1. Call and response
Next generation call-centres with sophisticated "speech analytics" to be deployed as chatbots.
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Dr Brahnam has also found that the appearance of the chatbot's on-screen persona, or avatar, has signficiant impact on how much abuse is leveled at it. "My study showed that you get more abuse and sexual cooments with a white female compared with a white male," she says. Black female avatars were the most abused of all.

2. Working the crowd
New start-ups allow for users to install tracking software that tracks online habits. This information can then be sold through a data market with a commission going to the software vendor. This is essentially Google's business model but for entrepreneurial individuals.
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In effect, Google users trade personal information in return for free use of Google's online services. But some people think this is a bad deal. They think the personal information is worth far more than the services that Google and others offer in return. Seth Goldstein, a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco, believes that the personal information contained in users' click trails, online chats and transactions is something they ought to take hold of and sell themselves, generating direct payback. “Attention is a valuable resource, and we're getting to the point where it can be parsed in real time,” he says. So he has co-founded a new venture called AttentionTrust.

3. Big brother just wants to help
Government agencies applying data mining techniques to improve the delivery of public services.
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Dr Paul Henman from the University of Queensland, who has written extensively on the subject, raises a rather more philosophical objection to government data-mining: that the technology starts to transform the nature of government itself, so that the population is seen as a collection of sub-populations with different risk profiles—based on factors such as education, health, ethnic origin, gender and so on—rather than a single social body. He worries that this undermines social cohesion.

4. Go with the flow
Mobile photo data is being used to map human activitiy in urban centres.
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WHERE is everybody? Being able to monitor the flow of people around a city in real time would provide invaluable information to urban planners, transport authorities, traffic engineers and even some businesses. Bus timetables could take account of hourly or daily variations; advertisers would be able to tell which billboards were most valuable.

5. How touching
How haptic (touch) technology is being deployed on consumer electronics. Get your minds out of the gutter, this article is mostly about mobile phones (see e.gl. iPhone).
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Dr Hayward's idea is that such switches could be used to convey information to the user without the need to look at the device. Skin stretch could be used to present the tactile equivalent of icons to the user, rather like a simple form of Braille.

6. What's in a name?
Bureaucratic glitches arising from converting foreign languages. This is in itself a matter of national security. Software is being applied to databases that "enriches" the names with cultural information.
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Credit-card companies use the software to spot recidivists applying for new cards under modified names. (Names are cross-referenced with addresses, dates of birth and other data.) Developers and users are hesitant to discuss costs. But OMS Services, a British software firm, says government agencies pay a lot more than commercial users, who pay about $50,000 for its NameX programme.

7. Watching the web grow-up
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's three trends to watch (beyond the hype of Web 2.0): 1)mobile devices, 2)technology's growing social and political impact, 2)the semantic web.
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These examples may not sound like a revolution in the making. But doubters would do well to remember the web's own humble origins. In 1989 Sir Tim submitted a rather impenetrable document to his superiors at CERN, entitled “Information Management: A Proposal”, describing what would later become the web. “Vague but exciting” was the comment his boss, the late Mike Sendall, scribbled in the margin.