Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Bank of New Zealand has launched a trial of a phone with an embedded chip that is able to make payments by swiping the phone against a card reader.

The three month trial is being done by 44 BNZ and Vodafone staff using a Samsung Galaxy S2 phone with a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, similar to one used by Google in its Google Wallet trial in America.

The trial is using a system set up in conjunction with Visa and Paymark, BNZ said.

Starbucks customers in the UK will be soon be able to walk into their local store, fire up their iPhone and pay for their orders via their Starbucks card, the company has announced.

The one-touch app, which has been available in the US since the beginning of the year, is set to launch on January 5th, allowing Starbucks card owners to link their accounts to the iPhone application and pay using the on-screen barcode in any of the 700 Starbucks locations in the UK.

It’s perfect for people that regularly travel without cash and regularly utilise their Starbucks card in order to pay for their coffee on the commute to work or when out shopping. With one in five customers already using their cards to pay for their cup of Joe, Starbucks is likely to see a rapid uptake in application usage.

Twitter was born as a text messaging service; tweets are 140 characters because that is the length of a text message, minus a few characters for the author’s name.Today, though, most people in the United States think about Twitter as a Web tool, and they use it either online or via smartphone apps.But Twitter has not forgotten about all the people in the world who do not have fancy phones. On Friday, the company announced that it had acquired Cloudhopper, a Seattle text-messaging start-up.There is “untapped potential” with Twitter text-message use “Mobile is clearly where the majority of usage will happen,” Evan Williams, Cloudhopper has already been working with Twitter to connect its service directly with Mobile carriers around the world, in part so that users do not have to pay extra to send or receive text message tweets. Twitter has long had problems with this, and in the past has had to disable text messaging in certain countries because of high fees.Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Described as a location-based, real-time commerce platform that “makes the buying and selling of g

How Zaarly Works • According to the company, consumers can post what they're looking for on Zaarly, describe how much they're willing to pay for it, and announce how soon they need it. • Zaarly will immediately share that request in the local community through the Zaarly platform. Users may also use Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to find what they're looking for. • Nearby people or businesses will see what you want and connect to Zaarly to fulfill your request. • Zaarly allows buyers and sellers to “anonymously message and talk on the phone to facilitate the logistics of a transaction, enabling an in-person or virtual meeting to complete the transaction,” the company says.

• To pay for the transaction, Zaarly features an integrated credit card payment system, “all within a safe and secure platform.” Users can also pay with cash

The series of events will be launching in Paris, Brussels, Madrid, London, Milan and Berlin on the 18th of May, the aim of this high-tech outdoor treasure hunt is to encourage people to rediscover the environmental treasures hidden in these great cities by harnessing every day technology in their search for geocaches, rewards and fun. For all those taking part the rewards are multiple: besides the satisfaction of discovering beautiful outdoor locations, the geocaches, the give-aways and the joy of adventure, Timberland is offering a hiking trip to Iceland

Adding realism to AR by using real world surrounding information (HDRs panoramas, IBLs) is a thing we all want to have sooner than later! We have seen a cool demo of Suomi’s VTT on this, where they fake the surrounding information using the background and scanning a ping pong ball for lighting information. Now we have another candidate porting a similar approach to our beloved mobile devices. The paper of the University of Münster (Germany) has been published already in 2004 (titled “Virtual Reflections for Augmented Reality Environments”), but now it’s time to hit the mobile world with it!

If you are interested in some tech talk, please read on! :-) Their approach can create CubeMaps for all reflective or lighting purposes in real-time using only the information from the background video frame: they not only flip and stitch the frame six times and mirrored together, but do a pretty smart estimation, that yields in plausible neat-looking reflections (although obviously fake): they project six regions of the background frame (see below) onto the new six sides of a Cube. The general idea is to have reasonable regions to map from

This way they get to simulate glossy and diffuse reflections already. Lighting/shadow influence will probably be the next step, since the CubeMap is already there…

his ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important cat

This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

some members of the startup and funding communities are looking for the next wave. “I’m really searching far and wide for new ideas,” Rosa said. “There seem to be a lot of clones. ... There’s this behemoth ball of social and apps and mobile, and they’re just tacking onto this ball and rolling along. We’d like to see some more snowballs.”

Bling's system, you may remember, worked by attaching an NFC-enabled sticker on the back of phones. Users could then tap the phone onto specialized hardware (the Blinger) at the register and Bling could debit the user's PayPal account to pay the merchant.

Unless you have a Sprint Nexus S 4G on Sprint, you'll be attaching an RFID tag onto the back of your phone if you want to try out Google Wallet this summer. Google Wallet is an Android app, so presumably even though the RFID hardware is a sticker, the system won't work on any non-Android phones. Even so, Google should be applauded for getting its program rolling without having to wait on the handset makers.

Ryan Kim on GigaOm has a good write-up detailing Google's partners in the effort and the likely gains to NFC as the dominant mobile payment platform.

A deep integration of Twitter and iOS 5 was among the many things announced by Apple today but it's not just that you'll be able to post to Twitter from inside official Apple apps like photos and maps. Any 3rd party iOS developer will be able to leverage a number of Twitter Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make their apps better and more social. After email, SMS and iOS messaging, Twitter will now become a key social layer over the top of many of the apps on iOS devices.

"There is single sign-on, which allows you to retrieve a user's identity, avatar, and other profile data." That sounds like Facebook Connect, but I'm going to guess that Twitter will not prohibit developers from caching that data for time-shifted, aggregate, offline or other interesting types of analysis. Letting users skip having to create an account with every new app they download and instead click to log-in with their Twitter accounts is going to make many users very happy and encourage every iOS owner to get a Twitter account if they don't have one already. App developers will get more and better populated user accounts, faster.

"There's also a frictionless core signing service, allowing you to make and sign any call to the Twitter API." To be honest, I'm not really sure what this means. Perhaps it means that parts of the Twitter API that require user authentication will be accessible via the same single sign-on feature discussed above.

"The number of 3G cellular subscriptions in North Korea passed half a million during the first quarter, according to the country's only 3G cellular operator. The Koryolink network had 535,133 subscriptions at the end of March, an increase of just over 100,000 on the end of December 2010."

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is calling for laws requiring wireless carriers to store user location data that could be helpful to criminal investigations in which a person's location is critical to solving the crime. The request came, ironically enough, in the middle of a Senate hearing at which lawmakers grilled Apple and Google executives over their collection and use of location-based data from iPad, iPhone, and Android devices

Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division of the DOJ, Tuesday testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law that it would be useful if companies that have access to smartphone location data could provide that information lawfully to criminal investigators. The DOJ is particularly interested in the data as it pertains to investigations about cyber crimes that target mobile devices, child abductions, and others in which a mobile phone user's location is crucial, he said.

Poynt has been given a patent for delivering multi-mode location based E-directory services, enabling method, system and apparatus. The patent marks an important protective feature and barrier to entry for competitors of the company’s location-based search model, allowing for the delivery of location-based, contextual and relevant data, sorted by proximity to users. This granted patent allows a method of returning proximity sorted directory results to a mobile device user, based on automatic location detection on a mobile communication device and a search query. At least one e-directory query result and one web query result are compared, results are sorted based on proximity to the location detected, duplicates are deleted, and the results are delivered to the users. In some cases, additional information related to the listing, such as promotions or websites, are added to the results.

"Verizon will be eliminating its unlimited smartphone data plan this summer. No longer will one be able to pay $30 a month to have unlimited data. This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to pay more for mobile data.'"

Long-awaited data from an international study have shown no evidence of increased risk of brain tumors associated with mobile phones, except in people who have the most exposure. But design flaws of the Interphone study, which is partly industry funded, suggest that the latest results cannot be taken to mean that cell phones and brain cancer are unrelated, critics say. "I'm not telling people to stop using the phone. I'm saying that I can't tell you if cell phones are dangerous, but I can tell you that I'm not sure that they are safe," said Dr. Devra Davis, professor of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. The study itself, to be published Tuesday in the International Journal of Epidemiology, acknowledged that the findings were not definitive and called for more research. But Daniel Krewski, professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa in Ontario and one of the Interphone collaborators, said the study went to "great lengths to make sure that the results were scientifically sound."

At the highest exposure levels -- using a mobile phone half an hour a day over a 10-year period -- the study found a 40 percent increased risk of glioma brain tumors. With adjustments for statistical biases, that turned into 80 percent. But Krewski and colleagues say that there is not enough evidence to show a causal connection, and the group of participants using their phones this much was relatively small.

Wal-Mart’s social and mobile plans are starting to take shape only two months after acquiring Kosmix of Mountain View, Calif.

When Kosmix was purchased, it was building a database called the social genome project, which kept track of what people were interested in and what products people were talking about.

the executives say they are hard at work defining how the mega-retailer — with $419 billion in sales and 1.5 billion online visits a year to its Web site — will address the two very disruptive platforms: social and mobile.

What will it take for mobile augmented reality to become mainstream? Big brands are starting to experiment with AR features in their own apps and partnerships with startups such as Layar, Wikitude and Metaio, but there was a strong sense at yesterday's AR Summit conference in London that much work remains to be done to take the technology beyond early adopters."One of the worst things about this industry is the name," said Nick Brown, chief executive of AR technology provider Crossplatform. "Augmented reality? What does that mean to the public?"Layar's AR strategist King Yiu Chu suggested that the key may be a shift in the way people think about AR. "Augmented reality is not a technology: it's part of everyday life," he said. "It will be embedded in televisions, cars ... everything that has to do with vision. You don't want to be aware of that, you just want to experience."

The market is primed for the right game to galvanize interest in experiences that combine the real and virtual worlds. Just as FarmVille put social gaming on the map and Angry Birds brought attention to mobile gaming in general, we could see a wave of smartphone owners flood the application markets looking for similar experiences. This will present a valuable opportunity to marketers that want to foster emotional connections with their audiences, so keep a close eye on new releases and brace yourself for the next big thing in mobile gaming.