The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, has been slow to attract the attention of budding entrepreneurs. However, there has been some startup action in so-called "social objects." We've covered two companies in this domain in recent times, StickyBits and TalesOfThings. The New York Times profiled a third company in this space over the weekend, Itizen.

All of these startups are searching for a business model, but there is massive long term potential in this market. Leandro Agro, CEO of sensor data company WideTag (our review), says that by 2050 objects will be judged more for their 'sociality' than their aesthetic value. It's an intriguing notion, so in this post we imagine what a 'social' tennis racquet might look like in 40 years.

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Living Objects

In an interview for Wired Italy and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, transcribed on the WideTag blog by David Orban, Leandro Agro said that "tomorrow a social object might be associated with Italy not because of its aesthetic value but because of its level of 'sociality'." He sees an opportunity for his country, Italy, to take a leadership role in re-inventing the design of objects:

"Every object should tell its own story. The story of its past (what it is made of, where it was produced, how it is used) and its future (how to differentiate it, how to take it apart, how to recycle it). It should be actively self-aware (being sentient or at least having some idea of the time and place for its own use), be connected and social, in other words it should belong to us humans, "living" as part of our digital and social network. "

I expressed skepticism about social objects earlier this year, because the early startups in this domain were attempting to create new social networks on top of objects. I still think that's the wrong model. However, there is a lot of scope for online data from objects to contribute to your existing social networks.

A Social Tennis Racquet (Circa 2050)

Using Agro's vision, here is one possible scenario.

Imagine a tennis racquet with an RFID chip embedded in it. The chip specifies the materials the racquet was made with, which factory it was produced in and on what date, the strengths of that particular racquet compared to other models, and so on.

Then when the racquet is bought, the chip tracks the usage of the racquet. It will monitor for damage and wear, how often the strings are tightened or swapped out, and so on. It might also send to and receive information from other computing chips - in tennis courts, other players racquets, inside tennis clubs, etc. This would enable the tennis racquet to, for example, automatically track the tournaments its owner enters and the games it plays in (let's assume this is an amateur player, since professional tennis players swap racquets every set or so!).

This Internet-connected tennis racquet has a social element because it is being used by a person, who presumably uses the racquet to play tennis with other people. So that data from the racquet can be a contributor to social networks.

Using today's social networks to illustrate the point (although surely these will be seen as rather primitive examples of social networks in 50 years time), imagine your tennis racquet automatically checking you in to a tennis court on Foursquare. Or the racquet updating your Facebook page when you defeat your mate in a social game of tennis. Or the racquet sending you a DM on Twitter that it requires string tightening (!).

These and many other scenarios will occur over time, as objects get connected to the Internet and the resulting data meshes in with your social networks. So by extension, the tennis racquet will become a 'social object.'

While this is a future-looking scenario, are you aware of objects that are already 'social'? And do you think StickyBits, TalesofThings, Itizen and others are on the right track to realize this vision?

Image credit: Siddhartha Lammata

Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy writes in a new report that "The Internet and the mobile Internet have effectively combined." Facebook users who access the social networking site through a mobile device are twice as active as users who don't. It's no surprise then to see the announcement of Salesforce.com's Chatter Mobile, a mobile client for the company's increasingly popular Chatter social networking and microblogging platform.

Chatter Mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and the new iPod touch will be available in late 2010, with Android support coming in the first half of 2011.

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Chatter's simple, Facebook-like interface accomplishes the goal of most enterprise 2.0 platforms: making enterprise technologies as accessible as consumer technologies. According to Kraig Swensrud, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter is its most successful product launch yet. The product, which came out of beta in June, is now in use by 20,000 companies. Many are Salesforce.com CRM customers, but many new customers are also picking up Chatter and using it independently of the company's flagship product. Some companies, like Nokia are even deploying Chatter enterprise wide.

Saleforce.com's mobile CRM app has also been successful, with over 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and over 100,000 from the BlackBerry App World.

Salesforce.com is aggressively targeting enterprise mobility and social networking as several competitors are eying the same space. Yammer recently announced it will expand beyond microblogging into general enterprise social networking and RhoLogic recently released a mobile SugarCRM client. Expect to see this space heating up more in coming months as mobility continues to mainstream.

See our coverage of Chatter from June for more information the service.

From Silicon Valley’s observation deck that may seem like small peanuts— these days we barely bat an eye when HP and Dell get into a multi-billion dollar tug-of-war game. However, for the Middle East and in particular Jordan, the Maktoob takeover was a flash point for the fledgling tech scene.

That’s not to say that Jordan has become a premiere tech hub overnight. Indeed, the region still suffers from a dearth of angel investors. But there is a palpable rise in confidence among the region’s entrepreneurs, like Ammar Ibrahim founder of Asuaq.com. The young site, which touts itself as the Craigslist of the Middle East (minus the “censored” controversy), has only garnered about 300,000 unique visitors since its launch earlier this year, but it’s growing at a healthy clip. Traffic has doubled in the last five months.

On this week’s episode of Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur, SGN Founder Shervin Pishevar talks to Ibrahim about his new site, Jordan’s startup community, the Maktoob deal’s effect and the challenges of funding. See video above. Many thanks to Shoo Fee TV, a content provider and aggregator of Arab satellite channel listings based in Jordan, for shooting this video.

For all the progress in Jordan, it was interesting to hear Ibrahim discuss the ongoing challenges of raising capital in the region. Although he says the investment environment has improved significantly in the last 2-3 years, a site rich in traffic is still tough sell in this traditional market: “The thing that is still happening today is that people are still evaluating internet businesses on the balance sheet. So it’s pretty much like a grocery store, like gasoline station… So this is one of the biggest problems, if you’re a website and you do have significant traffic…it’s a bit difficult to monetize traffic…[so] internet businesses are undervalued because of the internet business model.”

To see episode one of Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur, featuring Yahoo’s former Chief Data Officer, Dr. Usama Fayyad, click here. On next week’s episode, we’ll meet the man Pishevar calls the “Ron Conway of the Middle East.”

The most interesting thing about Campus Dibs, a recently launched GroupOn clone, is its choice of vertical i.e. college campuses. If you don’t think this is notable enough to merit another (albeit brief) GroupOn clone post then just remember how Facebook got a heads start towards world domination, by strategically targeting social networks in the Ivy League and slowly expanding outward.

Facebook has proven that colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and thus are extremely interesting when thought of  in terms of a market for GroupOn clones. If you doubt Campus Dibs’ chances for setting itself apart from the 800 or so daily deals sites out there, just imagine the power of the 50k plus populations of college campuses and alumni coupled with the mob mentality of group buying sites.

Picture briefly what a deal tie-in might mean for the student store, especially at campuses with pretty fanatical populations and hopping college towns. I’m looking at you USC, Penn State, Arizona State, Michigan State, OSU, and UT Austin who are among the campuses covered by Campusdibs.

Right now the USC deal (my alma mater) is “50% off Timbuk2 messenger bags and backpacks.” Perfect for back to school! But no joke, college campuses are serious business, no matter how niche they might seem. And as history has proven, no niche is too niche; Just ask GroupOn CEO Andrew Mason, who once sold slippers with flashlights. Enough said.

The Internet is a series of tubes - man, that joke just doesn't get old. Or rather, the Internet is a series of text documents. That isn't so funny if you're trying to optimize your search engine rankings for video content on your website. Other than the title and description, videos don't provide the text that robots from Google and others use to create those search rankings. You can, of course, transcribe your videos but that can be time-intensive and cost-prohibitive, particularly if your site is video-heavy.

Enter SpeakerText which relaunches today with a transcription service that combines both the human and the artificial - a combination of natural language processing and crowdsourced human transcription.

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But SpeakerText offers more than just transcription. Once a video is transcribed and time-coded, SpeakerText loads an interactive transcript player beneath each video. Dubbed the SpeakerBar, this player allows visitors to use the text as a controller, of sorts, for the video they're watching. Click on a word or sentence and the video will skip to that part. Cut and paste a portion of the text to share, and it will contain a link back to that exact part of the video.

And it's that social element, perhaps, that makes SpeakerText's service innovative. This isn't merely a transcript, but an "alternative viral pathway" for video. As CEO Matt Mireles points out, the sort of "closed caption" transcription that we are accustomed to is really a relic of the broadcast era - "linear old school television." SpeakerText, he argues, is "native to 21st century technology."

Currently SpeakerText works with video players from Brightcove, YouTube, and blip.tv. SpeakerText stores the transcripts in the cloud where they can be accessed server-side via an API or a WordPress plugin.

Transcription services - both human and machine-based - are notoriously mediocre, but Mireles says that the process his company has created is designed to improve both quality and automation over time. SpeakerText starts at $20 a month, with a $2 per minute charge for the transcriptions, a price that seems competitive to other similar services.

Former head of Google China, Kai-fu Lee, insists—insists—that he is not happy that Google imploded its business in China. “Seeing the work that I put in, how could I be happy to see that?” he says. In fact, in a press release all about his incubator’s companies being built on top of Android he doesn’t use the G-word once. “Given the pull out, we’ll accept the situation and do our best,” he says humbly. Yeah, accept the situation like a fox.

As Lee begins to open up more about the types of companies being created at his incubator, Innovation Works, there’s a consistent theme—Android. Whether it’s address books, music programs, video games, maps, eCommerce marketplaces or e-readers, many of Lee’s companies are hoping to take advantage of the good things about Android—namely that it’s a free, robust operating system—but customize the core smartphone applications in a way that Google won’t or can’t.

It’s interesting that I had a conversation with Lee about this topic right about the time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was delivering a keynote touting that more than 200,000 Android-powered smartphones are activated daily, going beyond just the smartphone wielding “elite.” Lee would agree with everything his former boss said. It’s just that Google isn’t well positioned to make money off the apps and services in the world’s largest market. Oops.

Lee philosophically may have issues with the lack of openness in the Chinese Web, but it’s also giving him an advantage: The most popular applications for the Android phone like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Pandora aren’t available in China, and Google’s native apps may not be the top choice of manufacturers given the search engine’s stance on doing business in the country. So Innovation Works is collectively trying to build a new Web on top of the platform that’s customized for Chinese tastes.

For example, music services that show song lyrics as they play—an essential feature for China’s karaoke loving audience. Another example is a program that automatically enters different dialing prefixes that save money on calls to certain regions. Because 3G is so expensive in China, a video program called Wonderpod downloads videos onto your phone from your laptop at work, so you can watch them without having to stream them on the commute home. An eReader software company lets you read 60% of the book for free then asks for a payment to read the rest. Because of rampant piracy, there’s no chance of selling eBooks without giving anything away for free, but once people are hooked, if they enjoy it, they’ll pay for the rest of the book out of convenience, Lee argues. The incubator is making a few, broad platform plays with an Android-based operating system called Tapas, an analytics tool for developers called Umeng and Ascending Cloud, a publisher of social games.

At most, Lee’s mobile companies are getting a couple dollars per user for these apps so these ideas only become huge companies with massive scale. This can’t be just a game played for the top of the pyramid. And there’s no question in Lee’s mind that Android will be bigger in China than the iPhone, because the cost differential is much more pronounced. Because there aren’t many Android models in the US, hardware makers can price the phones close to the iPhone, but in manufacturing-heavy China prices will almost certainly be driven down much faster.

Lee says the Android devices coming out next year—including manufacturers his companies are working with—cost $200 to $300 per phone. He expects that to fall to around $100 the next year, and possible fall below $100 the year after that. The iPhone will never experience that kind of competitive pressure because only Apple makes it. (Although I could show you plenty of cheaper versions with the an Apple-like logo in the dodgy markets of Shenzhen…)

And there are no carrier subsidies in China, because 80% of phones are bought independently from airtime. So an iPhone will cost around $600. Already Android will enter the market at half the price. For a big swath of the Chinese population that will make a difference, especially if those prices can get under $100 per phone in just a few years with features more tailored for the market.

In a lot of ways, this is a strategy that would only work in China—it’s all about volume and counts on a market with hyper-aggressively competitive gadget manufacturing. But with billions of dollars in venture capital sloshing around China, the market to build the best mobile apps could be as cutthroat as the competition to win the hardware wars. Lee has recently inked some strategic partnerships with Foxconn, Chunghwa Telecom, MediaTek Inc and a raft of global investors to help his chances of being the one to profit from the opportunity.

He’s also moved Innovation Works from Google China’s building to a new location that features what any incubator needs—a hologram that greets you at the front door. I’m not kidding. He told his designer he needed it to look different than any other office and from the look of the pictures, he succeeded. His mobile bets are less certain. But if he wins he’ll have at least one guy to thank: Sergey Brin. A big juicy market opportunity is a lot better parting gift than a watch.

Google rolled out a new inbox last week that, in theory, separates your important emails from your unimportant emails and lets you speed through work faster.

Most of the initial reaction reflected users' concerns as email recipients - excitement about reading email faster, worry about missing something urgent because Google didn't think it was important. But most of us who receive email also send email, and we want those emails to be read. Are we entering an era of optimizing our emails for the Priority Inbox, just as we optimize our websites and blogs for Google search?

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The death of email marketing?

Email marketers in particular were scrambling after Google announced Priority Inbox. The blog Marketing Professor introduced a new term to describe the divide between priority emails and non-priority emails - the "Priority Inbox Fold."

The marketing blogosphere's conclusion seems to be that Priority Inbox is going to cripple marketers who rely on blasting out messages to a massive list of email addresses, but that it will be a boon to marketers who are trying to figure out how to really engage their audiences.

Excerpt and illustration from a post on the blog Marketing Professor about the "Priority Inbox Fold."

Some marketers have kicked around ideas like adding the word "important" to every email, emphasizing upcoming deadlines in the text or having a competition that requires your subscribers to reply. But most are upbeat - as marketers often are - about Priority Inbox.

"Gmail's Priority Inbox Isn't a Threat, But An Opportunity," booms a headline on email marketing blog Notes from the Lab. "Doesn't this just place a spotlight on what email marketers should be doing better than anyone? Providing value so the minute an email comes in from a sender, it's received with positive thoughts in mind? If you're doing things the right way, you shouldn't worry but be confident you'll be tagged as important."

Fretting about getting priority for outgoing email

But what does Priority Inbox mean for ordinary users? The feature seems to err on the side of assigning too much importance to email, as Google doesn't want to burn users right away by burying an email from the boss or a reminder from the dentist. ReadWriteWeb's fearless new researcher Micah Vandergrift tried valiently to send me an email that would be marked non-priority, to no avail.

Emails that were marked Priority included the subject lines, "This is interesting" (about pizza), "This is not a priority at all" (copy of an email from the Gotham City Beardsmen's Alliance), and a subject-less email which was a list of Micah's favorite bands from Last.fm.

Tough to game

But Priority Inbox is like a recommendation engine for email. It assigns a list of attributes to each email and watches for patterns as you gently mark emails important or not important by hand. I've only been using Priority Inbox for a week, so it hasn't fully learned the way we do things around here (not priority: humorous emails from uncle, press releases from Vespa. Priority: discount airfare).

As time goes on, I have faith that Priority Inbox will learn what I think is important. That's great for receiving email, but a little unnerving for sending it. The personalized algorithm makes it extremely tough to optimize for exposure in Priority Inbox the way we've learned to optimize for Google's search engine.

No doubt tricks will arise, like including urgent-sounding buzzwords in the subject line and making sure that you are included in the recipient's social graph. But based on early experiments,

But that probably reflects reality - senders and recipients are not always in agreement concerning the importance of an email:

Are you worried your emails won't get marked "Priority"?

The ongoing saga of Google’s logo continues. The search giant has just changed the doodle on google.com once again this evening, leading up to their search event tomorrow. And once again, it looks as if the logo points to what they’ll be announcing tomorrow.

Whereas yesterday, the doodle was more kinetic, which Google called “fast, fun and interactive,” today’s logo updates as you type in the search box. This points to Google rolling out the live-updating results-as-you-type feature they’ve been testing.

When you load Google.com right now, you’ll see the logo grayed-out. When you start typing, the colors come to life one character at a time. If you backspace, the logo goes back as well.

Join us bright and early at 9:30 AM PT for coverage of the event tomorrow. Just in case you can’t see the new logo yet (last night it seemed to roll out slowly), I’ll include a video below.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to see how yesterday’s doodle worked, check out the recreation Rob Hawkes made using only HTML5.

Update: And here’s Google tweeting about it:

Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews.

Surprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps.

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For small businesses and startups especially, getting the word out to relevant media outlets, while important, can be a time-consuming task that competes with each day's list of to-do's.

So how can businesses streamline their media outreach? One answer is MediaSync, a service from Web marketing firm mBlast. MediaSync is a free database of media contacts that enables you to find individual journalists and bloggers based on the topics they tend to cover and the outlets they write for.

For example, a search for "social media" will return a list of bloggers for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, CNET and others.

Each writer has a profile containing basic contact info, a brief biography, links to their social networking profiles, as well as data about the topics and beats they cover.

MediaSync currently boasts 521,899 media contacts in its database, and that number is sure to be growing on a regular basis.

The database is evidently a work in progress, as not all media contact profiles are populated, including those of a few high-profile bloggers and journalists. Nonetheless, MediaSync remains a good way to do some initial research into which media professionals might be most receptive to a given request for coverage.

Most tech and business bloggers see a ton of emails fly across their desktop and mobile phones each day, so targeting the right ones might improve your message's chances of getting read and, if you're truly onto something, acted upon.

VMworld set up a lab this year that ran a hybrid cloud.

The VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by Terremark in Miami and Verizon in Ashburn, Va.

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The hybrid cloud was redundant so if it went down, the load could be picked up elsewhere.

This was the first year that VMworld used a hybrid cloud environment. They called it Lab Cloud. The numbers demonstrate the difference in what can be accomplished in a multi-tenant environment.

Last year, there were 4,500 labs completed at VMword. This year there were more than 15,000 labs done.

Lab Cloud deployed and destroyed about 4000 Virtual Machines on a per hour basis. In total, Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 virtual machines. Private cloud environments can not usually handle this kind of load, showing again the capabilities of what can be done when data centers and public cloud environments are connected.

To be fair, it is important to remember that this is a lab environment. The Lab Cloud was built from scratch. Any enterprise environment will face any number of obstacles in setting up a hybrid environment.

One thing it does show is the volume of virtual machines that are being spun into the cloud. The Lab Cloud demonstrated how much more extended a cloud environment can be compared to a traditional data center operation or a private cloud.

It also shows how VMware plans to do training at future VMworld events. VMware set up 480 seats for doing labs. Each lab took about an hour to do. A few people complete all of the labs. But more so, it helped give attendees hands-on experience in how to manage thousands of virtual machines that are being deployed and destroyed throughout a work day.

Source: Yellow Bricks

The enterprise needs this kind of training for a few reasons. Hybrid cloud computing is still very new to most people. The labs give people a chance to learn new skills that will be needed as enterprise operations evolve toward a hybrid cloud computing environment.

And perhaps just as much, it shows the IT knowledge worker the possibilities that the cloud brings to their work.

AFP - Connecticut's top law enforcement official called for online classifieds website Craigslist to confirm that it has permanently closed its "adult services" listings.

Authorities cracked down on file-sharing sites across Europe yesterday in a major operation two years in the making, Swedish officials told media.

The raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of Wikileaks.org, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites.

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Seven locations were raided in Sweden, according to the file-sharing news site Torrent Freak, including a university. Raids were also reportedly carried out in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, the UK, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Belgium, where the request originated.

Several torrent sites including Pirate Bay were down for users in some countries today.

Five policemen showed up yesterday morning at PRQ, the company that in part hosts Wikileaks, and asked about two IP addresses used in 2009. The company handed over email addresses associated with the IP addresses, which are the only records it keeps on its clients. No servers or computers were confiscated, the company said.

The raid comes as Wikileaks is preparing to release 15,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, which the U.S. government is anxious to prevent. PRQ denied that Wikileaks was the subject of the raid and Wikileaks has not made any statement yet.

"The raid was about the usual file-sharing crack-down, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or its customers," PRQ said in an email to customers.

The extent and precise targeting of the raid suggest that it was a dedicated effort to crack down on piracy. The fact that one of Wikileaks' hosts was targeted could be a coincidence because Wikileaks and file-sharing sites have similar requirements: security and bravery in the face of international law enforcement.

But stranger conspiracy theories regarding Wikileaks have been proposed. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is claiming rape charges filed against him in Sweden are part of a smear campaign orchestrated by the U.S. government.

What do you think - was Wikileaks a target here?

Well, power to the people, I guess. Yesterday we announced quite innocently that we’d be changing our logo every day for 50 days to salute a different startup. We thought it would be fun based on doing it last week with an old Twitter logo.

Fun it was not. Reddit, it seems, has been doing exactly the same thing for the last eight days. Within moments of our post going up we were slammed for copying them. And then demands were made that we stop, and/or give them credit for inventing the silly idea. I scoffed, and then things went crazy. We get more than our fair share of crazies in our comments, but this was over the top even in our experience. We banned dozens of hateful comments, but they’re coming faster than we can stop them. And I certainly have no intention of doing this day after day as each new logo goes up.

So, Reddit, you win. Making fake logos is your territory from here on out. Some things just aren’t worth fighting about. And believe me, if we actually ever visited Reddit and saw that they had begun doing this we never would have done this, too.

Hope everyone enjoyed our 1 day of logos.

Firefox just launched its fifth Firefox 4 beta, which includes a more streamlined interface, faster graphics and a new audio API that exposes raw audio data (see video above).

What’s new in this latest iteration of Firefox?

* The introduction of an audio API which uses HTML5, allowing developers to visualize the sound data in a browser and creating novel ways to experience sound while web surfing.

* Emphasis on faster graphics with default graphics support from Direct2D, a 2-D graphics API for Windows 7, on machines that support Windows 7.

* Implementation of the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a security protocol that increases the chances for a secure connections.

A stable version is set to be released by Mozilla in November. You can try out the latest beta here.