As mobile phone penetration continues to surge, the years-old hype about the mobile Web being the next big thing is no doubt coming true. But despite all of the industry gurus, conference keynotes and trade magazine articles imploring you to get your business ready for the mobile space, it’s not always easy to know where to begin. Sure, you could hire a team of top-notch mobile developers, but not every business owner has that luxury, especially with the economy still in limbo. Here are a few tools to get started: Sponsor Make Your Website Mobile Friendly Your company’s website may be getting you noticed on the desktop, but what happens when people try to access it from their phones? Probably a lot of pinching, scrolling and squinting. There are a few ways to get your existing site ready for mobile display with minimal coding and development required. One such tool is a hosted solution called Mofuse , which offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface from which to manage mobile content, design and ads. Plug in an RSS feed URL to pull content in from your company blog (or any source), or simply publish static pages with the most pertinent info. When it’s ready, Mofuse provides several flavors of code snippets for redirecting mobile users from your full-size desktop site to the more mobile-friendly version. Another option is Mobify , a freemium service that takes your existing website and strips it down to only the essentials you want your mobile users to see. The result is a clean, highly usable design that displays for the users who visit your site from their phones. Although they have different pricing plans and feature sets, both Mofuse and Mobify come with custom domains, analytics, ad server integration and e-commerce options. Get Started With QR Codes Although not yet as common in the U.S. as they are in Japan, QR (quick response) codes are popping up more and more in commercial and marketing contexts. These square barcode-esque patterns can be printed on any page or real-world surface to enable users with a QR-equipped mobile phone to scan it and then be be redirected to any URL. These could be used in print advertisements to send users to your mobile site for more information or for special promotional offers. While the jury is still out on if and when QR codes will see widespread adoption in the West, it’s easy to get started using one of the many QR code generators that are out there, including Kaywa QR Code , Delivr and QR Stuff to name a few. Keep it Social This may seem like a no-brainer and the last thing the world needs is somebody else espousing the magic of the social Web, but we would be remiss to discuss going mobile without touching on the most obvious and simple way of getting your brand onto people’s phones. Let’s face it: people access sites like Facebook and Twitter from their phones all day long. If your company has a social media strategy, then it already has the beginnings of a mobile strategy. Phone photo by Thiago Felipe Festa . QR photo by cocreatr . Discuss

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When explaining the concept of augmented reality (AR) to someone who has never heard of it, I find myself going through a series of common real-life and pop-culture examples to help them understand. Aside from explaining that the 1st and Ten Line in football games and the computer vision of the Terminator are indeed forms of augmented reality, I often use examples from the military – the fighter pilot heads-up-display, for example – to supplement them. In fact, the military has played a significant role in the early development of AR, and one company is attempting to make sure it is a large factor in the future of the technology as well. Sponsor A Chicago-based company called Tanagram Partners is currently developing military grade augmented reality technology that – if developed to the full potential of its prototypes – would completely change the face of military combat as we know it. Tanagram CEO Joseph Juhnke presented the technology last week at the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California, and wowed the audience with his presentation. Illustrations from Juhnke’s presentation tell the company’s story of how their technology could give American troops the upper-hand in hostile situations. First of all, the company is developing a system of lightweight sensors and displays that collect and provide data from and to each individual soldier in the field. This includes a computer, a 360-degree camera, UV and infrared sensors, stereoscopic cameras and OLED translucent display goggles. With this technology – all housed within the helmet – soldiers will be able to communicate with a massive “home base” server that collects and renders 3D information onto the wearer’s goggles in real-time. With the company’s “painting” technology, various objects and people will be outlined in a specific color to warn soldiers of things like friendly forces, potential danger spots, impending air-raid locations, rendez-vous points and much more. In the above image, a spotter on a roof paints an area near his squad-mates in a red color, marking the area as a danger spot. The ability to virtually communicate the location of hostile forces to fellow soldiers is an invaluable technology to troops fighting in unfamiliar urban environments. The local fighters have “home field advantage,” because they are fighting in their back-yards in a way. Tanagram hopes to level the playing field – and then some – in an effort to help troops better understand their surroundings. All of this technology can also be monitored from a central base location by military leaders. They can gather around a virtual map of the battlefield with live location data for their troops. Best of all, the system has a memory for the information put into it – which means soldiers new to an area that has been fought in before will have the benefit of knowing where previous danger spots were. As futuristic and far-fetched as this seems, Tanagram is actually in the process of building this technology right now. The company is funded by a grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and plans on having a working proof-of-concept that runs on an iPhone by the first quarter of next year. Tanagram also hopes to have the server/client system operational as early as Q2 2011 as well as an open source head-mounted display (HMD) client by the end of next year. Discuss

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What would you do if you knew exactly who was coming to your site and were able to tailor your site accordingly? With Demandbase ‘s B2B-focused Real-Time ID service, businesses can now identify information about a visitor’s company, including industry, size, location and revenue before they even render their sites. In addition, they can also identify if that visitor is already a customer. Thanks to this, businesses can now, for example, tailor their marketing messages and advertising on their home pages for every visitor, and show them just those messages and white papers that are relevant to their businesses. Sponsor Demandbase’s solution is based on the company’s extensive database of company IP addresses. While regular reverse IP lookup services often only reply with the address of a company’s ISP, Demandbase has created its own proprietary database that goes beyond this and provides far more detailed information. The company has also partnered with various data providers like Dun & Bradstreet, Jigsaw, Edgar Online, Harte-Hanks, Hoovers and LexisNexis that allow it to display relevant company data. The idea here is that by being able to identify your visitors even before you render a page for them, you can cater your website to these visitors and increase your chance of converting these visitors into paying customers. This technology also comes in handy when it comes to registration forms. Instead of asking visitors for their company information when they want to download a white paper, for example, Demandbase already has this information. Integrates with Existing Tools Demandbase provides its customers with an API, so they can integrate this information with their existing customer management and business intelligence solutions. The company claims that it can correctly identify 83% of U.S. business traffic and that its real-time solution can identify a customer within 5 milliseconds. The company currently identifies about 200 million Web visits to B2B websites each month. New Today: LivePerson Integration Starting today, Demandbase is also bringing its technology to LivePerson , the popular live chat solution for businesses websites. Thanks to this, a company that implements Demandbase’s solution can now, for example, ensure that chats on their website are routed to the right specialists, and instead of having to gather basic information from these customers in the chat, the agents can immediately provide relevant information to their customers. Discuss

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Facebook is holding a press conference this morning where the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will discuss Facebook’s progress in bringing enhanced and simpler privacy controls to the popular social networking service. Since Facebook’s last round of updates, the company has come under growing pressure to safeguard its users’ privacy and offer simplified privacy settings. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company has “made a bunch of mistakes” lately and we expect Facebook to announce how it plans to regain its users’ trust today. Sponsor Note : As an experiment, we will use Google Wave to live blog this call. We recommend you use Google Chrome or a recent version of Firefox or Safari to follow along. For now, this Wave is read-only. We plan to open it up for comments after the event is over. The press conference is scheduled to start around 10:30am PT (1:30pm ET). Discuss

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The launch of the “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha was one of the most anticipated product launches of early 2009. Since then, it’s been rather quiet around Wolfram Alpha, even though the company continues to add new features and data on a regular basis. Today, we had a chance to talk to Wolfram Research’s founder Stephen Wolfram about the first year and the company’s plans for the future. Sponsor Looking Back As Wolfram told us, the most basic question he tried to answer when the company started development was simply to see if it was even possible to take all this data and make it computable. Now, a year later, his answer to that question is an emphatic “yes.” Wolfram, however, also acknowledged that right after the launch the user experience for first-time users wasn’t necessarily ideal, as Wolfram Alpha didn’t yet have data for a lot of knowledge domains. The choice at that point, he said, was to either delay the launch and get more data, or to release Wolfram Alpha and be able to learn how its users would use it, and then enhance the experience over time. Wolfram says that today, most users are aware of the difference between a search engine and Wolfram Alpha, and the experience for first-time users has become far better. He stressed that the team (which consists of about 200 employees and 500 volunteers) is currently adding new data at an increasing pace. That’s gotten easier as the team has learned how to import information from a large variety of knowledge domains and sub-specialties. Getting the Data is Just 5% of the Work Unlike Google , Wolfram thinks that the Web “isn’t useful for getting raw data.” Indeed, whenever the Wolfram Alpha team experimented with this, the data simply wasn’t up to par. Instead, the company will continue to mostly work with data from primary sources. Getting this data, however, is only 5% of the work. The real difficulty is to understand how to compute this data and to understand how people talk about this data: What kind of questions do they ask? What are the alternate names for a specific chemical element? In addition, the Wolfram Alpha team and volunteers also check for anomalies in the data they receive. If there are major outliers, the team will track down more information to verify the original source. Sadly, though, not all data is free and Wolfram Alpha has to pay if it wants to include some databases. To make Wolfram a viable business and still offer this data, the team is considering a subscription plan that will give paying users access to deeper datasets from subscription databases. Challenge: Bringing Wolfram Alpha to More Users The question now, however, is how to get more users and how to bring Wolfram Alpha to more users through more channels. As we noted earlier this year, the company’s newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz thinks that the team’s “number-one priority is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” To get to this point, they will soon release more and better tools for third-party developers who want to use the company’s APIs to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s functionality in their own sites and services. It’s also worth noting that Wolfram Alpha now offers an appliance that companies can install behind their firewall to curate and compute their own data. Looking Ahead: Analyzing Your Own Data, More Knowledge Domains, Programming with Natural Language Queries Besides looking back, we also asked Wolfram about his plans for the future. In answering this question, he stressed that this new approach to computing is just getting started and it usually takes him about 10 years to develop his projects before he fully understands what’s possible once this new paradigm has arrived. For the near future, however, Wolfram hopes that Wolfram Alpha’s users will be able to upload their own data and perform complex computations on this data and use Wolfram Alpha to find correlations within Alpha’s vast database. The usage scenarios for this could include anything from analyzing sales data to doing personal analytics on data from devices like the Fitbit . In addition to uploading data, Wolfram Alpha will soon make it easier for users to download data to use in presentations. Wolfram also wants to bring Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica closer together. One development that Wolfram is especially excited about is using Wolfram Alpha’s ability to understand and compute natural language queries in order to create Mathematica programs. By building on this capability, Mathematica users may soon be able to write and manipulate their code using natural language queries just like in Wolfram Alpha. Obviously, the team behind Wolfram Alpha will also continue to add more data across an every-growing number of knowledge domains. Today, for example, the team is launching real-time space weather data, 12 complete genomes and local maps, as well as numerous other knowledge domains related to math, biology, physics and geography. Discuss

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