#Apple's Quiet Attempt to Shake up Wireless Carriers Could Benefit Us All If you happened to pore over the details added to Apple website yesterday about its new ipads,
you might have noticed that models with cellular capabilities include something interesting on the wireless front.
They use a special SIM CARD-the tiny card that allows your device to connect to a carrier network-called Apple SIM.
To start, you will be able to choose from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint in the U s,
the Apple SIM is added eventually to the iphone (and, perhaps, similarly flexible SIMS appear for other smartphones as well).
Not only would it make it easier to move from one carrier to another, but it could also make it more affordable for people all over the world to communicate.
which account for much of its iphone sales and subsidize their cost to consumers. That said, Apple does have a lot of influence over wireless carriers.
It even convinced Cingular Wireless (which then became a part of AT&T) to agree to sell the first iphone without even setting eyes on the device.
The point-of-sale terminal at the CVS drugstore in Palo alto, California, can accept payments through a quick tap from a smartphone.
and clicking on Google alletapp intended to allow instant payment and taps the terminal. Nothing happens.
Over the past decade, tech companies including Google, ebay Paypal, and upstart Square, along with mobile carriers,
and phone carriers, and consumer indifference. Though mobile payments at U s. retail stores will nearly double this year, to $3. 5 billion, according to market researcher emarketer,
Standing in front of a photo of an overstuffed billfold, Apple CEO Tim cook unveiled its mobile wallet at a September 9 event where he also debuted new iphones and the Apple Watch.
When Apple Pay launches Monday on new iphone 6 models, all it will take to buy a sandwich at Subway
or an air-chilled chicken at Whole Foods Market is to hold your iphone near a wireless reader and press your thumb on the home button.
The iphone Touch ID fingerprint sensor already used to unlock the phone, recognizes it really you.
Behind the scenes, a payment processor such as Visa recognizes an encrypted version of your credit card such as the one in an itunes account,
which require unlocking the phone, opening an app, checking into a store, typing in a code,
and seize commanding positions in music players and smartphones. If Apple Pay works as promised, it could do something similar for payments,
starting with its influential army of iphone users. obile payment is finally hitting that pivotal moment
says Matthew de Ganon, senior vice president of product and commerce for Softcard, a rival mobile wallet joint venture of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.
because card numbers aren stored directly on the phone or on Apple servers. Instead, digital tokens, encrypted numbers that look like card numbers,
and stored on a secure chip in the phone. During a purchase, that token and a onetime transaction-specific code are sent to process the payment,
Though Google Wallet and others have used tokens, Apple Pay will deploy them more widely. Notwithstanding Apple own recent icloud breach that exposed nude celebrity photos
For one, only iphone 6 and eventually iphone 5 owners with an Apple Watch can use Apple Pay.
The Softcard mobile wallet joint venture of T-Mobile AT&T, and Verizon is touting its support of more than 80 Android phones
and the ability to pay at retailers including Mcdonald, Subway, and Walgreens. Paypal, soon to split off from ebay,
and Google continue to push their wallet apps as well. Individual retailers which have persuaded customers to use their own apps have no intention of replacing them with Apple Pay.
Starbucks, for instance, lets customers pay by launching an app and holding up the phone screen with a QR code to a reader on its cash registers.
But spokeswoman Maggie Jantzen says the bigger reason that 15 percent of Starbucks purchasesome six million transactions a weekre now completed via mobile is combined the appeal of payment
a rewards program, and a store locator all in one app. Apple will have to offer a lot more to merchants than it currently does
#Inspired by Wikipedia, Social scientists Create a Revolution in Online Surveys Gathering data about human preferences
Today Matthew Salganik at Princeton university in New jersey and Karen Levy at New york University outline an entirely new way of gathering data inspired by a new generation of information aggregation systems such as Wikipedia.
Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents they say.
Projects like Wikipedia are the result of user-generated content on a massive scale. The question that Salganik and Levy ask is
and Levy created a free website called www. allourideas. org on which anybody can create a pairwise wiki survey
Since 2010 this website has hosted some 5000 pairwise wiki surveys that have included 200000 items
For example on Wikipedia most of the information is intuited by a tiny proportion of editors.
If Wikipedia were to allow 10 and only 10 edits per editor akin to a survey that requires respondents to complete one and only one form it would exclude about 95%of the edits contributed say Salganik and Levy.
or OLEDSHE same kind of technology used in some ultrathin TVS and smartphones. OLEDS could be used in large sheets,
The hope is that it could also be distributed using the same global network of liquid fuel transport that moves petrol around the planet.
an Ad-Free Facebook Alternative The first thing I noticed on Ello a new ad-free social network is the abundance of white space.
Unlike Facebook which rages with status updates trending topics and ads imploring me to click on things my friends like Ello is quiet and calm.
and entrepreneur Paul Budnitz Ello contends that on social networks like Facebook we the users are the product as our data is sold to advertisers who hope to entice us with ads in our feeds.
and one of several manifestos posted on the site says that those behind Ello dislike ads more than almost anyone else out there.
whether or not you want to let it gather information about your own Ello activity to improve the site.
This anti-ad (and in many ways anti-Facebook) ethos coupled with a stark simple design that looks
as if the German industrial designer Dieter Rams had created a more social version of Tumblr is probably not causing many people to ditch Facebook
but it is making plenty of them curious about the new social network. Ello began its invite-only beta test in August with 90 people
In a smartphone-obsessed world that s a lot attention for a social network that doesn t even have an app yet.
But since the social network is still so small it s hard to tell whether I ll need it in the same way
I do Facebook and Twitter where I m accustomed to paying with the breadcrumbs of data
which is the opposite of how it s done on Facebook or Twitter. And it s embarrassingly easy to delete a friend s comment on one of your posts by clicking a tiny gray x next to the comment which
So Ello is basically a stripped-down (commercial-free for now) Tumblr/Twitter? Is that it?
and for a number of other startups like Evernote and Strava but it s not clear how well it can work on a social network especially one that wants to grow.
and its sudden popularity appears to be straining the social network. The search function seemed really slow
Apps for iphone and Android are in the offing but for now the only way to use it on a smartphone
or tablet is via a mobile browser. Despite the long to-do list Ello is off to an intriguing start.
There s room for a social network that is both pretty to look at and a pleasure to use e
Later this year Brain Corporation will start offering a ready-made circuit board with a smartphone processor
At the Mobile Developers Conference in San francisco last week a wheeled robot with twin cameras powered by one of Brain Corporation s circuit boards was trained live on stage In one demo the robot called
Twenty-five years later the idea is now being commercialized as a gene sequencing machine that's no larger than a smartphone and
While the lithium-polymer batteries used in smartphones today are somewhat flexible they can survive being bent many times.
and Facebook Data Datacoup one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data has closed finished a trial of its service
Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts credit card transaction records and other personal information and will gleaned sell insights from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
Options include debit card and credit card transactions and data from Facebook Twitter and Linkedin. Datacoup won t provide raw data to companies.
For example a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.
Tens of thousands of people already receive $100 a month from a company called Luth Research in return for very detailed data from their smartphones tablets
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
Since 2009 Google has been working with controversial startup D-Wave Systems which claims to make the first commercial quantum computer.
And last year Google purchased one of D-Wave s machines. But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
Now John Martinis a professor at University of California Santa barbara has joined Google to establish a new quantum hardware lab near the university.
Martinis has taken a joint position with Google and UCSB that will allow him to continue his own research at the university.
Martinis s work on D-Wave s machine led him into talks with Google and to his new position.
However Google has given not up on D-Wave. In an online statement the leader of Google s quantum research said that the two companies will continue to work together
and that Google S d-Wave computer will be upgraded with a new 1000 qubit processor when it becomes available e
#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
Over the last few decades we ve grown beyond the industrial economy to the IT economy and the Internet economy each
Social networks let billions of people collaborate in a variety of ways. Meanwhile business networks have enabled new types of frictionless commerce.
The numbers of people-to-people connections##business networks social networks##they ve all been growing over the past 10 years says Dinesh Sharma SAP s vice president of marketing for the Internet of things.
But while social mobile and cloud computing helped set the groundwork for the Networked Economy it s important for businesses to understand that this revolutionary economic environment goes far beyond those technologies creating unprecedented new opportunities for collaboration and customization.
Google Waze an app allowing drivers to share local real-time traffic and road information; and Uber a mobile app that connects people seeking taxicabs or ridesharing services.
A business looking to purchase say a particular machine part can now turn to the ultimate consumer marketplace##ebay.
Now technology can easily extend a search via a consumer network like ebay. That dramatically increases the number of choices available
and the Internet##millennials are natural networkers. They re completely at home in highly connected collaborative spaces like those underlying the Networked Economy.
#A Headset Meant to Make Augmented reality Less of a Gimmick Andrew Maimone thinks augmented reality hasn been much more than a gimmick so far.
While it possible to use a smartphone or tablet to, for example, conjure a virtual character
and place it onto a real world table viewed on a smartphone screen, this just sn very compellingsays Maimone. he experience doesn occur in one own vision,
Anyone paying attention knows that his or her Web searches, Facebook feeds, and other online activity isn always safee it from the prying eyes of the NSA
or those of the companies providing a social networking service. While a substantial chunk of the populace finds all this tracking creepy and invasive,
Some startups hope to exploit this by buying access to your Web browsing and banking data (see ell Your Personal data for $8 a Month.
is now offering companies an unprecedented window into the private digital domains of tens of thousands of people who have agreed to let much of what they do on a smartphone, tablet,
but what it does gather includes where smartphone users are given at any moment, what websites they are visiting,
what queries they are feeding into Google, and how often they check Twitter. The program participants are asked also to answer questions about their behavior.
Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix. The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars.
Advertisers want better targeting because click-through rates for online ads now stands at less than. 01 percent.
If it turns out that consumer review sites are a prominent part of the process, for instance,
partnering with the sites, and buying ads there. Ultimately, Luth found that by the time a customer actually visits a car manufacturer website,
theye most likely ready to buy a car. hat a big deal, says the company senior executive for marketing,
But as many as 20,000 PC users and 6, 000 smartphone users are given, at any time,
In a survey of 1, 100 smartphone users by Punchtab, an advertising company, in April 27 percent of respondents said they would allow themselves to be tracked by retailers on mobile devices
Last month, Verizon announced a new loyalty program for its 100 million U s. wireless customers,
and Web browsing behavior to be tracked and sold to marketers. This kind of tracking will only get more sophisticated.
#U s. Warrants for Overseas Data Trample Foreign Privacy Laws U s. Internet companies and indeed all multinationals with a presence in the United states appear to be trapped between the data access requirements of U s. law enforcement agencies
But it is not surprising that other major companies (like Apple AT&T and Verizon) have supported publicly Microsoft's position.
The revelations of Edward Snowden have put them all under increasing pressure to resist U s. requests for data access.
For example in June the German government cancelled a contract with Verizon for Internet services. Many more companies have a commercial incentive to contest these cross-border requests for data.
The issues raised in the Microsoft case are relevant to all companies subject to U s. jurisdiction not just those in the Internet sector including companies based abroad but active in the U s. market.
The privacy expectations of the Internet users whose data may be accessed have received little attention. The best way to resolve this conflict would be to make changes to U s. legislation that balance the interests of companies and law enforcement while taking the privacy expectations of individuals into account.
and existing wireless methods such as those used for cochlear implants won t work with devices buried deep in the body.
They call the technique midfield wireless powering (as opposed to near-field which refers to the exponentially decaying radiation and far-field
Morris Kesler vice president of research and development at Witricity a Massachusetts-based company that develops wireless powering systems says Poon s technique would be particularly useful for powering tiny devices.
The ground signal can also be measured by fastening an alligator clip at the far end of an Ethernet, VGA,
#A New Chip Could Add Motion Sensing to Clothing A company called mcube has made a new kind of accelerometer, the device that senses motion from inside a smartphone or fitness monitor.
so immediately after you swing you can get an analysis on your smartphone. Accelerometers are made usually of two chips:
In fact, the company says its new accelerometer is sensitive enough to replace the gyroscope in a smartphone.
This could perhaps bring sophisticated motion-sensing capabilities to even the cheapest smartphones, some of which lack gyroscopes.
Nearly 70 million of mcube sensors have already been shipped to electronics manufacturers in China for use in smartphones.
But several experimental options for energy harvesting or wireless charging might eventually make that possible (see Batteryless Sensor Chip for the Internet of Thingsand obile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery w
#Longer-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices A type of battery that could eventually store twice as much energy as a conventional one could be about to move beyond niche applications to wearable devices phones and even electric cars.
#Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One Microsoft researchers say simple hardware changes
and machine learning techniques let a regular smartphone camera act as a depth sensor. Just about everybody carries a camera nowadays by virtue of owning a cell phone,
but few of these devices capture the three-dimensional contours of objects like a depth camera can.
if our phones capture the contours of everything from street corners to the arrangement of your living room,
Yet while efforts like Google Project Tango are adding depth cameras into mobile gadgets, new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications
and machine-learning techniques an ordinary smartphone camera or webcam can be used as a 3-D depth camera.
But the group needed to train the machines (in this case a Samsung galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Microsoft Lifecam Web camera) on that relationship,
#Super-Fast Pixels Could Make Smartphones Brighter and Longer-Lasting Displays account for between 45 and 70 percent of the total energy consumption in portable electronics.
A new kind of liquid crystal display (LCD) with pixels that switch much more quickly could give smartphones brighter screens
OLEDS are used in some smartphones and TVS, but are more expensive to produce. Marc Mcconnaughey, CEO of Light Polymers, says the company materials are being evaluated by flat-panel display manufacturers.
Google famous neural network capable of recognizing cat and human faces required 1, 000 computers with 16 processors apiece (see elf-Taught Software.
#Mobile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery A new breed of mobile wireless device lacks a battery or other energy storage,
but it can still send data over Wi-fi. These prototype gadgets, developed by researchers at the University of Washington,
get all the power they need by making use of the Wi-fi, TV, radio, and cellular signals that are already in the air.
The technology could free engineers to extend the tendrils of the Internet and computers into corners of the world they don currently reach.
Putting low-cost, Wi-fi-capable, and battery-free sensors behind couches and cabinets could provide the detailed data needed to make such thermostats more effective. ou could throw these things wherever you want
The battery-free Wi-fi devices are an upgrade to a design the same group demonstrated last yearhose devices could only talk to other devices like themselves (see evices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals and Need No Power Source.
Adding Wi-fi capabilities makes the devices more practical. Gollakota hopes to establish a company to commercialize the technology,
which should also be applicable to other wireless protocols, such as Zigbee or Bluetooth, that are used in compact devices without access to wired power sources,
Engineers have worked for decades on ways to generate power by harvesting radio signals from the air, a ubiquitous resource thanks to radio, TV
and cellular network transmitters. But although enough energy can be collected that way to run low-powered circuits,
Harvesting ambient radio waves can collect on the order of tens of microwatts of power. But sending data over Wi-fi requires at least tens of thousands of times more powerundreds of milliwatts at best
and typically around one watt of power, says Gollakota. The Washington researchers got around that challenge by finding a way to have the devices communicate without having to actively transmit.
Their devices send messages by scattering signals from other sourceshey recycle existing radio waves instead of expending energy to generate their own.
To send data to a smartphone for example, one of the new prototypes switches its antenna back and forth between modes that absorb
and reflect the signal from a nearby Wi-fi router. Software installed on the phone allows it to read that signal by observing the changing strength of the signal it detects from that same router as the battery-free device soaks some of it up.
The battery-free Wi-fi devices can harvest enough energy to receive and decode Wi-fi signals in the conventional way.
But they can detect the presence of the individual units, or ackets, that make up a Wi-fi transmission.
To send data to the battery-free device a conventional Wi-fi device sends a specific burst of packets that lets the receiving device know it should listen for a transmission.
The data is then is encoded in a stream of further packets with gaps interspersed between them.
Each packet signals a 1 and each gap a 0 of the digital message. Ranveer Chandra, a senior researcher in mobile computing at Microsoft Research, says the technology could help accelerate dreams of being able to deploy cheap,
networked devices that have been slow to arrive. iven the prevalence of Wi-fi, this provides a great way to get low-power Internet of things devices to communicate with a large swath of devices around us,
RFID tags, which also lack batteries, are the closest technology in use today, says Chandra. But they can only communicate with specialized reader devices,
including LG Heart rate Monitor Earphone and iriver iriveron Heart rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset (available to consumers for $180 and $200, respectively) and a pair of earbuds from Intel,
The data is sent then on to your smartphone. Leboeuf says Valencell technology has been validated by groups outside the company;
Like Bluetooth headsets and some noise-cancelling headphones, the Performtek technology needs its own power source to work.
the LG earbuds connect to a wearable clip that holds the battery and Bluetooth device,
Apple will start selling iphones with a sapphire screen that is just about impossible to scratch. The supposed supplier of that sapphire, GT Advanced Technologies, can confirm as much.
making it possible to add a tough layer of sapphire to just about any smartphone or tablet screen relatively cheaply (see our Next Smartphone Screen May be made of Sapphire.
The manufacturing technology known as an ion accelerator, can make fine sheets of other costly materials,
and the screens on some high-end phones that cost as much as $10, 000. But sapphire has been too expensive for widespread use.
as the forthcoming iphone may be, remains five times as expensive as a regular one, or $15 to $20 each.
Smartphone makers have taken long advantage of advances in glass production to make devices with stronger and more durable screens.
which is used in iphones. But even Gorilla Glass is vulnerable to scratching and cracking, and replacing the glass is expensive.
in theory, let you store tens or even hundreds of times as much data on your smartphone.
Some prototypes can store data densely enough to enable a terabyte chip the size of a postage stamp. hy don you have all the movies you would like on your iphone?
What if the compass app in your phone didn just visually point north but actually seemed to pull your hand in that direction?
and it suggests possibilities in mobile and wearable technology as well. Tomohiro Amemiya, a cognitive scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, began the Buru-Navi project in 2004, originally as a way to research how the brain handles sensory illusions.
His initial prototype was roughly the size of a paperback novel and contained a crankshaft mechanism to generate vibration,
and relies on a 40-hertz electromagnetic actuator similar to those found in smartphones. When pinched between the thumb and forefinger,
Google, and perhaps Apple are mobilizing to sell
#Can Technology Fix Medicine? After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age.
and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems.
as well as the corporate venture funds of Google, Samsung, Merck, and others, have invested more than $3 billion in health-care information technology since the beginning of 2013 rapid acceleration from previous years, according to data from Mercom Capital Group.
which advises users on how much insulin they should take in light of information recorded on their smartphones:
Ginger. io uses data collected (with permission) from a phone and other sensors to assess the behavior of people with mental illnesses such as depression.
And that an idea that could influence everything from drugs policy to social network studies to the marketing of beef burgers r
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