Facebook

Over the last 4 months Walmart has been trialing facial recognition systems with Facebook in many of its US stores.

The newest cameras are being trialed at head level in the technology sections with a screen with the flashing word “recording” these are to ease the customer in to the fact that there are cameras watching and make them not look as scary.

Also more head level cameras are now at the entrances of the stores, facing in and out of the lobby area.

689,003 People turned into lab rats on Facebook without consent
Well they have done it again at Facebook messing with people’s minds, allowing researchers to conduct an experiment on 689,003 English speaking users during Jan. 11 to Jan. 18, 2012. The experiment was posting comments and photos that were more positive or negative to see how people react.

The study is here:  National Academy of Sciences

Walmart is commencing facial recognition of customers in order to target advertising and pricing using photographic data from Facebook. This probably isn’t a surprise to Facebook users that actual read the terms and conditions when signing up or when they agreed to updates of the terms.

Once the systems roll out Facebook information will be used from profile photos and also tags where people have identified you.

In recent years, Apple, Google and Facebook have been gradually violated their territories. For 2013 the war is expected to escalate on two fronts, online search and hardware.

Two of the biggest players in the software market, Google and Amazon, are looking forward to increase their hardware presence in order to increase the loyalty of their customers and gain greater control over their software services. In response, Apple is increasingly developing its own software in order for their products to differentiate from the competition.

More than just rumors, a Facebook insider has leaked that current discussion are on the table about a possible takeover offer for Blackberry device maker RIM, but not until RIM has settled with Mformation Technologies Inc . This week Mformation successful sued RIM for $147m for not licensing patented server technologies used by RIM from 1998 until recent, leaving the company with more vulnerability than ever.