One of the biggest focal points of the phone’s initial unveiling in London, was its unique ability to predict a user’s next move.  This feature, which is called Smart Stay, uses eye-tracking technology to wake the phone up and put it to sleep based on user movements.  The front-facing camera specifically, can detect when a user is looking at the device or not, and will react accordingly.

A similarly unique feature allows a Siri-esque program called S Voice to launch the 8-megapixel camera application, (which also plays host to an LED flash and 1.9MP front-facing camera) something that the iPhone 4s and other competitor phones can’t do.  The program also performs a whole host of other tasks via voice recognition software such as checking the weather, searching the web, adding appointments to the calendar app, and placing phone calls, much like the offerings of Siri for the iPhone.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the phone though, comes in the form of facial recognition technology that can identify people in photos and link back to your friend’s social network pages like Facebook and Twitter.  One can also easily email or text photos to those identified people within their phone book with the stroke of just a few keys.  And yet still, there’s more.

The massive 4.8-inch screen makes for a good interface for the phone’s Pop Up Play feature, which is similar to the picture-in-picture, or PIP, features found on many televisions.  This allows users to watch videos while browsing, texting, or using other applications simultaneously on different parts of the screen.

In addition to all these new, unique features, some other hardware highlights include a 1280×720 display resolution, a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, and a built-in NFC chip for file sharing and mobile payments.

While the 3G version of the Galaxy S 111 will launch in May in Europe, and then across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East after, the U.S. will have to wait until later in the summer for the handsets.  Samsung has said that by then, the phones will run on 4G LTE networks as well, although pricing and carriers have not been identified yet.

A modern spin on a classic vision board, Pinterest can help any entrepreneur realize their brand’s vision of creating a greater online presence.

Visuals

Human beings are highly visual creatures. YouTube and infographics are proof that audiences enjoy visuals. While most of your subscribers would love to spend an hour of their day reading your blog post, most of them cannot. Time is a limited and precious resource. Fortunately, an image is worth a thousand words. With visuals, your reader can decide, in seconds, whether they can spare a few minutes of their day to read what you have to say. The visuals on Pinterest can entice readers to read your content.

Humanization 

Social media is all about being social and engaging with your audience. Like other social media sites, Pinterest is not meant as a solely self-promotional tool. Your followers will quickly be turned off by this approach. Pinterest is a reciprocal community; it humanizes brands. Pinterest allows followers to get to know a brand’s personality, and, ideally, trust the brand. On Pinterest, users are the main driving force behind referral traffic for brands that they trust.

Marketing 

No matter what product you sell of what niche your blog is in, all entrepreneurs are in the business of marketing. Fortunately, bloggers do not have to rely on a direct response agency to take advantage of Pinterest’s tools. Beth Hayden’s guest post on Copyblogger captured ways that beginning, intermediate and “black-belt” pinners can all take advantage of Pinterest’s marketing tools.

Entrepreneurs can use a number of Pinterest’s extensive marketing tools, like a prominent Follow Me Pinterest button on a website, an exclusive “thank you” board or a Pinterest contest, to reach their audience. According to Hayden, there are fifty-six ways anyone, at any stage of their Pinterest journey, can use Pinterest to promote or revamp their marketing strategy.

So if you are looking to get ahead in business or blogging, Pinterest should be one of your first stops.  The possibilities are endless, and it undoubtedly demonstrates the new face of social media.

I guess I could just be a little paranoid for not wanting my every move tracked. I guess I am just torn on whether or not this would be fun. I mean, if I want to know where I went I can just think “where did I go today?” Do we need a phone app to tell us something we already know.

click to see how to track a mobile phone

On an even more literal level, however, the Google Street View program has circumvented the globe multiple times in an effort to take a picture of every street in the world. In the past couple years the program has added museum and shopping mall interiors, parks and university campuses, and tours of some of the most inaccessible places on Earth – including Antarctica and the Amazon River.

Now, first the first time, Google has announced plans to dive below the surface – literally – and capture the world’s last truly unexplored frontier: the ocean. Google is collaborating with the University of Queensland and the Underwater Earth organization to bring Street View to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. This will be done by sending a specially-designed camera 100 feet down into the water, where it will take around 50,000 panoramic images of the reefs, the vegetation, and the animal life. Those images will then be stitched together and uploaded online.

In conducting this project, Google and its collaborating institutions hope to bring attention to reef deterioration and build a model to track such deterioration over time. It is hoped that the images will provide the first data points for a long-term study of the health and vitality of the Great Barrier Reef area. Of course, Google is also hoping to draw even more people to its already-popular Street View application, in the process bringing the company more advertising money and more end-users who may want to purchase advanced sets of imagery.

After the filming of the Great Barrier Reef is complete, Google plans to start bringing its underwater camera to other reef sites and notable coastal areas around the world, with the ultimate goal of covering the ocean almost as well as it currently covers the land.

The project is expect to begin filming this summer.

This incredible amount of connectivity has bred a backlash of sorts. Privacy concerns have resulted in FTC settlements, investors scrutinizing the upcoming initial public offering have been wondering if the social network has ballooned beyond its means, and a growing number of early Facebook users have decided to deactivate their accounts. Facebook may have surpassed a staggering 800 million users, but it’s quite clear that privacy is a key concern and that connectivity may have its limits.

A recent study has confirmed this belief. In a report recently-released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an examination of Facebook users has found that people have become more private and cautious about their online presence over time. Rare only a few years ago, users are now taking concerted steps to prevent personal information from being viewed by colleagues, bosses, family members, distant friends, and, of course, the general public.

Some of the main findings: almost two-thirds of respondents said they had deleted friends and 44 percent reported that they had removed comments from their profile. These figures reflect increases from the 2009 study, which found the numbers to be 56 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Users furthermore reported untagging pictures at a higher rate (37 percent versus 30 percent in 2009). The percentage of respondents who have a fully-private profile (58%) was also at its highest level ever.

Facebook users reported utilizing a range of methods to monitor the privacy settings on their profile. In addition to making their page private, deleting unwanted posts and friends, and untagging pictures, users also ask friends to delete images and comments, remove geographical data from their information tab, and alter their name so as to make them difficult to track down. These measures have been shown to be effective.

The Pew study also broke down respondents by demographic to further assess privacy trends. It found that women were more private than men but that no single age group was statistically more restrictive than another. It also concluded, based upon deleting comments, that people tend to make fewer regrettable comments as they grow older.

The study was conducted in a phone survey of 2,277 adults this spring. It has a margin of error of two percentage points.

Enter the most recent patent issued to Microsoft – a GPS service that helps people safely navigate around areas with high crime rates. It’s a wonder such a service hasn’t already appeared in the form of a downloadable app, yet even with such obvious markets as tourists, business travelers, and the good old fashioned paranoid public, the “Avoid Ghetto” GPS feature is far from immune from criticism and controversy.

At the forefront of issues taken with this technology is the matter of what crimes, and what amount of what crimes, make a particular area “unsafe.” Since not every crime happens in a bad part of town, and not every crime is one that threatens pedestrians and motorists, such particulars are important. Deeming a particular area “unsafe” for pedestrians and motorists is far from the realm of responsibility for a tech company such as Microsoft.

Critics are adamant that if such technology were to exist, the conclusions must be drawn from dedicated statistical analysis and sociological study. But as CNET points out, the real crime may ultimately be the ulterior motives lurking behind Microsoft’s push to provide the public with this technology. As it turns out, some fine print would seem to suggest that the service would lead people to walk by advertisements most likely to appeal to them based on search data.

Yet the real question is whether or not such an app will prove either to be a mere novelty, measurable benefit to the community, or a detriment to those trying to use it to lead safer lives. If the data and projections Microsoft uses to create the GPS service are outdated and/or unreflective of reality, then it won’t be worth much to people besides as a gag. If the data is sound, then such technology may very well assist people in safely navigating themselves around areas with high crime rates.

But if the technology is unable to match the wits of criminals, we may very well see such a service blow up in the faces of both the creators and the users; nothing would aid would-be muggers more than technology that helps them figure out the exact route pedestrians will take to avoid a specific neighborhood laden with crime.

Regardless, such useful technology is a little late into the game: the crime rate in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been in decades.

While the bug may certainly be a minor and correctable one, it nevertheless reflects an early stumble for Apple in an area where the company cannot afford to fall. The iBooks 2 – along with the iBookstore and iBooks Author – is part of Apple’s broad attempt to revolutionize the education industry. As it announced at a much-heralded event this week in New York, the company aspires to fully embrace digital textbooks by entering into publishing agreements, building publishing software, and providing cheap, virtual books that can be uploaded onto any iPad device. The iBooks 2 application is the interactive iPad program upon which digital textbooks can be read.

Apple’s plan has many strengths: there is a growing digital textbook market, competition in the educational tech world is limited, and the company has already contracted with the three publishing firms that together control most of the elementary market – McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Apple also, of course, possesses tremendous resources and a powerful brand name. Yet despite all these positive indicators, early reviews of the company’s objectives have been highly mixed.

Critics note that Apple can only successfully sell digital textbooks to elementary schools by convincing districts to buy hundreds of expensive iPads and then “renewing” the books every year – a proposition that all but the wealthiest schools are unlikely to consider. Furthermore, the company may have even more trouble entering the high school and college textbook markets, where competition is more fierce from both a publishing and a digital retailing perspective. Ultimately, Apple has tied its education success to that of its iPad device. It’s a risky play to make.

So it’s impossible to tell what will happen with Apple’s endeavors in the digital textbook world. All we know at this point is that the company got off on the wrong foot with its iBooks 2 app. But there’s a long road ahead.

Made by the Dextera team in less than eight hours, Iris is more limited than Siri. It’s mathematical skills are sparse and most of its references come from Wikipedia. Additionally, the app requires Google’s voice recognition software, which is prone to error. But Iris stands to inherit considerable improvements in the future, when it moves out of its current alpha phase. More than anything, the hackers who made Iris showed how quickly something approximating Siri could be put together.

But Iris isn’t the only app that looks to challenge Apple’s Siri. Vlingo, which can be downloaded for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, provides a Siri-like service, with features like being able to create alarms and reminders, compose texts and update Facebook. Another Android challenger, Speaktoit, is still in beta but assists with information retrieval, app launching, weather reports, currency and measurement conversion, and social media services. Dragon Go! is perhaps the leader of the pack in terms of voice recognition but is not nearly as compatible with or integrated into your device, instead operating as web reference. Finally the Android app Edwin, offers a variety of fresh web options, connected as it is to Wolfram Alpha.

The future of voice recognition assistant smartphone apps could see some major new players. Kinect’s voice recognition system is good enough that it’s not hard to imagine the sensor itself evolving into a Siri-like service. The Amazon voice search tool Yap, which will be compatible with Kindle Fire and could be a major part of the Amazon online store in the coming years. Another possible contender is called Teneo, which was created by ‘natural language interaction’ consultant Artificial Solutions. One thing is for certain, the next few years should be very active in the voice recognition app field.

Almost immediately after the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, a similar bill was introduced onto the floor of Congress. For media conglomerates and the government alike, there are huge incentives for getting such laws passed. It makes it much to shut down sites where copyrighted content is shared, and prosecute the owners of these sites for copyright infringement. The money and power behind these incentives is of an enormous quantity. While many powerful individuals, including the President, have spoken out against such laws, countless more either secretly or openly support their existence.

Needless to say, it’s foolish to expect the defeat of two bills in Congress to signal victory for anyone who did not support beefed up measures to enforce copyright laws in the United States. Bills are written, submitted, sometimes debated, voted on, and occasionally passed on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Nothing stops any member of Congress from writing virtually any bill they want, and it only requires minimal changes to allow for old ideas to be once again brought onto the floor for debate.

Those against SOPA and PIPA seemingly did all they could by contacting their elected members of Congress and raising a stink across the World Wide Web. Those in favor of anti-online piracy legislation are doing all they can by not stopping in their efforts to see the thing through. They have the money, power, and influence that it takes to have bills repeatedly pushed through Congress. Any amount of tech lobbying that speaks out against the dangers of such bills turning into law is minimal compared to the amount of lobbying those in favor of anti-piracy legislation practice in the nation’s capital.

In order to continue to prevent the success of anti-piracy legislation, those against it will have to do more than flood their elected officials’ email inboxes. Ultimately it will come down to money. Techhies who despise the thought of a far more tightly regulated information superhighway will have to suck it up and send money to the organizations that make it their mission to convince Congress that such laws will prove disastrous for the country.

In short, it takes more than a week to win a war over the rights of the World Wide Web.

This is not necessarily a brand new direction for the revolutionary gaming giant, nor is it particularly surprising. Facebook, whose online gaming platform is heavily dominated by Zynga, has been seeing escalating profits from casino games and applications. It stands to reason that two of the most addictive trends in society, gambling and social media would be combined to create a profit goliath. For years now, people have been gambling for virtual currency; the move to real currency could be a cash cow, though it’s unlikely Facebook, still reeling from blows to its brand over privacy breakdowns, will support such a controversial feature.

But that’s not to say other media giants won’t be investing considerable money and effort into making real-money online gambling continue to grow. Two major power moves in the last half year have pointed to this as not just a possibility but a probability. Firstly, International Game Technology, a major video poker developer, absorbed Double Down Interactive for the price tag of $500 million. Clearly, their spending that much money indicates they see a considerable payoff. So too apparently does Caesars Entertainment, who for $90 million acquired Playtika, known for the game Slotomania.

These moves toward more online gambling games are taking considerable financial resources but Zynga, worth over one billion after its initial public offering, has the money in the bank to fund such an endeavor. Clearly, with the popularity of its Facebook games and poker and casino games in general, as well as the incredible promise of combining gambling and social media, Zynga thinks it will be well worth the financial, legislative, and corporate wrangling. In the meantime, fans can keep harvesting their Farmville gardens, waiting to spend some of the virtual currency on big winnings at roulette and blackjack.