A new “easy unlock” feature appears in the developer channel of Chrome OS. Once enabled, it will let you unlock a Chromebook or Chromebox by placing a trusted Android phone nearby.
A Boston startup is launching yet another in-store smartphone payments app. But Loop believes it has edge. Instead of building a transaction network its using its magnetic field technology to emulate the plastic in your wallet.
Don’t think that wireless NFC tags are just for mobile payments. You can do practically anything with them if you know how to program them with small bits of data. Some free apps make this easy and I’m already on the NFC bandwagon at home.
Tired of carrying hundreds of business cards? What if you only needed to carry one? That’s the idea behind this Moo card with embedded NFC tag inside it. You just tap it to a phone with NFC-capabilities and it share just about any information you want.
Participants in a Mapping Session identified personalization as the key disruptive technology companies can exploit to jump-start mobile shopping. Other Disruption Vectors included location sensing and big data.
Barclaycard US is the latest card issuer to back Google Wallet. The company also backs Isis, the mobile payment joint venture between Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile, illustrating that not even the traditional banking companies know yet which mobile payment standard will be successful.
Sony has been on a quest to climb back into the U.S. handset market, and this month it’s introducing an imaging powerhouse that may help it accomplish that goal. AT&T will start selling Sony’s first U.S. LTE smartphone, the Xperia Ion, on June 24 for $100.
Ever since the smartphone era began, companies have looked for ways to quickly get information from the offline product world onto the phone. Barcode scanning and QR codes work, but what if we could just use a printed solution readable by our phone’s touchscreen?
Phones embedded with near-field communications chips are beginning to proliferate, but their uptake is much slower in North America than in Europe and Asia, according to Berg Insight. Of the 30 million NFC handsets sold, roughly 5 million wound up in the hands of North American consumers.
A Nokia research project called Nokia Hello leverages wireless technology with Near Field Communications (NFC) chips to help people “speak” to each other. I figured it would be a good solution when speaking to someone in a non-native language (it is), but Nokia suggests another use.
