Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

The fundamental problem with all payment systems is to accurately verify the identification of the buyer. If one can be hundred percent sure that the identification of the buyer is absolutely accurate, one can be hundred percent sure that the payment is not fraudulent. In the physical world this is achieved by verifying physical documentation (for instance ID documents, fingerprints etc.). The problem is of course much more difficult in the digital world.

That is why solving digital identification is almost the same as building a fraud-proof digital payment system. This is emphasised by a recent announcement from Paypal (Read here). In this announcement, Paypal aims to become the custodian for their clients' digital ID's. Similarly, deploying well-designed mobile payment solutions in emerging markets is similar to rolling out robust identification systems. One should consider combining both problems: rolling our national ID systems at the same time as deploying mobile payment systems.

Mobile banking will continue to grow next year across a multiple fronts. Not only will more banks jump into mobile with optimized sites and application, but financial institutions will also build their existing mobile programs with a variety of new services.

Much of the interest in mobile banking is being driven by consumers, who tend to interact more with a mobile banking solution than they do Internet banking. On average, customers use a mobile banking app three times per week and only use traditional Internet banking two times per week, according Malauzai Software.

“We see a demand for mobile via the application and text messaging,” said Jim Simpson, vice president of information technology at City Bank Texas, Lubbock, TX, which has over 30 locations across Texas.

We've been promised a wallet in our phones for years, but 2012 will be the year that it breaks through. The advent of this technology will mean more than just the convenience of a 'Jedi wave' of your phone to pay for coffee. From tracking your carbon footprint to smart posters, mobile payments are another piece of the infrastructure of the 'Internet of Things'.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, is a type of chip built into mobile phones to allow contactless payments. Although the NFC technology has been around for years, a major barrier to progress has been the lack of payment terminals.

The Transport for London Oystercard is a form of contactless payment, and you've probably seen contactless payment terminals in popular sandwich chains like Pret and EAT. The same terminals can be used for NFC mobile payments as these phones become available. The difference is that NFC will allow the phone to interact with the terminal using an app, making it much more flexible than the debit card or Oystercard systems.

Wearable computing becomes the next mobile frontier.

We’ll remotely connect to our smart homes.

A jump in wireless home broadband adoption.

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

Just what might be possible is hinted at in this fascinating post by Andrew Fisher, entitled "Towards a sensor commons": For me the Sensor Commons is a future state whereby we have data available to us, in real time, from a multitude of sensors that are relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition and that data is freely available whether as a data set or by API to use in whatever fashion they like. My definition is not just about “lots of data from lots of sensors” – there is a subtlety to it implied by the “relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition” statement. In order to be useful, we need to ensure we can compare data relatively faithfully across multiple sensors. This doesn’t need to be perfect, nor do they all need to be calibrated together, we simply need to ensure that they are “more or less” recording the same thing with similar levels of precision and consistency. Ultimately in a lot of instances we care about trended data rather than individual points so this isn’t a big problem so long as an individual sensor is relatively consistent and there isn’t ridiculous variation between sensors if they were put in the same conditions.

What this boils down to, then, is trends in freely-available real-time data from multiple sensors: it's about being able to watch the world change across some geographical area of interest -- even a small one -- and drawing conclusions from those changes. That's clearly a huge step up from checking what's in your fridge, and potentially has major political ramifications (unlike the contents of your fridge).

Become dispersible

Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques: - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws; - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database. To put it another way, the system is transforming the vibrations transmitted from touch through a rigid body into waveforms that a computer can, in real time, recognize and either transmute into audible sound or use as a triggering mechanism for other sounds. It's an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it "hears" a tap.

will touch interfaces of the future rely on sounds as well as capacitance? Perhaps sound would be a cheaper, more-durable option for certain kinds of interfaces, making touch interactions all the more ubiquitous.

This year, NFC technology will finally make its way into the hands of millions of users. This will be spurred along by new smartphones, notably from Android, that have NFC capabilities baked into them. The technology industry is waiting to see if and when Apple decides to put NFC into the iPhone. Many pundits think that when Apple goes NFC, that will be the true harbinger of the heyday for mobile payments. As it stands, Apple's newest iPhone 4S is three months old and a new one will not be released till the third or fourth quarters of 2012, if at all.

It is still a cash world, with about 85% of transactions still being made with paper currency. It behooves the financial system and their technology partners to shift those scales. Even a 1% increase in digital payments means billions dollars flowing through the ecosystem.

Mobility will reshape the credit card and payment industry.

The battle is not just about dividing up territories already occupied; it is also about finding new lands to conquer. Both firms are keen to stake claims on the largely uncolonised and still somewhat notional terrain known as the “internet of things”: the myriad processors in industrial machinery, consumer goods and infrastructure, ever more of which will communicate with each other and with distant computers. Cisco, a giant American maker of networking gear, estimates that by 2015 there may be almost 15 billion internet-connected devices, up from 7.5 billion in 2010. Whereas the market for more phones and other personal computing devices is limited by the number of persons the planet has to offer, things, being more numerous than people, provide a lot more long-term room for growth.

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth, reports Kevin J. O’Brien in The New York Times.

25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.

Along with “general assembly” and “99 percenters,” Occupy Wall Street has brought the phrase “live streaming” to the forefront. Rising-star reporters — known best by their Twitter and Ustream handles — such as Pool (timcast) in New York City and Spencer Mills (oakfosho) in Oakland are passionate, deeply embedded correspondents who provide live video reporting – sometimes lasting a dozen hours or more – of protests, general assemblies and other Occupy events. Instead of using a satellite truck, they broadcast live “TV” coverage from 3G- and 4G-equipped smartphones over video networks such as Ustream.com and Livestream.com.

The AR Drone is the first toy that came out,” said Sam Shapiro, a 24-year-old programmer from Brooklyn who’s helping Pool hack together an airborne news network.

Building on its success with laptops designed for developing countries, the One Laptop Per Child project is set to unveil a long-awaited tablet at CES next week. Here's what you get for $100.

The OLPC has been kicking around the idea of a super-affordable tablet for over a year. Originally known as the XO-3, but now dubbed the XO 3.0, the tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024x768 screen with some models also offering a PixelQi 3qi display that mimics E-paper. A Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM reside in the tablet's ruggedized shell and will run either Linux Sugar or Android OS.

German automotive supplier Continental has announced that it will showcase its new NFC-enabled vehicle access control solution this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.According to Continental,the “Simplify your Drive”system uses a virtual key that is stored on the SIM card of NFC-enabled phone. To unlock a vehicle,the user simply taps their handset against the car door equipped with an embedded reader.

Intuit is announcing major news this evening around its mobile credit card swiping device and Square-competitor GoPayment reader. Intuit is one of the first major U.S. mobile payments readers to go international, with a launch in Canada. And Intuit is debuting a newly, redesigned sleek version of its reader.

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and similar to Square’s device, the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).

The GoPayment mobile payment app is free and the basic service has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions. Intuit and Square actually both eliminated the per transaction fee. And Intuit recently started allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account.

Big box retailer Home Depot is ramping up its mobile strategy by testing a PayPal-enabled mobile payment solution at select stores

The news marks Home Depot as the first retailer to sign on with PayPal as part of a bigger initiative from Paypal to bridge online and in-store traffic for retailers. The program has been in use since early December in five Home Depot locations in the United States and utilizes PayPal’s point-of-sale mobile payment service.

“Retail is changing with the emergence of these technologies that blur the lines between online and offline,” said Anuj Nayar, director of communications for PayPal, San Jose, CA

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL  ) filed a patent at the tail end of 2009 dubbed "Local Device Awareness," which describes automated connections between a number of close-range devices. Some potential applications could be device position targeting (think locating your keys) or proximity-based gaming.

If Apple's patent seems overly broad, patent hoarder InterDigital (Nasdaq: IDCC  ) has gone for specificity. It holds some 33 known patents covering machine-to-machine communication.

Motorola and Google seem to be behind in patents, with only one highly technical machine-to-machine patent showing up for Motorola Mobility, and none for Google. But as you'll soon see, the two companies might be hoping for a more open environment.

PayPal’s first retail tests of its in-store payment system is happening at Home Depot, the payment company acknowledged last week. But the bigger test will be ensuring that many more retailers and merchants are in a position to easily integrate PayPal’s system as it looks to roll out its offering this year.

PayPal is taking a big step forward by partnering with AJB Software Designs, which helps connect the point of sale terminals at many tier-one retailers to payment processors and financial institutions. AJB is now incorporating PayPal’s mobile payment system into its framework and building out a specific PayPal interface, which will allow PayPal users to pay through 250,000 point-of-sale terminals that connect to AJB software. AJB said it services 20 percent of the top retailers in North America. The AJB integration should be become available to retailers in the first quarter of this year.

Retailers will still have to decide if they want to enable payments via PayPal. And the process of outfitting stores and chains can take anywhere from days to weeks. But if they choose to make the software upgrade, retailers will be able to receive payments via a PayPal Access Card or through an “empty hand” payment in which a user accesses their PayPal account by entering in their phone number at a point of sale terminal. In both cases, they will need to confirm a transaction with a PIN code and then AJB’s software takes the request and pings PayPal, which authenticates the user. PayPal can send back coupon information or deals stored on a user’s PayPal app, which the user can then decide to apply before selecting their payment form and checking out. After the transaction, users will receive an e-receipt on their PayPal app and online in the PayPal account.

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel launched an interactive dialogue on government mobile policy on Wednesday that he said would be the first step toward a governmentwide mobile roadmap due out in March. That roadmap, VanRoekel said, will address a range of issues from ways the government can save money -- such as by buying smartphones in larger quantities -- to serving citizens more effectively through public-facing apps

It also will include information about building internal mobile applications to help federal field officers, such as U.S. Forest Service workers and Border Patrol agents, do their jobs more efficiently. As things stand now, too many agencies and bureaus are putting time and effort into mobile projects without leveraging each other's gains, he said.

The dialogue will be open for 10 days and the mobile strategy should be out about two months later, VanRoekel said. Within six months, he hopes to introduce new procurement vehicles so agencies can buy smartphones and tablets more efficiently and cheaply

Increasing the role of governments in cyberspace could spell disaster for the free nature of the Internet, top American officials and analysts said on Wednesday. Rather than seeking expanded government control, countries, companies, and other organizations should seek to strengthen a "multi-stakeholder" approach that allows input from everyone, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Larry Strickling told an audience at the Brookings Institution.

"Each challenge to the multi-stakeholder model has implications for Internet governance throughout the world," he said. "When parties ask us to overturn the outcomes of these processes, no matter how well-intentioned the request, they are providing ammunition to other countries who would like to see governments take control of the Internet."

He said efforts to more strictly control cyberspace will only lead to stagnation.

Kicking off the new year with a fresh wad of cash: according to an SEC filing, mobile and online payments startup Jumio has raised $25.5 million in funding on top of the $6.5 million it raised from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin – and others – back in March 2011.

The startup’s twist on helping e-merchants process card payments digitally is to leverage webcams (and smartphone cameras) to read credit cards rather than making people enter their details or swiping their cards. Its solution, called Netswipe, in other words turns phone cameras and webcams into credit card readers.

Jumio confirmed the financing round but declined to provide more details (which investors participated and what they plan to use the additional capital for) at this time.