It's beautiful and rare when the worlds of computer games, band geekdom and college football can all get along.

The Ohio State marching band peformed a fairly amazing tribute to computer games between halves on Saturday, Oct. 6, 2012, including an eye-popping rendition of Epona (Legend of Zelda) galloping across the field. Other games referenced include Space Invaders, Pokemon, Tetris, Mario Bros., Halo and Pacman.

Oh, yeah. There was a game, too. The Buckeyes kicked the snot out of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, 63-38.

We're running a series based on Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report mid-year, in which she listed 50+ industries that are being "reimagined" by social and mobile technologies. One of her slides was about the home improvement information industry, which up till recently revolved around broadcast media like magazines and TV. Meeker pointed to a new generation of home improvement services, like Houzz and One Kings Lane, that is making this industry much more two-way... and useful!

Houzz describes itself as "the leading online platform for home remodeling and design." The company told us it has five million unique users per month and has had over two million downloads of its iPad and iPhone apps.

The previous generation of home improvement information services is typified by Better Homes and Gardens, a magazine boasting the fourth highest circulation in the United States. Better Homes and Gardens is owned by The Meredith Corporation and has been around since 1922. It has a website at bhg.com which, at first glance, appears similar to Houzz. But let's look more closely...

Houzz (House + Buzz, Geddit?)

As well as offering a Pinterest-like catalog of colorful home designs for users to browse, Houzz has hundreds of articles and community discussions. However, the real killer feature of Houzz is that it connects homeowners with designers and home improvement professionals.

Houzz helps you organize a home improvement project, with a concept it calls "Ideabook." I'm currently looking to buy a dining table, so I created a new Ideabook for that. I then entered the search term "dining table" into Houzz. The homepage has photos as its default search type and that brought up 7,124 "dining table" home design photos. I added a few to my new Ideabook.

The thing is, I'm no interior design expert. I need a little help here. Happily, at the bottom of the photo results page for "dining table", there was a link to an article entitled Discover Your Dining Table Style. The article gave some handy tips, encouraging me to add styles I liked into my dining table Ideabook.

Houzz follows the Pinterest model even further, by offering an "Add to Ideabook" bookmarklet - so you can save images from external websites into your Ideabooks (privately, if you don't want the whole world to see).

There's a good discussion area in Houzz, where you can ask a question to the community or browse existing questions. You can also follow people on Houzz, whether it's professionals or other homeowners. Overall, the site has very strong community features.

Finally, it's worth noting that Houzz has well-designed iPad and iPhone apps.

The one area which Houzz could improve on is e-commerce. Houzz isn't a full e-commerce operation, it simply links to external sites. To hire a professional Interior Designer or purchase a dining table, I'd need to go to the provider's external website or call them up. It would make a lot of sense if I could order a new dining room table - or even a second-hand one - from within Houzz. Or order the services of an Interior Designer who has good ratings.

How Does Better Homes and Gardens Compare?

I tested the BHG website with the same search for a dining table. It turned up 33 articles, 2 videos and 115 slideshows (although a quick browse through the slideshows revealed that many were about more than just dining tables).

BHG does have some good articles on dining tables, such as one gradly titled Ultimate Guide to Dining Room Tables. But overall, the BHG user experience is inferior to Houzz. There is no way for me to organize projects, a la Houzz's Ideabooks, and there isn't much community on BHG. The site also has tech glitches - I had trouble with the signup process and the Pinterest link led me to its Twitter page.

Mary Meeker described the reimagined home improvement website as a "Communication Platform for Designers & Consumers [featuring] Share / Discover & Click-And-Buy." Houzz has excellent discovery and sharing features, as well as a large and active community. It has a massive database of products - over 7,000 photos of dining room tables, for example. The one thing it doesn't have, as noted above, is click-and-buy. But (as with Pinterest) this is surely the next step for Houzz.

As for BHG, right now they remain the 4th most popular magazine in the US according to circulation. But with its current website, which is limited and not very functional compared to Houzz, it's hard to see how it can continue to remain the leader in the home improvement information market. Especially with the financial backing Houzz has - at the end of last year, Houzz received $11.6 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.

I'm curious to check back in 5 years time and see how the two products compare then. It seems to me that Houzz has a massive opportunity to bring a reimagined home improvement service to a mainstream user base.

There's been a lot of talk in the tech community that Pinterest has changed the popular art of scrapbooking. Internet analyst Mary Meeker even suggested that Pinterest had reimagined scrapbooking. But after looking at how two scrapbooking gurus are using Pinterest, our conclusion is that the lucrative scrapbook market is still ripe for reinvention in the mobile and social era.

Scrapbooking is a popular hobby in the United States and has a long history. Wikipedia defines it as "a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of a scrapbook." Scrapbooks typically include photos, journal entries, clippings from newspapers and magazines, and artwork. As Mary Meeker noted in her presentation, the tools of scrapbooking have traditionally been paper, scissors and glue.

Over the past year Pinterest has had an impact on the scrapbooking community, but not as much as we've been led to believe. In this post we profile a couple of leading "scrappers" (as I discovered they are known as), to see how they use Pinterest.

The Family Scrapbooker: My Sister-in-Law

It turns out I have an avid scrapbooker in my family, in the form of my sister-in-law. She told me that lots of "the American scrappers" are on Pinterest and a lot people follow them there. Many of the bigger names in scrapbooking have blogs, along with Facebook and Twitter profiles. She said this allows fans to follow popular scrappers on social media, "rather than waiting a year or two for them to bring out a new book."

According to my scrapbooking sister-in-law, many scrappers use Pinterest to keep track of art works, color schemes, home decor, ideas and other people's layouts (scrapbook pages).

Now let's look at a couple of prominent scrapbookers and how they use Pinterest.

The Traditional Scrapbooker: Stacy Julian

Stacy Julian is a guru in the scrapbooking world. A mother of five from Spokane, Washington, Julian has written four books on scrapbooking, the first in 2000. She was the founding editor of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, which ran from 2002-2009.

Julian went on to found Big Picture Classes, an online education site for creative women. The company encourages its students "to use materials they have on hand or materials that can be acquired in their local economy." So scrapbooking is viewed as a physical craft by Stacy Julian and her education website.

Stacy Julian has over 7,000 followers on Pinterest. She's pinned 640 images, across 26 boards. She uses Pinterest mainly for inspiration, with her most popular board 'Happy Colors' being a place to "visit when I'm tired and need to find my mojo." Color is an important part of her scrapbooking philosophy, but the emphasis is still on deploying colorful materials on paper - rather than online. So Pinterest is a complementary activity for Stacy Julian, it hasn't replaced scrapbooking for her.

The Digital Scrapbooker: Ali Edwards

Ali Edwards has also written four books about scrapbooking (the first in 2004) and currently designs "digital scrapbooking products" for Designer Digitals. She has a foot in both camps of scrapbooking, paper and digital. She advises new scrapbookers that the best way to begin is to start writing and photographing, then "[bring] them together on your computer or with paper and glue."

So-called digital scrapbooking is relatively new. The key tools are scanners, image editors like Adobe Photoshop, and specialist tools like the Silhouette (an electronic cutting tool that connects to your computer). Edwards designs templates and kits, containing things like PNG files and .STUDIO files for use with the Silhouette.

Even though Stacy Julian is the more established scrapbooker, Edwards has more followers on Pinterest: 16,500 compared to 7,000 for Julian. That's really the only statistical difference between the two on Pinterest, however, because Edwards has pinned 652 images (Julian has 640), across 29 boards (Julian has 26).

Edwards' most pinned board is one called Memory Keeping. Many of these pins are about layout inspiration and ideas.

Scrapbooking Reimagined? Nope

Despite the different scrapbooking approaches of the two gurus, neither Stacy Julian or Ali Edwards use Pinterest as a replacement for scrapbooking. Both use Pinterest primarily for inspiration and to catalog ideas. At best, Pinterest gives scrappers a community to share ideas and inspirations. But it isn't reimagining scrapbooking.

However, there does seem to be a big opportunity in the market for a more social and mobile form of scrapbooking. Although Ali Edwards and others are beginning to push digital forms of scrapbooking, this is currently more about digital manipulation of images than a true Web native form of scrapbooking.

Perhaps I'm being presumptuous suggesting that scrapbooking can be even more digital, so I'd love to hear the thoughts of scrappers in the comments.

Image credit: gluestickgirl

Sports news website Bleacher Report (B/R) was mentioned twice in Mary Meeker's 2012 Internet Trends report: as an example of re-imagination of both sports news and TV. Bleacher Report, founded in 2006 by four sports fans from Silicon Valley, has become so influential that Time Warner is rumored to be trying to acquire it. What makes B/R stand out and can it continue to fend off much larger competitors like ESPN and Yahoo Sports?

What Huffington Post is to politics and current affairs, Bleacher Report is to sports. Like HuffPo, it has a large community of amateur contributors. B/R posts over 1000 new "content items" every day. In what has been a common theme in the new media era, B/R first made a name for itself by sheer mass of content. After it had conquered Google search and social media channels with quantity, B/R turned its attention to editorial quality (others like HuffPo and Mashable followed the same course). Since 2010 B/W has instituted a training program for its fan writers and hired some senior editors. Those measures seem to have worked, with TIME magazine declaring B/R one of its 50 Best Websites of 2011 and stating that "the standard of quality [at B/W] is markedly higher than at some community-created news hubs."

B/R's fan contributers helped the site get where it is, but other sports news brands have now followed suit and opened up their platform to amateur bloggers. Also, older sites have adopted the social media and multimedia tricks of B/R. There is still one thing that B/R has an edge on, however, and that is its iPad and iPhone app called Team Stream. The app's personalized stream of content is a pointer to the future of sports news. You select which sports teams - or categories of sports - to follow and Team Stream only shows you content related to that.

B/R has some big, smart competitors. Yahoo Sports is still the leading online sports news brand, with 48 million unique visitors in April according to comScore (source: The Wall St Journal). That's 5 times more than B/R, which had 9.6 million unique visitors in April. ESPN, Fox, CBS and NBC are other big players in online sports news. B/R is just outside the top 10 sports websites in the US, according to this chart of comScore's March statistics:

B/R has done a great job of reimagining sports news, but one gets the sense that an acquisition by Time Warner may be B/R's best chance at continuing its impressive growth. Where B/R is still ahead of the game is its mobile app, Team Stream. But that's only in terms of app design. ESPN actually has the number one iOS sports app, with WatchESPN. B/R's app is number 12, although it's more highly rated by users: 5 stars compared to 2.5 for WatchESPN. So if B/R is to extend its purple patch of success in online sports news, it's either going to have to come up with more mobile magic - or jump on board a juggernaut like Time Warner.

Twenty-six floors above Tokyo's Shinjuku district sits one of the city's coolest showcases of Japanese gadgetry: Toto's flagship showroom, where visitors can check out the latest in high-end toilet and bath technology.

From automatic-everything "washlet" toilets to a $30,000 light-up bathtub, there's a lot to explore.

Toto, the world's largest plumbing manufacturer, was founded in 1917 - almost 100 years ago. In Japan, its products are in almost every bathroom you visit. And worldwide, the Toto company did almost $6 billion in sales last year.

But it's probably best known in Western pop culture for its high-tech "washlet" toilets, which you might find in a high-end Japanese restaurant in New York City or an increasing number of private homes. Think: Heated seat, remote control, and an automatic bidet nozzle that washes you with warm water after you use the restroom, dries you with air and doesn't waste paper.

In Japan, the washlet-type toilet has more than 70% penetration in residences, Toto's reps tell me. And internationally, washlet sales are increasing by "double digit" percentages annually. But the Japan domestic market is still the big one.

Today's high-end Toto washlets are the "Neorest" line, available for purchase in Japan and internationally. (Pictured above.) They're attractive, highly automated, and efficient, featuring a special glazing to promote cleanliness and a "Cyclone" flushing system, described as "the cleanest, most hygienic and most powerful flushing system." The top-of-line Neorest 600, for instance, uses just 1.6 gallons of water per flush and costs more than $6,000. (New Neorests also spray anti-bacterial solution every time they're used, and every 8 hours. Some great videos here, though Japanese text.)

It's pretty cool - and a little disarming, like the automatic Japanese taxi doors - to wave your hand in the right place and have the toilet seat fly up. But from a convenience and sanitation perspective, it makes sense.

In Toto's showroom, the toilets are also set up in powder room configurations, including small hand-washing sinks and fixtures. These vary in design and price; the one above costs ¥478,000, or about $6,000.

I also checked out a few low-end models and a commercial urinal or two, but they weren't as interesting. This wall of toilet paper roll holders was pretty cool, though.

There's a lot more than toilets on display, of course. In Japan, residential bathrooms are typically sold as integrated units, including bathtub, shower, drain, and another set of sophisticated controls.

One highlight of the tour is this ultra-high-end bathtub, the PVK180AC. The Japanese love soaking in the tub, and this is the Cadillac of tubs. It's big, obviously, but also made from a semi-transparent material that lets light through. So you can turn off the overhead lights, switch on the LED tub lamps, and have a nice, glowy soak, wrapped in light.

It is not cheap, of course. The tub itself goes for ¥2.4 million, or $30,000. And the complete set-up costs about $38,000. But your relaxation is worth it!

On the way out, I also got to test a few shower handsets in a nifty demonstration booth.

It's easy to forget that the things we use for basic hygiene on a daily basis are technology products, too. Touring the Toto showroom in Tokyo was fun and informative, and next time I visit, I fully expect to be able to flush the toilets from my iPhone. If you have some spare time in Tokyo, it's worth a visit. (Although don't expect much English.) Great view, too!

Also: Flying the 787 'Dreamliner': What It's Like to Ride Boeing's Newest Airplane

I'm a frequent contributor to the C.S.T. program on Colombia's news channel NTN24; and yesterday, my producer there asked me to contribute a comment on the subject of the Church of Kopimism.  To be completely honest with everyone, I had not heard of it before she shared a link.

The Web site of the international headquarters for the church (kopimistsamfundet) explains the loophole it attempts to exploit this way: Since illicit file sharing may be, in at least one sense, a transgression, the transmission of the knowledge of that transgression may be, at one level, a confession. Thus if the operators of the services receiving such confessions treat them with absolute secrecy (I suppose not all information wants to be free), then those operators are entitled to special protection under Swedish law as priests.

If you're thinking what I was thinking... well, first of all, shame on you.  Second, someone did try to obtain priestly protection for, um, that too, to no avail.

I could stop here and say, "Well, isn't that just ridiculous" and move on to the next thing to ridicule.  But my NTN24 producer knew my background on the blending of technology and religion, and asked me to take it one step further. So I wrote the following few paragraphs, in an essay I presented for C.S.T. host Mónica Fonseca this morning:

First, briefly, allow me to speak as someone involved in the information technology field:  There is nothing about copyright violation that can be cleansed and purified by declaring it a religion. I could go next door right now and saw down my neighbor’s trees. If I tell the police I did this in the act of spiritual revelation, that does not somehow make it legal or even right.

As someone who has learned a few things about the law as a journalist, I can say this: In the United States and Canada, and most other countries I can name, you can’t just declare yourself a religion for tax purposes.

Most important - and I hope your viewers will permit me to do this - I should like to speak as a Christian. I find it sad that any group of people should find it necessary to desecrate the beliefs of millions, including myself, simply to justify, in their own minds, a guilty obsession. The Church of Kopimism declares the act of copying and redistributing digital information to be sacrament. If indeed the distribution of digital information is holy, then I would make it my life’s mission to make certain that every act of transmission I made was infused with only the purest wisdom and the greatest knowledge. Somehow, I suspect that what the Kopimists spend their time copying is something less than revelation.

True religion, I believe, should be that which gives you strength and wisdom and power when all else fails. At this moment, there are thousands of Colombians who remain homeless after the waves of devastating floods took all their possessions and some of their family. I sincerely doubt that any of these people today are praying for the return of Megaupload to save them from their misery. Praying for them should not require electricity. God is the source of all power when every other source has failed. I would hate to have to depend for my personal strength upon any power source that a human being or an act of nature can turn off.

Cathedral image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Is the world ready for mobile payments? Not quite, according to a global survey released by MasterCard yesterday. There are a variety of factors that lead will lead to mobile payments adoption across the planet, from infrastructure deployment to consumer willingness to make payments with a mobile device. The mobile payments revolution hasn't arrived just yet, but if MasterCard can be believed, we are not far away.

MasterCard released the “MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index" (MPRI) to gauge the readiness of 34 countries across the globe for mobile payments. MasterCard defines mobile payments in three different categories: peer-to-peer, mobile commerce (mCommerce) and at the point of sale (POS).

Six different factors were weighted on a 0-100 scale:

• Consumer Readiness – MasterCard surveyed 1,000 consumers in each of the 34 markets to gauge their familiarity with mobile payment, willingness to use mobile payment and current usage of the three payment types. 
• Environment – Economic, technological and demographic elements, such as Internet access and per-capita income. 
• Financial Services – Depth of the financial services sector, including accessibility and affordability, and penetration of digital (plastic card-based) payments. 
• Infrastructure – Mobile phone penetration, network coverage and breadth of NFC terminals. 
• Mobile Commerce Clusters – Partnerships among financial services, telecommunications companies, governments and technology providers. 
• Regulation – Structure and efficiency of each market's legal and governmental bodies.  

These six categories show MasterCard is doing its homework. The MPRI is the result of that homework. The results are mixed, but no country has hit what MasterCard identifies as the inflection point for mass mobile payments adoption, at 65 of 100 on the company’s scale. See the results below.

According to MasterCard’s white paper on the survey results, Singapore’s top ranking is based on its infrastructure. The country has 100% mobile coverage, 70% Internet penetration and 68% mobile phone penetration. It also leads in the regulation category with “well-developed laws in relation to information and communication technology.”

In North America, the U.S. and Canada are both above average on the index. The U.S. skews toward a younger demographic, with young, affluent males making up most of the mobile payments sector, especially in the POS sector. The U.S. rates above average on willingness to use mobile payments for POS and mCommerce.

MasterCard’s conclusion on mobile payments in the U.S.:

“While scoring quite well compared to other markets in terms of integration, there remains much work to be done in the United States. That’s one of the reasons mCommerce is so far ahead of other varieties of mobile payments: The infrastructure, especially as regards the roles and responsibilities of the players – is already in place. The existence of Isis and Google Wallet do much to boost the United States’ score; but until both these projects begin to achieve air speed by engaging all players, it’s still in the early days.”

The needs of mobile payments vary in scope between developed and emerging worlds. For instance, Kenya is No. 4 on MasterCard’s index despite having little infrastructure or mobile commerce clusters. Yet, it is precisely this lack of infrastructure that has led Kenya to be one of the most ready countries in the world for mobile payments because it is building a new transactional model almost from scratch. That kind of flexibility makes developing mobile payment systems easier. For instance, take a look at M-Pesa, a peer-to-peer mobile payments system that works without banks or financial services organizations (such as MasterCard). M-Pesa is administered through IBM for Vodafone, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. It is an example of how technology is used to fulfill a need (in this case, easy transactions) as opposed to artificially disrupting an entrenched market that will be slow to change.

That is where MasterCard and much of the financial ecosystem may be seeing mobile payments through rose-colored glasses. For instance, why do mobile payments skew heavily toward young males in developed countries? The answer, more or less, is because it is cool. The actual need for mobile payments (NFC or otherwise) is not as clear in the U.S. as it is in other countries, like Kenya and Singapore. Mobile commerce does well in the U.S. because the existing infrastructure is in place for it to succeed. It has robust carrier billing options, PayPal and other online payment processors, as well as retail destinations like Amazon, eBay and others. The need for a peer-to-peer payment system in the U.S. is a novelty, because money can be switched easily via bank transfers, checks or other means. As for POS integration, it remains to be seen how robust that market segment becomes as retailers and consumers decide whether NFC, beam technologies and/or QR codes really add more value to the transaction process.

MasterCard has identified what it will take to create a true mobile payments ecosystem in many countries across the world. What it fails to recognize is that none of this is a foregone conclusion. Reading MasterCard’s MPRI, you get the feeling that the payment processor wants mobile payments to become a worldwide reality. It identifies an MRPI score of 60 or more as the inflection point at which a country becomes ready for mass adoption of mobile payments. The question then becomes: Even if a country does hit that inflection point, will it actually develop a robust mobile payments system?

MasterCard presupposes that there is a distinct need for mobile payments. As we have seen, that already is a reality in places like Kenya. But in developed countries, mobile payments are not based on need, but rather on creating extra value for the consumer. Whether mobile payments will deliver an easy, seamless ecosystem that creates that kind of value (such as deals, offers and data) remains to be seen. 

If you're quick, you might even be able to buy one for yourself.

The U.S. Navy is auctioning off a stealth ship. Seriously. But bidding ends at 6 p.m. Eastern today!

We just learned what a cryobot is and thought you might enjoy it.

The Washington Post has a cool photo gallery about the exciting beginnings of private space flight.

The Daily doesn't think that asteroid mining is as far-fetched as we think.

Preparing for the inevitable, Delta Airlines bought an oil refinery.

Here is a brain-shakingly awesome HD video of a space shuttle launch. This is how the program should be remembered.

Image via Shutterstock.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."

"No matter how you slice the data," Vivek Wadhwa said on Twitter, "the exponential growth in Social Media is no more. Just gradual growth now."

Wadhwa is an astute observer of long-term technology trends and is likely correct within a particular understanding of the situation. For one thing, I can't help but imagine raw user numbers still have a long, long way to go in many parts of the world just beginning to come online.

Even within the US and the rest of the West though, such conclusions require an assumption that the key metric is number of new users in total. "Instead of raw user growth," Eldon argues on Techcrunch, "the numbers to watch going forward will be around engagement."

What might that look like? I'd like to present two possibilities for major continued growth in social media.

Afterwords, Vivek Wadhwa's response.

The Instrumentation of Everyday Life

One way to understand engagement with social networks is not just time on site, but data provided as input. Mark Zuckerberg sees it this way, he argues that the amount of information people share doubles every year.

Facebook's Open Graph API allows all kinds of websites to push user activity into their Facebook newsfeeds. The roll-out of Open Graph, widely referred to as Frictionless Sharing, has just barely begun. It's already super controversial. I believe it has been implemented in a way that puts the whole kitten caboodle at risk, unfortunately.

Have you noticed how much more prominent music has become in Facebook since the introduction of the Open Graph on Spotify, Rdio and other services? Now imagine that rolling out to everything you do online. It's already begun to enter into news reading and video viewing. Facebook is sure to do it better the next time around when they roll it out to shopping again, after the Beacom debacle several years ago.

Meals eaten? Hours of sleep slept? Distances traveled? TV shows and books watched? There are many more parts of our lives that can be wired up to Facebook or other social networks.

The instrumentation of everyday life may sound frightening to many people, but so did posting photos of yourself online or using a debit card (at all) just a few years ago.

If it's done well, with privacy protections, security, user education, informed consent and delighted users - then this type of engagement with social media could represent a huge and desirable period of growth in the industry.

"Just as location-based applications became a 'feature' rather than the 'big thing,' social media will live on and become an integral part of what we do," Wadha writes. "But the party's over for investors and start-ups in this space. The big growth is behind us. Revenues from social media have not lived up to the promises, and the vast majority of those thousands of start-ups are either dying or on the ropes. It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."

Given the huge growth of data input that is likely just around the corner, it makes no sense to me that investors and start-ups don't have plenty of room to make money in social still.

The Web of Things

Connected devices, many of which you might not even consider connecting to the Web today, are expected to facilitate fundamental changes in human life over the next few years.

Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson, predicts that the world's nearly 5 billion mobile phone subscribers today will be surpassed by 50 billion connected non-phone devices in 10 years.

What does this have to do with social media? Quite simply, what do you think people will be doing while they ride in the driverless car that picked them up at home to take them to work? They'll be Facebooking and Tweeting, of course.

What will happen after your 50th automatic re-supply of Cap'n' Crunch? You'll win a Super Fan badge on your social media profile, I'm sure.

Blippy, the social network that publishes every debit card transaction you perform out into your social network of fellow exhibitionist friends may never take the world by fire. But Mint.com's aggregate financial data and benchmarking is much more likely to. Real-time data bout local spending sounds like social media to me.

Social media in the age of instrumentation and connected devices may be more about aggregate social activity than about the long voice blogging and Tweeting.

The intersection of people, machines and passively monitored objects (the cheapest input of all!) all combine to form an entirely new world of opportunity.

That may be the biggest opportunity yet.

As Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, wrote this Spring:

"This change - enabling computers to see and understand what is happening in the real world - is enormous. Most people have yet to grasp it, seeing RFID as a more expensive alternative to bar codes. They don't comprehend that when computers can automatically collect information regarding what is happening in the world, new insights and business strategies then become possible. And the companies that leverage these capabilities most effectively will be the big winners in the century ahead."

Cloud-scale information gathering regarding what is happening in the world we live in, leading to entirely new insights and business strategies. That sounds like social media to me.

I expect that this kind of information is going to make the number of photos we all pro-actively upload to Facebook look like a drop in the ocean. Let's hope this vision of the future gets built in a way that's equitable and pro-freedom. Those are key concerns here at the early morning, just after the dawn, of social media.

Wadhwa's reply

I was fortunate enough to catch Vivek Wadhwa on Twitter last night and sent him this post before publication. This was his response.

"I don't disagree with you. But I maintain that this segment will lose its sizzle--just like eCommerce did in the early days of the Internet. We overhyped this, invested in too many of the same startups, and portrayed this as a destination rather than a means. Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter will become platforms from which other, deeper, services are built. But gone are the days of the silly me too social media startups--the Twitter and Facebook clones.

"Look at 'location based services'--the insane hype that TechCrunch created around this. This has just become a feature that we take for granted and build other meaningful applications on. Social media will go the same way. It will persist and grow, but in depth and value rather than just numbers and hype.

"I expect the excitement and hype in 2012 to be in the social game companies, newfangled B2B technology plays, and cloud computing. These will be the next bubble. Soon after, we'll see the Big Data bubble. All of this is good because it spurs investment and innovation. That's the beauty of Silicon Valley--it moves from one fad to another as if nothing ever happened."

"Most of the apps out there today that are location-specific are delivering lists of content back to the user," says CEO Jason Karas. "We feel that exploring a space is not really done best through lists, that it's done through information that's organized in a spatial way. You can literally stroll around with our UI and take in the neighborhood just like you would when you're walking around."

Growing The User Base

Trover has been available on iPhone since July, and anyone can browse discoveries on a big screen at Trover.com. "The app hasn't changed much in its functionality since we launched in July," says Karas, "but we've been working like crazy getting Android online because our community is asking for it. They want to share with friends who aren't iPhone users."

Trover reports that over 100,000 users in 160 countries have downloaded the iPhone app, and its next goal is to grow to scale with Android. "It's such a social application," says Karas, "and the ability for more folks to use it is what really gets the flywheel spinning."

Social Is Just A Vector

As the iPhone app has gained traction, Trover has attracted a certain kind of user base. Karas calls them "hyperlocal influencers." These are users with very specific tastes and expertise who gain a following on Trover based around their interests.

But while following others is one way to discover things on Trover, one of the app's distinguishing features is its emphasis on the content itself rather than the users who created it. While other apps in the space like Yelp or Foursquare emphasize friends and personal achievements in order to drive participation, Trover just treats the social Web as "a vector" to help more users discover the real-world places shared on the network.

"We are a social network for sharing discoveries," Karas says, "but what we're sharing is not 'me and where I am.' What we're sharing is something that I've found."

Next Steps: Keywords, Tablets and Kitchen Tables

Karas says that keyword-based browsing is coming to Trover in the next few weeks. Currently, Trover use centers around spatial browsing, using the map interface to see whatever is around. Keyword browsing will allow users to filter for certain kinds of discoveries, like sushi or graffiti art.

After getting Trover onto all smartphones, Karas looks forward building to native tablet apps for iPad and Android. These will be more focused on the browsing aspect of Trover, "like when you're sitting in your living room or at the kitchen table," Karas says. "It will be more like the experience you see on Trover.com today where the images are sized according to their popularity."

"We think that the handset is the primary tool that you should use to go capture these discoveries," Karas says, "but why not also let people explore their neighborhood, or even another country, from the comfort of their computer?"

Download Trover for Android or iPhone today (it's free), or explore existing discoveries straight from Trover.com

Designed to reduce the need for skilled labor operating the machinery, the system would mean that farmers could do other higher-level planning work and operate the tractor all night long by itself. Presumably the whole thing is networked, collects data and will make some analytics available. Hello, Internet of Things, goodbye Old MacDonald? I'm not sure what to think of this - but large scale agriculture has probably been far enough from a city dweller's idyllic vision of farming to be creepy for a long time anyway. There's something about this video that feels especially creepy to me though.

In case you can't see it at this size, that is a John Deere in the video.

Of course all technology is about saving time and work so that greater, higher forms of work can be done. It's a beautiful thing, in many contexts. That which can be automated, networked and measured at scale can be performed more rationally, more efficiently and in standardized ways that offer a foundation for further inovations.

It's not as if farm labor done by underpaid seasonal migrants living in cramped conditions after fleeing Latin American economies crushed by CIA installed military dictators and death squads from the 50's through the 80's is necessarily anything to romanticize either.

Perhaps we should welcome our new, fully autonomous food production overlords.

In this post we tell you how to monitor the Rugby World Cup online, using a range of impressive official websites and social media accounts.

As you'd expect, the event has an official website that is constantly updated with news and results. You'll also find the fixture list, tickets information and much more.

The official site is also a good place to check out video coverage of the games, with full match coverage available on past games. Note that there is a 72 hour delay in the USA, presumably due to TV rights. Although in our tests, none of the videos seemed to work in the US. So your mileage may vary. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like, in case you can't see the videos right now:

For further video content, the RWC YouTube channel offers a daily 5-6 minute news round-up. Below is the latest one at time of writing.

The RWC Facebook Page has 1.3 million 'likes' so far and is a good place to discuss the games with other fans. There are currently over 300 comments on the South Africa vs. Wales match.

Rugby fans may also want to check out the extra features in the Facebook Page menu, including separate pages for Discussions and Events.

The official Twitter account has nearly 75,000 followers at this stage. It's an active account, with helpful updates and even match scores. The official hashtag is #rwc2011. In addition, you can follow Twitter lists for teams and players.

For a flavor of the atmosphere around New Zealand as the RWC plays out, check out the official Flickr account.

There are a number of RWC mobile apps available, including for iPhone/iPad, Android phones, Blackberry and more.

Finally, if you'd like a calendar of the games for Google Calendar, Outlook and more, local rugby fan Mike Riversdale has created a few options.

Overall, the online coverage of the Rugby World Cup is comprehensive and makes excellent use of social media. Other than some issues with watching video from the U.S. and perhaps other countries, the online presence for RWC2011 is more than satisfactory.

As the founder of ReadWriteWeb and the company's only kiwi (I live and work from New Zealand), I can't resist finishing this round-up by stating: GO THE ALL BLACKS! It's about time we lifted the World Cup again, it's only been 24 years :)

That's an experience that children all over the world have had. Flat Stanley calls itself the longest-running literacy and community building program on the web. The program encourages participants to carry, mail or otherwise send a cardboard cut-out figure called Flat Stanley to faraway places and interesting circumstances. When the same Flat Stanley that was in a classroom in South Africa shows up in a photo perched on a snow bank in the United States - something magical happens in the minds of the children who sent it across the world. It's as if those faraway places become more real, now the child has a connection with the place and the prospect of making that trip themselves feels more possible. Anything that expands a person's understanding of what's possible is a good thing. Now the Flat Stanley experience is available in a new mobile app, making it easier than ever to use.

Flat Stanley is a little bit like a chain letter, a little bit like having a pen pal and a little bit like putting a folded paper boat in the river. It's simple, but it seems to touch some deep human themes.

There's something about mom or dad taking a Flat Stanley photo while away on a trip that says to a child, "I am here and I am thinking of you." Whether that same feeling gets communicated and whether a virtual Flat Stanley caries that same psychological payload as a cardboard one remains to be seen.

To send a Flat Stanley, I think, is to use a virtual object (either very thin or entirely digital) to write something on the real world. The Flat Stanley phenomenon makes that writing more accessible and appealing to children than anything else I've heard of before. The interaction between self, avatar, place, distance and other is a fascinating opportunity for young people to become more global in their understanding of the world. I think it's beautiful, and I hope the iPhone app helps many more children around the world connect with each other and enjoy the Flat Stanley experience.

United is labeling the iPad manual an "electronic flight bag" (EFB). It will completely replace paper flight manuals for all pilots by the end of this year. In addition, the pilots will use an iPad app to replace paper aeronautical navigational charts. Below we check out a short video of what United pilots will see, plus some screenshots.

The iPads will come loaded with Jeppesen Mobile FliteDeck, which United calls "the industry's premier app featuring interactive, data-driven enroute navigation information and worldwide geo-referenced terminal charts."

Here's a quick video showing Jeppesen Mobile FliteDeck in action, followed by a few screenshots to give you a flavor of the app. This is what United pilots will see on their iPads.

Though Trover is a photo-sharing app, it is organized for exploration, not just for browsing images. Don't think Instagram; Trover's roots within Seattle-based travel startup Travelpost are apparent. Trover shows what's around you to help you explore the place.

You can use Trover to browse for images nearby, but you can also expand the radius around you to see more and more content. As you expand, an icon changes from a pedestrian to a biker to a car to intuitively indicate distances. You can also "jump-to" faraway places and explore at a distance.

Location is the main feature, but you can also narrow down discoveries chronologically, and you can browse and follow other user profiles, too. There's a re-share button to send interesting discoveries to your followers, along with a note. There's also a 'Featured' tab that shows curated highlights.

This app is more reminiscent of Banjo than Instagram or other sites that are primarily about creating content. Trover, like, Banjo, is about exploring. Banjo pulls in social media posts from all around you and lets you browse them on a map, much as Trover does for photos. These social apps are more about connecting with the world (and people) around you than about broadcasting to the whole Web.

The app is available for iPhone users, with an Android version coming in the fall. Anyone can log in and view content on trover.com. Existing users can post Trover invitations via Facebook or Twitter.

I spoke to Suzanne Nagel, Digital Chief, U.S. Army Accessions Command, who walked me through how the Web is being used for recruitment and community. We started off by discussing a blog called Army Strong Stories, which enables people to hear authentic stories from U.S. Army soldiers.

Launched in 2008, the target audience of Army Strong Stories is the U.S. Army's primary recruiting target: men aged 18-24. This age group spends a lot of time online, so a blog was seen as an effective way to reach that audience. The site also reaches women in the same age group, but Nagel explained that about 80% of jobs in the U.S. Army aren't open to women (I didn't realize it was that high a number).

Real Army Stories

The idea behind Army Strong Stories is to interact with the target audience and enable them to read and hear stories about Army life. Soldiers are encouraged to engage with the readers by replying to comments. The aim is to build a dialog with potential recruits, partly to disavow them of myths about Army life - for example, said Nagel, the scream-in-your-face drill sergeant so often portrayed in Hollywood movies.

Army Strong Stories features blog posts about anything related to army life. It's not necessarily career based content (see the tag cloud to the right for a list of topics). I asked Suzanne Nagel whether the bloggers write about politics. She replied that generally no, however the Army doesn't censor or filter content - other than for bad language.

Video is a relatively new part of the site, generally featuring Army staff speaking for a couple of minutes about their lives.

I've Traveled the World as a Saxophone Player; by Staff Sergeant Daniel Post

Army Strong Stories isn't the Army's main Web presence. Goarmy.com is the main recruiting website, which is used for recruiting soldiers and presenting facts about the Army.

Usage so far of Army Strong Stories has been broad, said Nagel. She noted that it's not just men 18-24 who frequent the site. Regulars include bloggers' parents and other relatives.

Army Social Media

Of course, in this day and age, it isn't all about the blog. The Army uses Facebook and Twitter a lot. It also has both an iPhone app and a mobile website, featuring the same functionality as the website. They are currently working on an iPad version and will "probably" work on an Android version in the future.

Overall, the U.S. Army is actively growing its digital efforts. In particular, and in common with many other organizations, over the past 5 years it has increasingly used social media.

The Army is working on building up its social networking presence even further: for example, buying online advertising to drive users to its Facebook Page. Also, the Army will be doing "social media events" this year, in order to drive traffic and buzz to their sites. What form these events will take hasn't been decided yet.

The goal of all the U.S. Army's sites - whether self-hosted blogs or social networks like Facebook and Twitter - is to "keep the conversation flowing."

Uncle Sam Needs You, See Our Facebook Page For More...

In general, the U.S. Army is a conservative branch of the military, remarked Suzanne Nagel, so allowing soldiers to tell their "mostly unfiltered stories" was a big step for them.

The hope is that the Army's online and social media presence will help recruiting, by showing what real Army life is like and helping people overcome the fear of joining.

I was impressed by the sophistication of the U.S. Army's web presence, although it helps that it's likely very well funded. What do you think of the U.S. Army's online activities? A good use for your taxpayer dollars?

Instead, Banjo, when launched, shows you the people around you. It's a social network based on who's present at any given location.

Banjo Wants to Bring Social + Location to the Mainstream

Banjo has three main goals. One is to connect you to your social networking friends you didn't know were nearby - for example, a friend from Facebook or Twitter, killing time at the airport, only a few gates away from you. It also wants to hep you find out what's going on nearby by providing access to status updates and tweets from everyone around you, in a radius you specify. It also provides you with a way to virtually visit other locations, even when you're far away, to see what's going on with the people there.

This last feature seems custom-built for journalists, we think. Imagine being able to provide the app with the name of a location where bombs have just been dropped, an earthquake has occurred, or a plane has just crashed. But will mainstream users simply want to peek in and see what people tweet about at Disneyland, though? We're not sure.

Still, the interesting thing about Banjo is its overall consumer-friendly approach. The app is well designed, and it attacks the combination of social and local in a very different way than some of its competitors. It's trying to go directly after the mainstream user from day one.

How it Works

The people Banjo finds don't necessarily have to have "checked in" using a location-based networking service like Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook Places. While that helps, Banjo is designed to also pull in locations from geotagged tweets, uploaded photos, and other media from all social networking services. Wait - all? Yes, that's the plan. Patton says they have 22 services they're focused on integrating now, but the company's goal is to become a federation of all social networks, big and small, from around the world.

Although you will get more use out of Banjo if you provide it with your Facebook and Twitter info (it will then put a small icon next to the photos of your friends), it's not necessary. Upon first launch, the app is populated with the icons of all the social networking users it finds nearby. You can view this in a photo grid layout, or as a list also showcasing their status updates. Other buttons plot the users on a map and allow you to connect your own social services.

Banjo is simple to use and straightforward in its layout, design and purpose. It's location-based social networking that even the least technically savvy user could grasp.

The application is a free download on iTunes and on the Android Market. A Web-based version (HTML5) is coming soon, and the company will look into building both iPad and Android tablet apps next.

For more details on how Banjo compares with similar startups in this space, stayed tuned. A second, more in depth post is on its way.

As I sat on hold, an automated voice reminded me that there were many things I could do if I went to the organization's website instead. Alas, not in my case. The website had some forms and an FAQ, sure, but much to my chagrin, I had to call the toll-free number.

I may have a bias towards online help desks as opposed to phone-based ones; I live on the Web, not on the phone. And it may be that as we conduct more and more business and e-commerce online, the toll-free number and the customer service hotline will fade away. But how far away from an online-only - or even predominantly online - customer service world are we?

Pretty far. Most companies do still rely on the phone for customer service, even if they have a website. But there are a number of tools that are moving the help desk online - from collecting simple feedback to more complicated troubleshooting.

Forums: Forums are probably one of the oldest ways of communicating with users online, and as always, the usefulness of a forum for customer service depends on the level of activity there - from CSRs and from other users. There are several companies that offer Web services to set up public and private forums - for user feedback and inquiries - including Uservoice.

Customer Service Apps: One of the benefits of using third-party services to help manage the online help desk is the ability to tap into a number of new apps. These allow customer service reps to answer questions and fulfill support tickets while mobile. (See Klint Flinley's recent post 6 Help Desk and Customer Service Apps for the iPad.) The customer support software-as-a-service company ZenDesk offers an iPad app, for example, that gives agents the ability to manage their entire ticket workflow from the iPad by editing tickets, assigning them to different agents and tagging entries. Other companies offer remote access to users' computers, so as to help assist them directly with problems on their machines.

Social Media: Despite the buzz about social media, the vast majority of companies do not yet use social media to help with customer service efforts. But that's changing, in no small part because customers are demanding it. Gartner predicts that within five years, social media will replace phone call centers in more than 40% of the top 1,000 companies.

Clearly customer support is moving online. Having been on hold far too long, I can't wait.

Photo by atroszko

Local news aggregator Topix held a "State of Local Online Advertising" survey with some of the top U.S. advertising agencies. The survey shows that 60% of advertisers believe geo-targeted ads deliver stronger return on investment, with 33% of advertisers seeing double-digit gains. In an interview, Topix CEO Chris Tolles said advertisers and publishers do not need to be "hyperlocal" to make money in local markets.

Tolles: Topix is Bigger than Mahalo

At the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit last week, publisher and serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis blasted local news saying "no one gives a s**t about local."

Tolles would disagree. He sited a FCC report that recently said that there are not enough page views in local news and said that it was not local consumers who are the problem, but rather the journalists.

"An FCC report came out recently that said 'wow, there is not enough traffic to local news sites.' I think people are interested in local news and I think the people who are not interested in local news are journalists," Tolles said. "The people who do not (have an interest in) local news are journalists. They are the problem, they are not the answer. The opportunity is to change the journalists' minds about local news because there is a hierarchy of news reporting that no one talks about. Everybody wants to have the pyramid of news end at the White House. I say, invert the pyramid of news so that the highest calling is to do local news and the PTA meeting. Some guy at Gawker said once 'America needs you to cover all the news that I don't want to.'"

Tolles said this is where he fundamentally disagrees with Calacanis.

"Let me point out that our site is bigger than his site," Tolles said with a smile (he was very particular on making sure to be quoted with a smile). "I won't comment on his aspirations but to say no one cares about local? Yeah, except for the 100 billion or 150 billion dollar ad market that is out there and the fact that newspapers have been the largest way to make wealth in the media for quite a while until the dissemination of the Internet happened."

The Town As the Contextual Advertising Unit

Traffic to Topix truly comes from the local level. Tolles said that he gets "more traffic from Utica, New York than he gets from New York City" and that in some towns of 5,000 to 10,000 people he is getting upwards of 100,000 page views. The trick, Tolles says, is to start conversations around "sticky" topics, like politics. The more controversial, the better.

As such, Topix will be making a big move into the political sphere on the local level for the 2012 general elections. Advertising revenue is always on an upswing in presidential election years and Tolles is smart to take advantage of the localized aspect of that, creating political heat maps for certain types of debates across the country.

CPM Works for Topix, Will Not Work for Small Local Publishers

"What we noticed is that the localizable unit is the town," Tolles said. "We notice most of our traffic from small to medium-sized towns. In that way you don't really need to segment zip code. For instance, if you are in Colesville, Maryland ... we can get to Colesville We have a news page about them and it is contextually relevant to Colesville."

Local is a tricky market when it comes to advertising. Topix can function on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis because it can target ad inventory on a state or county level. Yet, small local publishers cannot make money on CPM because on a localized basis, there are just not enough page views (there are other revenue models, such as sponsorship and local deals).

"We use all parts of the dollar at Topix," Tolles said. "We do whatever works. There are definitely CPM issues with a small site. It is very hard to get there through a page view point. People like Groupon and Foursquare are exposing different ways to do local advertising."