We began our Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things series yesterday with a look at barcode scanning . We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes – in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. These applications, such as RedLaser on iPhone and ShopSavvy on Android, allow you to scan a barcode on a product or object and get more information about it. We noted however that RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year. Sponsor RWW’s Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things Series: According to a number of believable blog reports , RFID is set to be a part of the as yet unannounced iPhone 4G. Apple holds a patent for a touch screen RFID tag reader and is said to be testing an RFID-enabled iPhone currently. So RFID could be a feature of the iPhone 4G as soon as Spring 2010 . As MacRumors succinctly explained in November, mobile phone usage of RFID technology will come in the form of Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is a new standard based on RFID and it has three use cases: the phone as an RFID tag; the phone as RFID Reader; and peer to peer communication (P2P) between two NFC-enabled phones. The first two use cases are most interesting. Using the iPhone as an RFID tag means it can be a deployed as a payment device (similar to a credit card), identity card, security device, and more. This type of functionality is already happening in Japan, where the RFID Suica chip is installed in some mobile phones. Using the phone as an RFID Reader allows the iPhone to interact with RFID-enabled objects in the real world. Check out this prototype from a Norwegian research organization called Touch, using the iPhone as a Media Player: Timo Arnall from Touch noted in a follow-up post in November that RFID and NFC peripherals are beginning to be released for the iPhone. 2010 could be a great year for RFID in the consumer market, if it is to be a feature of the next iPhone. Expect to see it in Android devices too. Will mobile phones provide the tipping point for adoption of the Internet of Things? We’ve seen now that mobile phones are a big driver of consumer adoption of both barcodes and RFID tags, so we wouldn’t be surprised. Discuss

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iPhone as RFID Tag & Reader: Coming Soon

With the first week of 2010 in the books, we thought we would take a look at the most popular posts of the new year in ReadWriteStart – our channel devoted to entrepreneurs. In this ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup, we’ve got tips for funding advice , keeping organized and building loyal communities , but be sure to check out the newest post in our new series “Never Mind the Valley,” highlighting thriving startup communities outside of Silicon Valley. Sponsor 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank. 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don’t try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don’t make God-jokes in Utah and you don’t get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you’re looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here’s a list of five to get you started. Community First: How Wufoo Created a Captive Audience So you’ve got a fabulous idea for a startup? That’s great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community. Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like

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ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on a new “superphone” launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs). Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report , about the Real-Time Web. Sponsor Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper , we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print . For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it . Don’t forget about our Community Management Report . It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it! Web Trends How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records. Web Apps Meet Consumer Electronics at CES The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics , from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars , courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford’s announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung’s latest Internet-connected TV . SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise , devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL Web Products Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One , which it described as “Where Web Meets Phone.” Google calls this a new category of phones – the “super phones.” The Nexus One apparently “pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.” Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details. Droid’s December Boom: Metrics Show Device Use Doubled in One Month The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests. Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You Starting this spring, you won’t need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won’t even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen – the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs. SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Nexus One, CES Coverage, Online Finance, And More…

Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like

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Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles

Last year , SawHorse Media, a Twitter aggregator that pioneered the concept of lists , put together the Shorty Awards . This contest and ceremony was intended to “honor the best producers of short, real-time content.” The first show was such a success that SawHorse is currently producing a second event. Like the Webbies, the Streamys and other award shows for online content, this event will recognize the geeky heroes we probably follow more than we do real-world celebrities – the ones who make us laugh, think and act. Voting is now open in 27 categories; read on to see who’s making the grade. Sponsor Categories range in scope from serious topics such as government, health and politics and to lighter fare such as music, culture, celebrities and humor. There are also a few geek-centric topics, such as tech, science and apps. Additionally, SawHorse has allowed users to create crowd-sourced categories, such as sexiest Twitterer and social media. The awards are given based on each content creator’s whole Twitter oeuvre, not just a single tweet. Any Twitter user with a valid, active account can nominate and vote; votes are sent out as tweets from that user’s account. Next month, the nominees will be narrowed to five per category and referred to the hilariously named Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences for final judging. Although the Academy has a spoofy name, it includes such distinguished members as MIT Media Lab’s director, Frank Moss, and Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito, among other luminaries. Last year’s special guests included MC Hammer and Gary Vaynerchuk. There’s no word yet on who will be speaking and presenting at this year’s show, but we do know the ceremony will be held in March in New York City, and winners will be giving 140-character acceptance speeches. Check out the site and vote for or nominate your favorite tweeters, from ShitMyDadSays to David Archuleta. And we’d appreciate a vote for ReadWriteWeb in the tech category, if you’re so inclined! Discuss

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The Oscars of Twitter: Shorty Awards to Honor Creators of Short-Form, Real-Time Content

One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me. Nozzl Media today unveiled a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records like restaurant health inspections, building reports and public safety emergency responses. It’s like a little robot reporter and the company plans on offering it as a mobile app in the future as well. Nozzl raises questions, though, about what constitutes news and whether or not human reporters are expendable in the news process. Sponsor Nozzl was founded by a team of ex-newspaper reporters and engineers. They got out when it was clear the newspaper industry was in trouble, but now they aim to give something back by bringing together the real-time, programmatic possibilities of the web with the reporting of the newspapers. Reporters have for decades written programming scripts that repeat database queries over and over again to extract public data for bulk analysis. The Nozzl team has taken that to the next level and combined it with new social media. The company put up a demo page for Portland, Oregon news that anyone can look at today. The public records streams are the big value-add and are fully customizable per newspaper. Visitors can then type live filter terms into the box at the bottom of the widget to zero in on topics of interest to them. That’s the nozzle in Nozzl Media. User Experience is Hard For Robots Unfortunately, there are two big issues here. First, the flow of Tweets is overwhelming and undifferentiated. On the demonstration site you see almost nothing else unless you can think of something to filter for. If automated Twitter feeds hold value for local news, they will probably require some smart pre-proccessing before being presented to the reading public. There have always been people who like to listen to police radio scanners. Myself, I like to read restaurant health inspection reports, building permit applications and liquor license applications. If Nozzl had some categories I could choose between, that would be very helpful. The second, and more interesting, problem is that the public records that are extracted are exciting in theory but relatively unreadable in practice. The truth is, Nozzl didn’t exactly tell me that there was an unconscious person reported at Nike HQ today – it told me with code from a form that there was an UNCONS/UNRESPONSIVE report at 1 SW Bowerman Drive, in Portland. A little Mad-Libs style transformation of forms into human-readable sentences and some pre-fetching of names associated with addresses could go a long way. Run the name associated with that address through a News search engine and tell me if its an entity that’s been reported on in the past – if so then it’s probably high-priority news to push live again. The company needs to put these machine-readable pages it displays into coherent English sentences, or find some other solution. Don’t Forget the Humans Ambulances to Nike’s Headquarters to help someone unconscious today? That sounds like it could be news. Even if the technology presented the information this clearly – it may take a human eye to pick this out of a list of automatically captured ambulance reports. Having a human available to pick up a phone, call Nike HQ and ask who was found unconscious there this afternoon would add another element of value to this data – but that’s not what Nozzl is looking to do. The company is serving up raw data to news consumers. In the end, human reporters and raw robot feeds sound like a great combination. That appears to be what Nozzl is aiming to create by offering its widgets to established news organizations. The company says that a mobile application could be in its future, too. That’s something I’m very excited about. Be it a widget or a mobile app, Nozzl’s robot reporters need more polish before they are ready to win back the hearts of fast-leaving newspaper readers. As a picture of the future, though – Nozzl is very inspiring. Interested in what companies like Nozzl Media mean for the future of the web? Check out our profile of Nozzl and ten other case study companies in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Discuss

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Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters

Correction : An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that BreakingNews.com was opperated by the same people who started the @breakingnews Twitter account. MSNBC announced this morning that it is buying the BreakingNews.com URL from a company called PV Media Group. This follows November’s purchase of @breakingnews and its 1.4 million followers. The two companies were not connected before MSNBC’s acquisitions of their various projects. When we profiled @breakingnews founder Michael van Poppel in July, the company was just about to release its iPhone app and had over 800,000 followers on Twitter. That number is now over 1.5 million. Sponsor “Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features,” said Charlie Tillinghast, president of the MSNBC Digital Network in the company’s press release about today’s purchase. MSNBC Spokesperson Gina Stikes told us in an email that “Msnbc has acquired the URL only.” She did not disclose any further details, such as the purchase price. For more background about BreakingNews.com, see today’s coverage at DomainNameWire . Discuss

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MSNBC Buys BreakingNews.com to Go With With @breakingnews [UPDATED]