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IBM’s Smarter Planet team has created a great 5 minute video explaining the emerging trend of Internet of Things, an exciting topic ReadWriteWeb has and will continue to cover frequently and in depth . Internet of Things is about, as the video explains, the coming future when there are more “things” on the Internet (sensors especially) than there are people. The result of that will be “a kind of global data field” the video says. “If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That’s where societies become more efficient, that’s where more innovation is sparked.” Check out this artistic, succinct, optimistic and inspiring video explaining what could well become a big factor in how the future unfolds. Sponsor This is heavy stuff, clearly aimed to fostering positive and substantial cultural change through technology – by opening up a new plane of options for humanity. Of course there’s little critique of this movement in videos like this; that’s something we’re still exploring but we imagine surveillance is one down side. There’s also some risk of paying so much attention to our machines that we lose track of the joy of engaging directly with the world around us . The upside as described in the video is big, though. “When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.” To track this trend across multiple vendors, check out ReadWriteWeb’s Internet of Things archive . Photo by Svilen Milev . Discuss

Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia , will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can’t be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources? Sponsor Even Moka Pantages , the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation , said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled ” Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right “. Here’s the thing – we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise. Tackling Real-Time Content The panel featured journalists from the New York Times , SeattlePI.com , Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content – whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise – could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency. Each panelist spoke about a specific case study – the New York Times’ coverage of last summer’s protests in Iran, for example – and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage. “When you’re sitting in an office in New York and you’re trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you’re not going to be able to verify that,” he said. “The idea is that its a conversation on the web about this event.” The Newsroom Moves Online Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website’s breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter. “The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter,” said Guzman. “We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff.” While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? “Common sense,” she answered. The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story. Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks Then came Pantages’ turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai . While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn’t be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper. One particular user, Kensplanets , was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations. “It’s not just U.S.-centric information,” Pantages explained, “You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India – they’re all there.” According to Pantages , by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article’s life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is “really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom.” Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news. Wikipedia As News Aggregator Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection. “There’s no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it’s real-time aggregation,” Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals. In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors. While Pantages argues that “Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point,” we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we’ve entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow. With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content – whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else – as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own. Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you’ll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it’s all laid bare for the world to see. Discuss

Editor’s note : We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. We were walking the streets of San Francisco and happened to witness a street band in the process of setting up shop. On the cue, almost all the observers around the band fished out their cellphones and started snapping pictures and video. Which lead us to ask this question: Which is the greatest camera? Sponsor A renowned photographer pointed out to us during Macworld Expo that the greatest camera is not the one that gives you the best quality picture or the best resolution. The greatest camera is the camera in your hand. Going by that, I guess it makes the mobile camera the greatest camera of our time. Mobile photography has really blossomed in the past few years with almost every cellphone worth its merit having a camera built into it. We now have cellphone camera capturing with up to 12.0 megapixels. We have citizen journalists providing breaking news of the Indian Ocean earthquake through phone footage. Let’s step back a little. There are 110 or more million cellphones with camera on them. Add the dimension of them connecting to social networking sites , and that really makes things interesting. But there is a raging debate as to whether the cell phone camera can really be called a “camera”. Maybe it depends on individual choices. However, from personal experience we have observed that people are passionate about photography from whichever source it comes from. The sheer volume of photos taken using cellphone cameras makes mobile photography a serious affair. (For instance, our iPhone app Camera Plus has been downloaded 5 million times.) Consequently,the ecosystem around mobile photography is also blossoming. The range of photography applications in the iPhone App Store is the testimony to how serious mobile photography is. The apps have covered all aspects of photography from the actual capture of the picture to editing, managing and sharing them all within the phone itself. No Limits for Mobile Surprisingly, the limitation of the phone hardware here is not stopping the application developers to dream any less than the digital camera manufacturers. If anything, they’re dreaming bigger. You can use multi-shot to snap photos, adjust anything from brightness, sharpness of a photo, and add funny effects to them. With most of the cameras having GPS, users can also geotag their photos with just a click. It does not stop here. You can also instantly share your photos on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media platforms all from the phone itself! And things have also started moving on the video side. Did you know you can not only capture video using a mobile but also add effects like black and white, sepia from within the phone itself? And of course, you can share your videos on YouTube. Now just step back and wonder whether you can do all the above from within a digital camera, and you realize that mobile photography might not be that primitive at all. To put things in another perspective, you can liken the use of a cellphone camera to the use of a Swiss army knife. This was the theme around which we built our photography application Camera Plus Pro . Both Mobile Geeks and Kodak have some tips on learning how to use all the tools in the knife. With all the mobiles around, we can now reduce the disappointment of the sentence – “I wish I had a camera right now.” Discuss

Moombo is a classifieds service that is meant to take advantage of the flexibility we all associate with the Social Web. Basically, this new service capitalizes on the user’s social network as well as Moombo’s own network and affiliates in order to get the classified across and reach out to an audience that is as extensive as it could be. Furthermore, the concept of video becomes a key part of the classifieds since all ads necessarily come with one, along with the ever-obligatory picture. Read more Learn more about Moombo.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much Moombo.com is worth with Stimator.com

Nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and fueled by leaders and social hubs such as Micah Baldwin , Tech Stars mentor, #followfriday creator and now chief community caretaker at Graphic.ly of Digital X, and Robert Reich, the founder of Boulder/Denver Tech Meet-up, Boulder’s startup community is pumping, even in the midst of recession. Boulder is the home of Blue Mountain cards , one of the first successful online greeting cards websites. In the 1990s, Fortune 1,000 tech companies popped up all over the Western prairie between Boulder and Denver. Since then, Boulder’s creative, crunchy, beautiful mountain environment has nurtured a self-supporting startup tech ecosystem. Sponsor We already wrote about Boulder in our Never Mind the Valley series , and recently had the chance to visit the city and lunch with four of the region’s startups. Here is what we found. Community Support RWW’s Never Mind the Valley series: The Boulder startup community, continues to be a supportive, passionate community with talented individuals, inspired ideas that is affecting change politically and economically in the United States. Lunching with four startups that Micah Baldwin organized was like lunching with a family. The group we talked with share office space, mentor each other and talk proudly of each others ideas and accomplishments. The Underground Rail Road Attracting talent is foundational to any startup environment. Eric Marcoullier, co-founder of Gnip described the “underground railroad” of transients that have made their way from Silicon Valley to Boulder. “Weekly I would get emails asking about what Boulder was like. Eventually I just started telling people to come here, visit and ask the locals themselves,” he said. Venture capitalists have also made their way from busy Silicon Valley to the Boulder Valley. Affecting Change – The Startup Visa Act Once you have the foundation of talented motivated individuals, ideas flow. Brad Feld of TechStars took the idea for a national startup visa bill and made it a reality. TechStars receives proposals from all over the world. Startups based in foreign countries come on tourist visas with great ideas – and potential jobs are being sent home with them. The startup bill seeks to change this. The bill will enable companies that do not have U.S. citizen or resident status, but who have blessed by at least $100,000 in VC investment, to start their companies in the United States. Measuring Outcomes The four thought-provoking, pioneering startups we met with had had nothing but positive things to say about TechStars and starting a business in Boulder. Each had a unique story; two of them were locals and all of them men. Gnip Eric Marcoullier , co-founder of Gnip , launched two years ago with the unique idea of providing data collection and analysis of social signals across multiple social websites to help companies improve their product and service experience. The Gnip platform and service bridges the gap between the data APIs between large companies and multiple social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Post Rank. ReadWriteWeb has covered Gnip extensively . Since its launch, Gnip has changed its technology strategy and will be re-launching soon. Everlater Natty Zola and Nate Abbott spent one year sleeping on couches as they traveled across five continents before they came up with the concept for Everlater . Everlater allows travelers to easily record and share their travel experiences through Twitter and Facebook. The platform allows users to use data from across multiple photo sharing sites. People can also publish their travel “scrapbooks”. An algorithm lays out the book automatically so you don’t have to. For hopeless photo organizers like me, this is a godsend! Next Big Sound Alex White , co-founder Next Big Sound , provides cultural analytics specifically to music companies. Music professionals can track how fans interact with their music, or music from many musicians across sites such as MySpace and LastFM. It is currently developing a premium service. Graphic.ly Micah Baldwin is not only social hub-connector extraordinaire, but also works for the uniquely cool comic book community Graphic.ly . Graphic.ly, which is currently in private beta, hopes to open opportunities for comic book creators, publishers and enthusiasts that are currently suffering under a one distributor model – as well as reawaken America’s and the world’s love for online comics. Members can both purchase and discuss comic books on Graphic.ly. Ties to the Universities Startup’s ties with Colorado universities are immature, but starting to materialize. The morning of our lunch someone from the Colorado startup community (who we promised not to name) had met with the University of Colorado. As the individual put it, “Universities are turning out graduates prepped for a traditional computer science career at the likes of Lockheed Martin. We don’t need MBAs – we need coders.” The local Universities are overlooking careers in startups that are based – literally – around the corner or down from “The Hill” as a viable career option. An exception, University of Colorado Law School is has been offering startups free legal advice in exchange for student experience. Judging from the close-knit group of entrepreneurs we saw, Boulder has matured significantly since the dot-com boom and bust. The only thing lacking at lunch was more estrogen. Discuss