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

Two of the biggest trends we tracked last year were Mobile Web and Internet of Things . In a new series on ReadWriteWeb, which we’re calling Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things , we’ll explore how these two important trends are converging and look at some cutting edge example products. We start with barcode scanning… Internet of Things is when everyday objects become connected to the Internet, via technologies such as RFID tags, sensors and barcodes. One trend we saw expanding in 2008-09 was mobile phones being deployed as readers for barcodes . Sponsor Increasingly, smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices offer applications that allow you to scan a barcode on a product or object and get more information about it. The Technology Barcodes are similar to RFID tags, in that they both hold data. RFID tags are generally more functional and flexible than barcodes . Also RFID tags can be read/write, whereas barcodes cannot. However the big advantage for barcodes is that they’re cheaper, therefore we’re more likely to see scanning as a consumer activity ramp up in the U.S. via barcodes. The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for “Quick Response”), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets. The Products In a series of posts written over September 2008, Sarah Perez analyzed the then burgeoning ” scannable world .” As Sarah explained, barcode scanning is not a new technology on the Web. One of the first examples was :CueCat , a cat-shaped barcode reader from the late 1990s. It linked a user to a website by scanning a barcode in an article or other printed matter. CueCat never took off because it required a separate piece of hardware, but now in 2010 smartphones are the hardware . There’s also no shortage of software circa 2010, such as ScanLife and the NeoReader app described in Part 2 of Sarah’s Scannable World series . A variety of other barcode reading apps are listed in Part 3 of that series. There are a variety of use cases for barcodes on the Web. They include Semapedia.org (a non-profit project that aims to augment the physical world with Wikipedia data), QRContact (contact management via barcodes), and barcode wearables such as p8tch (“Think of it as a TinyURL you can wear”). But none of these is likely to become widely used in the mainstream, at least in the near future. What Will be The Tipping Point? In Japan, barcode scanning is already a popular activity thanks to the culture of using mobile phones for just about everything. In the U.S., where the Mobile Web took longer to ramp up, barcodes are yet to catch on. However there’s one market where barcode scanning could become a mainstream activity in the U.S. and other countries. No, not magazine publishing – although there are valid advertising use cases there. We’re talking about scanning retail products using your mobile phone . By the end of 2009, a lot of barcode scanning apps had gained popularity in the iPhone and Android, in particular. In November we listed our picks for scanning and other mobile shopping apps to test over Black Friday. There is no clear winner yet in the shopping scanning market, but here are some applications you may want to try: RedLaser (iPhone app getting rave reviews ) ShopSavvy (popular on Android) The Amazon Mobile app ; see also SnapTell , owned by Amazon StoreXperience CardStar pic2shop Point Inside ( good review on CNET ) CompareEverywhere (Android) ZXing Barcode Reader (Android) Thanks to followers of @rww on Twitter , who suggested some of those. Will Consumers Adopt Barcode Scanning? As well as adoption by retailers, another big question is: will consumers want to interact with real world products using their mobile phones? I suspect they will, once they begin to see compelling reasons for doing so – which will probably involve getting the best deals and being able to do advanced shopping comparison very easily. Finally, it’s worth noting that Google is active in barcodes . Google’s Favorite Places program allows local businesses to put a sticker on their products which features Google’s logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading “We’re a favorite place on Google.” Barcode scanning and its applications will grow during 2010, meaning more and more real world data will be connected to the Internet and accessed on your mobile phone. There are many apps trying to entice consumers to wave their mobile phone in front of products, so let us know your favorites in the comments. Image credits: clevercupcakes ; Stan ; ScanLife Discuss

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Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things: Barcode Scanning

Today’s startups, entrepreneurs and investors live and die by what seem like a series of holy proverbs. “Release early, release often” is perhaps one of the most poignant phrases when considering product launch and feature scope. On this cold Saturday, we’re paying homage to the origins of the concept by recognizing one of the seminal works in programming philosophy, and looking at a recent startup that’s taken it to heart. Sponsor In the late nineties Eric S. Raymond presented The Cathedral and the Bazaar convincing Netscape to publish open source code. The work’s premises “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” and “release early, release often” were meant to justify early releases and crowdsourcing community feedback. While his work originally made a case for open source releases, it has gone on to inspire many outside of the open source realm. Lead by Micah Baldwin, TechStars’ comic platform Graphic.ly is launching its beta version under the “release early, release often” tenet. Said Baldwin in a recent blog post , “If we are truly going to get the community involved, we need them involved early and often. We need them now.” ReadWriteWeb first covered the mobile comic platform in November under its original name, TakeComics . Since then the company has rebranded as Graphic.ly, announced raising a little over a million dollars from Starz Media and appointed Baldwin as CEO. As a serial entrepreneur, Baldwin rationalizes his company’s early release saying, “So many young entrepreneurs get stuck in the ‘What if’ world and try to release the perfect app. At Graphic.ly, we just released our Baby Beta, which frankly sucked. Badly. But we are getting amazing feedback, and its clear that it will be such a better product in the long term.” Baldwin is using a combination of GetSatisfaction and Zendesk to manage early-stage feedback. Graphic.ly is also looking to adapt products like Google Moderator for proactive feedback in order to engage community members in the engineering and product discussions. When asked about possible outcomes for the release, Baldwin replied, “The worst case scenario is that we don’t engage our community properly and lose their trust. There is nothing more dire than lost trust. The best case is that everyone who uses Graphic.ly sees their fingerprints all over it and shows it to their friends proudly, saying ‘I built that. That’s something I did.’” The service’s first batch of invites got out tonight, to register for the service fill out the form here . Discuss

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How the Cathedral and the Bazaar Is Shaping the Future of Comics

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You’re allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you’re never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, “Luddite time.” Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you’re with rather than the people you “follow,” time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don’t include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that’s increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, “super” phones and what ever “super duper” devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can’t be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web – the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts – to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you’re making more connections between online entities and content, but you’re losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I’m not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you’re not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you’ve ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren’t you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble’s FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn’t trend on Twitter and hit Digg’s front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I’ve spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we’ve all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an “overheard” on Twitter. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I’ve certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don’t want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock – or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

The smart phone is not a phone. It’s a computer. It’s like your desktop or laptop. It stores data. It connects to the Internet. It runs applications. It’s a computer, not a phone. The real challenge for the enterprise is to shift its thinking about how it will move beyond the carriers and one day become an entirely data-centric organization – an organization that gives information workers the ability to work entirely on an IP infrastructure, be it for Web-based productivity applications or on a VoiP network. Forrester Research issued a report today that calls 2010 the year of the smart phone. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? To its credit, Forrester does use the report as an opportunity to explore how the enterprise can make the smart phone a part of the daily work life for as many employees as possible. Sponsor There are many reasons for the enterprise to adopt a smart phone culture: There is no excuse anymore. Workers have to be connected. The big weave on the social Web is getting richer. Billions of threads are being added by the day. How can we even tolerate not being connected? Collaboration depends on being connected. You can’t be fully connected without a decent smart phone strategy. People are not working at the office as much anymore. They need a smart phone to keep up with their work. As illustrated by Forrester, the trend is already in play: It does not have to be that expensive to adopt a smart phone culture. People want to use their smart phones for both their personal lives and work, too. They will pay for their data plans. Forrester agrees. From the executive summary by Ted Schadler: “Employees, aka consumers, are mad about smartphones, attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with documents from anywhere. Fourteen percent of information workers across the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones to do work today, and another 64% would like to. That demand, coupled with the willingness of some employees to share the cost of a monthly mobile plan, sets the stage for a surge in the use of personal smartphones for information work. Information and knowledge management professionals should immediately call for a formal bring-your-own (BYO) smartphone strategy, establish a sliding scale for when to reimburse employees, and pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across corporate-liable and personally liable plans.” Forrester’s BYO recommendation makes sense. But he does not explore how smart phones can be treated as computers. This discussion can create a new level of discourse in the enterprise between IT and business users. Forrester points out that IT recognizes the importance of smart phones. Many companies are already developing policies for how the devices should be treated. Collaboration tool are not being heavily used but this could change if smart phones were treated as tools as much as communication devices. MobileIron follows this approach, offering services that give IT managers the ability to be more like change agents than police forces. In MobileIron’s view , information can be tracked with a data-centric approach. Applications can be monitored. Users and administrators can view a social graph that shows usage. That’s a smart approach. It stimulates thinking and moves people to start exploring how a fully data-centric approach can be adopted over time as VoiP matures in the enterprise. Discuss

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"Smart Phone" is a Misnomer: It’s a Computer, not a Phone

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Sponsor 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. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Mint: Leading the Charge Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit’s Quicken Online . Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you. Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta . Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week. Mint’s success didn’t go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn’t plan to compete in the market anymore . Correction : In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi. Beyond Mint While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it’s by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint. ClearCheckbook.com , for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online. A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe , for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint. Since acquiring Exepnsr , Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo – which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting. Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax , for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K. Going Mobile Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe , for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone – either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert. Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America , Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example. When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due. What’s Next? Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software. This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Discuss

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How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

The only thing preventing Google’s Nexus One phone from supporting multitouch features might be Apple’s patents . Allow me to explain: There is nothing in the hardware of this device to prevent multitouch as evinced by Google’s comment this morning at their press conference. When asked if the Nexus One would one day support multitouch, a Google rep responded, “We’ll consider it.” In a word, this means that the hardware is ready for users’ pinching and zooming, but the current iteration of Google’s software is locked to prohibit multitouch for legal reasons. We give the hackers of the mobile world a couple days to hack the device – after all, it’s already been done on the Droid. Sponsor Here’s a video showing multitouch on a Droid: And here’s how that was accomplished. European hackers figured out how to jailbreak the device a scant month after its release. In the States,the folks at AllDroid sussed out how to port the web browser from the Motorola Milestone – which does support multitouch – over to the Droid. Granted, the hack only works for web browsers, but it’s a significant improvement for those who can live with a bricked phone. The hack requires the would-be multitouch hero to get root access to the phone and install and delete certain components. Clearly, this user runs the risk of breaking the device and may violate Motorola’s TOS and void the warranty. All of the above applies to the Droid. However, the same stipulations that prevent multitouch on that device also apply to the Nexus One: It’s not a hardware issue; the software is simply locked. So, we’re likely looking at a wait of a few days to see who wants to risk a $500+ device in the quest for an Android-powered multitouch mobile via TOS-violating hacks. Apple’s involvement with the stalling or prevention of more and better multitouch devices has been a topic of speculation in the mobile gadget press since last year, when a group of several key patents for specific gestures were published. Since then, several multitouch devices, such as Palm’s Pre, have been released without legal fanfare. Still, some speculate that Google’s holding out on multitouch for legal reasons. “I think at this point that’s more of a legal consideration than a technical one, since many phones that run Android have the capability of supporting multitouch on a hardware level,” wrote Jason Chen of Gizmodo when he toyed with the device last month. And Chris Ziegler of Engadget said , “This is still very much a sensitive subject – but at least we have some confirmation that it’s a software limitation alone… there’s definitely some logic (probably legal logic, but logic nonetheless) behind which devices are getting it in which markets.” What do you think – is this a patent issue? Or is the software simply not ready for public consumption yet? Better yet, if you had one of these devices, would you jailbreak it for multitouch capabilities? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

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One More Thing: Multitouch on Nexus One Is Just a Hack Away (VIDEO)