Viral Spaces is about facilitating discourse between real people in real places. It’s about technologies of connection–networks and computing that enhance the dialogue between people, both locally and at a distance. It’s about both interactions and transactions. It’s about making a future where a mobile device enhances our experience of that space as opposed to being a pocket window that bypasses it. Most often, our work in viral communications has involved an ecological or systems approach that includes an assortment of fixed elements, such as displays and sensors in addition to our mobile devices. With Viral Spaces, we are proposing a new way to look at this: we stress the need for end-to-end, comprehensive designs. Research activities include optical and radio network architectures, protocols based on intentions rather than destinations (the Third Cloud), and applications that include retail transactions, information access, entertainment and social activity support.