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.
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.
The technology could free engineers to extend the tendrils of the Internet and computers into corners of the world they don currently reach.
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.
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.
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
as well as AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund of Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, to further develop its proprietary chemistry and finance the batteriescommercial launch.
The batteries that power most laptops and smartphones contain lithium which is highly reactive and has to be protected in ways that add size and bulk.
and Schneider Electric but it faces blistering competition from EMC Syncplicity and Citrix Sharefile as well as Microsoft Onedrive Google Drive and a host of others.
That pressure has spurred Microsoft Google and now Amazon to evolve from providing generic file storage to specialized services aimed at large organizations that have real problems
It has sparked also a price war that so far has seen Google drop prices and Microsoft boost per-customer storage allotments.
Given that Amazon web services has become the go-to source of computing power for new-breed online businesses the company may well threaten Google Microsoft
The most effective method to protect data against cyber-spying is to process confidential information on dedicated computers that are connected not to the Internet.
Some U s.-based defense contractors are openly advertising positions for people with Top Secret/SCI clearance to create offensive exploits targeting iphones, ipads, and Android devices.
Government surveillance The two most important inventions of our time, the Internet and the mobile phone, changed the world
monitors people known to be innocent and builds dossiers on everyone based on their Internet activity.
Because the U s. is home to the most ubiquitous Internet services, search engines, webmail sites, browsers,
#How to Clean the Gas and Oil industries Most Contaminated water In a nondescript site in Midland, Texas, an inexpensive new process is cleaning up some of the most contaminated water aroundhe extremely salty stuff that comes up with oil at wells. By the end
But in recent months a number of practical virtual reality devices have begun to emerge such as the Oculus Rift and Google cardboard.
Ice can take whole wind farms offline and wreak havoc on the grid in places such as Colorado,
#Facebook s Emotional Manipulation Study Is Just the Latest Effort to Prod Users With emotion-triggering effort, Facebook pushes beyond data-driven studies on voting, sharing,
Facebook controversial study exploring whether it could manipulate people moods by tweaking their news feeds to favor negative
but it is far from the social network first effort to control user behavior. With huge amounts of data flooding in from more than a billion users, the company has a unique position to study their every move
and to perform experiments by measuring how behavior changes under different conditions (see hat Facebook Knows.
This helps Facebook persuade users to spend more time on the site. But in the past three years it has also been probing everything from voting to the effect of encouraging people to make organ donations.
Other academics perform research on Facebook without collaborating with the companyither by simply observing users
but also because the affected users were asked not for permission to participate (agreeing to Facebook terms
Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users to see if it could manipulate their emotions by varying the selection of posts in their news feeds.
Past Facebook studies have shown that relatively minor restructuring of its pages and prompts can have significant social effects.
when Facebook posted reminders to vote, that action prompted 340,000 more people to vote than otherwise would have (see ow Facebook Drove Voters to the Polls.
And in 2012 Facebook showed it might have the power to get people to donate their organs.
The company put a clickable box on Timeline pages to let people indicate that they were registered donorshe campaign was associated with a huge boost to donor enrollments.
though, extensive media coverage of Facebook effort complicated the analysis of whether Facebook effort directly caused the increased enrollments.)
In some ways, Facebook published research is just part of a vast ongoing effort at Web-based manipulation. hat far more concerning is the lack of transparency about Facebook practices overall,
says Zeynep Tufeki, an assistant professor at the University of North carolina, Chapel hill, and a former fellow at the Center for Information technology Policy at Princeton university. concerned about these practicesesting and manipulating the user experience every day.
What else does Facebook do every day? We have no idea. Mining personal data is a billion-dollar business (see he Data Made
Facebook data use policy is far more vague, saying that it might use your data for nternal operations,
not only on the Web but in daily life, he says. hat is what advertising in general
On Monday Facebook said it had nothing to add beyond the apology its researcher, Adam Kramer, posted on the matter e
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