Weekly Round-Up 5/02/11

Shameless Plug

For more about Social/Local/Mobile, see us at the Social-Loco Conference—I’ll be speaking on the “Big Brand” money panel.

Wrap your mind around this: Escher’s Waterfall has our mind boggling!
Check out Little Thor, a miniature hero who gives this year’s favorite Super Bowl character, Little Vader from the Volkswagen commercial, a run for his money.
Will Turnage, VP, Technology & Invention for R/GA, shows off a shirt he hacked for a South by Southwest session. This shirt not only flashes when he taps his phone through a Bluetooth control, but also lights up when someone tweets his twitter handle.

AppNation brought the growing consumer application trend to the forefront of the minds of all those who were fortunate enough to attend.
Drew Ianni, Chairman of AppNation, joined us at Anthem Worldwide in San Francisco to share his view-from-the-top of the Apps Ecosystem.

I spoke at AppNation last week on Mobile Video. It’s going to be huge—already ½ of total mobile traffic in 2011. Here’s a run down of relevant data.
Privacy Concerns over Apple’s tracking of location data on the iPhone flared
GigaOm argues for greater transparency in this area
Good reason for tracking concerns. Last week, Tomtom got into hot water when media discovered they were reselling anonymous data to local Police.
Facebook unveils its group deals program putting the heat on Groupon and Living Social through it’s enormous scale and command of the socialgraph
Since Apple added gyroscopes to the iPhone and iPad Augmented Reality (AR) apps have been exploiting those coordinates for a greater cool factor