Yesterday, the San Francisco 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) gathered the emerging social media expert crowd from the Bay Area. The topic of the day was “What the Real Time Web can bring to the World?”

The 140 characters conference objective follows Twitter spirit: “One can change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” @Jack (Jack Dorsey, co founder of Twitter). The subjects were diverse: from Agriculture to Telco or Spirituality. I will just highlight some pearls of the conference.

Peter Hirshberg, chairman of the Re-Imagine Group, talked about the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA) last exposition MIT SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures. He wanted to demonstrate that Arts can bring a lot to understand technology and its future which is precisely GAFFTA idea. “Visualization can help us realize what’s going on”, stated Hirsberg, taking the example of the NYSE visualization picture exposed at the NYC MOMA.

Dom Sagolla, helped to create Twitter back in 2006, writer of the 140 characters book and more recently founder of the iPhoneDevCamp took the stage to share his tweet per capita invention. According to him, “tweet per capita” answers the question “how to best measure technological and cultural progress”. One funny fact about Twitter: it was first called “Status” internally at Odeo.

Just after, Google and Twitter Geo experts were talking about the future of LBS and last Facebook Places announce. For Leorn Stern from Google New Business Development: “Facebook Places is the mainstreamization of checking”. But the real question about LBS is Local Merchant interaction with customers, something that is the next big opportunity for the Internet players and has been already leveraged by some like Groupon.

Deborah Schultz from Altimeter Group began her “Etiquette in a RT world” speech with a clear statement: “Twitter is blogging on crack” (repeating what she said in the early day of Twitter). “Social media is a teenager figuring out what is elegant” added Schultz mentioning that it was reshaping the social contract between people like nothing else before. Taking the example of the “no device diner” mentioned by Jeff Pulver previously, she explained that it was really hard to figure out what was okay or not to do and there was a growing gap between techies and non techies as well as between generation.

Last but not least, Twitter was also part of the conference with a dedicated panel. Twitter team has grown like crazy in the last two years: from 22 people in early 2009 to 70 in October 2009, 250 people in July 2010 and more than 350 people expected by the end of 2010. They are experimenting a lot of things and said that what was “glue for the people” to stay on Twitter was a good mix between following celebrities, real life friends and some experts from a community and/or hobby.

Update: Twitter list of Speakers at the San Francisco 140 characters conference http://twitter.com/atelier_us/sf-140conf

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.

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.

One year after its launch, Google Wave is still one of the big subjects at Google I/O. How can Google Wave help enterprises improve their workflow? That was the question that the Wave team and Salesforce managers tried to answer.

Because most collaboration happens in small groups, enterprises need tools that can combine structured information – work processes, formalized rules – and unstructured information – casual, day-to-day interactions. Usually, companies’ work habits separate these two kinds of information: one place for work processes, one place for chaos. Both are needed.

For both types of situations, Google Wave was conceived to be the main answer to collaboration needs - the perfect tool for semi-structured processes. New Google Wave features were announced at the conference that focus on user experience and efficiency. For example, Wave automatically highlights names on a to-do list, or strikes items as done.

To improve users’ Wave experience, enterprises are strongly encouraged to develop simple applications or widgets that suit their specific needs. A strong focus has been made on the open collaboration platform and how all is about modular functionality and adaptation. Google Wave is a changing product specially imagined to fit to everyone needs after few developments.

This ready-to-go usability is what Salesforce attempted to illustrate with a detailed case study. The social network for companies has added personas and Facebook-like co-worker profiles, real-time feeds and chatter stream to its tool. But most of all, it is now synchronized with Google Wave in order to let co-workers chat, organize work and share documents more easily. Chat is the future of collaboration, and collaboration is the future of enterprise.

Furthermore, Google Wave could be soon developed for Android, even if nothing official has been announced at the conference.

Android 2.2 and Google TV were the focus of the second keynote of Google’s I /O conference today. Before announcing what’s new for Google’s famous smartphone operating system, Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, gave us some data. Indeed, Android is compatible with over 60 devices - in opposition to Apple’s strategy of one device for all. This system, available in 48 countries, is now second on the smartphone market in the US (after RIM) and first regarding usage. Finally, they’ve passed 50,000 downloaded apps. We could easily say that all of this encouraging data will be increased by the appearance of Froyo . The codename for Android 2 .2, Froyo benefits from the Just-in-Time compiler, new specific features for enterprise and new services for developers. Android’s owners will also now experience automatic updates for all of their applications.

For tech enthusiasts, one of the most interesting new Froyo functionalities is voice commands. For example, during the demo, the developers asked the handset, “Picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.” This sentence appears automatically in the browser with pictures of the famous bridge below. More amazing is the ability to analyze human intentions. “Call Fifth Floor Restaurant,” asked the Google employee, and the smartphone performed the task in seconds. In the last example, he said another phrase and his Android device translated it into French. Awesome.

Another fascinating announcement is the possibility to download applications to an SD card in addition to internal memory. Due to this advancement, a user could download an app on a PC and send it wirelessly to the Android device. It could also be possible to send music from the PC’s library to the phone.

Thanks to that announcement, it’s obvious that our smartphones will become more connected to our computers, and more clever at responding to our requests…The definition of a personal assistant, isn’t it?

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…

Image via Wikipedia

Until now, the smartphone market has been divided between the main operators, the most blatant example being the agreement between Apple and AT&T. Each brand has its own app ecosystem. More than 300,000 applications will be accessible in the Apple App Store by the end of 2010, and between 50,000 and 75,000 applications will be provided in the Android Market.

Applications are the symbol of the smartphone, but also one of its main values.

For brands that have invested in the mobile app market or want to do so, the breakup of market forces has caused them to multiply applications across platforms. Strategically speaking, smartphones’ individual OS’s maintain control over the attractive and steadily growing market by forcing developers to adapt to a new format for each ecosystem and seeking the consent of the OS owner before an app can hit the market. Apple, Google, Blackberry and Nokia are engaged in a format war that forgets the consumer and constrains brands.

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Image via CrunchBase

Barely two days after launching Buzz, the social networking feature for Gmail, Google bought the social search engine Aardvark for $50 million on February 11.

This acquisition is part of Google’s strategy of going social in order to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Aardvark is a social search engine founded in July 2007 by former Google employees. The San Francisco startup, which launched its service in private beta in 2008, allows web users to ask questions which are then distributed through their social network and sent to someone who can answer them.

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Google’s Android OS will be the second biggest operating system in the smartphone market by 2013, IDC predicts.

The research company forecasts that global smartphone sales will surpass 390 million units by that time, a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 20.9 percent between 2009 and 2013.

“In a market that was once dominated by a handful of pioneers, such as BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, newcomers touting open standards (Android) and intuitive design and navigation (Mac OS X and webOS) have garnered strong end-user and handset vendor interest,” according to the company press release.

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