A1, the Austrian operator within the Telekom Austria Group, has introduced an NFC payment service. Austrian customers will be able to pay for anything up to 25€ by holding their NFC phone close to a payment terminal - for now at Merkur supermarkets and McDonald's restaurants. The number of NFC-enabled phones in Austria is expected to hit 200,000 by the end of the year.

PRIAMUS, an Austrian Augmented Reality research project, has made some more progress. Several demo applications are tested right now, including "Real World Drag'n'Drop". PRIAMUS allows you to interact with conventional non-touch screens by using your smart phone. Developers are invited to provide feedback.

The Sony Xperia sola is a rather usual phone, when looking at the specifications. However, what makes it special is "floating touch", basically a touch-screen-without-touching technology. Being or knowing someone with a quick trigger finger, one might ask if that is really a good thing.

Christmas shall be a time of contemplation, of gathering with your family and closest friends. But what if your closest friends are in your computer? If you'd like to check messages without upsetting your grandmother by typing on your laptop or smart phone, you might as well use the Christmas tree as message beacon.

The technology of voice recognition for smart phones is evolving and improving. Following, we will provide you with a short overview of the current voice recognition assistants for the different operating systems.

Creating Apps had an interesting online video interview with the mind behind Wikitude's newest big thing called "ARchitect": Wolfgang Damm explains how the tool allows for easy integration of rich media into an AR view. He also tells us more about ARML - and reveals the next OS ARchitect will work on.

Have a look at this nice infographic about users of geo-social & LBS. Interesting: Geo-social users tend to be younger than other LBS users. Also, automatic location tagging is mostly done by certain socio-demographic groups.

The tablet market has reached another milestone: For the first time, more tablets than netbooks were sold. While the iPad is still leading, Android has a mentionable share of 27%. A study in the US also revealed what tablets are mostly used for - which gives developers a hint what markets to move into.

Voice recognition company Nuance has confirmed it bought Swype. Nuance is best known for its products such as Dragon Naturally Speaking and is said to have been involved in the creation of iPhone's personal assistant Siri. Combining the assets of the two companies might have interesting outcome in regards of data input.

Up until now AR (Augmented Reality) usually meant that you augment the depiction of reality you see through your phone. Researchers in Austria are working on the next step: changing the reality around you for everyone to see – at least the digital reality. Using PRIAMUS, billboard-like screens and projections can become interactive. Image you changing the ads on Times Square's big screens! Creating Apps had Matthias Baldauf of the Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien explain the system. He also talked about why AR development gets down to real business now – and why using AR does not always make sense.

Recently, a lot of Austrian companies have started to use QR codes for sales and marketing purposes. However, experts don't see a bright future for the technology. "In two years they won't be sexy anymore and they will disappear", said Martin Ebner, lecturer for media informatics at the Technical University Graz (Austria), in an interview with futurezone.at published today.