#Subway Teams Up With Paypal On Mobile payments Ordering your food or beverages by smartphone and then paying for it via an app is quickly becoming the new normal.
however though that will change later this year as Subway begins to advertise its mobile ordering and payments app for ios and Android.
The app will allow Subway customers to build their sandwiches using their smartphones pay ahead of time (or while in line), then pick up their bag
it moving to integrate Paypal Onetouch mobile checkout into the Subway application as another checkout option, alongside the app support for Apple Pay and Android Pay.
This means end users only have to sign in one time in a supported app and then can skip logging in to Paypal the next time they check out in that same app or any other one.
and the online ordering function on Subway website. e do anticipate this hockey stick will continue to happen as we put more resources to it,
including Apple Pay and Android Pay, that the businesses themselves will want to support. t the end of the day,
#Google Loon To Cover Entire Country Of Sri lanka With Internet Google is working on many things,
and that includes balloons that fly high in the sky to bring Internet infrastructure to locations that can be wired for it easily.
Today, Sri lanka announced that it the first country to ever get universal Internet access from Google Project Loon.
Thanks to a partnership with Google, the country promises ffordable high-speed Internetfor all of its residents.
Google Loon was announced in 2013, with only incremental and anecdotal information hitting the presses up until now.
#Google s Brain-Inspired Software Describes What It Sees in Complex Images Experimental Google software that can describe a complex scene could lead to better image search
Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to accurately describe scenes shown in photos significant advance in the field of computer vision.
the software responded with the description group of young people playing a game of frisbee.
The software can even count, giving answers such as wo pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.
most efforts to create software that understands images have focused on the easier task of identifying single objects. t very exciting,
a research scientist at Google. sure there are going to be some potential applications coming out of this.
The new software is the latest product of Google research into using large collections of simulated neurons to process data (see 0 Breakthrough Technologies 2013:
No one at Google programmed the new software with rules for how to interpret scenes. Instead, its networks earnedby consuming data.
Though it just a research project for now, Vinyals says, he and others at Google have begun already to think about how it could be used to enhance image search
or help the visually impaired navigate online or in the real world. Google researchers created the software through a kind of digital brain surgery,
plugging together two neural networks developed separately for different tasks. One network had been trained to process images into a mathematical representation of their contents
in preparation for identifying objects. The other had been trained to generate full English sentences as part of automated translation software.
When the networks are combined, the first can ookat an image and then feed the mathematical description of what it eesinto the second,
After that training process, the software was set loose on several large data sets of images from Flickr
The accuracy of its descriptions was judged then with an automated test used to benchmark computer-vision software.
Google software posted scores in the 60s on a 100-point scale. Humans doing the test typically score in 70s,
That result suggests Google is far ahead of other researchers working to create scene-describing software.
However, Vinyals notes that researchers at Google and elsewhere are still in the early stages of understanding how to create
and test this kind of software. When Google asked humans to rate its software descriptions of images on a scale of 1 to 4
it averaged only 2. 5, suggesting that it still has a long way to go.
though large databases of hand-labeled images have been created to train software to recognize individual objects,
Microsoft this year launched a database called COCO to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new research,
but it is still relatively small. hope other parties will chip in and make it better, says Vinyals
By 2015##next year##at least 500 million smartphone users worldwide will be using health-related apps says Tighe who recently spoke#at MIT Technology Review s Emtech conference in Cambridge Massachusetts.
By 2017 the app market is projected to reach 26 billion users. Among its key drivers:
Smartphone technology is promising for use in remote patient monitoring for several reasons. David Pettigrew Sagentia s Vice president of Connected Health sums up the advantages:#
and data capabilities and using an interface that consumers know and understand and is already part of their everyday life.
But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.
and released draft guidance proposing deregulation of medical data aggregation systems. This clarification she says significantly reduces the risks of these opportunities for medical technology companies.
and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds.
However with the clearer regulatory pathway emerging concepts are now starting to push the boundaries
and are moving towards using the smartphone/tablet hardware and software to perform more advanced functions.
An emerging example of this is Setpoint Medical s implantable neurostimulation device (currently in development) configured via an ipad app.
This device is aimed at treating patients with debilitating inflammatory diseases. It consists of an implantable microregulator a wireless charger and the ipad prescription-pad application.
Addressing Two Critical Questionssagentia believes there are two critical questions for medical device companies entering this space:
It s not just a software tool he says. MMAS should be treated like any other medical device.
You then need to map your core user requirements so that you understand what information is needed how it should be presented
Verihaler uses wireless acoustic monitoring to provide valuable feedback to users physicians or other health-care providers promoting correct inhaler use
By 2015##next year##at least 500 million smartphone users worldwide will be using health-related apps says Tighe who recently spoke#at MIT Technology Review s Emtech conference in Cambridge Massachusetts.
By 2017 the app market is projected to reach 26 billion users. Among its key drivers:
Smartphone technology is promising for use in remote patient monitoring for several reasons. David Pettigrew Sagentia s Vice president of Connected Health sums up the advantages:#
and data capabilities and using an interface that consumers know and understand and is already part of their everyday life.
But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.
and released draft guidance proposing deregulation of medical data aggregation systems. This clarification she says significantly reduces the risks of these opportunities for medical technology companies.
and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds.
However with the clearer regulatory pathway emerging concepts are now starting to push the boundaries
and are moving towards using the smartphone/tablet hardware and software to perform more advanced functions.
An emerging example of this is Setpoint Medical s implantable neurostimulation device (currently in development) configured via an ipad app.
This device is aimed at treating patients with debilitating inflammatory diseases. It consists of an implantable microregulator a wireless charger and the ipad prescription-pad application.
Addressing Two Critical Questionssagentia believes there are two critical questions for medical device companies entering this space:
It s not just a software tool he says. MMAS should be treated like any other medical device.
You then need to map your core user requirements so that you understand what information is needed how it should be presented
Verihaler uses wireless acoustic monitoring to provide valuable feedback to users physicians or other health-care providers promoting correct inhaler use
and combine it with their knowledge of television radio billboard and print campaigns to tailor marketing messages and ultimately improve return on investment (ROI).
With that data marketers can make better decisions about how to allocate their ad budgets. Indeed the analytics themselves will identify the smart choices.
A key challenge for any marketer is deciding what mix of media TV Internet direct mail radio print will best promote a product or service.
and machine learning says Madan Bharadwaj product marketing chief of Visual IQ an analytics firm based in Needham Massachusetts.
Thanks to technologies such as cookies and browser pixels marketers can now tell exactly where a specific buyer saw their ads.
The data even shows how long that buyer watched a video or lingered on a page carrying the ad.
Paying search engines for stimulating clicks that led to purchases was fine but most consumers take a more circuitous route to their final decisions.
Then the same algorithms can find similar audiences on other websites and present the ads to them.
With enough data and a good algorithm the analytics companies say they can determine just which ads made a difference.
A favorable product review in Consumer Reports or a celebrity endorsement at the Oscars falls outside the algorithm.
Sometimes though such events will cause a spike in discussion on social media here they are monitored
or impressions) to avoid fraud David Perez Convertro s chief marketing officer wrote in a recent blog post.
In theory the algorithms should be able to allocate budget to advertising networks that police their inventory to avoid phony ads.
#Laser-Radio links Upgrade the Internet The rise of Wi-fi and cellular data services made Internet access more convenient and ubiquitous.
Now some of the high-speed backhaul data that powers Internet services looks set to go wireless, too.
Technology that uses parallel radio and laser links to move data through the air at high speeds,
in wireless hops of up to 10 kilometers at a time, is in trials with three of the largest U s. Internet carriers.
It is also being rolled out by one telecommunications provider in Mexico, and is helping build out the Internet infrastructure of Nigeria,
a country that was connected to a new high-capacity submarine cable from Europe last year. AOPTIX, the company behind the technology, pitches it as a cheaper and more practical alternative to laying new fiber optic cables.
Efforts to dig trenches to install fiber in urban areas face significant bureaucratic and physical challenges.
says Chandra Pusarla, senior vice president of products and technology at AOPTIX. He says a faster way to install new capacity is to use his company wireless transmission towers to move data at two gigabits per second.
Pusarla says the service is particularly attractive to wireless carriers whose customers have growing appetites for mobile data.
Many U s. providers are currently scrambling to install fiber to replace the copper cables that still link up around half of all cellular towers,
AOPTIX technology takes the form of a box roughly the size of a coffee table with an infrared laser peering out of a small window on the front,
AOPTIX teamed up the laser and radio links to compensate for weaknesses with either technology used alone.
while millimeter wave radio signals are absorbed by rain. Routing data over both simultaneously provides redundancy that allows an AOPTIX link to guarantee a rate of two gigabits per second with only five minutes or less downtime in a year,
whatever the weather conditions, says Pusarla. A typical fiber connection might be 10 or more times faster than that, due to the limitations of the radio frequency link.
But AOPTIX says the convenience of its technology makes up for that and it could be increased to four gigabits or more in the future.
The radio and laser equipment inside an AOPTIX device move automatically to compensate for the swaying of a cell tower caused by wind.
AOPTIX originally developed its laser technology for the Pentagon, designing systems that actively steer laser beams to keep data moving between ground stations, drones, and fighter jets.
Pursala declined to identify the three U s. carriers that have been testing AOPTIX technology over the past year or so,
or its Nigerian customer. Other early customers are being more open. The Mexican telecommunications company Car-sa recently switched on the first of several links it plans to use to link up cellular towers
and provide Internet to corporate customers. And before the end of the year, Anova Technologies, a networking company that specializes in the financial industry,
will use AOPTIX technology in New jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock market and the New york stock exchange e
#A Battery to Prop up Renewable Power Hits the Market A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar
and wind power cheaply and cleanly has hit the market. It is by far the cheapest of a new generation of large,
or she often doesn have an opportunity to radio for backup. Yardarm, a California-based company, is building technology that will automatically alert headquarters in such situations.
and transmits data over a cellphone network connection. The data transmitted includes the location of a gun
and whether it has been discharged unholstered or. The company is also working to track the direction in
The data can be fed to a police dispatch system or viewed on a smartphone. Founded in 2013
Yardarm started out making a consumer product for monitoring a firearm location. But since many American gun owners object to technology or policies aimed at regulating firearms,
and officers realize that the data can help clear them of wrongdoing and save litigation costs.
and devices to come with Internet connectivity. The gun industry is gradually taking notice of these trends.
a sensor that goes on the front of the gun and captures data on the weapon use.
says Santa cruz sheriff Phil Wowak. he product brings so much data that wee going to have to figure out how to respond to every element.
Yardarm plans to start selling the hardware and tracking service in mid-2015. The next goal is to capture the direction in
and imaging technologies assembled into a single workstation. It combines a touch screen camera, infrared depth sensors, projector, touch-sensitive whiteboard,
and a conventional printer and scanner. Youe encouraged to hook it up to a 3-D printer,
like the one HP launched alongside the Sprout. All that is supposed to make Sprout into a powerful new tool for designers and other creatives.
You might use the device to scan, say, a Buddha statuette in 3-D, and then use a stylus to modify the digital scan once it is projected onto the workstation touch-sensitive surface.
After you made your change, you could print the new design out in 3-D. Sprout shows signs of HP history of making PCS and printers,
with matte grey casing and the bulbous contours of a Ford taurus. But it is clearly the product of some very clever engineering and an ambitious product strategy.
While computer processers and memory have advanced over the decades, we have continued to interface with them via monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
More recently, tools for making things in the physical world have changed a lot too, with the advent of maker spaces and affordable, computer-controlled lathes, mills,
and 3-D printers. But in neither of these cases do you have the opportunity to take control of the world of physical outputs
and software-based design and computing together. Sprout is a clunky device to gaze upon,
but it dreaming in a big way about the very nature of work. You can do things with Sprout that had previously only had been possible by piecing together at least a half dozen different devices.
The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen. It mounted on a thick steel post,
#Google's Secretive Deepmind Startup Unveils a Neural Turing Machine""One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain.
At the same time computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico. Today Google s secretive Deepmind startup which it bought for $400 million earlier this year unveils a prototype computer that attempts to mimic some of the properties of the human brain s short-term working memory.
The new computer is a type of neural network that has been adapted to work with an external memory.
The result is a computer that learns as it stores memories and can later retrieve them to perform logical tasks beyond those it has been trained to do.
Deepmind s breakthrough follows a long history of work on short-term memory. In the 1950s the American cognitive psychologist George Miller carried out one of the more famous experiments in the history of brain science.
This is the ability to take a piece of data and assign it to a slot in the memory and to do this repeatedly with data of different length like chunks.
During the 1990s and 2000s computer scientists repeatedly attempted to design algorithms circuits and neural networks that could perform this trick.
Such a computer should be able to parse a simple sentence like Mary spoke to John by dividing it into its component parts of actor action and the receiver of the action.
So in this case it would assign the role of actor to Mary the role of action to the words spoke to
and the role of receiver of the action to John. It is this task that Deepmind s work addresses despite the very limited performance of earlier machines.
They begin by redefining the nature of a neural network. Until now neural networks have been interconnected patterns of neurons
But the fundamental process of computing contains an important additional element. This is an external memory
and read from during the course of a computation. In Turing s famous description of a computer the memory is the tickertape that passes back and forth through the computer and which stores symbols of various kinds for later processing.
This kind of readable and writable memory is absent in a conventional neural network . So Graves and co have added simply one.
This allows the neural network to store variables in its memory and come back to them later to use in a calculation.
This is similar to the way an ordinary computer might put the number 3 and the number 4 inside registers and later add them to make 7. The difference is that the neural network might store more complex patterns of variables representing for example the word Mary
. Since this form of computing differs in an important way from a conventional neural network Graves
and co give it a new name they call it a Neural Turing Machine the first of its kind to have been built.
The Neural Turing Machine learns like a conventional neural network using the inputs it receives from the external world
but it also learns how to store this information and when to retrieve it. The Deepmind work involves first constructing the device
They compare the performance of their Neural Turing Machine with a conventional neural network. The difference is significant.
The conventional neural network learns to copy sequences up to length 20 almost perfectly. But when it comes to sequences that are longer than the training data errors immediately become significant.
And its copy of the longest sequence of length 120 is compared almost unrecognizable to the original.
Once again the Neural Turing Machine significantly outperforms a conventional neural network. That is an impressive piece of work. Our experiments demonstrate that our Neural Turing Machine is capable of learning simple algorithms from example data
and of using these algorithms to generalize well outside its training regime say Graves and co. That is an important step forward that has the potential to make computing machines much more brainlike than ever before.
But there is significant work ahead. In particular the human brain performs a clever trick to make sense of complex arguments.
An interesting question that follows from Miller s early work is this: if our working memory is only capable of handling seven chunks how do we make sense of complex arguments in books for example that consists of thousands or tens of thousands of chunks?
To Miller the brain s ability to recode in this way was one of the keys to artificial intelligence.
He believed that until a computer could reproduce this ability it could never match the performance of the human brain.
Google s Deepmind has stated that its goal is solving intelligence. If this solution is anything like human intelligence a good test would be to see
#A Credit card Terminal That Takes Apps Last year Osama Bedier then the head of Google Wallet decided he was on the wrong side of the payments business.
The sleek-looking $299 touch-screen gadget accepts cards with embedded chips which will soon be widespread as well as digital payments
Google s digital payment app Google Wallet offers consumers a number of payment-related features including a quick way to pay at stores by tapping a phone that contains a near-field
Although adoption of Google Wallet has been slow NFC technology is gaining in popularity and that is likely to accelerate with the introduction of a similar system from Apple called Apple Pay (see With Apple Pay Forget Cash Just Pull out Your Phone).
Meanwhile the U s s major credit-card companies are mandating a shift to more secure credit cards that eschew the familiar magnetic strip for a chip that uses a unique string of numbers for each transaction (a standard known as EMV
Bedier a former Paypal executive who came to Google in 2011 saw an opportunity to switch his focus from the gadgets we can use to make payments to the ones used to handle the transactions:
Poynt s terminal is dominated by two touch screens that meet at an angle a seven-inch display that a store employee will use to ring up sales
and there s a built-in receipt printer that will spit out paper from an opening below the customer touch screen.
It accepts payments via NFC (used by services such as Google Wallet and Apple s new Apple Pay) and QR code.
It includes Bluetooth as well. Bedier showed me how it works during an interview conducted via Skype video.
The Poynt terminal he used said Welcome to Main St. Bakery on the customer screen
Merchants could use the screen for ads or store specials when not taking payments Bedier says.
and make a purchase using Apple Pay on an iphone: Bedier typed in the amount due
and the colleague tapped the terminal with his iphone while placing his finger on the iphone s home button
which on newer models is also a fingerprint reader to validate his identity. The Poynt terminal weighs a little over a pound
and contains a wireless modem and eight-hour rechargeable battery which means it could be carried around a store or restaurant if needed.
and Kabbage and releasing a software development kit in hopes of attracting other developers too o
, according to new data from the Energy Information Agency. Besides a small rise in the price of natural gas and slightly cheaper coal, the weather played the biggest role in in pushing up emissions,
#Internet-Connected Battery Could Bring Smoke alarms Online A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful:
a nine-volt battery with built-in Wi-fi. The battery can alert you on your smartphone
We were approaching the Internet-of-things space not from a perspective of##How can we build a whizzy new device that does something?
and not that are excluded currently from the growing throng of connected gadgets. Roost s first batteries which are based lithium
and meant to last for more than five years contain a Wi-fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring.
To get one working with a smoke alarm you d set it up with a forthcoming Roost smartphone app.
or kids bedroom) and connect it to your home Wi-fi and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm.
Right now Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive;
But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.
#How Magic Leap s Augmented reality Works A Florida startup called Magic Leap announced Tuesday that it had received $542 million in funding from major Silicon valley investors led by Google to develop hardware
for a new kind of augmented reality hardware. The secretive startup has yet to publicly describe or demonstrate its technology,
what the company CEO and founder Rony Abovitz has called he most natural and human-friendly wearable computing interface in the world.
The filings describe sophisticated display technology that can trick the human visual system better than existing virtual reality displays (such as the Oculus Rift) into perceiving virtual objects as real.
The display technology used in most devices can show only flat, 2-D images. Headsets like the Oculus Rift trick your brain into perceiving depth by showing different images to each eye,
but your eyes are focused always on the flat screen right in front of them. When you look at a real 3-D scene,
the depth at which your eyes are focused changes as you look at objects at different distances away. f we leave out those focus cues we get an experience that not quite realistic,
They describe displays that can create the same kind of 3-D patterns of light rays, known as ight fields,
Earlier this year, Wetzstein and colleagues used that technique to create a display that allows text to be read clearly by people not wearing their usual corrective lenses (see rototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses.
He previously worked on glasses-free 3-D displays based on similar methods. And last year, researchers at chip company Nvidia demonstrated a basic wearable display based on light fields.
A trademark filing from July describes Magic Leap technology as earable computer hardware, namely, an optical display system incorporating a dynamic light-field display.
One of Magic Leap patents describes how such a device, dubbed a WRAP, for aveguide reflector array projector, would operate.
The display would be made up of an array of many small curved mirrors; light would be delivered to that array via optical fiber,
and each of the tiny elements would reflect some of that light to create the light field for a particular point in 3-D space.
Multiple layers of such tiny mirrors would allow the display to produce the illusion of virtual objects at different distances.
That would allow the mirrors to be reprogrammed using a magnetic field to rapidly display points at different depths fast enough to fool the eye
Magic Leap greatest challenge may be to find a way to seamlessly integrate virtual 3-D objects created by that display with
and eye-tracking cameras on a wearable display to figure out at what depth a person eyes are focused.
Depth-sensing cameras are now relatively cheap and compact (see ntel Says Tablets and Laptops with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon.
But Wetzstein says Magic Leap will need likely to make major breakthroughs in computer vision software for a wearable device to make sense of the world enough for very rich augmented reality. hey will require very powerful 3-D image recognition,
running on your head-mounted display, he says. The company is recruiting experts in chip design and fabrication
apparently with a view to creating custom chips to process image data. Dedicated chips could make that work more energy-efficient, something important for a wearable device.
Magic Leap already employs Gary Bradski, a pioneer of computer vision research and software, notes Wetzstein.
Magic Leap is also trying to recruit people skilled in lasers, mobile and wireless electronics, cameras,
manufacturing supply-chain management, 3-D sensing, artificial intelligence, and video game development. Altogether, many of the underlying techniques Magic Leap needs to realize highly realistic augmented reality have been demonstrated,
says Wetzstein. But the company will have to refine and combine them in ways no one has managed yet to do. think people are starting to realize this is the future of building consumer devices he says. ut it involves big challenges at the intersection of optics, electronics, algorithms,
and understanding the human visual system. h
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