Alexei&Partners

Apple’s plan to add near field communications (NFC) chips to its next generation iPhone and iPad products constitutes a major and hugely disruptive move into mobile payments, especially as iTunes already has credit card and purchase info.

“Area/Code has developed a number of games on Facebook and for mobile, including CSI: Crime City with partner Ubisoft, Facebook game Parking Wars and Drop7 for the iPhone. According to the startup’s site, the developer focused on highlighting ‘the connections between the interactive systems and imaginary landscapes inside of games and the real world around them.’ These connections could include, ‘online games that respond to broadcast TV in real time,’ ‘game systems that explore real-world social issues,’ ‘urban environments transformed into spaces for public play,’ or ‘game events driven by real-world data.’” More on the acquisition via the Area/Code blog: “Our ambition is to contribute in a major way to the evolution of games on social networks, to make games in this space that are deeper and more interesting, games that reward the time and attention of the millions of people who play them with complex, meaningful experiences.”

Brilliant @NewYorker piece on the rise of neuroscience: “The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.”

Good David Carr piece in the New York Times on fashion brands learning to think like media companies and the integration of content and commerce. As I’ve said before, the future of retail is editorial. And the future of editorial is retail.

Great blog post from former New York Times design director Khoi Vinh: “the reality that people just don’t like to consume magazine content in the monolithic, issue-centric form that these apps take has caught up with the irrational enthusiasm that we saw in 2010… It’s bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design. Time to focus instead on coming up with new and genuinely different solutions to this admittedly vexing and unforgiving problem facing great print publications everywhere. So I say stop it, Condé Nast. Stop it, Hearst. Stop it Adobe. Stop it everyone who’s pursuing this all but discredited strategy. All of the money, time and effort that has gone into these misbegotten experiments amounts to a kind of neglect and misdirected focus that borders on a dereliction of duty.”

“Melding social networking and the style maven’s obsession with all things beautiful, sites like Fancy (thefancy.com) and Svpply (svpply.com) have emerged recently, letting users shop and fetishize while creating and sharing things they like with friends and followers, from clothes to art to gadgets.”