Filling in a restaurant promotion form after a meal out with friends inspired serial entrepreneur Aneace Haddad to launch Taggo - a service that simplifies the process of collecting loyalty rewards in shops and restaurants.

"One day when I was having a meal nearby, near my place, they had a membership form to fill out to become a member of that retailer's programme," he recalls. "They only had two restaurants and I was thinking you wouldn't fill out that form…just to have another card that's only for that retailer." Mr Haddad was annoyed at the prospect of having yet another loyalty card stuffed into his wallet. So he dreamt up a service he calls Taggo - short for tap and go. The idea he says is simple: take a plastic card with a unique identity number, one you use for everyday tasks such as contactless payments or paying for public transport. Next, register it with the online service. Then you can use your card to sign up as a fan on the Facebook pages of retailers or restaurants, and be in line to receive special offers and discounts.

"It's a substitute for coupons, it's a substitute for cards so the retailer doesn't have to issue his own loyalty card," he explains. "You just tap your transit card and on the screen the clerk sees whether or not you're a fan."

R2-D2 would be impressed.

Thirty-three years after he helped Princess Leia make an impassioned plea from afar in Star Wars, scientists are making 3-D telepresence a reality.

"It is no longer something that is science fiction, it is actually something that you can do today," says Nasser Peyghambarian, leader of a U.S. team that is busy sending 3-D moving holograms of Phantom jets and people from one location to another.

"We have demonstrated the concept and it works," says Peyghambarian, whose optical science team at the University of Arizona describes the new system in the journal Nature, released Thursday.

Facebook is getting the heat (once again) over privacy. According to the Wall Street Journal, the social-networking site has been sharing private information with advertisers from the use of it’s third-party applications. If you use Farmville, expect that your name and your friends’ names have been sold to advertising and Internet tracking companies.

Here’s a list of Facebook top 10 apps found sharing information:

• FarmVille 59.4 million users
• Phrases 43.4 million users
• Texas HoldEm 36.3 million users
• FrontierVille 30.6 million users
• Causes 26.7 million users
• Cafe World 21.9 million users
• Mafia Wars: 21.9 million users
• Quiz Planet 16.5 million users
• Treasure Isle 15.3 million users
• IHeart 14.0 million users

Facebook is getting the heat (once again) over privacy. According to the Wall Street Journal, the social-networking site has been sharing private information with advertisers from the use of it’s third-party applications. If you use Farmville, expect that your name and your friends’ names have been sold to advertising and Internet tracking companies.

Here is a how-to video from Electronic Frontier Foundation on maximizing your privacy settings. Source: Leila Pejman, GetConnected

On Wednesday, Google announced their latest new thing, a Gmail phone call feature. Within 24 hours, one million phone calls were made with this new service.

The new "Call Phone" feature, also called "Voice Calls from Gmail," launched by Google, allows U.S. users to make phone calls using their Gmail accounts. Using this service, you can make free calls in the U.S. and Canada. You can also make international calls at discounted rates, for as low as two cents per minute.

If you have a Gmail account and want to take advantage of this new feature, you have until the end of the year to get your local calls out for free, according to Google.