feed on what you know, you tend to stick to your values, you tend to stick to what brought you to the dance, if you will. My point is that’s okay: in the end you may go back to what you know best, but for God’s sake, every time you have an opportunity, at least look outside. I point out I think 10 examples. I think some of them are business models, innovation ideas, a couple of them are talent ideas, where to find the site, using women as technology innovators. I think the industry has done a poor job of leveraging women. So that ‘left-field’ idea, it’s right here. Why don’t we look at them and see what we do better. I have an example of rural sourcing; I gave an example of this guy who is using an Arkansas-based labor force. We’ve tried off-shoring and it’s worked pretty well, but why not try something right here? I give an example of the freemium model. Is it right for a change? I think it is. I kind of question whether we can keep going the way we’ve defined freemium. My basic point is that we tend to do just what we are comfortable with, and that chapter was meant to challenge that idea and say ‘Look at the exotic.’ The chapter is titled “Exotic,” because the tendency is, if it’s that different, you don’t hustle towards it. That was my left-field example.

Firefox Home was extended to iPhone and iPod Touch by Mozilla yesterday. The service, formerly just for full-sized computers, enables users of the Firefox browser to synchronize their browser data across multiple computers and store it remotely in case a backup is needed. This is done with the browser extension Firefox Sync, a Mozilla project formerly known as Weave.

The new app, free from the iTunes store, provides access on the iPhone to browser history, bookmarks and open tabs. The data is securely synced to the cloud and can be accessed in the smartphone’s Safari browser, and is password and "secret phrase" protected. If the user does not already have a Firefox Sync account, the app sends an email on how to set up the service.

The interface is sparse, with a menu to navigate to tabs, bookmarks and a search bar for same and history. The search bar is commonly referred to as an "Awesome Bar," just as in Firefox or Chrome it attempts to predict as the user types. The links open in a limited-functionality browser which can transfer navigation to Safari when it encounters video or other media that it cannot render.

Some may wonder about the absence of a fully functioning Firefox browser, especially with the mobile version Fennec only released to Android so far. But as ReadWriteWeb muses, what many users appreciate about Firefox, the extensions, are simply out of the league of iPhone specifications. Additionally, TechCrunch thinks that Apple would only block a full browser app.

Firefox Home’s strength lies in its simplicity, as is often the case with mobile innovation. In this case, developers have gone with less is more, and Home does what it is meant to do well. Users can access their work quickly and easily, and efficiently move from desktop navigation to commuter workflow.

Yesterday, L’Atelier attended the 2010 Mashable U.S. Summer Tour, an event organized by the social media web site.

There, we met an interesting new start-up named Gotelo. Founded by Ray Kasbarian in 2009, Gotelo is a new way to connect to the pages of people you know with just their phone number. Indeed, it simplifies the way people interact with friends, and could also be useful for business.

By creating a link between a phone number and a web page, Gotelo allows users to control their presence on the internet.

How does it work? First, users have to register on www.gotelo.com by giving their phone number. After that, the website will call this number for a validation process. Then, users can add links to their social network profile from places like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, YouTube or their blog.

So with this, when you meet a person, you just need to give your phone number. This person will find you on the Internet by typing your number in Gotelo’s browser. As a phone number is something personal and unique, you will be sure to find the right person.

Currently, Gotelo is in beta version. According to Victor Nappe, co-founder of Gotelo, the service will launch next month.

Since now, this connection engine is free because they need to create a huge database, which is key for success. It’s obvious that Gotelo will be useful only if everybody is registered on it. Maybe that’s why the service is already available in more than 30 countries.

According to Nappe, the company is thinking of releasing premium services in the future with additional functionality. Like flavors, it seems that Gotelo has created a new kind of online business card.

The US added more power capacity from renewable sources in 2009, as shown by reports released today from the United Nations Environment Programme and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century. Power collected from wind, solar and other sustainable sources accounted for more than fifty percent of newly installed capacity last year. Predictions for this year or next indicate that the world will add more capacity to the total supply from renewable rather than conventional, non-renewable sources.

According to the report release statement, "investment in core clean energy (new renewables, biofuels and energy efficiency) … suffered a fall in investment [in North America], to $20.7 billion from $33.3 billion." But in general, green power weathered the economic crisis better than expected. Though investment dropped seven percent globally, there was record investment in wind power, as well as an increase in spending on solar water heaters and installation costs for rooftop solar PV.

UNEP’s Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2010 and the REN21’s Renewables 2010 Global Status Report, were released by UN Under-Secretary-General Achim Steiner, UNEP’s Executive Director, and Mohamed El-Ashry, Chair of REN21. Steiner comments on the resilience and frustration that defined the sustainable energy industry in 2009. The UN climate convention in Copenhagen did not deliver the results that many had hoped for, but there were industry actors and governments that are still transforming the financial crisis to deliver green growth.

In 2009, renewable power sources represented one-quarter of global electrical power and eighteen percent of global power production. By 2011, the world should reach half or more in newly-installed power capacity from renewables. In the same year, Asia and Oceania private sector green energy investments exceeded that of the Americas - $40.8 billion compared to $32.3 billion.

VentureBeat’s annual mobile tech conference, MobileBeat 2010 took place this week in San Francisco, and featured speakers HP’s Phil McKinney, AT&T’s John Donovan, and Facebook’s Erick Tseng. The theme of “The Year of the Superphone” spotlit high-powered mobile devices and the operating systems, applications and functionalities that are making mobile the defining platform of new media today.

As for the Startup Competition, the two Tesla awards went to education app EduPath and map maker Micello. EduPath is the 21st century’s answer to bloated SAT prep books - the app has sections for the SAT and LSAT tests, with section tests that students can practice with anytime. Micello, described as the “Google Maps inside a building,” serves to route users through large buildings and geolocate a walking path, with compass function if the mobile device is so equipped.

Additionally, the 2010 Gettie Awards were announced at the conference, named by cross-platform mobile app store GetJar. For each mobile OS, an application was named for best success or innovation:

• Best Java application: WaveSecure Backup – Runs on non-smartphones and backs up or restores data securely
• Best Symbian application: Nimbuzz – Free app makes calls, instant messaging, file & location sharing with Nimbuzz friends and Skype, and major chat networks
• Best Windows Mobile application:Opera Mini – Fast Web browsing and file transfer, data compression for lower mobile plan charges
• Best Blackberry application: Kayak Flight/Hotel Search – Multi-site travel search engine Kayak.com created an app that also manages itineraries and flight information
• Best iPhone application: Tap Tap Revenge 3 – Social rhythm game with free songs and premium bundles of music collections
• Best Android application: Lookout –Runs virus and malware protection in the background, remotely stores backup data, locates a lost phone on a Google Map, remotely sets off a loud alarm on the device, or wipes data
• Best Overall Cross Platform App (Gettie Award): Layar – Augmented reality app for Android and iPhone that gives users contextual information about their location for finding restaurants, learning about buildings or playing games

It’s obvious that the internet is everywhere: on our laptops of course, but also on mobile phones, on netbooks and tablets, on portable game consoles, personal navigation devices…

And cars?

For a lot of drivers, it would be a dream to prepare their route at their desk and send it directly to their car, without having to print paper directions or lose time typing it in their GPS.

Actually, this kind of connectivity between cars and computers is already available; Google has been working on this functionality for a long time. That’s it has partnered with the automotive industry to bring services like Local Search into cars.

For example, three years ago, Google launched, in partnership with with BMW, a new service named “Send To-Car.” It’s a feature which allows users to send a business listing or address found on Google Maps directly to their car; drivers can then set the information as the destination for the in-car navigation system. On Google Maps, users just need to tap their desired destination and send it to their cars via a dedicated pop-up window. When they are in their car, a “virtual adviser” shows them the route.

More recently, (in the beginning of this year), The Mountain View company and Audi brought Google Earth directly into the new A8 (the Audi limo), allowing drivers to enjoy 3D satellite imagery and geo information relevant to their current location.

Recently, the Google Automotive teams have extended the partner base to more than 20 car brands worldwide, including GM, Lincoln, Mercury, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and Pontiac.

The service now works in 19 countries.

For more information…

Earlier in the year, we spoke with VirtuOZ’s Mark Gaydos about the company’s customer-service avatars. What was most striking about the conversation was the high amount of customer engagement with the avatars, something that spoke to the underlying psychology of humans interacting with human-skinned technology.

At the time there weren’t any metrics to confirm this psychological attachment, but now there are findings that explain the psychological mechanisms behind it. Researchers at Concordia University, led by Dr. H. Onur Bodur, studied Second Life to find out what factors led to people’s identification with avatars.

“Members of the community use particular avatar traits or visual cues, such as attractiveness, gender, stylish hair, or expression (“babyfaceness” is associated with cooperation), to form impressions or opinions about the human behind the avatar,” the researchers write.

“Well-known psychological principles such as Social Response Theory (SRT) and anthropomorphism come into play at this stage of discovery and discernment,” the researchers write. “[The] study finds that these impressions, based solely on fairly limited or superficial traits of the avatar, may accurately match the true personality of the real person behind the avatar.”

It is predicted that 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community by 2011. France’s fnac, one of the first major companies to use an avatar as a customer-service agent, had to deal with a consumer protest when they removed the avatar – Clara – from the site, a protest that would not have occurred if the help tool had not been anthropomorphized.

Booyah does not yet have the brand-name hype of Zynga or Foursquare in Silicon Valley, but if we talk about their two first apps, MyTown and Nightclub City, it’s clear Booyah is already becoming a serious force.

Booyah was created one year ago in Palo Alto with the goal of “creating new forms of entertainment for the masses by bringing together elements of the real world and the digital world.” The team has a strong background in the gaming industry: Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah, was formerly lead producer at Blizzard for Diablo III, one of the best known game franchises, and other members of the team worked on World of Warcraft.

Booyah has already succeeded on two platforms everybody has dreamt of: the iPhone and Facebook. That’s not just in terms of active user number (2.5 million for MyTown and 4.5 million for Nightclub City), but also in terms of engagement (time spent and user activity) and revenues generated through virtual goods and advertising.

MyTown is “monopoly for real life,” as Booyah has branded it: you can check-in on your iPhone at real places, manage them by getting revenues from people who walk into your virtual “locations,” and upgrade them. MyTown has only been released in the USA on iPhone and iTouch and has reached 2.5 million users in 6 months, which is great in comparison to the other location-based services startups.

Nightclub City was launched 2 months ago with little advertising (Booyah just published a blog post today to make it official) and has already reached 4.4 million active users. The game is simple: you’re the manager of a club and you can choose the music, change the decor, pay for celebrities coming into your club and go to your friend’s virtual club to mix and refuel their bar when they are not online.

Keith Lee’s passion is DJing, which has something to do with Nightclub City. Booyah would love to involve the entire electronic music scene in the game: it could be a new distribution channel for indie music. And it pays, as Nightclub City was awarded best social game on Facebook for 2010, according to Inside Social Games late June.

Booyah raised $20 million from Accel in May, so you can be sure they will grow quickly. As Google just invested in Zynga last Friday, maybe next time it will be Microsoft who’ll invest in Booyah.