Touch technology help non-tech industries improve business, efficiency, and their bottom lines.

The SMART Table brings touch to masses and classes. Photo: SmartTech

We all oohed and aahed when Apple's (AAPL) iPhone came out because of how cool it was, especially its multi-touch capability that let us flick through photos and "pinch" and expand photos and websites.

Now, with Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 7 specially formatted for touch capabilities, and everyone from manufacturers to hotels touting their tough capabilities, we know human contact with computer screens is more than a gimmick — it’s here to stay.

Touch is already a big business — estimates indicate that sales will be more than $3.66 billion for this year and will catapult 145% to almost $10 billion in the next five years.

Only half of that revenue is coming from consumer electronics (i.e. cell phones, digital frames, etc.) — the rest is from retail, hospitality and more. What many people forget is that this 30-year-old technology has been integrated in non-tech industries for years — mainly as a way to improve efficiency, but never as a centerpiece.

So, we decided to take a look at the best of the rest and highlight the most innovative, business-savvy ways other industries are implementing touch technology — and helping improve their bottom line. More

Royal Caribbean Cruises hopes enviro-friendly Oasis of the Seas can burnish its green image.

The world's largest cruise ship — featuring 16 decks and an interior Central Park that's longer than a football field with more than 12,000 species of flora — is drawing ever closer to its home port of Port Everglades, Florida, where it will dock next week and conduct a few test runs before departing on its maiden voyage early next month in Caribbean waters.

Two years and $1.4 billion in the making, Royal Caribbean's new baby is a true colossus — almost a quarter-mile in length, bigger in every direction than any passenger ship that has ever sailed and 40% larger than the company's next biggest ship. Capable of carrying 5,400 guests in 2,700 rooms and more than 2,000 crew members, it boasts almost five times the gross domestic tonnage of the Titanic.

Manufactured by STX Europe in Turku, Finland, the Oasis represents a technological feat on many levels. It can travel up to 10 knots moving sideways, for example, and has retractable smokestacks and a pool with a movable floor. But Jamie Sweeting, Royal Carribean's  chief environmental officer, is most proud of the ship's green cred. More

Will your cellphone soon become a proxy for your credit card? Zong and others are betting on it.

If there’s one thing online merchants want, it’s to make it quicker and easier for you to buy what they’re selling. This is the case whether you’re buying a novel from Amazon or an iPod nano. But it’s especially true for micropayment impulse buys like a new handbag for your avatar or virtual fuel for your tractor in an online world or game.

One way purveyors of such virtual goods are streamlining the process for you to pony up is by partnering with payment services that allow you to pay using your mobile phone. Instead of taking the time to get your credit card and enter the number—during which you might change your mind about that virtual cupcake—you type in your mobile number instead.

Mobile payments have been hyped for years, and although they're embraced overseas, where fewer people have credit cards, they’ve been slow to catch on in the U.S. In the past, purchases were tallied on your mobile phone bill, and you paid your carrier.

Now, one startup in the nascent world of mobile payments has moved to lower the barrier for merchants to offer mobile payments. More

Rajeev Goel, CEO of upstart PubMatic, thinks his company can help print publishers recapture advertising revenue from their glory days.

Print media is dead! Yawn.

Goel says he can boost media companies' online ad revenue. Photo: PubMatic

You’d think media analysts and bloggers would find another catchphrase. This executioner’s call is as tired as Jon and Kate’s tabloid tussles.

So when Rajeev Goel, co-founder and CEO of PubMatic, told me that not only would print publications survive, but he knew how they could, he definitely got my attention.

PubMatic offers what it calls "real-time ad price prediction technology." In other words it lets publishers of premium content (read: traditional magazine and newspaper companies) decide in real time which ad networks on which to sell unused advertising inventory.

Others, including Google's (GOOG) DoubleClick and the Rubicon Project, make similar promises. But Goel touts that PubMatic is the only advertising optimization company completely devoted to publishers, pushing his close competitors into a separate category. Not to mention he’s doing this all in real-time.

Still not convinced? I wasn’t either. But Goel says his two-year-old company has already been able to increase publishers’ advertising revenue from 30% to 70%. (In one case, PubMatic was able to catapult revenue by 300%.) He only charges a 15% commission fee.

We sat down with Goel to see how he thinks PubMatic can help the ailing print industry.

Fortune: What trends and mistakes do you think publishers are making in choosing ad networks? More

And a few things we don't love about Motorola's forthcoming Google-powered phone.

Droid does (and doesn't) wow our writer.

The Droid is a fierce phone. Motorola's newest smartphone has a number of features that match and even best its biggest competitor, Apple's (AAPL) iPhone. It has a fast processor. It’s got a large display with almost double the resolution of the iPhone as well as a slide-out keyboard. And it’s got a five megapixel camera with flash and zoom and a video camera that renders your Flip camera unnecessary. Add to that a new sharp-edged form factor straight out of Star Trek. And the marketers have given their campaign a bunch of attitude with their “iDon’t” commercial that pits the Droid directly against the iPhone.

But is any of that going to be enough to woo iPhone fans to Motorola's new device? As I wrote in a September feature, the company has a lot riding on it. Thanks to a massive marketing push by Verizon Wireless (VZ), plenty of excitement is building for the Droid’s November 6 launch. But just a year ago there was a lot of similar hype around RIM's Storm, which was also going to take on the iPhone. Though initial sales were pretty good, the smartphone received lukewarm reviews.

Motorola's new offering will have to prove itself once the hype dies down. And with so many Android-powered devices coming to market in the next few months, it may be hard for the Droid, which Verizon Wireless will sell for $199 after an $100 rebate with a two-year contract, to stand out.

Fortune received a Droid to test this morning. I powered it up, and a monotone robotic voice uttered “Droid.” Here are five things I think Motorola (MOT) has done right with the Droid…and a couple features I miss.
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The largest smartphone maker you've never heard of wants to capture the hearts – and dollars – of the U.S. consumer.

Motorola's (MOT) Droid phone is getting a ton of buzz, and that’s by design. Verizon Wireless (VZ) chief Marketing Officer John Stratton has said the marketing campaign behind its iPhone competitor will be the largest in its history.

But the Google (GOOG)-powered device isn't the only smartphone the company is likely to begin selling at the start of November. Though no one has officially confirmed, the carrier is expected to announce a second device that will also run on Google's  Android operating system at half the price: the HTC Droid Eris.

Haven’t heard of HTC? You aren't alone. More

Online jukebox Lala hooks up with Facebook and Google. Together, can they mount a serious challenge to Apple?

Lala's Nguyen aims to challenge Apple's iTunes. Photo: Lala

Apple rules music retail for now: iTunes passed Wal-Mart (WMT) last year to become the top-grossing music store in the world. But that doesn’t mean things will stay that way.

The latest challenge to iTunes comes from Bill Nguyen, the serial entrepreneur who founded Lala.com.

Palo Alto-based Lala is an online jukebox with 8 million songs; you can buy the rights to stream a radio-quality version of any song for 10 cents or download a higher-quality version for 99 cents. He says he’s averaging about $67 per year from paying customers.

By itself, Lala poses no threat to the iTunes juggernaut. But now it’s teaming up with Google (GOOG) and Facebook, arguably the two hottest properties online. Late today Google is expected to announce a partnership with Lala that should drive massive amounts of new traffic to the service.

And just last week, Lala announced that it will team up with Facebook and its 300 million users to push a new form of music distribution: song gifting. Soon, Facebook’s legions of social networkers will be able to do more than chat, update and poke — they’ll be able to buy each other songs, right within Facebook’s payment system.

We caught up with Nguyen soon after the Facebook announcement to ask about his vision for digital music, and why he dares to take on iTunes and Apple (AAPL).

Fortune: What’s the elevator pitch on Lala. What business are you in? More

Electronic money purveyors make it easy for Russian consumers to make micropayments. Now they’re seeking legitimacy.

By Julia Ioffe, contributor

Because building an entire banking sector from scratch in 20 years makes for some wild swings, Russians put their trust in cash. In Russia, the first thing you do when you get your monthly salary is withdraw it all, and pay for everything with tangible, fungible cash.

You buy your groceries with cash, pay for your winter boots with cash; heck, you even pay for real estate in cash. But how do you use cash for amorphous things like Internet service or to prepay your cell phone?

In the last ten years, a rapidly growing shadow banking system has sprouted up in Russia to service these small payments by turning cash into electronic currency, or e-money. And now that this sector has reached the $1 billion mark – and this in a crisis – and has expanded to include 10 million customers, e-money business owners are getting antsy about government regulation. More

At least one company is making money off of social networking. The game developer behind 'FarmVille' and 'Mafia Wars' has seen its web-based games take off – and deliver profits.

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga

On any given day 500,000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don't start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet. These are $20 "virtual" tractors that belong to the 50 million players of FarmVille, the largest and fastest-growing social game on the Internet.

Social games are free online applications accessed through sites such as MySpace and Facebook. If you've spent any time on either site you're probably familiar with titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Caf World. All three games, which rank among the top five games played daily on Facebook, were developed by San Francisco-based Zynga, one of the tech sector's most talked-about companies these days.

Behind the buzz: Annual revenue at the two-year-old firm is likely to surpass $100 million this year, prompting speculation that the company — backed by the likes of LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and PayPal cofounder-turned-investor Peter Thiel — will soon go public. The software company also has managed to do something that other hot online brands such as Twitter and Facebook have not: Zynga has found a way to make social networking profitable.

Zynga was founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus, 43, who also started social-networking site Tribe.net and software company SupportSoft (SPRT), which eventually went public. (The name Zynga is a misspelled tribute to his deceased American bulldog, Zinga.) While many of his Web 3.0 peers rely on advertising and sponsorship for revenue, Pincus makes its money by getting gamers to buy virtual goods, like tractor fuel or land in the case of FarmVille, that enable players to build bigger farms at a faster rate.

By developing games on social networks, Zynga is able to capitalize on the viral nature of the platform. (Zynga estimates it has 70 million monthly unique visitors.) Gamers can invite friends to join them in the game, and they can send updates on their progress to their friends, stoking interest. More

A storied financier of startups expands — but its new businesses have yet to take root.

A year ago, when venture capital firm Sequoia Capital ordered its portfolio companies to slash costs in the face of a sick economy, even healthy businesses, such as LinkedIn and Zappos.com, complied.

As word of the edict spread, many non-Sequoia startups also trimmed their budgets — a testament to the venture firm's influence in Silicon Valley and beyond. In its 35 years in business Sequoia had nurtured the likes of Atari, Apple (AAPL), Cisco (CSCO), Yahoo (YHOO), and Google (GOOG). If it was bracing for the worst, the situation must be serious.

But just as Sequoia was commanding its upstarts to contract, the firm was plotting an ambitious expansion of its own. Throughout 2008 and into this year Sequoia tried entering entirely new businesses, hiring professional investors to build a hedge fund, as well as an asset-management group that would mimic the wealth-preservation approach popularized by major university endowments. More