#â Wave and Payâ##Mobile phone Payment System Launched in the UK Samsungs new phone is the first to use Barclaycard and Oranges Quick Tap payment technology.
Orange and Samsung have teamed-up with Barclaycard to provide mobile phone payments with the new Quick Tap#payment technology.
Like the abolition of the £1 note or the introduction of the £2 coin, yesterday was a historic day for British money.
Courtesy of Barclaycard, Orange and Samsung, consumers across the UK can now pay for goods and services with nothing more than a mobile phone.
Yougov research, commissioned by digital payments provider Intelligent Environments, says 42 per cent of smartphone users want to use their phones as mobile wallets.
Owners of the Apple iphone are keenest, but significant proportions of Blackberry and Google phone users want to take advantage of it too.
Thats not because technology built into mobile phones is the way that everything from cameras to translators, seems to be going.
Its down to the fact that this new mobile-based method is quick, simpler and crucially,
With a mobile phones data connection, however, all transactions can be authorised and completed instantly. In due course, transactions over £15 will be permitted
if a pin is entered on the mobile phone. That, too, is more secure than the traditional keypad.
however, is that for now only one phone, one payment provider and one network operator provides this whizzy technology.
So yesterday was a milestone but not a tipping point: Orange customers, with a Barclaycard who took the trouble to buy a specially made Samsung Tocco handset can take advantage of the new systems.
Even though the near-field communications technology is built into a wide and growing number of phones already,
Using an app on the mobile phone, customers can top up their wave and pay account from a connected credit
The app allows a constant, running check on transactions and provides a real, useful and sometimes painful tally of expenditure.
even if rumours that NFC payments are to be built into the forthcoming iphone turn out to be untrue,
Google is working with Mastercard and a host of other manufacturers have similar plans. Indeed, as with almost all significant new technology, the appeal is mainly in the simplicity of NFC.
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#Adoption of Mobile Wallets Being slowed by Behind-the-Scenes Battle Among Corporate Giants Consumers would wave their phones instead of swiping credit cards at the checkout counter.
The cellphone has been more than a cellphone for years, but soon it could take on an entirely new role#standing in for all of the credit
consumers would merely wave their phones. Theres just one hitch: While the technology is already being installed in millions of phones
Mobile phone carriers, banks, credit card issuers, payment networks and technology companies are all vying to control these wallets.
which makes mobile payment software for merchants and banks. You have banks competing with carriers competing with Apple and Google,
and its pretty much a goat rodeo until someone sorts it out.##In one camp are established the long players.
Payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, along with banks that actually issue credit cards to customers, want to stay at the center of any payment system
These include Paypal and Google, which want to play a part in a new payment system,
which want to collect fees through their control of the phones themselves. In the middle#and perhaps playing a deciding role#are the retailers.
Are telcos and card networks and banks going to agree on anything?##Visa and Mastercard now dominate the major tracks that shuttle credit card and debit payments between banks and retailers.
and payment networks like Visa take a small cut. So for every $1 spent by a consumer,
and the remaining penny goes to the merchants bank handling the transaction and the payment network.
to store important payment credentials on a secure piece of the chip inside the phone.
There are several technologies that allow phones to communicate wirelessly with other technologies, though the front-runner for payments is called one near-field communication,
was the impetus behind a joint venture by Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Discover to create their own mobile wallet.
Barclaycard, already a major player in Britain, will be the first issuer of the groups in-phone credit card
or updating their mobile device.##The banks and credit card issuers, meanwhile, have found a way to temporarily avoid working with the cellphone carriers.
Because their model is powered by a chip that consumers insert into a slot in certain phones,
But that variation may become outmoded as more phones with embedded chips become available. Visa said it was also working with other providers to ensure that its network would work in all wallets.
As to the issue of security, several banks and payment networks said that mobile wallets would require a pass code
and could be disabled remotely if a phone was stolen. Consumers would not be responsible for transactions they did not make.
Apple and Google already have payment systems#Apples itunes has 200 million accounts tied to credit cards,
while Google Checkout has been less popular. Both could be turned into mobile wallets, allowing users to pay for offline purchases with their Apple or Google accounts.
But they would need access to the cellphone chips and the merchants terminals. Apple could make its own cellphone chips to make this all happen,
but Google could not because it makes only Android cellphone software, not the phones themselves.
Getting retailers on board is important to the widespread adoption of the mobile payments because many merchants will have to replace their card terminals.
While one analyst estimated conservatively, that only 5. 9 percent of merchants will accept mobile payments by 2015,
whenever the payment network was figured out. And, he said, 80 percent of consumer transactions occur at the top 200 merchants.
mobile phones have replaced often cash. And in Japan, people have been swiping phones at convenience stores and bus stations for several years.
Other global markets may have a single dominant mobile carrier or a small number of banks,
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#New Traceability Rule Represents Major Adjustment for U s. Food industry Where does your food come from?
who in some stores can wave a smartphone above an apple or orange and learn instantly where it was grown,
consumers could tap into through their computers or cellphones. The one step forward, one step back#traceability requirement#for processed food and produce#is designed to make it easier for the Food
Some are experimenting with radio frequency identification and other sophisticated methods including etching identification codes on produce with lasers
They each believe they have the holy grail product tracking solutions sitting in their laptop, #said David Acheson, former assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA.
Paul Chang, who leads the traceability initiative at IBM, said the company is basically taking the tracking system it uses for the pharmaceutical industry
Shoppers can scan the sticker with a smartphone or go to the Harvestmark website and enter the number from the sticker to learn the path the food has taken
and other information the farmer chooses to share, such as the harvest date. Theres been a very rapid sea change in consumer behavior#
With very high-profile food recalls, cellphones and iphones, people have been trained that they can access information very quickly.
use e-mail or have Internet service. Harvestmark provides him with a laptop computer and preprinted bar code stickers for his melons.
And during harvesting, he takes the laptop to a bank or some other place with Internet service to upload the data to Harvestmark.
One day he was surprised to get a letter from an unhappy customer who had tracked down his address from the Harvestmark sticker.
Using the code, Bauman traced the melon and discovered it had been picked in August but purchased by the customer in October.
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#Five technologies IBM predicts will be possible in the next 5 years What if a computer could let us feel#the texture of a fabric before we buy clothes online?
Or gives us a whiff or taste of a meal we re thinking of preparing?
it s all within the realm of possibility in the next 5 years, according to IBM s list of technologies it thinks are on the cusp of adoption.
Every year IBM polls its R&d brain trust about what technologies that may have been at the hairy edge before
but are now closer to the scalp, #IBM fellow and VP of innovation Bernie Meyerson told me recently.
This year those closer-to-the-scalp#technologies converge around computers growing ability to handle richer,
more diverse data and churn out more valuable output#such as the feel of cloth, the smell or taste of food.
The general premise is that these sensory and cognitive technologies will convert computers from glorified calculators into true thinking machines.
So, without further ado, here s IBM s sixth annual 5 in 5 technology picks. 1. Computer with a sense of touch Even people who love shopping online say that it s hard to get a good read on the finished
and temperature on a touch screen can simulate that feel, Meyerson said. Imagine you have very fine pixels
Some of this capability is available now in rudimentary form in computer games where the controller shakes to indicate an on-screen car collision. 2. Seeing the forest,
If the computer can instead really see and understand that image for what it represents#say,
The difference here is between the computer viewing an image and understanding that image without having to break it down into myriad components.
Computers could monitor scanned images of a person over time to watch for and detect changes that indicate a health condition before it gets too serious for example. 3. Hearing the whole story
Just as computers need to see images as whole entities, IBM thinks they also need to hear total sounds#ambient noise, words, music,
a lot of inputs to get the full story. It s not necessarily just hearing words, hearing is also background noise
if a cell phone caller is in a car with an engine running at 2, 000 rpm,
Computers could also likewise learn based on past experience when a baby s cry is due to a wet diaper,
teething, or something more serious. 4. Digitized taste buds IBM s brainiacs think that machines will increasingly be able to taste things#like chocolate
For example, researcher and app developer Foodpairing has broken down flavor to its molecular components and has compiled databases that can match the flavor of those ingredients against other completely different ingredients.
By compiling foodpairing trees#its technology can identify vegetable or seafood ingredients that reinforce the flavor of different meats,
What if your smartphone could tell from your breath that you re about to get a cold?
So, how s IBM doing as a sooth sayer? Since I m still waiting for the jet packs we were promised decades ago, I m skeptical about technology predictions,
but IBM s list provides a good starting point to track tech progress and priorities. It s also fun to grade its prognostication skills.
IBM has 4 more years to make good. Taking the longer view, looking at IBM s inaugural list in 2006,
it does better. It was on the money with its call that people would be able to access healthcare remotely.
IBM also predicted real-time speech translation now exemplified by products like Samsung s Galaxy speech translation.
Meyerson admits to some less successful calls#especially one about hydrogen-powered vehicles#but he s pretty happy overall with IBM s effort.
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#Boom in app development lures coders but it s tough to make a living Software engineers now outnumber farmers
writing software applications for mobile devices like the iphone or ipad. Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high
the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category.
These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers. Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago,
apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering,
organizing and controlling the world, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry virtually overnight. The iphone and ipad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds.
Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real,
and lasting, the rise in app employment might be. Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps, according to surveys and experts.
The Grimeses began their venture with high hopes but their apps, most of them for toddlers, did not come quickly enough
or sell fast enough. And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their rsums, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers.
One success story is Ethan Nicholas, who earned more than $1 million in 2009 after writing a game for the iphone.
But he says the app writing world has experienced tectonic shifts since then. Can someone drop everything
and start writing apps? Sure,#said Mr. Nicholas, 34, who quit his job to write apps after ishoot,
an artillery game, became a sensation. Can they start writing good apps? Not often, no.
I got lucky with ishoot, because back then a decent app could still be successful.
But competition is fierce nowadays, and decent isn t good enough.##The boom in apps comes as economists are debating the changing nature of work,
which technology is reshaping at an accelerating speed. The upheaval, in some ways echoing the mechanization of agriculture a century ago,
began its latest turbulent phase with the migration of tech manufacturing to places like China.
Now service and even white-collar jobs, like file clerks and data entry specialists or office support staff
and mechanical drafters, are disappearing. Technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation,
#said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M. I t. Center for Digital Business.
Four of the most valuable American companies#Apple, Google, Microsoft and I b m.#are rooted in technology.
that set off the app revolution with the iphone and ipad. Since Apple unleashed the world s freelance coders to build applications four years ago,
and the exact composition of a jobs subcategory to reflect the new prominence of apps.
And the tech industry has begun making claims about how apps are contributing to the broader economy A study commissioned by the tech advocacy group Technet found that the app economy##including Apple, Facebook,
Google s Android and other app platforms#was responsible, directly and indirectly, for 466,000 jobs.
Apple said this month that its app business had generated 291,250 jobs for the American economy,
as varied as developers and U. P. S. drivers. That number rose 39 percent in less than a year.
During that time, the number of United states developers paying the $99 annual fee to register with Apple rose 10 percent to 275
Some of these registered developers have other full-time jobs and write apps in their spare time.
Apple has become increasingly assertive in promoting the economic benefits of apps as its own wealth
and prominence have grown and its employment and other business practices have come under scrutiny. The company issued a statement for this article saying it was incredibly proud of the opportunities the App store gives developers of all sizes,
#but declined to answer questions. At the company s annual meeting this spring, the chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, noted that just a few years ago mobile app#wasn t even in people s vocabulary.
Now there s this enormous entirely new job segment that didn t exist before, #he said.
The guy who writes an Apple app one day will write an Android app the next day,
#For many of the developers not working at traditional companies, moreover, job#is a misnomer.
Streaming Color Studios, a game developer, did a survey of game makers late last year.
while not a scientifically valid sample and restricted to one segment of the app market,
the app world is weighted an ecology heavily toward a few winners. A quarter of the respondents said they had made less than $200 in lifetime revenue from Apple.
A few apps have made it extremely big, including Instagram, the photo-sharing app that was bought by Facebook in April for $1 billion.
When app developers dream, they dream of triumphs like that. Most developers, however, make their money
when someone buys or upgrades their app from Apple s online store, the only place consumers can buy an iphone or ipad app.
Apple keeps 30 percent of each app sale. While its job creation report trumpets the $6. 5 billion the company has paid out in royalties,
it does not note that as much as half of that money goes to developers outside the United states. The pie,
while growing rapidly, is smaller than it seems. My guess is that very few developers make a living off their own apps,
#said Jeff Scott, who runs the Apple app review site 148apps. com and closely tracks developments in the field.
The Struggling Entrepreneur Like many computer experts Shawn Grimes started experimenting with apps almost as soon as Apple opened its doors for the iphone.
He wrote an Internet security program as well as a tool for studio photographers to manage portrait sessions.
Those amateur apps pulled in more than $5, 000 from Apple. Late last year, Mr. Grimes was laid off as a computer security specialist by Legg Mason, the Baltimore financial firm.
The dismissal shook his confidence. I worked really hard, #he said. I did my best.
But ultimately my career was not in my hands.##The layoff, a result of Legg Mason s decision to eliminate the jobs of 300 tech support workers,
had been in the works for more than a year, which gave Mr. Grimes and his wife, Stephanie,
plenty of time to contemplate their future. They have strong family roots in the Baltimore area
but would have moved for a position with a Silicon valley giant. Google, which receives two million applications a year,
interviewed Mr. Grimes, but he did not make it past the preliminary stages. With direct employment out of reach, he decided to work independently by writing apps.
He had no illusion that he was likely to become rich. Mostly he hoped to find satisfying work that paid enough to provide a middle-class living and some shelter from a shifting economy.
But with hundreds of new apps introduced every day in Apple s store, the field is overcrowded#something the Grimeses learned quickly and painfully.
Ms. Grimes, 32, quit her job teaching kindergartners to join the couple s new venture, Campfire Apps.
They worked steadily on apps that revolved around children. Henry s Smart Headlamp was a learning game for preschoolers
a hunt for hidden objects that the Grimeses hoped iphone-wielding parents would think was worth $2 for a moment of distraction.
A free version called Henry s Spooky Headlamp got 5, 409 downloads during Halloween 2011.
The couple aimed for one new app a month, but progress was slow and sales were slower.
In March, with the apps bringing in only about $20 a day, they cashed in Mr. Grimes s 401 (k),
At one point they owned a 24-inch imac, a Mac Mini, a 24-inch cinema display screen, two 13-inch Macbook Airs, a 15-inch Macbook
Pro, two ipad 2s, two Apple TVS, two iphone 4s and an iphone 3gs. We justify buying new models by saying we need them to test out the apps,
#Mr. Grimes said. Soon, though, it got to the point where Mr. Grimes needed to take on freelance work,
but took time away from Campfire Apps. By the beginning of summer, troubled by several persistent health care issues
Mr. Grimes now works as an app developer for ELC Technologies, an Oregon company that allowed him to stay in Baltimore.
Ms. Grimes is still working on Campfire Apps. While Mr. Grimes was angry at Legg Mason for laying him off,
So far this year, their eight apps have earned $4, 964. When the newest iphone came out at the end of September,
the couple immediately bought two. Success Beyond Dreams Ethan Nicholas was a Sun microsystems programmer, a games enthusiast and a father of two very young boys,
and he needed some extra cash. So in late 2008 he wrote an artillery game that could be played on the iphone,
which was still relatively new. There were about 11 million in circulation#certainly a large number but nothing like the 270 million that have now been sold.
They founded echobase, a start-up with 14 employees that is developing apps to allow doctors and nurses to view
and update medical records across different computer systems. They brought in Mr. Miller s father, Rod, a former I b m. sales manager, as chief executive.
Echobase markets its service to medical records software providers and hospitals, whose doctors download the app free.
Apple makes no money here, but it gets a long-term benefit: start-ups that succeed will embed the ipad and the iphone more thoroughly into society.
The company is, in a sense, another arm of Apple s research and development program. The applications are what sells the hardware,
#Rod Miller said. Without us, and thousands of others like us, Apple has limited appeal.##On one level, it was a strange move for Apple to open its devices to people like Mr. Grimes, Mr. Nicholas and the Millers.
Imagine a violinist s horror at letting a toddler play with his Stradivarius and you would have some idea of Apple s reluctance to let anyone outside of its walls fool with any of its technology.
This is a company that sealed batteries into its devices so people could not replace them.
Apple s brilliant but mercurial chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, agreed to unlock the gates of the fledgling iphone only after much internal argument
and he made sure that Apple would retain strict oversight of every app. In retrospect, it might have been the smartest decision ever made by a company that prides itself on creating the future.
The App store opened in July 2008 with 500 apps. In an interview, Mr. Jobs laid bare the company s goal:
Sell more iphones.##And so, thanks in large part to the multitude of apps, it came to pass.
More iphones#nearly seven million#were sold in the next three months than in the entire previous year,
and that was just the beginning of the ascent. Apps changed the iphone from a simple phone into a mobile computer,
#said Mr. Scott of148apps. com. Apple s financial documents show just how crucial app inventors are.
If the developers stop developing, the company warned again last month, customers may choose not to buy the company s products.#
#So far, there has not been much risk of revolt. Developers have expressed flickers of grumpiness at Apple s 30 percent cut of each app sale.
A shadowy group calling itself theapp Developer Union briefly posted a petition online this summer asking for something more equitable.#
#Apple declined to comment about the union, which disappeared from the Web as mysteriously as it had arrived.
Mr. Nicholas has the same philosophy about Apple now as he did wrote when he ishoot.
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#Global manufacturing is changing with a new wave of robots At the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif,
Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human. One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires
Factories like the one here in The netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants,
Apple s iphone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones,
it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee, economists at the Massachusetts institute of technology, made the case for a rapid transformation.
#In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century,
Mr. Mcafee argues. At what point does the chain saw replace Paul Bunyan?##asked Mike Dennison, an executive at Flextronics,
a manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is based in Silicon valley and is increasingly automating assembly work.
At an automation trade show last year in Chicago, Ron Potter, the director of robotics technology at an Atlanta consulting firm called Factory Automation Systems, offered attendees a spreadsheet to calculate how quickly robots would pay for themselves.
In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250, 000 and replaced two machine operators,
If the United states does not compete for advanced manufacturing in industries like consumer electronics, it could lose product engineering
are more complex to make than smartphones. The assembly line here is made up of dozens of glass cages housing robots made by Adept Technology that snake around the factory floor for more than 100 yards.
Video cameras atop the cages guide the robot arms almost unerringly to pick up the parts they assemble.
and darting electric vehicles as workers with headsets are directed to cases of food by a computer that speaks to them in four languages.
Each rover is connected wirelessly to a central computer and on command will race along an aisle until it reaches its destination#a case of food to retrieve
The software is sophisticated enough to determine which robot should pick up which case first, so when the order arrives at the supermarket,
Then a forklift operator summoned by the computer moves the cube to a truck for shipment.
this robotic warehouse is inspired by computer designers who created software algorithms to efficiently organize data to be stored on a computer s hard drive.
the cases of food moving through the robotic warehouse are like the digital bits being processed by the computer.
a suburb of Phoenix, Josh Graves has seen how automation systems can make work easier but also create new stress and insecurity.
Because a computer sets the pace, the stress is now more psychological. Mr. Graves wears headsets
A centralized computer the workers call The Brain dictates their speed. Managers know exactly what the workers do, to the precise minute.
#Some jobs are still beyond the reach of automation: construction jobs that require workers to move in unpredictable settings
because computer vision systems were limited costly and to carefully controlled environments where the lighting was just right.
But thanks to an inexpensive stereo camera and software that lets the system see shapes with the same ease as humans,
The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft s Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game system.
Such robots will put automation within range of companies like Federal express and United parcel service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks.
but it will ultimately have as big an impact as the Internet.##Via New york times Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati t
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