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 latest study from the Nielsen company shows that social networking is becoming the number one activity on the Web in terms of time spent, averaging five-and-a-half hours per user per month in December 2009. It’s 82% more time than one year ago and is still growing. It’s interesting to note that the other biggest time-consuming activities on the web are blogs, IM and online gaming: these are all about connections between people. The growth of status updating (as 33% of social network users already update their status at least one time a week according to Forrester’s latest study) with Facebook and Twitter as stars will create a new web within the World Wide Web.

Two examples to confirm this evolution: the experiment “Behind closed doors on the Net,” led by French-Canadian radio journalists, should conclude the same thing: even if it’s not perfect, the new kind of interaction and sharing provided by social networking makes sense and can become a new level of knowledge and comprehension of the world. The second example is the latest moves by the two big players in search, Google and Microsoft, which signed agreements with Twitter and/or Facebook to integrate the feeds in their results and make money out of this new kind of data.

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Most of the time when you read about RFID, it’s about business applications like payments or another step in building the internet of things.

But Guard RFID Solutions is using RFID for something more valuable than spending your money or communicating with your possessions: protecting you loved ones in hospital settings. More specifically, babies and elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, what are called “wandering risk patients.”

Guard RIFD’s SafeGuard monitors senior patients’ whereabouts, using RFID chips and existing wifi or Ethernet networks. Sensors indicate to hospital staff when a patient is wandering towards an area that could be dangerous for them. TotGuard is a similar solution, but for infant and pediatric security.

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Behavioral marketing is one of the cornerstones of Web advertising, but most Americans do not like it, a joint study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology finds (PDF).

Sixty-six percent of Americans do not want advertising that is geared towards their perceived interests and generated by captured information.

The amount of public distrust of behavioral marketing is so high that 63 percent of Americans believe that advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete user information.

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Developed by San Francisco’s Radar Networks, Twine is being billed as “the first mainstream semantic application.” Those are big words, and a lot is resting on them. Semantic capabilities have long been seen as the underpinnings of Web 3.0, but, to date, the technologies have been their developmental phase, and the semantic web has remained largely theoretical.

Twine is a social bookmarking site that uses statistical analysis, natural language search, and semantic search; the three complement each other well. Twine was running a bit slow when I used it, but once I had created my profile and entered my interests, the results were impressive.

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This month NBC will be reconfiguring the Web sites of its city-specific stations to focus more on local entertainment and younger demographics. Sites such as wmaq.com and wnbc.com will be transformed into nbcchicago.com and ncbnewyork.com, respectively.  The old sites are more network television-centric, with most of the page’s real estate taken up by news headlines. The redesign, “Locals Only,” includes local news and weather in widget formats with traffic and other feeds built in. There is also more of an emphasis on community and user-generated content, with polls and calls for image and video submissions.

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On August 5 VUDU and the Adult Video Network announced a partnership to bring High-Definition adult-entertainment to a dedicated AVN channel on the VUDU network.

This latest step in TV set-top box entertainment further develops the trend in immediate access to full-resolution, full-length movies and television episodes to rent or to buy. It’s TiVo from the Internet, but more so.

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Missouri governor Matt Blunt signed a bill that changes the definition of harassment after 13-year old Megan Meier committed suicide in 2006 because of messages sent over social networking site Myspace, as we previously reported.

The updated harassment law takes into account communications via text messaging and online, whereas the previous version was limited to written or verbal, such as over the telephone.

The signed bill comes almost two years after Megan Meier killed herself after receiving demeaning and antagonistic messages on Myspace. The messages were between Meier, 13 years old, and a fictional teenager named Josh.

According to the Associated Press, Meier’s neighbor Lori Drew along with her daughter and an employee set up the fake account in order to see what Meier said about Drew’s daughter.

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Those purchasing a “smartphone” for professional purposes know, presumably, they are striking a sort of Faustian bargain: the wonders of the Internet become available to them at any moment, but then, so do the e-mails and documents associated with their work. So some, including ABC, the Writers Guild, CNBC and The New York Times, asked whether jobs should pay for that overtime BlackBerrying accordingly.

If a BlackBerry is buzzing long after the office day has finished because of a work-related email, and the recipient checks and replies, should he/she be compensated?

Is there a scale of what is and should be considered most ‘work-related’?

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May was a lucrative month for vendors on the Internet as Mother’s Day and Memorial Day celebrations spurred penny pinchers to seek better prices online, comScore reported Wednesday.

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