"The big trend for the past 10 years has been to pack more and more features into devices: making phones the Swiss Army Knives of gadgets. If you have a smartphone now it’s already your camera, watch, GPS, calendar and music player.

With the next generation of phones, it’s going to become your credit card, train ticket, TV remote control, language translator, toaster controller, it will power the augmented reality glasses that you wear, it could become your ID card and your passport...

Some of the most interesting innovation in mobile tech still comes from these third-party apps...

When the “cloud” becomes more significant our mobile phones will be our portal to the immersive internet that surrounds us, letting us control and interact with other computers and people.

Your phone is only going to get more important. Just don’t lose it." - LES

Does your company, brand name, web address pass the Siri test?

The percentage of magazines with at least one (QR Code) code is up from 96% in Q4 2011.

Overall, the total number of action codes printed increased to 1365 in Q1 2012 from 352 in the same period of 2011.

The percentage of advertising pages with an action code may provide the most accurate measurement of mobile action code adoption. For the first time, the percentage of magazine pages containing an action code exceeded 8% each month in Q1 2012.

via nellymoser

In lieu of the recent news that Posterous (the platform this blog is hosted on) has been acquired by Twitter, this blog will be moved to a new a platform in the next few weeks. While Posterous has yet to confirm any roadmap alteration for the service, I'm not exactly bullish on the idea of creating content on a platform that seems almost certain for major changes at best, or complete closure at worst.

In addition to a new platform, look and feel to this blog upcoming, expect a few changes to the type of content that will be published here as some exciting changes are on the horizon for me and my business focus. Stay tuned, please :-)

The largest pure single domain name transaction belonged to Sex.com which was sold in October 2010 for a record breaking $13M. Now it appears Sex.com will have to a back row seat to PrivateJet.com which has more than doubled the previous benchmark for a pure single domain name sale.

Nations Luxury Transportation, LLC (Nations) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Nations has acquired the domain name http://www.PrivateJet.com, from privately held Don't Look Media.com, a leading intellectual property holding company, for $30.18 million in cash and stock. - PR Web

Hardware - Software

Not quite, but it's getting close.

QR Code Use Jumped 617% From January to December in Top 100 Magazines

A Record 4468 Mobile Action Codes Appeared in Ads and Editorial Pages. QR Code Market Share Reaches 80%.

The monthly count of codes printed in the top 100 magazines grew from 88 in January to 631 in December.

Advertisers contributed heavily to the growth. The monthly percentage of codes from advertising increased from 87% in January to 96% in Q4.

The average number of codes per issue grew – from 2.33 in Q1 to 6.50 in Q4.

QR market share increased from 66% in January to 80% in December.

Almost all codes in Q4 led to product demonstrations, branding videos, sweepstakes, e-commerce and/or social sharing sites.

Ben Parr really nails this one. Any consumer-focused product or service needs to keep this in mind.

Why do you post photos on Facebook? Why do you tweet? Why do you check out your Klout score, even though you claim you never check it? The answer is simple: we get an emotional high every time somebody likes, retweets or comments on the things we post. 

We always want another hit. Validation is the crack, Internet is the crack pipe and Facebook & Twitter are the dealers.