The push that mobile payments need – iPhone 6

While Apple doesn’t talk about future products,latest report that the next iPhone would include mobile-payment capabilities powered by a short-distance wireless technology called near-field communication or NFC. Apple is hosting an event on September 9^th, that’s widely expected to be the debut of the next iPhone or iPhones. Mobile payments, or the notion that you can pay for goods and services at the checkout with your smartphone, may finally break into the mainstream if Apple and the iPhone 6 get involved.

Apple’s embrace of mobile payments would represent a watershed moment for how people pay at drugstores, supermarkets or for cabs. The technology and capability to pay with a tap of your mobile device has been around for years, you can tap an NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S5 or NFC-enabled credit card at point-of-sale terminals found at many Walgreen drugstores, but awareness and usage remain low.  Apple has again the opportunity to transform, disrupt and reshape an entire business sector. It is hard to overestimate what impact Apple could have if it really wants to play in the payments market.

Apple won’t be the first to enter the mobile-payments arena. Google introduced its Google Wallet service in May 2011. The wireless carriers formed their joint venture with the intent to create a platform for mobile payments. Apple tends to stay away from new technologies until it has had a chance to smooth out the kinks. It was two years behind some smartphones in offering an iPhone that could tap into the faster LTE wireless network. NFC was rumored to be included in at least the last two iPhones and could finally make its appearance in the iPhone 6. The technology will be the linchpin to enabling transactions at the checkout.

Struggles

The notion of turning smartphones into true digital wallets including the ability to pay at the register, has been hyped up for years. But so far, it’s been more promise than results. There have been many technical hurdles to making mobile devices an alternative to cash, checks, and credit cards. NFC technology has to be included in both the smartphone and the point-of-sale terminal to work, and it’s been a slow process getting NFC chips into more equipment. NFC has largely been relegated to a feature found on higher-end smartphones such as the Galaxy S5 or the Nexus 5. There’s also confusion on both sides, the merchant and the customer, on how the tech works and why tapping your smartphone on a checkout machine is any faster, better or easier than swiping a card. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem between lack of user adoption and lack of retailer adoption. It’s one reason why even powerhouses such as Google have struggled. Despite a splashy launch of its digital wallet and payment service more than three years ago, Google hasn’t won mainstream acceptance or even awareness  for its mobile wallet. Google hasn’t said how many people are using Google Wallet, but a look at its page on the Google Play store lists more than 47,000 reviews giving it an average of a four-star rating.

The Puzzle

Apple has quietly built the foundation to its mobile-payment service in Passbook, an app introduced two years ago in its iOS software and released as a feature with the iPhone 4S. Passbook has so far served as a repository for airline tickets, membership cards, and credit card statements. While it started out with just a handful of compatible apps, Passbook works with apps from Delta, Starbucks, Fandango, The Home Depot, and more. But it could potentially be more powerful. Apple’s already made great inroads with Passbook, it could totally crack open the mobile payments space in the US. Apple could make up a fifth of the share of the mobile-payment transactions in a short few months after the launch. The company also has the credit or debit card information for virtually all of its customers thanks to its iTunes service, so it doesn’t have to go the extra step of asking people to sign up for a new service. That takes away one of the biggest hurdles to adoption. The last piece of the mobile-payments puzzle with the iPhone is the fingerprint recognition sensor Apple added into last year’s iPhone 5S. That sensor will almost certainly make its way to the upcoming iPhone 6. The fingerprint sensor, which Apple obtained through its acquisition of Authentic in 2012, could serve as a quick and secure way of verifying purchases, not just through online purchases, but large transactions made at big-box retailers such as Best Buy. Today, you can use the fingerprint sensor to quickly buy content from Apple’s iTunes, App and iBooks stores.

The bigger win for Apple is the services and features it could add on to a simple transaction, if it’s successful in raising the awareness of a form of payment that has been quietly lingering for years. Google had previously seen mobile payments as the optimal location for targeted advertisements and offers. It’s those services and features that ultimately matter in the end, replacing a simple credit card swipe isn’t that big of a deal.

 

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: app, Apple, card, card swipe, cash, checkout machine, checks, chips, credit, credit card swipe, credit-card, customer, debit card, Digital wallets, fingerprint recognition, fingerprint sensor, Galaxy S5, Google Wallet, iOS, Iphone, market, merchant, mobile, mobile device, mobile payment, mobile wallet, Near Field Communication, network, Nexus 5, nfc, payment, payment service, platform, point of sale, products, sensor, services, smartphone, software, statements, swiping card, terminals, transactions, wireless technology

Mind-Blowing 3D Trickery for Work or Play Occipital Promises

Mind-Blowing 3D Trickery for Work or Play Occipital Promises

Get in on the ground floor as we look at the most exciting crowdfunded tech projects out there. Structure Sensor, which is pitched as the world’s first 3D sensor for mobile devices. The device is designed to be an attached-hardware add-on for mobile tablets and phones that allows the user to capture spatial models of objects and indoor areas.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing input device for the Xbox 360 game console, you’ll have an initial grasp of how Occipital’s 3D scanner for mobile devices, called “Structure Sensor”, functions. Whereas game add-on Kinect is a sensor for detecting and interpreting movement, new Kickstarter crowdsourced funding project Structure Sensor is for mapping three-dimensional spaces or objects.

What Is It? Occipital’s Structure Sensor is pitched as the world’s first 3D sensor for mobile devices. The device is designed to be an attached-hardware add-on for mobile devices that allows the user to capture spacial models of indoor areas – 3D models of objects – and perform augmented reality. The creator uses rooms, furniture and augmented reality games as examples. The captured 3D models can then be imported into CAD software of the kind used by architects and designers, or to a 3D printer to be replicated.

Technical Details Structure Sensor contains a precision infrared emitter, camera and optics that are housed in an anodized aluminum shell. The shell affixes to a bracket designed to clip to the 4th Generation Apple iPad. Data-streaming connectivity is with Apple’s Lightning Connector. Hardened glass is used to protect the dual infrared lenses. Range is from 40 cm to 3.5 m. Some iOS demo apps included in the package consist of an object scanner; room capture; Fetch, which is a virtual pet; and Ball Physics, an augmented reality demo with virtual balls. An SDK is available.

The Downsides The creator has recently said that the technology is still in development and some planned features haven’t been implemented yet. We’re concerned about the lack of software or brackets for any Android devices, even though the creator has said it will be producing open-source drivers. We would also like to see more work go into precision measurement because we think that an architect planning a remodel, for example, is going to want the same kind of tolerances as are available in laser measurement.

The Upsides Occipital has been involved in panorama-creation apps and a successful shopping-scanner app, so it’s familiar with the spatial and optical-scanning area. The project creator has said it has already inked agreements with manufacturers and suppliers and is almost ready to start manufacturing a run of beta sensors. We like the way that the creator has plans to simply redesign the bracket rather than the entire scanner assembly as new mobile devices come to market.

The Numbers After launching a Kickstarter project on Sept. 17, Occipital already had more than 2,000 backers a week later pledging more than US$700,000 of a $100,000 goal. So, its funding goal has been achieved. The funding period ends Nov. 1. Pledge rewards range from a T-shirt for $25 to a Structure Sensor in your choice of silver or blue, a USB hacker cable, drivers and open CAD models for $349 — everything, in other words, that you need to develop with the iPad.

Underlying Concepts Kinect and Structure Sensor both work on the same principal – one shared also with golfing and shooting-sports range finders  – in that they send out radio signals, like laser, or infrared frequencies that bounce off objects. The returned signal is then interpreted to calculate gestures in 3D for gaming, map an object – in the case of Structure Sensor – or measure golf-hole distance. Varying levels of sophistication are employed in the resulting rendering, depending on software, that can include 3D reconstructed images and so on.

Conclusion Pre-beta, and with available demo apps only, this product is at a supremely early product life-cycle stage, but is a potentially exciting product, particularly for software and app developers. 

Posted in Smartphone Tagged with: 35, 3D Printer, Apple, architects, CAD, camera, iOS, ipad, Mobile Devices, object scanner, occipital, optics, sensor, shopping, tablet