Tuesday, October 3, 2023
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Thursday, March 31, 2016
Trinity Computer Repair | A-M-S-Computers
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Former Head of Google Wallet Debuts a Universal Payments Terminal
Osama Bedier. 
David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty ImagesOsama Bedier is intimately familiar with failure in the world of mobile payments.
In 2011, he left a long career at PayPal to oversee the launch of Google Wallet, a service that let people pay for stuff in stores with their smartphones. By 2012, he publicly admitted that, like other mobile services tying to reinvent point-of-sale purchases, Google Wallet wasn’t really going anywhere. “Nobody today is delivering any solution that will get scale, including me,” he said at the time. Within another year, he had left the company.
A big part of the problem, he says, is the payment terminal, the thing that sits beside a cash register and reads info from credit cards or phones. The mobile revolution has made our phones smarter than ever, but the payment terminal is still in the Dark Ages, as Bedier describes it. They’re too limited. No one payment terminal works with all payment services.
It’s that disparity, Bedier explains, that has led to the failure of every promising effort to revamp the way payments work, including Google Wallet. “We have a ton of innovation going on, but nothing getting mass adoption. It’s all experiments and small examples in different stores around the country,” he says.
PoyntBut Bedier believes he can change this with the flagship terminal of his new startup, called Poynt. On Wednesday, the company is unveiling its first “smart” payment terminal intended for small and medium-sized merchants. Based on the Android mobile operating system, this gadget includes two screens—a main one facing the merchant, and a second, smaller screen for the consumer. It comes with built-in sales-analysis apps. It lets you build and install your own apps. But most importantly, it includes ways to accept a vast range of payment types, from traditional credit cards to the newer chip-and-pin variety, along with several digital options, including NFC (which powers Apple Pay), QR code, and Bluetooth technologies.
The aim is to give more small merchants the ability to accept mobile payments—and help bootstrap the entire market in the process.
This month, Apple reinvigorated the prospect of pay-by-smartphone with the introduction of Apple Pay. But even Apple faces significant obstacles as it seeks widespread adoption—drug stores chains CVS and Rite Aid, for instance, have blocked the service. Bedier believes the new Poynt terminal can help smooth the way for Apple Pay and plenty of other payments services. His single terminal is meant to work with all of them—at least in theory. It will work with Google Wallet and Apple Pay out of the box, for instance, and it should work with CurrentC, the technology apparently favored by CVS and Rite Aid.
PoyntAt the same time, the $299 terminal will work with chip-and-pin cards. By October of next year, credit card companies are demanding that US merchants accept more fraud-proof chip-and-pin cards. It’s a huge transition that will require a huge turnover in hardware. Poynt plans to begin shipping well before that deadline to take advantage of that transition. With a guaranteed market, it seems like a great time to get into the payment terminal game. And for Bedier, it gives Bedier a kind of second chance to make mobile payments a reality on checkout counters everywhere.
Friday, October 31, 2014
New Species of Frog Discovered in New York City
Rana he newest species of leopard frog is called. Feinberg, J.A. et al/PLoS OneIf you wanted to find a new species of frog, the rainforest seems like a better place to look than the urban jungle. However, scientists have found a new species of frog living in and around New York City.
The new species, which biologists are calling the Atlantic Coast leopard frog, was hiding in plain sight. Besides its croak, the new species is nearly indistinguishable from several other frog species living in the area. As detailed today in PLoS ONE, the researchers were able to make the identification after comparing the DNA, appearance, and croaking noises of hundreds of frogs.
The authors, led by Jeremy Feinberg of Rutgers University, first announced their suspicions of the new species in 2012, when they reported that familiar-looking frogs with unfamiliar croaks were hopping around the wetlands near Yankee Stadium. Although the coloration of the Atlantic Coast leopard frog is very similar to that of other leopard frogs, its distinctive croak, which sounds like a simple, repeated “chuck,” sets it apart.
Biologists have debated the number of leopard frog species for nearly 250 years, and other scientists weren’t ready to declare a new species. Most dismissed the croak as a mutation in the known Northern or Southern leopard frog species. But now, Feinberg and colleagues say they have enough evidence, in DNA differences and acoustic analyses, to justify the new species designation. In order to declare that a frog’s genome is different enough to declare a new species, the researchers found a significant collection of gene variants that were not found in any of the other species of leopard frogs. Frogs use sound to set themselves apart, so the researchers analyzed the waveform of the new species’ croak to show that it had a different pitch, structure, and rhythm than other leopard frogs.
The Atlantic Coast leopard frog’s (R. kauffeldi) range is centered on New York City. 
Feinberg, J.A. et al/PLoS OneThe new species also fills different habitat niches than the other leopard frogs. For example, the Atlantic Coast leopard frog is much better suited for life in the coastal bogs of Staten Island than one of its sister species, which might favor New Jersey’s Pine Barrens instead. This could help ecologists better plan their restoration efforts.
The Atlantic Coast leopard frog lives from northern New Jersey to southern Connecticut. Next time you’re hiking in the area, keep your ears open for the sound in the video below.
The I-95 corridor is one of the most densely populated, and developed, regions in the world. Finding a new species in this type of environment shows that even the most well-trod places could be hiding fruitful ecological surprises. It just goes to show that New York City has surprises for everyone, even wildlife biologists.
Why So Many American Retailers Are Fighting to Freeze Out Apple Pay
MCXMCX—the coalition of retailers at the heart of recent decisions to block Apple Pay—says it could eventually embrace that technology that drives Apple’s brand new payments service. But it seems that coalition will continue to freeze out Apple Pay—and all other payments services that compete with its own app, known as CurrentC. During a virtual press conference on Wednesday, a representative of the organization said that MCX is “technology agnostic” and that CurrentC could “pivot” to NFC, the Near Field Communication tech that lets Apple Pay users send money from their iPhones to payment terminals in stores.
Basically, the organization is in damage-control mode. Over the weekend, according to reports, drugstore chains Rite Aid and CVS blocked the use of Apple Pay in their stores—basically by shutting down NFC readers—and it later emerged that these chains, as part of MCX, did so in anticipation of the arrival of CurrentC. CurrentC is built around QR code technology, not NFC.
But it’s still unlikely that MCX members—which also include WalMart, Best Buy, and the Gap—will let both Apple Pay and CurrentC coexist on their mobile payment systems. According to the New York Times, MCX members signed exclusivity CurrentC contracts years ago, back when no one knew about Apple Pay. If retailers break those contracts, the Times reports, they would have to pay steep fines.
MCX denied this claims in a statement released on Wednesday morning, and repeated that position during its conference call. “It’s simply not true. There are no fines,” a MCX representative said. But it still seems that members are contractually obligated to use CurrentC exclusively.
The final version of CurrentC is still months away—it’s set to launch in 2015—while Apple Pay is already here. And if Apple Pay is a success at other stores, MCX members could miss out on an incalculable number of mobile transactions, and risk turning customers off.
The only reason retailers might still choose CurrentC over Apple Pay are the benefits of tracking their customers’ shopping habits across all MCX stores—a database that has thus far been the sole domain of credit card companies. And if retailers had access to that data, they could potentially wield it to offer deals and loyalty rewards, increasing their bottom lines. Meanwhile, Apple Pay, essentially a contact-less form of paying by credit or debit, still leaves the retailer out of the loop and does nothing to change that dynamic.
Compounding its already poor image problem, MCX has also confirmed news of a data breach involving its system. Within the last 36 hours, according to the group, unauthorized third parties stole the email addresses of some CurrentC pilot program participants, as well as the emails of others who had expressed interest in the app.
No payment data or personal information had leaked, the organization says, and the CurrentC app itself was not affected. During the conference call, an MCX representative said the company was continuing to investigate the situation and it was “premature to comment” on why it was just CurrentC tester email addresses that were stolen. “In the digital age, some people think it’s cool to hack,” the representative said. Yes, and sometimes they hack organizations they’re unhappy with.
Joker Lets You Instantly Stream Perfectly Legal And Legitimate Torrent Files
Let’s say there’s a torrent online you would like to view. After all, torrents themselves are perfectly legal. Instead of downloading the torrent, paste the link to the torrent in Joker.org and watch the content instantly. Watch out, Popcorn Time. The Joker is here.
Using Joker.org to watch a torrent is stupid easy. Grab a Torrent magnet link — the more seeds the better — and paste it into the text input box on the home page of Joker.org. From there, the service seems to cache the content, and depending on the amount of seeds, it starts playing after an ad.
Streaming is not a newly discovered torrent function. Programs and services have offered the functionality for years, yet Joker.org’s implementation is clean and elegant. And that’s why it probably won’t last long.
Legitimate torrents or not, Joker will clearly be used for pirated content and the site is trying to make money. Ads play prior to the video plays back. With ads, likely come a paper trail and the MPAA has successfully taken down sites with much less information to go on.
TorrentFreak points out that the site appears to cache the torrents, too, which requires servers and bandwidth. This is most likely to improve playback. However, the cached content could be grounds for a takedown notice since it will no doubt include pirated content.
Enjoy Joker while it lasts and use it at your own risk. It’s a magical experience — that is, when used for perfectly legal and legitimate torrent files.
Twitter Partners With IBM To Bring Social Data To The Enterprise
Twitter and IBM announced a significant partnership today that will involve Twitter sharing its data with IBM for integration into IBM’s enterprise solutions, including the Watson cloud platform. The deal means IBM will gain access to the Twitter “firehose,” allowing businesses to incorporate insights gained from the social network into their decision-making processes.
Additionally, the two companies will also be teaming up to build “a unique collection of enterprise solutions,” they say, which puts IBM into a different category than some of Twitter’s other data partners, who generally just ingest the data for use in their own systems.
IBM says the companies will collaborate to build enterprise applications to improve business decisions across industries and professions, beginning with applications and services for sales, marketing and customer service. They will also work together on industry-specific solutions, including those for banking, consumer products, transportation and retail.
Developers will also be able to integrate Twitter data into their own cloud applications, thanks to this agreement, using either IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or its BlueMix development platform.
Going forward, the integrations will allow IBM customers to ask more complex questions about their businesses, like “why are we growing quickly in Brazil?” for example, a Twitter blog post suggests, and then use Twitter data to help them inform those responses.
The announcement, which Twitter says has been “years in the making,” comes at a time when IBM has been ramping up its efforts to become a player in the analytics space. The company has been rolling out a number of products recently, including Watson Analytics, a cloud application designed for working with big data which bears the name of the Watson supercomputer best known for its stint as a Jeopardy contestant years ago.
IBM has since taken that technology and turned it into a cloud platform that they’re building their own solutions on top of, while also inviting others to do the same.
IBM wants to provide business customers with as many data sources as they can, so it makes sense that they would include Twitter’s data stream in their analytics products.
Meanwhile, for Twitter, the company is now able to benefit more from its firehose of data, while also establishing its value to enterprise customers beyond the usual marketing and social media monitoring kinds of use cases. That matters even more these days as Twitter is struggling to find user growth, even attempting to invent new metrics that can track Twitter’s true reach to its “logged-out” and “syndicated” audiences, and beyond. (During the company’s earnings this week, it reported that user growth slowed to 4.8 percent and timeline views per user fell 7 percent.)
Twitter’s user growth may be slowing, but its move into the enterprise space here is surely not without some financial impact to the company’s bottom line.
Twitter also notes today that its new relationship with IBM was made possible by its acquisition of Gnip earlier this year, as it provided the enterprise-grade platform capable of delivering its 15 billion “social activities” created per day to Twitter partners, now including IBM.
Additional Reporting: Ron Miller
How to Turn Off Your Mac’s Annoying Call-Forwarding Feature
Ariel ZambelichContinuity, the new feature in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, is noble in its intent to make your Apple devices work together better. One of its key abilities is to let you answer messages or receive calls on whatever Apple device is most convenient at the time, be it your iPhone, your iPad, or your Mac.
Sounds like the future! But in the actual present, this can be a huge annoyance.
Let’s say you have Continuity enabled on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. A call comes in. All three devices ring at once. Or almost at once: Usually the iPhone rings first, then the iPad and Mac start ringing five seconds later. And if you answer the call on your iPhone quickly, the other two devices will continue ringing for a few seconds because of that delay. Worse, if your Apple devices are strewn around your home, you’re suddenly surrounded by an overwhelming number of rings. It’s the same with incoming iMessages. One notification becomes two, or three, or more.
If you’re sick of this, here’s how to turn it off.
For phone calls, on your iPhone go to Settings > FaceTime, and then toggle iPhone Cellular Calls to off. This will prevent your incoming calls from forwarding to your other devices. Continuity works by linking any hardware that you are logged in to using your Apple ID—the login/password you use to verify your iCloud and App Store accounts. So, any iOS device or any Mac that you have you have set up with the same Apple ID will be able to pick up calls from your iPhone. Switching this setting in FaceTime to “off” will break this connection for phone calls.
You can easily flip this setting on and off depending on your connectivity needs. For example, you may want want your calls forwarded to your other Apple devices during business hours, but not on weekends.
Assuming you want iMessages to appear on your phone, you can prevent them from forwarding to your other devices.
If you don’t want iMessages to show up on your iPad altogether, pick up your iPad and do this: Settings > Messages and switch off iMessage. If you still want messages sent to your iPad, but don’t want to be interrupted with an audible “ping,” go to Settings > Notifications > Messages and switch the Notification Sound to None. And if you still want to send and receive iMessages from your iPad, but you don’t want to hear a sound or see a pop-up when each new one arrives: from that same screen, switch off Allow Notifications.
On a Mac, if you don’t want iMessages to show up at all, open Messages, go to Preferences, click on Accounts, then under Apple ID uncheck “Enable this account.” This means you won’t be able to send, receive, read or interact with iMessages in any way from your Mac.
A gentler approach: Just turn off all the notifications, so you can still respond if you have to, but you won’t be interrupted by pings and pop-ups. To silence these incoming message alerts, go to System Preferences > Notifications > Messages, then you can adjust the Messages alert style to None. To just switch off sounds: on that same screen, uncheck Play sound for notifications and choose the Message alert style setting you want: banners or alerts.
[Hat tip for the phone call settings: Finer Things]
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Take a Google Seaview Tour of the World’s Most Stunning Coral Reefs
Richard Vevers left the world of London advertising to go to Australia and chase his dream of making a career in underwater photography—a source of fascination for him since his teen years in landlocked Bromley, England. Now, he and his team at the Catlin Seaview Survey, thanks to a partnership with Google Street View, may have created the most viewed underwater imagery of all time.
“I saw that there were a lot of issues going on underwater that were out of sight and out of mind,” said Vevers. “I saw that as an advertising issue. Our solution was to reveal the ocean and let the conservation organizations do the rest.”
Vevers and his team capture gorgeous, immersive, 360° images of all six major global coral regions to be used as baseline data to monitor their swift degradation. “We started off with coral reefs because we’ve lost 40 percent in last 30 years, and because of the effects of climate change, it’s not likely to slow down,” said Vevers. “This will give us an incredible, unprecedented baseline to measure change. These environments will be hit more and more by storms and bleaching events. It’s the recovery that is so critical.”
The team started with Australia, then moved on to the Caribbean, and this year will continue on in the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia. Next year they will dive in the Indian Ocean, followed by the Red Sea, and finally the Pacific. The Catlin Seaview camera rig was modeled after the Streetview Trekker backpack-mounted camera pod and contains three Canon 5D cameras in a spherical waterproof housing, controlled by a Samsung tablet, and propelled by a Dive X underwater scooter. Seaview divers routinely cover 2 kilometers in a dive and generate 3,000 panoramic images in a day. Only a fraction of the best are uploaded to Google Street View, but all are processed into the Catlin Global Reef Record—an open source tool available to any marine manager or ocean researcher.
In his line of work, Vevers routinely finds himself in jaw-dropping marine environments. “You don’t know what’s around the next corner,” he said. “When you’re in remote places like the really far north part of the Great Barrier Reef—which takes two days of steaming just to get there—and you jump in the water, it’s truly wild. You get buzzed by baby sharks straight away, shooting up from the depths, and then there are magical encounters with manta rays that check themselves out in the dome of the camera.”
The Seaview Survey has also captured countless manmade wonders in the depths. The Underwater Museum of living sculptures off the coast of Cancun, Mexico, the Antilla Shipwreck off Aruba, and the Christ of the Abyss off Key Largo, Florida are all included in the Seaview collection.
Vevers’ team is currently developing an autonomous underwater vehicle to be deployed by 2017 to cover even more of the ocean. “These AUVs can stick to a meter and a half above the seafloor and hover at one knot,” he said. “They could cover 12 kilometers in a day, which would scale the project significantly.” These craft would also be perfect for retracing previous paths to measure the impact of say, a large cyclone on a sensitive stretch of reef.
“This is science that has not been possible on this scale before—to measure impact and create new baselines with which to measure recovery,” said Vevers. “I think it’s safe to say that we’ve taken Street View to places they weren’t imagining when they named it.”
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Thursday, October 30, 2014
Flipboard Finally Ditches Its iPad Roots With a Smarter Phone App
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The Saddest Office Cubicles We Could Find
In 2007, WIRED.com (then known as “Wired News”) asked readers with particularly depressing office cubicles to submit photos of their plight. People hated their cubicles—and rightly so. They didn’t offer any real privacy, but were incredibly effective at communicating office hierarchy. The hatred of this terrible design was clear: Our gallery of “winners” of the saddest-cubicle contest still holds the record for WIRED’s most popular post ever.
Today, WIRED is in the midst of its own office redesign, casting off the last vestiges of cubiclean separation to join the popular open-floor-plan mania that has overtaken offices in Silicon Valley and beyond. In recognition of this pivotal moment in American workplace-design history, we’re resurrecting the long-forgotten saddest-cubicle gallery, and issuing a new call for submissions.
Please send us photos of your sad “workspace.” The new open plans have mercifully eliminated some of the worst aspects of cubicles, but exacerbated others and introduced some new problems as well. Is your desk in a super busy area of your office? Have you been left with zero real estate? We want to know.
Tweet a photo of your depressing workspace to us @wired using the hashtag #SadDesk, and if your situation is depressing enough, this moment in your time as an employee could go down in workplace history.*
Originally posted on Nov. 2, 2007:
By Julie Sloane
The winner — if you can call it winning — of the Wired News saddest-cubicles contest is David Gunnells, an IT guy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His desk is penned in by heavily used filing cabinets in a windowless conference room, near a poorly ventilated bathroom and a microwave. The overhead light doesn’t work — his mother-in-law was so saddened by his cube that she gave him a lamp — and the other side of the wall is a parking garage. Gunnells recalls a day when one co-worker reheated catfish in the microwave, while another used the bathroom and covered the smell with a stinky air freshener. Lovely.
*If your photo makes us sad enough, we may publish it on WIRED.com. Your photo may be cropped or edited and may be published in any medium.
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