Former Head of Google Wallet Debuts a Universal Payments Terminal

Osama Bedier. David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Osama 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.

Poynt

But 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.

Poynt

At 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.

New Species of Frog Discovered in New York City

Rana he newest species of leopard frog is called. Feinberg, J.A. et al/PLoS One

If 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 One

The 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

MCX

MCX—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 Zambelich

Continuity, 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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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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MIT Media Lab Gets a Transforming Logo, Courtesy of Pentagram

If you make your way over to the MIT Media Lab website, you’ll notice a subtle difference in the top lefthand corner of the page. For the last three years, the space was occupied by a logo that looked like three spotlights projecting multi-colored beams into the unknown distance. Created by Richard The and Roon Kang for the Lab’s 25th anniversary in 2011, the spotlights were generated by an algorithm that could generate up to 40,000 permutations of the logo.

The old MIT Media Lab logo was generated algorithmically.

It was a brilliant bit of design, ever-changing just like the Media Lab itself. So when MIT got in touch with Pentagram partner Michael Bierut about overhauling the identity, Bierut was surprised by the ask. “I said, ‘you already have a logo,’” he recalls.

The 2011 identity was an apt visual representation of the Lab’s varied research, which includes (but is definitely not limited to) topics like synthetic neurobiology, game design, prosthetic design and material research. But MIT wanted something more stable, something that communicated the idea that these 23 separate research labs were part of the bigger, cohesive MIT family. “It came down to the issue that every organization that’s trying to communicate graphically comes to, which is: how do you get unity without uniformity?” says Bierut. To find an answer for that dilemma, Bierut and his team looked to the past.

MIT might be best known for its engineering prowess, but it has a rich history of graphic design, too. In the 1962, Muriel Cooper, the longtime art director for MIT Press, designed the organization’s now-famous logo: Seven vertical white lines set against a black background that suggested the name MIT Press. It was simple and concise, a nod to the Bauhaus legacy of design. It was also enduring; more than 50 years later, MIT Press is still using the same logo. Cooper went on to found the Media Lab’s Visual Language Workshop, which ushered in a new technologically-focused age of graphic design.

The decades-old MIT Press logo inspired Pentagram’s new design. MIT Press

Bierut wanted to tap into the enduring nature of Cooper’s logo, without losing the flexibility that its previous logos had established. So Bierut and fellow designer Aron Fay decided to build their new identity system on the backbone of The’s 2011 logo: a seven by seven grid. “We sort of broke down the anniversary logo to the underlying grid that generated those shapes. Then using that same grid we drew first the ML monogram,” says Bierut.

From there, Fay suggested that the same could be done for every research group in the Media Lab. Using that same seven by seven grid, the designers mapped out how wordmarks of various groups could be be arranged. For example, the Camera Culture wordmark is two Cs nested into each other. Playful Systems shows a rotated P with the S sitting above the stem, while Mediated Matter uses the same M you see in the main logo, tucked into another like two puzzle pieces. Standing alone, it’s a little hard to decipher what each of the acronyms mean, but paired with a Helvetica descriptor, it becomes more clear. “We wanted them all to feel like they went together,” says Bierut. “So someone who was looking at them would sense an underlying DNA that made them all part of a closely knit family.”

These “glyphs” are static, but you can easily imagine how they could be rearranged, much like The and Kang’s morphing spotlights. And indeed, Bierut says his team is at work on an algorithm that would calculate the possible positions for each letter within the grid, meaning research groups will eventually have even more flexibility to toy around with their monograms, if they should want to. For now, you’ll see the letters, in all their regimented glory, splashed across tote bags, business cards and the occasional decorative gourd. “I do know that at least one group name glyph was carved into a pumpkin,” says Bierut, referring to the Object Based Media lab. “It kind of looks like a face, anyway.”

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This Self-Stabilizing Boat’s Deck Is Always Flat, Even in Rough Waters

The skipper spotted a passenger ferry a few hundred yards ahead of us and decided we could catch up. He piled on the throttle, speeding through the San Francisco Bay. The afternoon wasn’t windy and the water was calm, so Steve Shonk, lead engineer and test boat captain for Velodyne Marine, was intent on finding waves where he could get them. The wake from the ferry was his best bet.

We were cruising through the Bay on Velodyne’s Martini 1.5, the second version of a new kind of boat: one with an active suspension to make going over waves feel like, well, nothing. It’s a breakthrough that could make ocean search and rescue missions, where speed is crucial, safer. It could appeal to luxury yacht owners and commercial fisherman. And it makes chasing ferries a lot more fun.

The system is the work of David Hall, the engineer who founded Velodyne Acoustics in 1983 and invented an accelerometer-based servo system to control the movement of the cones used in subwoofers. In 2005, Hall developed the Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) system now used by Google’s self-driving cars to map the physical world. Not long after that, he moved on to the idea of the Martini: a boat that rides so smoothly, no wave will spill your cocktail.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The mechanics of the active suspension aren’t too complicated. Like a pontoon boat, the Martini sits on two long hulls shaped like skis. Those are connected to a platform at the front and back by metal arms. Each corner, where the arm meets the hull, has a linear accelerometer, a pneumatic airbag, and a DC servo motor. To match the movement of the ocean, detected by the accelerometer, the motor turns a ball screw that pushes or pulls the control arm, lowering and raising that end of the hull as necessary.

The result is a boat that works like an Olympic hurdler: The legs fly up and down to clear obstacles, the torso and head stay level. With each corner acting independently, the system can handle all kinds of motion: pitch (front to back), roll (side to side), and heave (when the whole boat goes up and down). And you don’t have to worry about upsetting the balance of the boat by walking around, either. The airbags change pressure to keep the platform level when people are cargo move around.

Hall launched and tested the Martini One, his proof of concept, in the spring and summer of 2012. The small boat looked like a ping pong table strapped onto a pair of canoes. It could handle only 3-foot waves, but it showed the basic idea worked. In October 2012, Velodyne launched the 35-foot Martini 1.5, which we are on. It’s a more capable iteration of the technology, but it’s still far from something anyone would buy. It also looks like a ping pong table on canoes, but everything’s a bit bigger, and there’s a little cabin on top. I’m glad it’s there, since the boat is made to handle 5.5-foot waves at 30 mph. At that speed, the wind makes being on deck unpleasant, no matter how level the boat.

Shonk says it’s too far from starting sales to discuss pricing, but there’s no reason any Martini boat should cost a huge amount. It’s the application of technology, not the hardware itself, that’s new. “There’s nothing really expensive about this system.”

The idea of keep ships stable at sea has been around for centuries, and systems that actively counteract movement popped up in the early 20th century. Fin stabilizers extend past the hull into the water, and turn to counteract motion, similar to ailerons on airplanes. The Velodyne system is a different approach, moving the passenger compartment of the ship above the water. And unlike stabilizing fins, Shonk says, the active suspension doesn’t make the ship less hydrodynamic.

When we caught up with the ferry, Shonk brought our speed back down to 30 mph and began cutting back and forth through the large boat’s wake. At high speeds, the boat turns by lowering one hull or the other, like a skier. Even as we slammed into waves head on, the platform stayed level. After a minute, I overrode my instinct to bend my knees to absorb the bouncing of the waves, and got comfortable. The Martini’s “knees” were doing all the work.

The full impact of the experience didn’t hit me until I got off the Martini 1.5 and into the Protector 28 chase boat. The 28 is designed to provide stability and shock absorption in rough seas, that’s why Velodyne uses it. But crashing through waves I barely felt aboard the Martini, I felt like a pair of dice in a Yahtzee cup. Getting off the Martini had the added bonus of seeing it at work from a better angle. Standing on the platform, you can tell the hulls are moving up and down, but it’s hard to appreciate their speed, matching each swell in real time.

That’s the experience Velodyne hopes to match next month, when it launches the Martini 2.0. This latest prototype is made to prove the suspension system can work on larger ships and at higher speeds. Thanks in part to bigger engines (520 horsepower instead of 250), it’s designed to tackle 7-foot waves at 50 mph.

The ability to travel at high speeds through rough water will have broad appeal, Shonk says. It could be used for Marine and Coast Guard transport, to cut down on the minor injuries that come with bouncing around in a boat. Whale watching, commercial fishing, and filming sporting events from the water could all be made safer and more pleasant. There’s a potential market for yacht tenders: The Martini boat could offer passengers a smooth ride out to yachts that can’t make it to the dock for whatever reason.

But before it can go to market, Velodyne has to mate its system to something that looks and feels like a regular boat. The 2.0 is a step in the transition. Its twin hulls will be connected by rigid box beams. They will still be able to move independently to counteract waves, but the design will work like a monohull. That will allow for a more standard cabin, useful for doing things other than proving the suspension technology works.

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Hackers Are Using Gmail Drafts to Update Their Malware and Steal Data

WIRED

In his career-ending extramarital affair that came to light in 2012, General David Petraeus used a stealthy technique to communicate with his lover Paula Broadwell: the pair left messages for each other in the drafts folder of a shared Gmail account. Now hackers have learned the same trick. Only instead of a mistress, they’re sharing their love letters with data-stealing malware buried deep on a victim’s computer.

Researchers at the security startup Shape Security say they’ve found a strain of malware on a client’s network that uses that new, furtive form of “command and control”—the communications channel that connects hackers to their malicious software—allowing them to send the programs updates and instructions and retrieve stolen data. Because the commands are hidden in unassuming Gmail drafts that are never even sent, the hidden communications channel is particularly difficult to detect.

“What we’re seeing here is command and control that’s using a fully allowed service, and that makes it superstealthy and very hard to identify,” says Wade Williamson, a security researcher at Shape. “It’s stealthily passing messages back and forth without even having to press send. You never see the bullet fired.”

Here’s how the attack worked in the case Shape observed: The hacker first set up an anonymous Gmail account, then infected a computer on the target’s network with malware. (Shape declined to name the victim of the attack.) After gaining control of the target machine, the hacker opened their anonymous Gmail account on the victim’s computer in an invisible instance of Internet Explorer—IE allows itself to be run by Windows programs so that they can seamlessly query web pages for information, so the user has no idea a web page is even open on the computer.

With the Gmail drafts folder open and hidden, the malware is programmed to use a Python script to retrieve commands and code that the hacker enters into that draft field. The malware responds with its own acknowledgments in Gmail draft form, along with the target data it’s programmed to exfiltrate from the victim’s network. All the communication is encoded to prevent it being spotted by intrusion detection or data-leak prevention. The use of a reputable web service instead of the usual IRC or HTTP protocols that hackers typically use to command their malware also helps keep the hack hidden.

Williamson says the new infection is in fact a variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) called Icoscript first found by the German security firm G-Data in August. At the time, G-Data said that Icoscript had been infecting machines since 2012, and that its use of Yahoo Mail emails to obscure its command and control had helped to keep it from being discovered. The switch to Gmail drafts, says Williamson, could make the malware stealthier still.

Thanks in part to that stealth, Shape doesn’t have any sense of just how many computers might be infected with the Icoscript variant they found. But given its data-stealing intent, they believe it’s likely a closely targeted attack rather than a widespread infection.

For victims of the malware, Shape says there’s no easy way to detect its surreptitious data theft without blocking Gmail altogether. The responsibility may instead fall on Google to make its webmail less friendly to automated malware. A Google spokesperson responded to an email from WIRED with only a statement that “our systems actively track malicious and programmatic usage of Gmail and we quickly remove abusive accounts we identify.”

Until the automated malware communication is cut off, however, Williamson says Gmail will offer a problematic new path for malware to adapt and update itself. “It makes the malware that much more dynamic,” says Williamson. “It’s the lifeblood of this attack.”

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The Wonderful Possibilities of Connecting Your Fridge to the Internet

Giordano Poloni/Getty Images

The first refrigerator connected to the Internet was in a wired 100-year-old house in the Netherlands, where it existed alongside networked lights, doorbell, mailbox, and, yes, even a toilet. The refrigerator went online on July 12, 1998, and it’s still there. All it does is record and broadcast every time the fridge door opens. As of this writing, its owner, Alex van Es, has opened it almost 70,000 times in the last 16 years. Call it the Quantified Fridge.

Outside of the pure voyeuristic novelty, there’s not a lot of value from this information. It’s certainly not life altering, and it’s certainly not going to lead to everyone’s favorite new design pastime: behavior change. Not all data is created equal, and certainly not all of it is meaningful to collect and display. I’m pretty sure the number of times a refrigerator has been opened falls into this category.

Dan Saffer

Dan Saffer is a Creative Director at Smart Design, Dan leads teams in creating new interaction paradigms across a wide range of products, spanning both digital and physical. He is the author of Microinteractions. You can follow him on Twitter at @odannyboy.

However, one valid reason to put something on the Internet is to check its status. What is this object doing, and is that good or bad? How much energy/resources/time is it consuming? Is something broken? Connecting sensors to the right internal components and sending that data online where it can be viewed via an app or web page is a way of giving you x-ray vision. But the emphasis here is on “right.” I probably don’t care how many times the fridge door has been opened, but I do care if the compressor breaks and everything in my freezer starts melting.

And that’s the second reason to put anything on the Internet: to be able to adjust it if something is wrong. If I get an alert that the temperature inside my refrigerator is suddenly rising, it would be great to be able to do something about it: attempt to fix the problem right there, order a new part, or replace the device with a new one. You could summon a repairman to come fix it.

This kind of connecting of objects to services is the third reason to connect something to the Internet: to easily engage resources outside of the object to improve, fix, or extend the object. If my dishwasher runs out of detergent, reorder it or add it to my shopping list.

Connecting your refrigerator to your shopping list has been a dream of manufacturers since the first commercial Internet fridge launched in 2000 by LG. But do you—does anyone—want to scan bar codes as they put food into their so-called “smart” refrigerator?

What connectivity shouldn’t do is turn you into a slave to your devices, constantly monitoring them or, worse, feeding them data. Don’t make me answer questions or alerts unless they are dire. But these are not successful arguments against connectivity, since they are design problems that can be solved.

Problems that Internet-connected appliances must resolve:
• You don’t want to remove physical controls: In the early dawn light, as you groggily stand in front of your coffee machine, do you want to find your phone and launch an app so you can get your morning caffeine fix? No you do not.

• You don’t need to run general-purpose apps: “Hey, I’ve got a few minutes. How about I use the screen on my stove to surf Facebook?” said no one, ever.

• You don’t need irrelevant data: Knowing how many gallons of dishwashing detergent I’ve used over the years? Fascinating stuff.

• You don’t want unrelated data collected and sold: I don’t want my appliances spying on me, or even suspect that they do. Observe me and my patterns, yes. Spy on me, no. And there’s a big difference. Spying involves giving away private information (secrets) to people I don’t want to know them. If you are using information from my dishwasher to upsell me life insurance, that’s intrusive. It feels creepy in a way that knowing I’m out of detergent and offering to buy more does not.

Even if all of this get solved, why bother put your refrigerator on the Internet? Especially if hackers could turn it into a spam machine? So it can be smart.

Smart appliances humbly predict our needs and modestly adjust as little as possible to accommodate them. This sometimes requires connecting to the network for a better, bigger brain or to draw upon the collected intelligence of similar objects. You don’t need to stuff lots of processing power and memory into the object itself if it can use resources in the cloud. Imagine if your refrigerator could learn how to keep food cooler more cheaply by looking at the data from other refrigerators in the area? Collective machine intelligence and the benefits it could engender such as fixing model-specific problems and product efficiency are good reasons to enable network connectivity.

We can also have a conversation with smart appliances. They can tell us what they’re up to when we ask, or tell us something’s wrong when it’s essential. They can observe our lives and provide small insights we don’t even notice. They can talk to other appliances, and pass along helpful information, the way that Nest Protect will tell the Nest thermostat to shut off the furnace if it detects carbon monoxide.
We can have a new relationship with our appliances, one where the previously mute boxes of plastic and metal become new platforms—not for apps, but for meaning and value. By learning how we use them and how we live our lives, they’ll be able to provide services to us we can’t see right now. They’ll set themselves up and fit into the existing household by knowing what—and who—is there and adapting to them. Appliances will grow and change with you and the house.

Connectivity, just like installing a microprocessor was decades ago, has to be a means to an end: more effective, more efficient, more resilient, more transparent, more powerful, more interesting, more enjoyable, more adaptable products.

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23 Beautiful Products to Make Waking Up Suck a Little Less

Chipper Chirper A peaceful awakening makes for a calm day—at least until you hit the office. Artist Martin Smith made this minimalist wind-up clock to mimic early-morning birdsong. A rubber accordion emits a pleasant, nonabrasive chirp while the feather flutters. Tweet Clock | $70

Chipper Chirper A peaceful awakening makes for a calm day—at least until you hit the office. Artist Martin Smith made this minimalist wind-up clock to mimic early-morning birdsong. A rubber accordion emits a pleasant, nonabrasive chirp while the feather flutters. Tweet Clock | $70 Slumber Jack This sleep tracker seeks to rebuild your slumber from the bottom up. A pad beneath your sheet tracks your heart rate, breathing, and body movements. The bedside unit detects environmental changes and uses its LED and sound system to gently wake you. Withings Aura | $299

Slumber Jack This sleep tracker seeks to rebuild your slumber from the bottom up. A pad beneath your sheet tracks your heart rate, breathing, and body movements. The bedside unit detects environmental changes and uses its LED and sound system to gently wake you. Withings Aura | $299 Great O'Clock Before you climb out of bed to wrestle with your digital devices, enjoy a dash of analog beauty. The defining characteristic of Lexon's tiny clock is its striking bare-bones design. But it's not so minimal: There's an alarm, of course, and a tiny light so you can see the time at night. Lexon Beside Clock | $38

Great O'Clock Before you climb out of bed to wrestle with your digital devices, enjoy a dash of analog beauty. The defining characteristic of Lexon's tiny clock is its striking bare-bones design. But it's not so minimal: There's an alarm, of course, and a tiny light so you can see the time at night. Lexon Beside Clock | $38 Ship Shape Your toiletries will want to sail across the universe—or at least the sink—in this yellow submarine. Four magnetically attached compartments hold the essentials. Made of hefty porcelain, it's finished with a pop of yellow rubberized paint, so it's both vibrant and easy to clean. Yellow Submarino Organizer | $70

Ship Shape Your toiletries will want to sail across the universe—or at least the sink—in this yellow submarine. Four magnetically attached compartments hold the essentials. Made of hefty porcelain, it's finished with a pop of yellow rubberized paint, so it's both vibrant and easy to clean. Yellow Submarino Organizer | $70 Bee Keeper Sure, the bee is cute, but this toothbrush holder gets everything else right too. It suction-cups to your mirror, freeing up valuable real estate and keeping toothpaste gunk from accumulating. Plus, the bristles are encased, keeping them protected from, uh, foreign particles. Bumble Bee Toothbrush Holder | $4

Bee Keeper Sure, the bee is cute, but this toothbrush holder gets everything else right too. It suction-cups to your mirror, freeing up valuable real estate and keeping toothpaste gunk from accumulating. Plus, the bristles are encased, keeping them protected from, uh, foreign particles. Bumble Bee Toothbrush Holder | $4 Grow Up Your bathroom is basically a tropical rain forest already, what with the steam and the various growing fungi. Beautify the experience with a vertical plant stand. Attach the 9.8-foot central rod to your ceiling and floor and your potted green things are free to circle up it like native vines. Ikea Plant Stand | $35

Grow Up Your bathroom is basically a tropical rain forest already, what with the steam and the various growing fungi. Beautify the experience with a vertical plant stand. Attach the 9.8-foot central rod to your ceiling and floor and your potted green things are free to circle up it like native vines. Ikea Plant Stand | $35 Look Sharp It's too pricey for your travel kit, but this straight razor makes a precious home groomer. The carbon steel blade will last decades, and the carbon fiber handle won't give out before the blade does. It's a choice heirloom, just make sure your kid doesn't turn into Sweeney Todd. Bison + Max Sprecher Straight Razor | $895

Look Sharp It's too pricey for your travel kit, but this straight razor makes a precious home groomer. The carbon steel blade will last decades, and the carbon fiber handle won't give out before the blade does. It's a choice heirloom, just make sure your kid doesn't turn into Sweeney Todd. Bison + Max Sprecher Straight Razor | $895 Reflect Yourself Full-length mirrors add a touch of class to your bedroom, but this one also adds functionality. Its rubber frame is propped up by a ladder-like stand with three rungs for hanging towels, clothes, or whatever helps you prepare for the day. Umbra Hub Floor Mirror | $300

Reflect Yourself Full-length mirrors add a touch of class to your bedroom, but this one also adds functionality. Its rubber frame is propped up by a ladder-like stand with three rungs for hanging towels, clothes, or whatever helps you prepare for the day. Umbra Hub Floor Mirror | $300 Station Agent The speaker grille and analog knobs are cutely retro, but this radio's rubberized exterior signals a decidedly modern sense of style. It manages to reference the past without dipping into sappy nostalgia. We can't say the same about the Prairie Home Companion coming out of the speaker. Lexon Mezzo Radio | $77

Station Agent The speaker grille and analog knobs are cutely retro, but this radio's rubberized exterior signals a decidedly modern sense of style. It manages to reference the past without dipping into sappy nostalgia. We can't say the same about the Prairie Home Companion coming out of the speaker. Lexon Mezzo Radio | $77 Power Drip It's easy to grasp why people love Nespresso's capsule-based machines: the convenience of on-demand java is a huge win on busy mornings. But the VertuoLine's appeal runs deeper than just instant gratification. Whatever appliance delivers your morning cup, it'll be difficult to find one more beautiful. Nespresso VertuoLine | $299

Power Drip It's easy to grasp why people love Nespresso's capsule-based machines: the convenience of on-demand java is a huge win on busy mornings. But the VertuoLine's appeal runs deeper than just instant gratification. Whatever appliance delivers your morning cup, it'll be difficult to find one more beautiful. Nespresso VertuoLine | $299 Fruit Puncher On a juice fast? Get your juice, fast. This beast's 850-watt motor extracts every last ounce of liquid from your fruits and greens in just seconds. A micromesh basket filters out pulp, and a special spigot keeps things from getting too frothy. Breville Juice Fountain Plus | $150

Fruit Puncher On a juice fast? Get your juice, fast. This beast's 850-watt motor extracts every last ounce of liquid from your fruits and greens in just seconds. A micromesh basket filters out pulp, and a special spigot keeps things from getting too frothy. Breville Juice Fountain Plus | $150 Tread on Me It's hard to imagine a trash can looking sexy, but this bin pulls it off. The brushed steel lid doesn't just flip down over the top, it tucks discreetly into the vessel, sitting flush with the lip of the cylinder. The lid is also hinged to open inside the bin, not behind it, leaving your walls unmarred. Menu Pedal Bin | $225

Tread on Me It's hard to imagine a trash can looking sexy, but this bin pulls it off. The brushed steel lid doesn't just flip down over the top, it tucks discreetly into the vessel, sitting flush with the lip of the cylinder. The lid is also hinged to open inside the bin, not behind it, leaving your walls unmarred. Menu Pedal Bin | $225 No Baggage Stop using tea bags and discover loose-leaf bliss with this German-designed steeping contraption. Put your leaves into the stainless-steel strainer and dip it into a cup of hot water. When it's done, the silicon sleeve flips inside out, making a little dish that catches excess liquid and prevents spills. Normann Copenhagen Silicone and Steel Tea Strainer | $27

No Baggage Stop using tea bags and discover loose-leaf bliss with this German-designed steeping contraption. Put your leaves into the stainless-steel strainer and dip it into a cup of hot water. When it's done, the silicon sleeve flips inside out, making a little dish that catches excess liquid and prevents spills. Normann Copenhagen Silicone and Steel Tea Strainer | $27 Pear Trap Oxo brings ergonomic design savvy to the toddling set with this ingenious catch-all. A bendy vessel at the end of its bib collects fallen peas and carrots. And when you're aaallll done, it forms a pouch for stashing the spoon and the rolled-up bib. Oxo On-the-Go Bib & Spoon Set | $17

Pear Trap Oxo brings ergonomic design savvy to the toddling set with this ingenious catch-all. A bendy vessel at the end of its bib collects fallen peas and carrots. And when you're aaallll done, it forms a pouch for stashing the spoon and the rolled-up bib. Oxo On-the-Go Bib & Spoon Set | $17 Improves With Age The problem with kids? They just keep growing! Stokke eases this dilemma with its adjustable high chair. The baby bassinet snaps out, the toddler seat snaps in. For later in life, there's a simple wooden seat. The height of the footsteps can even be adjusted as those little legs get longer. Stokke Steps Chair | $279

Improves With Age The problem with kids? They just keep growing! Stokke eases this dilemma with its adjustable high chair. The baby bassinet snaps out, the toddler seat snaps in. For later in life, there's a simple wooden seat. The height of the footsteps can even be adjusted as those little legs get longer. Stokke Steps Chair | $279 Tea Party Watch fluid dynamics at work as your tea steeps in this transparent kettle. Its attached tea egg has a silicone strap; when the steeping is complete, pull the egg up to its resting place at the top of the kettle and pour away. No drips! Menu Kettle Teapot | $65

Tea Party Watch fluid dynamics at work as your tea steeps in this transparent kettle. Its attached tea egg has a silicone strap; when the steeping is complete, pull the egg up to its resting place at the top of the kettle and pour away. No drips! Menu Kettle Teapot | $65 Johnny's Bench We don't know where the 2028 Olympic Games will be held, but your kid should start training now if they're going to win gold. This balance bench is the perfect perch for your budding gymnast. Lazy kids can just sit on it while they pull on their rain boots. Ikea Balance Bench | $50

Johnny's Bench We don't know where the 2028 Olympic Games will be held, but your kid should start training now if they're going to win gold. This balance bench is the perfect perch for your budding gymnast. Lazy kids can just sit on it while they pull on their rain boots. Ikea Balance Bench | $50 Rear View Even the hottest new to-do list app can't beat a simple grocery list stuck to the fridge. Especially if it's held there with a giraffe's hindquarters. This set of six wild animal butts will keep those essential notes, like your recipe for Nutella pancakes, front and center. Animal Butt Magnets | $13

Rear View Even the hottest new to-do list app can't beat a simple grocery list stuck to the fridge. Especially if it's held there with a giraffe's hindquarters. This set of six wild animal butts will keep those essential notes, like your recipe for Nutella pancakes, front and center. Animal Butt Magnets | $13 Under Wraps Give the gift of light with Stephen Johnson's whimsical design. What looks like a big, decorative bow, 20 inches wide, is actually a lamp. Stick it on the wall, stick it to the table, or hang it from the ceiling. Artecnica Surprise Surprise Lamp | $256

Under Wraps Give the gift of light with Stephen Johnson's whimsical design. What looks like a big, decorative bow, 20 inches wide, is actually a lamp. Stick it on the wall, stick it to the table, or hang it from the ceiling. Artecnica Surprise Surprise Lamp | $256 Storm Trooper The word umbrella derives from the Latin umbra, for shadow—and it seems like most rickety umbrellas are made to block sunbeams alone. But Gerwin Hoogendoorn's design is built for storms. Its asymmetrical shape turns into the wind to better guard against rain, and the canopy can withstand gusts over 60 mph. Senz Original Umbrella | $89

Storm Trooper The word umbrella derives from the Latin umbra, for shadow—and it seems like most rickety umbrellas are made to block sunbeams alone. But Gerwin Hoogendoorn's design is built for storms. Its asymmetrical shape turns into the wind to better guard against rain, and the canopy can withstand gusts over 60 mph. Senz Original Umbrella | $89 Lean In Plastic chairs don't have to be flimsy or uncomfortable. The relaxed resting position of this stackable polypropylene gem, designed by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, is augmented by 9-degree forward rock, so you can tackle those tougher problems with improved posture. Vitra Tip Ton Chair | $335

Lean In Plastic chairs don't have to be flimsy or uncomfortable. The relaxed resting position of this stackable polypropylene gem, designed by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, is augmented by 9-degree forward rock, so you can tackle those tougher problems with improved posture. Vitra Tip Ton Chair | $335 Space Capsule Bedroom storage is a necessity, but it can also be beautiful. These units, designed by architect Anna Castelli Ferrieri, are in the collections of both New York's MoMA and Paris' Pompidou. Pick from different designs to fit your needs and add casters to keep them mobile. Kartell Componibili Modular System | $50–220

Space Capsule Bedroom storage is a necessity, but it can also be beautiful. These units, designed by architect Anna Castelli Ferrieri, are in the collections of both New York's MoMA and Paris' Pompidou. Pick from different designs to fit your needs and add casters to keep them mobile. Kartell Componibili Modular System | $50–220
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Rocket Headed for Space Station Explodes After Liftoff

An unmanned Antares rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded just seconds after taking off this evening. The rocket, which launched from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia at 6:22 pm ET, was operated by the Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The cause of the “catastrophic anomaly” is not clear, and the team was not tracking any issues before the launch, according to NASA mission control. No injuries were reported, and all personnel have been accounted for. Orbital teams are now securing the crash site and telemetry data from the flight.

The rocket was carrying a Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft, which was to be boosted into orbit above Earth and rendezvous with the ISS on Nov. 2. It was carrying 5,050 pounds of cargo, including food, flight procedures books, crew equipment, and equipment for science experiments onboard.

Orbital has a contract with NASA for eight missions to resupply the ISS. This was the third of those missions. Orbital and NASA are determining when a press conference will be held, and if the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will be involved in the investigation.

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iOS 8.1 With Apple Pay Now Available, Here’s What Else It Brings To Your iPhone And iPad

Apple’s iOS 8.1 arrives today, and it brings with it some impressive new abilities. First and foremost, at least in terms of its long-term impact, is probably the introduction of Apple Pay, the new mobile payment solution built into iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and the new iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3. But 8.1 also offers the ability to send/receive texts and phone calls from your phone on your Mac, the return of “Camera Roll,” the public beta of iCloud Library and more.

Apple’s first major update for iOS 8 is a mix of features that didn’t quite make the launch of the original software, and things that the company is adding based on user feedback, like the return of Camera Roll. The ability to make and receive calls on your Mac, as well as “green bubble” (i.e. non-iMessage) SMS, was something first announced at WWDC in June, but required OS X Yosemite to run, so it makes sense that it wouldn’t arrive until after the launch of Apple’s new desktop update last week – still, this too likely needed a little more time in the oven, why is why it didn’t launch baked into iOS 8 in September.

Having used iOS 8.1 briefly before its release, I can say that on the iPhone it’s a big improvement, thanks in large part to the communications sharing features it brings between desktop and mobile. The ability to make and receive calls at your desk, and to get texts from your friends even if they’re not using Apple devices, is a great boon, provided you don’t have too noisy a phone. If you receive a heavy volume of texts and calls, only some of which are actually all that important, you might find the symphony of pings a bit much, but any texts/calls inbound to me are generally few and far between, as well as things I need to genuinely pay attention to.

Bringing Camera Roll back does eliminate some confusion in iOS 8.1 device media management, though I must confess I was never left all that confused by its absence in the first place. As for Apple Pay, while it seems like the feature launch in iOS 8.1 with the most long-term potential, initially it’s going to be limited by retail availability, and also the fact that it’s U.S.-locked – a fact which means I won’t have a chance to trial it in a real-world situation for the time begin. In staged demos with live terminals, however, it performs very well.

iOS 8.1 is available for your device as an over-the-air update, which you can find by going to Settings > General > Software Update; you can also plug your phone or tablet into your computer and update via iTunes, which might be preferable if you’re still on an OS version earlier than 8.0, since the size requirements for over-the-air are significant. To use the new Continuity features with your Mac, you’ll have to download and install OS X 10.10 from the Mac App Store, which is a free update.

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Smart Homes of the Future Will Know Us by Our Heartbeats

The Nymi. Bionym via YouTube

Kevin Foreman believes that homes will soon become intelligent enough to distinguish between family members and guests within physical spaces and adapt to individual needs based on biometrics like fingerprints, body temperatures and even the rhythm of our own heartbeats.

In the very near future as you walk through your home, a small device worn around the wrist will authenticate your identity by pairing itself to your specific heartbeat, allowing your home to automatically adjust the lighting, room temperature and play custom music based on personalized preferences and pre-configured profiles.

While this may sound like some futuristic mash-up of daily life straight out of Oblivion, Iron Man or even The Jetsons, it’s really not so far off and indeed, several companies are already pouring millions of dollars into developing technologies that seamlessly integrate our digital and physical worlds within our cars and homes.

Sitting alongside Foreman, director of product vision at the digital experience firm Vectorform headquartered in the nation’s automotive capital of Detroit, is an intellectual dialogue in both abstraction and technical innovation. His precise and metered speech comes off warm, yet controlled, and his eyes light up as he demonstrates his new Moto 360 smartwatch that according to him, “takes the conventions of a watch and embraces them with fashion and the perception of technology.”

The industry’s advancements in wearable technologies like the Moto watch, powered by Android, and the yet-to-be-released Apple Watch, are breaking down the screens that contain our daily lives, and will allow us to live in the real world without distraction while still being connected. He points to Google Glass as a step in the right direction.

“The more you can remove the UI, the better the user experience. We want to reinvent the smart home experience and make it almost invisible,” Foreman said. “Wearables allow us to remove the distractions of traditional mobile devices, and give us new input streams that enable improved contextual information gathering and sharing. As our mobile devices become larger and more unwieldy, wearables are becoming smaller and more invisible. Expect new wearables to look more like fashion accessories, rather than pieces of technology.”

Indeed, one of the barriers preventing the smart home industry from taking off is that the average consumer hasn’t yet adopted these connected lifestyle experiences because the value to them is not yet clearly defined.

“To date, the smart home lacks a killer app to drive these experiences but once this is made available, consumer adoption will skyrocket,” he said in our interview. “Providing real-time feedback is the best way to get consumers interested in adopting smart home technologies.”

In order to address these problems, Foreman’s team identified the one thing that homeowners want to manage more efficiently — real-time energy consumption — and conducted research on market entry points to determine the best way to introduce their idea to the masses. What the team at Vectorform found was that consumers don’t like to place trust in third-party vendors in their homes but would rather receive new energy-saving technologies from their established utility companies.

Then his team went to work developing a prototype device and app called PowerScan that allows people to measure the energy consumption of individual household appliances by just holding the app up to a power cord. Much like those bulky, yellow multi-meters used in high school physics classes (but way more complex), the app measures electromagnetic fields generated by appliances to calculate wattage usage and power consumption metrics.

Vectorform approached DTE Energy, a local power company based in Detroit, who worked in partnership over the past two years to bring DTE Insight, a complete home energy management solution, to their customers. Within three months, the platform has received over 25,000 users and is expected to achieve between a 9-12 percent reduction in energy savings.

“The rise of the smart home comes in integrating wearable devices like Glass and the ability to chain multiple verbal or touch-based commands together and having devices communicate with beacon-based technologies that use occupancy rather than motion.” As Foreman mentioned in a playful tone, motion powered lights in a bathroom sometimes turn off before you are finished in there and we’ve all had an experience sitting in the darkness trying to wave vigorously to trigger the sensor back on, but micro-location beacons run on BLE are based on proximity rather than motion.

Now, with the right devices, proximity as well as personal preferences can be automated through wearable technologies like Nymi, a device worn on the wrist that authenticates an individual’s identity through his distinct heartbeat variability.

Foreman’s colleague Taylor Hanson is the director of accounts at Vectorform’s Seattle office and helped the company discover Nymi by participating in a developer contest aimed to find the best use cases for the product and believes it’s the missing piece for the connected home.

“We submitted our idea around Nymi being an integral piece into the smart home, allowing for increased security and seamless authentication, while also providing location information throughout the home,” said Foreman. “We were chosen as a winner of that contest and have been working with Nymi to integrate these ideas.”

Hanson added, “The next step is allowing wearables to tap into a person’s body temperature and having rooms automatically adjust the thermostat to an optimal setting configured for the user. We also see the potential of wearables as the becoming the centralized access to all your digital content. Nymi knows who you are and can authenticate commands on your behalf.”

Both Hanson and Foreman believe the future of smart home adoption comes in establishing clear standards to unify all smart home technologies and is working to develop the backbone that allows disparate products to communicate seamlessly with one another. While companies like Google, Samsung and Microsoft and industry organizations like MoCA have made strides along these lines, overcoming this hurdle will create a green field of opportunities for the smart home industry.

Richard L. Tso is a journalist covering the intersection of advertising, social media, technology and music.

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