Java gets a bad rap. It's considered old-school. People say that young developers prefer Ruby-on-Rails and other Web-based hot stuff. True - but these are not bad times for Java at all.

James Governor of RedMonk wrote a post that provides several good reasons why Java is really doing quite well.

Elance shows the current demand for people with Google App Engine skills is greater than those knowledgeable about Amazon Web Services. Audrey Watters of ReadWriteCloud saw the news and posted on the topic of IT Jobs as the question for our weekly poll.

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The reason why Google App Engine is doing so well? It's all about the enterprise. VMware's Spring Platform is based upon SpringSource, which has become the dominant platform for launching Java-based apps. It now integrates with Google App Engine, a primary reason for the growing success of the platform.

Governor makes some points that are worth noting:

NoSQL is one of the hottest trends in tech right now. Many of the technologies built on the platform are written in Java. It was born on the Web but will eventually move to the enterprise.

MapReduce? It's what Google and Yahoo! use to get fast responses over large data sets. It is built on Java. Hadoop is based on MapReduce. It has its own ecosystem developing around the technology.

And then there's this from Governor:

Of course we're also seeing innovation from the new hotness - thus Erlang underpins CouchDB and RIAK. But Java is certainly core to the innovation. Lets look at RabbitMQ for example - which though written in Erlang was acquired by SpringSource as a messaging engine to underpin a Java-based programming model.

Governor goes on to provide a number of other examples to make his point.

And we have to agree. Java is not dead. it still has plenty of room for innovation.

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Baidu is the most-visited website in China and has captured 70% of search revenue in that country. Alexa's Top 500 Global Sites list puts it at number 6. But with virtually no penetration outside Asia, can it really be considered a global company at all, or just an awfully big one?

Until it reaches beyond its shores in an appreciable and sustained fashion, it probably won't be considered a global player of consequence. But its latest move may do just that. It is refocusing a great deal of its enormous resources into the mobile and app markets.

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At the annual Baidu developers conference yesterday, CFO Jennifer Li reiterated the company's dedication to the mobile space. The 10-year-old company started focusing on mobile last year with the development of a texting language and mobile mapping. At that point it also established a dedicated mobile department.

As for apps, last night its Box Computing Open Platform went live. The BCOP allows users to run apps, including games, videos and e-books, through the Baidu website using any platform.

A lot of our coverage of China focuses on Google's issues there. Among those issues are the lack of stability: what can a company or developer expect, day to day? With China's shifting censorship regime, it is hard to anticipate what might be disallowed. Mobile apps are dependent on the robustness of their developer community.

Will non-Chinese developers be willing to put time and money into developing on Baidu's platform? Can Chinese developers develop on Baidu for Western users compellingly enough to attract them? Or will the future of China's global influence be on the Internet of Things, leaving Baidu a strictly Chinese concern?

This isn't a rhetorical question. We sent it to a couple of our friends with first-hand knowledge of the Chinese web industry. But if you've got knowledge of your own, share it why not?

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One quote from an IBM executive stands out in the post that Chris Cameron wrote today about IBM's augmented reality app for the U.S. Open.

Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships said it all comes down tthe information generated with every tennis stroke, volley and serve:

"This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions."

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IBM is using the U.S. Open to demonstrate its commitment to cloud computing.

For example, according to eWeek, IBM implemented its analytics platform to use real-time and historical information to deploy services to "media organizations, tournament officials, the public, tennis players on different platforms such as broadcast, the Web, mobile devices and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

At the U.S. Open, IBM has deployed sensors to the radar guns, the umpire chairs and throughout the tennis grounds to collect data that can be analyzed and visualized.

It has partnered with the U.S. Tennis Association to provide its PointStream technology, which pull intelligence from the data around scores and match statistics. It is supposed to then present that information in real-time.

According to MediaPost, online viewers may also use IBM's Momentum Meter to see which player has a statistical edge. That provides a range of different possibilities for viewers. They can watch the matches on television and get stats from their smartphone, iPad or laptop. Images can be seen visually, which makes sense as following charts and graphs can be a bit cumbersome.

Analytics provide a different viewing experience for people watching the U.S. Open. The experience also provides a view of what we can expect as more "TV" plays venture online. For example, Google TV will be offering its own ways to analyze data to provide contextual information.

What we are seeing really is the start of a technology match that will last far longer than the last smash and volley at the U.S. Open.

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The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon have made a commitment to broadband for its largely rural population. Taking advantage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's broadband funding, the Tribes will spend $5.4 million in extending broadband infrastructure throughout the reservation and making it affordable for tribal users.

Warm Springs has always been a forward-thinking community. A decade ago it started a business incubator and venture capital firm, welcoming and even buying tech companies, including GIS companies. To further its drive for independence, it needs its people, and client companies, to be able to connect with each other and the world at large.

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Led by the newly-formed Warm Springs Telecommunications Company, the project, a half-and-half grant and loan package, will blanket the 1,000-square mile reservation with a network that combines fiber and wireless; 1,800 people, 18 businesses and 22 institutions users, including tribal government and schools, health care facilities, police and fire will benefit.

For a long time the Warm Springs tribal corporation was Central Oregon's number one business in terms of revenue; it remains an important economic engine of the area, though its distance from population areas still make unemployment a chronic problem.

As Robert White noted in his book "Tribal Assets," Indian tribal polities that create wealth also push out into the surrounding areas, adding to the economic health of their area. Those who don't produce often act as a vacuum, absorbing state and local money. If Warm Springs' historical business acumen is any indication, the benefits of the broadband project will not stop at borders of the rez.

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Tumblr is quickly becoming one of the Web's most popular and unique platforms on which to share and discover interesting content of all media. According to Tumblr, over 5.3 million posts are made each day by the service's over 7.5 million users. Posts are passed on over and over through Tumblr's "reblog" feature, but at such a high volume it's easy to loose track of where content originated. Tumblr hopes to solve this dilemma with some new attribution functionality launched earlier today.

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Whenever someone reblogs a post on Tumblr, text is generated automatically that produces a "via" link to the user it came from. As users reblog other reblogged posts, an ugly daisy-chain of these links clogs up the caption area, causing most users to simply delete it, breaking the chain of attribution.

Now, Tumblr has made is easy for users to add attribution metadata to posts just as they would tags and other information. This is great for users who want to credit where they found an interesting photo, quote or article, but this feature is a huge benefit to publishers.

As we mentioned earlier this summer, many popular publishers - including Newsweek, Huffington Post and The New Yorker - have flocked to Tumblr to share content in a new way. With this new attribution feature, they can rest assured that their content will be properly attributed as it is shared throughout the community.

This kind of publisher-friendly feature is likely a direct result of Tumblr's latest talent grab, Mark Coatney, formerly an editor at Newsweek. Coatney's new position is to serve as a liaison between Tumblr and media publications who want to leverage the platform, so it's likely Tumblr will continue to add features that will make publishers happy.

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First up at this week's Strategy Roundtable was Cheryl Yeoh presenting CityPockets, an online destination, and an app for managing daily deals across a wide range of sites. The daily deal and group buying market has really heated up, with numerous sites offering variations on the basic value proposition. But for Cheryl, the problem is that she needs critical mass.

I asked her not to assume that investors will be investing in this business idea, at least not until she can acquire some level of validation, which means tens, if not hundreds of thousands of customers, and several partnerships with daily deal sites.

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Venture capitalists today don't exactly practice venture capital. Investors are investing in proven concepts - they call those "momentum investments." As a result, the expectation is that you have to figure out a way to get to some level of momentum on your own (by bootstrapping) or with small doses of angel money - "drip financing" so to speak. To be successful, you need to understand this basic philosophy, and work within its constraints.

Gnosis India

Next Anuj Mishra with Gnosis India presented an idea of doing highly technical workshops (CAD, Robotics) for students all around India, including rural India. I asked Anuj who would be teaching these workshops, and who would be paying for them. In today's India, people with high-end engineering skills are in high demand. They make a lot of money, and nothing in Anuj's business model convinced me that these people have any interest or incentive to go around teaching, especially in rural India. I asked him to abandon this idea and find a better one.

Solution for E-commerce Vendors

Last up was Manish Jha pitching his inventory management, fulfillment and customer service solution for e-commerce vendors, with which he has already built a $500,000 a year business. Manish wants to explore how to get to $2 to $3 million in a couple of years. I advised him to strike OEM partnerships with the e-commerce shopping cart vendors like Volusion, BigCommerce, etc. Such OEM deals may cost him 50% of his product revenue, but would be the fastest way to reach a large number of customers, nonetheless.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

In addition, we also have a Deal Radar series in which we profile entrepreneurs who have successfully reached $1M in revenue. Many investors monitor this series as a source of fundable businesses that have achieved a certain level of validation, and we encourage you to pitch [following these instructions] to be featured in the series as well. Some recently featured companies include Appssavvy, MobileIron, Mashery, Clickfree, BullionVault, 3dcart, BrightEdge, FootzyRolls, LendingClub, Blacksocks, Merkle.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by wax115

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It may come as a surprise to some but augmented reality and the wide world of sports go way back. Glowing hockey pucks and yellow first-down lines on the football field are just a few of the early examples, but today AR is a part of every-day sports broadcasts. More recently, however, AR has begun to make its way into the live sports experience, and an app recently developed by IBM for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships is an excellent example of this transition.

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The app is only available on the iPhone and features functionality one would expect for a major sports event. Scores, news, videos, schedules, tweets, maps, etc. - the traditional sports fare is present and accounted for. This year, however, IBM has upped the ante by incorporating augmented reality into the app to let users "see through walls," as they describe it.

By holding the phone up and looking around with the camera, users can view information about the tournament - including live scores, food menus, transportation, first-aid and restroom locations - in real-time AR perspective. Fans of augmented reality may not be blown away by this implementation, but the exposure for the technology from the tournament and from IBM is significant.

Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships, was interviewed recently (see embedded video below) by Fox Business's Brian Sullivan who asked, "What's in it for IBM?" Singer notes that IBM can show to its clients that the company is on the cutting edge and experimenting with new technologies, but he also very succinctly summed up why AR is important.

"This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions."

Making better decisions with more useful aggregation and presentation of data. Now that's a great slogan for augmented reality!

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Facebook has begun surfacing widely "liked" news stories from independent media organizations in its basic search bar today, it appears. First reported by watchdog blog AllFacebook, the change is something that seems likely to be understood as a challenge to Google. It's early days for the feature, but something to watch for sure.

Search for a phrase that's appearing in the news in the main Facebook search box and you'll see off-site links to news stories. "It's an interesting extension of what they did before in terms of off-site links," Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand told us by phone today. "It's not clear how exactly these stories are being chosen and it clearly needs more work. It could work like Google's Social Search, displaying items shared by your friends, but this remains something to watch and see rather than 'oh the revolution is here.'"

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Above: News search in action, asterisks mine.

Earlier this year, Facebook put up a blog post urging people to "Like" the pages of major news organizations, so that they would receive stories posted by those media outlets in their Facebook Newsfeeds . Yesterday the company began experimenting with a new method of subscribing to updates from high priority friends, family and other people.

Clearly when you put together 500 million people, their friend connections, their "like" affinities (on and off-site) - then there are a whole lot of permutations that can be analyzed and surfaced in various contexts. Facebook search and subscription are likely to be very interesting for some time.

This particular search feature may be of limited impact, though. Presumably the vast majority of searches that go on in that search box are for peoples' names - not topics in the news. Perhaps that will change, as Facebook tries to extend itself.

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Salesorce.com acquired Jigsaw earlier this year. This past week, Salesforce.com unveiled the integration.

The service integrates Chatter, the Salesforce.com microblogging platform. When a contact is updated through Jigsaw, the subscriber gets an update in their Chatter feed.

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is an example of how microblogging services are becoming message platforms for crowdsourcing tools. Microblogging tools are serving as social middleware technologies that surface information from enterprise applications.

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It reminds us of services such as Socialtext Connect, which launched in June. The Socialtext service uses the Twitter Annotation spec to connect legacy apps by surfacing events that appear in an activity stream.

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM also shows how combining services changes the ways applications update people. In the process, the UX transforms as new filtering is required and different systems for updating. Contacts or companies are identified in the Chatter feed as opposed to traditional methods such as an email about an update.

Spreadsheets are traded for business intelligence tools to some degree as the contact data is packaged with an analytics platform.

We are more interested in how Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM serves as an example of how microblogging is emerging as a platform for surfacing events. But in this case, we also have questions about how the contacts are developed in the first place.

Anyone can add contacts to Jigsaw. That's the power of the crowdsource model. But in some respects, privacy can be compromised. Salesforce.com maintains that contacts are contacted when they are added to the Jigsaw platform. They may opt out by going into Jigsaw and removing themselves from the database.

Contacts are also notified once a year about their inclusion in Jigsaw.

We wonder if that is enough and what other measures should be put in place when contacts are added to a service like Jigsaw. Salesforce.com does not notify contacts via Twitter or through other services. That would seem like a respectful measure to take but perhaps that is where things will go as we get deeper into the ways crowdsourcing is used for developing contact networks.

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According to a German court in Hamburg, Google's YouTube can be held liable for damages when it hosts copyrighted videos without the copyright holder's permission. This case centered around three music videos by classical crossover soprano Sarah Brightman, but this ruling will likely have far-reaching consequences for YouTube's operations in Germany. YouTube will now have to block access to these videos and disclose how often its users accessed these streams. YouTube will also have to pay damages based on the number of plays. Google plans to appeal the ruling.

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The German court ruled that simply asking users whether they have the legal rights to the material they are about to upload does not relieve the company of its legal obligations.

"The court concluded that YouTube was treating content uploaded by its users as its own. That leads to a more strenuous duty to check out the content. The court came to the conclusion YouTube did not fulfill this."

The complaint against YouTube was originally filed in October 2009. At that time, Google argued that it "works closely with many thousands of copyright holders worldwide to make sure that they can manage their rights on our video platform. Our state-of-the-art Content ID tools go beyond what the law recommends by empowering rights holders to block, authorize or monetize their videos on YouTube in a way that is simple and straightforward."

In this case, though, it seems as if Google's Content ID tools failed. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argued that they repeatedly asked YouTube to take the videos in question down but never received a reply from YouTube.

In an interview with German news agency dpa, a spokesperson for the court today noted that "the court concluded that YouTube was treating content uploaded by its users as its own. That leads to a more strenuous duty to check out the content. The court came to the conclusion YouTube did not fulfill this."

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The API team over at Google Buzz have been buzzing to say the least. If you recall the long lost Twitter feature known as Track whose disappearance spawned numerous impassioned pleased for return you'll appreciate the latest from Google Buzz.

Last week the Google Buzz API team updated their blog to announce the general availability for Track as well detailed error messages. This means that you can get started with Track right now in Google Reader.

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Some examples:

Here is the XML returned for the VMworld example

To illustrate this, I decided to add the "vmworld" example for my trip to VMworld 2010 and discovered a host of references that I can peruse in Google Reader.

As you might expect, you'll get the statistics as well:

Also, as you might expect with a conference the size of VMworld... I'm already behind!

What are some of your favorite Google Buzz queries that you've added to Google Reader? Let us know in the comments below!

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This one's a classic case of "easy when you know how." How many times have you grabbed a comma-separated string, exploded it into an array, and assigned each item in the array to its own variable?

If it's a small array, it may not be too much of a problem. But it quickly gets tiring to type out all those array assignments if you have a lot of them to do.

Fear not, there's a better way...

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The Slow Way The Nice Way

See the difference? Much better!

Photo by Book Glutton

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The music identification app Shazam was one of the first must-have apps for the iPhone. Today, the company released one of the biggest updates in the app's history. Shazam for iPhone and iPod touch now sports an updated interface and support for fast-app switching in iOS4. The app now also features a new focus on music discovery outside of tagging. The new "Shazam Charts" highlight the most often tagged songs from 20 countries. Most importantly, though, the app now features an option that starts the music tagging feature immediately after opening the app without the need to click a single button.

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Today's upgrades are available for the free version of Shazam (limited to 5 tags per month) and the paid version (Shazam Encore). The (Product) RED version will get these upgrades soon.

According to Shazam's CEO Andrew Fisher, the service now has 20 million users on the iOS platform (up from 15 million in October). As usual, it is hard to pinpoint how many of these are active users, but there can be little doubt that Shazam is one of the iPhone app ecosystem's biggest success stories. Earlier this year, Fisher told TechRadar.com that Shazam was identifying about 2 million songs per day and that it was selling roughly 160,000 tracks daily. Now, with a significantly larger user base, chances are that these numbers are even higher.

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While the Bank of America has partnered up with Visa to begin testing out mobile payments later this month, analyst firm Forrester says one big question remains - are consumers ready to ditch their plastic?

According to Forrester analyst Emmet Higdon, the test is less one of the technology involved, but the user interface and whether or not "consumers' current love affair with smartphones is enough to change card payment behaviors that date back more than 50 years."

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The mobile-payments trial run involves equipping a group of users' phones with near field communications (NFC) technology, which currently does not come installed, but we expect to see as a pre-installed feature in the near future. NFC makes

To make any headway, writes Higdon, "banks need to convince customers that using a mobile wallet can be as simple and convenient as swiping a plastic card". Beyond that, companies would also need to ensure security and privacy, "as well as competitive issues regarding control of the mobile wallet application itself - before any broad consumer rollout could be contemplated."

Perhaps, though, mobile payments aren't entirely about the transaction itself, but the whole experience. Online payment systems could make it much simpler to transfer funds and to put limits on spending, features that might not be available for credit or debit cards. There's also the issue of security. A recent episode of NPR's On The Media discussed mobile payment systems and related how they can actually be more, not less, secure than cash. For workers in South Africa, the story went, everyone would get paid on the same day and often, returning home from work could be a scary time, as the chances of getting mugged were higher. Therefore, getting paid virtually rather than physically, was actually safer. Another possibility is that NFC could replace plastic in locations where completing credit card transactions become difficult, though mobile credit card solutions are becoming increasingly common.

According to Higdon, nearly 50% of iPhone users are interested in mobile payments. Are you one of them? And if so, why, because we can't imagine that the debit card in your pocket is taking up too much room. What is the value added by mobile payments?

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Gov 2.0 advocates have printed a run of QR (2D barcode) stickers they will stick at bus stops all over Washington DC today, allowing mobile phone users to quickly get up-to-the moment bus progress reports, post traffic status updates, and more. This augmentation of the physical world with real-time data from the ether strikes me as accessible and useful. The project was one of many ideas discussed at DCWeek this June and is being implemented by the Research and Development group in Office of the CTO, DC Government (on Twitter: OCTOLabs).

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O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 correspondent Alex Howard shared a link to this photo on Twitter this morning. Smart phone users will use QR reading apps to snap a picture of the codes, then their phones will be shown relevant real-time information corresponding to the bus stop they are at. (That makes more sense to me than NYC's new QR codes on the back of garbage trucks, but hey - they point is, these things are growing more mainstream in the US.)

Update: The team behind these QR codes has updated us to let us know that the stickers are ready but won't actually be distributed for a few more days.

Here in my home town of Portland, Oregon, the ability to check "time-to-arrival" for busses by phone is much appreciated. Augmenting that kind of data with a richer experience, launched by QR code, sounds great. Santiago, Chile added similar QR codes to 4,000 of its bus stops this Summer.

"See" also this audio interview earlier this week with Bryan Sivak,
Chief Technology Officer at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) in the District of Columbia.

Below: US interest in QR Codes, as expressed by Google search queries. Google Trends info via UK QR news blog 2d Code. Discuss

Montreal-based entrepreneur and blogger Ben Yoskovitz knows a thing or two about hiring employees at startups. Yoskovitz formerly founded his own company, Standout Jobs - a tool designed to improve hiring and recruiting techniques for small businesses on the Web. Needless to say, the hiring and performance tracking of employees at the SMB level is a topic of interest for Yoskovitz. One of the items he recently wrote about is whether startups should hire workaholics expected to work 80+ hours each week, and some interesting arguments against this doctrine emerged.

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"You have to hire people who are passionate about the business. If they're not passionate, they'll fail you. If they are passionate but lazy they'll fail you."
- Ben YoskovitzThe startup ecosystem has long accepted the "all day, every day" methodology toward building a company, especially at the early stages. When you think you have a great idea you don't want to stop working on it, and young entrepreneurs will work during every spare moment to hasten the progress of their idea. That's great, and many successful entrepreneurs have done just that, but should that translate to your employees once you begin expanding?

Yoskovitz argues that a startup shouldn't be hiring and measuring their employees based on the number of hours they work. The only thing "hours worked" is a good indicator of is just that - how much time they put into whatever it is they were doing, he says.

"I'm not even sure it's a great measurement of passion (which is an essential quality you need to look for in startup employees.) It could just be that the guy is slow, so he works more hours," writes Yoskovitz. "We need to think about other measurable indicators of an employee's quality and value.

In a post about hiring workaholics at startups, Yoskovitz reiterates this point, stating that passion and work ethic are far more valuable than simply the number of hours the person is willing to commit.

"You have to hire people who are passionate about the business. If they're not passionate, they'll fail you. If they are passionate but lazy they'll fail you," he says. "They need to have a strong work ethic, a sense of responsibility (to you, their peers & the business) and they need to be passionate."

Startups are a unique beast. They are not normal jobs. Anyone applying to work at a startup knows that they will not clock-in and out at the same time each day. That said, it would also behoove startups to look beyond a person's time commitment when evaluating potential and current employees. Just remember that 5 hours of concentrated hard work always trumps 20 hours of lazy work devoid of passion.

How many hours a day do you think employees should be working at a startup? Or do you agree in Yoskovitz's "hours, schmours" argument? What are the best new ways to gauge your employees work performance? Let us know in the comments below!

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Have you ever wanted to walk into a building and be automatically checked into Foursquare, without any action on your part? That's the promise of an intriguing DIY project from electronic engineering hobbyist, Casey Halverson. He has come up with a low-cost solution that involves a Nike+ sensor, a $25 breakout board and a Web service called Stumble.to that watches for electronic devices, then automatically checks you into your favorite places via Foursquare and other location-based social networking services.

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Every so often, we like to feature a "weekend project" here on ReadWriteWeb. These generally consist of the kind of things you'll want to try out and play with when you have some free time, like over the weekend! None of our projects to date have been quite this involved, but it's a holiday weekend here in the U.S. - and doesn't building an automatic Foursquare check-in system beat eating hot dogs at a cookout? We think so.

If you have a few hours this weekend, you can build this automatic Foursquare check-in system yourself, with very little upfront investment. If the idea sounds appealing, but you're not sure if you have the skills needed to make this happen, don't worry - the hardware may soon be available for purchase alongside re-modded sensors that dangle on your keychain.

Materials

To get started, you'll need the following materials:

• A Nike+ sensor: If you don't already have a Nike+ sensor, you can pick one up by locating the nearest store that sells Nike gear using the company website. Sensors are sold either with a pair of running shoes or along with the Nike+ sportsband. (If you don't have a sensor on hand, you can still do this. Stumble.to's service can register Wi-Fi clients via MAC addresses, too.)
• A USB+iPod Serial Adapter: This $25 breakout board (available here from Sparkfun Electronics) sends and receives commands to the receiver and listens for individual foot pods. Your local electronics hobbyist shop may carry something similar.
• A computer

Accounts

• Obviously, you'll need a Foursquare account. (Twitter check-ins and Fire Eagle are also supported.)
• Secondly, you need to register an account with Stumble.to and obtain an API key.

Software

• Python
• PySerial
• The shoe-agent Python script (direct download): This is the script that connects the Nike+ sensor to the Stumble.to software.

Just Do It!

Once you have all the components in place, here's how to get started:

1. Install Python and PySerial
2. Plug in the serial adapter.
3. Obtain your API key from Stumble.to
4. Edit the shoe-agent script with your API key information and specify the serial port your USB adapter appears as.

That's it! Halverson is working on a more detailed how-to guide, so stay tuned to his blog for an update on that, if you need further details. (Update: Here it is!)

Garage Project to Become Commercial Success?

Although the above guide is meant for electronic hobbyists who want to have a little fun with Foursquare and hardware sensors, this DIY "garage project" may end up leading to commercial success for those invovled. Halverson says he's thinking now about how he could build a different type of sensor, like one that hangs on your keychain, for example, instead one that sits in your shoe or pocket. The new sensor could be thinner and lighter or maybe have an on and off switch that would register your check-ins automatically when on while still allowing an easy way to go off the grid when needed.

The Stumble.to Web service created by Eric Butler and Ian Gallagher has incredible potential as well. Although it only works with Foursquare, Fire Eagle and Twitter for the moment, additional services like Facebook Places, Gowalla and other check in-based social networks can and will be added in the future. Stumble.to essentially works as a middleman between hardware devices and location-based networks. It works with sensors, but also with Wi-Fi clients like laptops and smartphones that register their MAC addresses with the service.

Bringing Check-Ins to Non-Smartphone Users with Low-Cost Sensors

In reality, this project isn't all that different from the system created by mobile check-in service Shopkick, but with cross-platform appeal. Shopkick, now available as a mobile application for smartphones, offers deals to users who check in at popular retail establishments like Best Buy and Macy's. However, it forces the venue to install the company's proprietary hardware to verify that the check-ins come from people who are actually in the store. It also requires a smartphone.

Using low-cost components at the venue level and short-range sensors like the one from Nike+ offers the same benefits but without excluding users who prefer using other location-based services... or even those who don't own smartphones! A sensor combined with an online account at Facebook, Foursquare or another site could engage feature phone users who want to participate in this hot, new check-in game, but can't install mobile applications on their phone.

For the end user, the experience could be simple: it would only be a matter of registering an account with Stumble.to and associating their preferred services with their keychain sensor. Afterwards, they could continue to enjoy the features of location-based apps, like the discounts, mobile coupons, tips, reviews and other rewards, without having to actually having to perform a manual check-in on their phone.

Another interesting side note: Stumble.to has a "check out" feature too, meaning it can calculate the time you spend at a venue. Although no location-based service tracks this metric today, it could be implemented in future iterations to discourage the so-called drive-by check-ins (those where the user checks in as they pass a venue, often while driving, in order to get the points or rewards in a given location-based game like Foursquare). A service could perhaps dole out more points or better rewards to those who actually stayed put for awhile instead of those who were just cruising by.

What Do You Think?

Whether you geek out on the DIY project or want to wait for a commercially available system, you can see there are clear advantages to automated, hardware-based check-in services. Whether or not companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and others will actually want users to skip using their apps in favor of automation is another matter entirely, though. Some smaller services may be dependent on in-app ads for example, or links posted by their users that drive traffic to company homepages. Automation would have an effect on how the services could be effectively monetized, and that's something they will need to consider thoughtfully before embracing a system like this.

But that's just them. We think it's awesome - what about you?

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On Monday we asked you about the workplace of the future - today, it's time to take a look at your comments. The biggest theme was remote work - several of you expect the workplace to be increasingly virtualized. Others suggested a few problems with this idea. "Swarming," as Gartner called it, was also seen as important - for better or worse. And could the workplace start to be more of a "FunPlace"?

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CitizenSpace in San Francisco. Is this what the future of the workplace looks like?

Remote Control

The first commenter, Martin, kicked it off by saying "People will just work from home. Homes will be built with cabinets, or people will buy wooden modeules and install them in their gardens. Commuting, and paying rents for office space just does not scale."

Many people echoed that sentiment. One reader suggested companies could give "work from home" bonuses to employees. And although there are many jobs that just can't done from home - like road construction, emergency room staff and delivery - there's obviously a huge interest in telecommuting. According to telework web site Undress for Success 40% of workers have jobs that can be done from home (it's not clear if that's just in the US or if it's both the US and Japan).

Of course, there are a few problems with this idea. Jackie Thorpe Ewing commented:

I don't believe all workers will work from home. Some folks just cannot function that way. They need the routine of getting somewhere and doing something specific. Those folks are necessary to the future work place. If everyone works remotely, where is the synergy, where is the idea bouncing. Humans need the contact to liberate ideas. Video conference, Skype - they cannot replace human interaction.

While many of the tasks can certainly be done remotely, I believe there will always be a need for face-to-face communication on some level.

I think that's a pretty common sentiment - one that has enabled the rise of co-working spaces such as Citizen Space in San Francisco and NedSpace in Portland. These sorts of spaces are popular among freelancers and startups - are there many people working for large organizations utilizing these types of spaces?

Another draw back pointed out by one commenter:

Everyone seems so convinced telecommuting will be the predominant mode of working. I can tell you as a manager, I just don't trust the productivity levels for when people work from home, and I know our CEO agrees with that. So, yes, cost-wise and time-wise, it is inefficient for society, productivity-wise, it's not.

So I don't think the percentage of telecommuting increases from here. Has anyone seen stats on it over the past couple of decades? It would be interesting to see if it has plateaued.

Looking at the stats on Undress for Success, it appears that the rates of telecommuting have been going up, with growth having slowed down between 2006-2008 - but they don't have more recent data up.

Personally, I think results based compensation will also become more common as organizations try to squeeze as much ROI out of employees as possible and replace full time, salaried employees with contractors. On the other hand, I think people have been predicting this since at least 1984 when the first edition of The Way of the Ronin was released (and I wouldn't be surprised is Alvin Toffler or Peter Drucker were talking it even earlier).

Drone Swarms

Autom Tagsa wrote us by e-mail to say:

As the recession ensues, work force headcount becomes a critical factor in ensuring healthy bottom lines. What we may see evident in the immediate is a temporary deconstruction of traditional work roles and profiles, wherein the "leaner team" is composed of workers each wearing multiple hats and becoming quite adept at performing tasks outside of their core competencies partly as a result of 'swarmed' initiatives (per Gartner) and spontaneous, autonomous work habits. The long-term impact of this trend may yield a more knowledgeable workforce constantly aggregating and fine tuning skills as a function of the need to truly multitask efficiently.

Insects are specialists, so I'm not sure if the "swarm" metaphor applies well. On the one hand, more generalist work sounds appealing. On the other, it sounds like an extraordinary amount of additional pressure for each employee.

Someone at BarCamp Portland 2009 suggested that business process outsourcing could be taken to its logical extreme: literally outsourcing entire companies. Teams of employees would work together juggling projects for multiple companies.

On Brighter Note

Jeff Walters shared a more optimistic view of swarming, suggesting that the practice will transform workplaces into FunPlaces as workers use social media to connect and engage in work that's more meaningful to them:

Example: A team working on how to improve the total experience for casino guests will come together in the casino to train, work, observe and then create a solution. They'll complete part of the solution elsewhere, of course, working from the team leader's shared "FunPlace" or home.

Example 2: A team working on a new distance learning app for university level studies will go to schools of students not yet in universities (high schools in the US), plus homes and communities where prospective students can be gathered to experience new forms of online education (a.k.a. = "games") that are engaging, effective and that simulate working in "FunPlaces."

Example 3: A team working on a new city development project will "camp" at the development site over the course of several days or weeks to live/design/architect the ideal 24x7 architecture and solution for a mixed use development (living, retail, "FunSpace," and entertainment).

Coming together physically will be for "fun" and physical/social connections or "workers" will find new gigs only a click away.

Discuss

Only 24 hours after the launch of Apple's new social network, Ping, the service has been overrun by spammers. The fraudsters have created iTunes profiles and are posting links to a number of online scams, including ones that promises "free iPhones" or "free iPads" in exchange for filling out online surveys. For the most part, these suspicious links are being posted in the comments sections of the most popular artists on Ping, like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, U2 and others, all of whom are among the recommended accounts linked to from the Ping homepage.

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As security expert Chester Wisniewski points out, Apple doesn't require a credit card or any other positive identification in order to establish an account on Ping, which itself is a part of newly launched iTunes 10. Doing so wouldn't be advisable, either, as it would lock out a lot of "credit card-less" kids, teens and young adults from using iTunes. There's actually quite a bit of free content available from the iTunes Store, from apps to music to video, allowing parents to feel comfortable in letting their children manage their own iTunes accounts without close supervision.

Given those lax sign-up requirements, however, it's somewhat surprising that Apple didn't build in a good spam filtration system into its social network, too. The types of links being posted now are what any halfway decent blog commenting system like Disqus or Echo would pick up automatically, or at least flag for review, especially since the posts contain links.

Although not mentioned by Wisniewski, we think the lack of attention to this security detail should have new Ping users concerned, or at least wary. If Ping's spam filter (assuming one even exits) doesn't block links to obvious online scams, how can we be sure it's blocking links of a more nefarious nature - like those to sites containing viruses, trojans or other phishing scams?

Where's the Spam Filter?

What's odd is that Apple is managing other aspects of the Ping network's security. User profile pictures have to be approved before becoming visible; we've yet to see blatantly offensive comments or posts, which seems to indicative some sort of filter; and, as the Apple-watching blog MacRumors notes, there is a "report activity" mechanism in place. Clicking the "report" link on any spammer's comment brings up a dialog box of choices such as "offensive comments," "inappropriate photo or video" and "spam."

But typically a report mechanism would be used to deal with the items the spam filter missed, not as the first line of attack. Due to the rampant nature of the spam - we've yet to see an artist profile not affected by this problem - that means that either Ping's spam filter needs major improvement or the report mechanism is the only spam filter Apple has.

We would ask Apple for comment on this, but they never return our calls. (Working in Apple PR must be a great, right?) So we'll just leave you with this warning instead: You can't get a free iPhone from filling out an online survey, OK? Don't click those links.

Discuss

As the cloud computing market gets more crowded, a number of Web-based calculators are popping up to lure customers.

These online calculators deserve their fair share of scrutiny. For the most part, they are there for the vendor to tell their own story in a way that shows the benefits of their service. Huge savings and incredible returns are pretty much what you are given when you pop in your numbers, requirements and company information. In the end, what you get is barely insightful. What the vendor gets is far more.

At their best, these cloud computing calculators provide a thumbnail view of the market. At their worst, they are slick tools for generating sales leads.

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Here are three that we looked at. None of these calculators should ever be used to decide how to use cloud computing services. There are just too many factors to consider when making such a decision. It's a complex undertaking for any established company. It's why cloud management companies do so well. They provide a full gamut of services to help companies decide what should be in the cloud and what should not.

Astadia

Astadia developed a cloud calculator based on the data it collected from the integrations it did for its customers. Its main purpose is to show the return on the Google, Amazon Web Services and Force.com platforms.

The calculator is heavily biased. SearchCloudComputing.com observes that the actual calculator itself was built on the Force.com platform. Astadia develops marketing and sales apps. Much of the apps it develops are created on Force.com.

Google Calculator

This one stinks. The Google Cloud Calculator is hardly a calculator at all. It's an advertisement and a lead generator.

The calculator asks for your company name and then the number of employees. Input two employees and the calculator says you will save about $31,000. Put in 15 employees and you will also save about $31,000. So, either Google is inflating the numbers for a two employee company or is vastly underestimating the savings for a 15-person company.

Google does not have to promote itself in this manner. Google Apps is an excellent service, it can stand on its own. Cost comparisons are fine but to call it a calculator is a bit far fetched.

Windows Azure

The Windows Azure cloud calculator is better than the Google calculator advertisement. It still requires a high dose of skepticism, especially considering that it was built by a marketing firm.

Before you launch the calculator, they issue a disclaimer. That at least removes a bit of the marketing gleam.

The calculator asks a series of questions. SearchCloudComputing.com makes the point that the calculator is no doubt collecting hordes of marketing information. Again, its more of a marketing ploy than anything else. Still, Micrsoft at least tries to show some integrity:

"You should not view the results of this report as a substitute for engaging with a third party expert to independently evaluate you or your company's specific computing needs. The analysis report you will receive is for informational purposes only," it reads. It also assumes a rough estimate of $20,000 per year to manage a server on-premise, and about $4,000 for the Azure equivalent."

There are plenty of other cloud calculators. Rackspace has one as does Amazon Web Services. Our advice is to treat these calculators like you would any marketing information. They are simply tidbits of information that should provide nothing else but a snapshot of the market.

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