Hell for leather? Wallets 'will be unnecessary by 2016'

Get ready to say goodbye to your leather friend; PayPal has told TechRadar that we are still on track for a wallet-less shopping experience by 2016, at least if you choose to opt for mobile payments.

PayPal's Rob Skinner believes that a bold claim made in 2011 by the payments giant - namely that we could choose to ditch our wallets inside five years - is still 'very much on track' as mobile payment steadily seeps into our everyday lives.

"We will see a big change," insisted Skinner. "We said 2016 would be the year you no longer need a wallet to shop on the high street and I think that's still true.

"We made that prediction at the end of 2011 and I still think that we are absolutely on target for that.

"Of course there's a caveat that it didn't mean you wouldn't have a wallet, but that it was a choice and the places that you go to would take mobile payment - that was the fundamental point."

Supermarket sweep

Of course, we're not there yet, and consumers will have to make a major shift in their behaviour as well as the shops that we all use on a daily basis getting with the 21st Century.

"The hold-outs tend to be traditional retailers - you wouldn't go hungry or thirsty because it's pretty straightforward to get a coffee or a pizza - but that net is growing," added Skinner.

"Increasingly you'll be able to buy your wardrobe - clothes, not the wooden container. Supermarkets are not there yet but I don't think that's going to be that far away.

"I don't know [which supermarket brand] will be the first but increasingly the retailers are getting used to apps and consumers doing so much more with them on mobile."

Obviously we'll be sad to no longer have a dog-eared receipt graveyard in our pockets or bags but we're looking forward to seeing if PayPal's claim comes to fruition.

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HP Slate7 VoiceTab voice-calling tablet launched in India at Rs. 16,990

HP, the former top PC manufacturer, has launched a voice-calling Android tablet in India, the Slate7 VoiceTab at Rs. 16,990, alongside its Slate6 VoiceTab phablet. The company has not revealed the availability details of the HP Slate7 VoiceTab tablet for the market.

The HP Slate7 VoiceTab runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean out-of-the-box and comes with dual-SIM functionality with voice-calling and dual standby support. Notably, the tablet much like the HP Slate6 VoiceTab phablet supports one normal SIM and other Micro-SIM. The Slate7 VoiceTab features a 7-inch (1280x800 pixels) HD IPS display. The tablet is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core Marvell PXA1088 processor alongside 1GB of RAM. It sports a 5-megapixel rear camera and also houses a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.

The HP Slate7 VoiceTab comes with 16GB inbuilt storage, which is further expandable up to 32GB via microSD card. Connectivity options on the tablet include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, Micro-USB, EDGE, GPRS and 3G (via SIM). The tablet packs a 4100mAh battery and weighs 325 grams.

The HP Slate7 VoiceTab tablet comes with 25GB of free cloud storage from Box and also comes preloaded with apps such as HP e-Print, HP Connected Photo, HP File Manager and HP Connected Music (three months of unlimited downloads have been bundled).

HP launched the voice-calling Slate6 VoiceTab for Rs. 22,990, with availability starting Friday. The HP Slate6 VoiceTab phablet comes with a 6-inch IPS LCD display with 720x1280 pixel resolution and is powered by a Marvell PXA1088 SoC with a 1.2GHz quad-core processor alongside 1GB of RAM. The HP Slate6 runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and comes with dimensions of 165x82.6x8.98mm and weighs 160 grams.

HP Slate7 VoiceTab key specifications

• 7-inch (1280x800 pixels) HD IPS display
• 1.2 GHz quad-core Marvell PXA1088 processor
• 1GB of RAM
• 16GB inbuilt storage, expandable up to 32GB via microSD card
• 5-megapixel rear camera
• 2-megapixel front-facing camera
• Android 4.2
• 4100mAh battery
• Dual-SIM

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Micromax Splash rumoured dust and waterproof smartphone spotted online

Micromax seems all set to launch a mid-range dustproof and waterproof Android smartphone, called the Micromax Splash, if reports are to be believed.

The rumoured Micromax Splash was leaked in a Twitter post from @MMXNewscaster, which states "Micromax Splash (unconfirmed) First IP67 certified Waterproof (1m for 30 mins) and Dust proof phone."

The alleged Micromax Splash smartphone is not yet confirmed officially by Micromax but is soon assumed to hit the shelves as it is said to have already passed the IP67 certification for dust and water resistance.

Not much is known about the rumoured Micromax Splash's specifications, but we assume the black-coloured handset to pack in some mid-range specifications. The image posted on Twitter also reveal the handset to feature a 5-megapixel rear camera with flash support. Since there is no concrete word from Micromax, one would have to wait till the smartphone gets launched officially.

Micromax had released a waterproof phone before, namely the Micromax X205, which is dual-SIM water resistant feature phone.

Earlier on Monday, we reported that the Micromax Canvas Duet 2 has been listed at a price of Rs. 15,790 with immediate availability at an online retailer. For now, the phone has not been officially announced by Micromax.

The Micromax Canvas Duet 2 (EG111), according to the online retail listing, is a dual-SIM (GSM+CDMA) smartphone that runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The smartphone features a 5.3-inch HD display with a 720x1280 pixels resolution. The smartphone is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core processor on the Qualcomm A5 MSM8625Q chipset, coupled with 1GB of RAM. The Micromax Canvas Duet 2 sports a 8-megapixel rear camera with an LED flash and also includes a front-facing camera, details of which is unknown.

The Canvas Duet 2 comes with 4GB of inbuilt storage which can be expanded up to 32GB with the help of a microSD card. It packs a 2300mAh battery, which according to the listing, is rated to deliver up to 7 hours of talktime (2G) and 150 hours (2G) of standby time.

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Windows Phone 8.1 will roll out to users in July or August: Report

After the recent leaks regarding common universal apps for Windows and Windows Phone attributed to information accompanying the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK files, the latest iteration of the Microsoft's mobile operating system is now said to arrive sometime between July and August 2014.

The tentative launch window was reported by a China publication, which claims the updates will be released between July and August of this year. While this release is said to of the final version for users, the developer's version is said to arrive a little before, in the month of April. The report adds that only those developers who have an App Studio account will be able to access the Developer Preview of Windows Phone 8.1 in April.

Phonearena states that during the time of WP 8.1 OS roll-out, a number of new handsets will be also revealed featuring the OS. No specific brand or dates have been announced as of yet.

The confidential, invite-only Windows Phone 8.1 SDK Developer Preview was reportedly released earlier in February, and since, a few purported leaks have made their way to the web.

Some of the new features purportedly gleaned from the leaked Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview SDK have also been detailed recently, and include:

• Sharing secure WiFi Networks with contacts if they have WiFi Sense. They don't get to see the shared password though.
• Social notifications will now show up in action centre by swiping from the top of the screen.
• Operators can now control data sense limits remotely.
• Operators can also install certain applications once a SIM card is detected.
• Along with normal updates, there are now "important" updates.
• Options to always download emails and pictures within them.
• Encrypted and signed email support.
• Change default SMS app. You can also change which SMS app will show notifications.
• Enterprise enrolled phones can have their passwords changed and remotely locked.
• "Type as I swipe through letters". This means we will be seeing Swypelike functionality.
• Geofence monitoring support. Geofence is a boundary around a place of interest to you.
• Location services can monitor geofences to tell your apps when you're entering and leaving them.
• Office Lens support. Will scan in documents and screens.
• The phone will have to update to the latest version before you can restore it to factory settings.
• Option to update store apps automatically.
• Option to update store apps when only on WiFi.
• App Suggestions by location.
• Manual App Update checks.
• Video Calling Support? I don't know if we will be given choices of which VOIP provider to use. Maybe Skype video calling will be builtin?
• Password protected Office document support.
• Trusted app list for NFC that will remove the need for asking whether you want to open a particular app.
• Incall speech commands. You'll be able to say "Call XXXXXX".
• DoubleTap to unlock your phone (Feature from Lumia devices on Amber Update and newer).
• Lock Notification.
• Quiet Hours.
• Double Tap to Power Off.
• Notification if charger isn't of adequate power.
• Screenshot button combination is now Power + Volume Up (Since the newer phones will have the start button on screen).
• Check disk for SD Cards essentially.
• Apps on SD Cards are only allowed from ONE originating phone. If it detects that apps from another phone are installed on the SD Card, then it will ask to delete those first.
• Voice Narrator for Accessibility.
• The Search button will be the new way to open Speech instead of the Start button.
• New Email sync options with accordance to usage patterns (i.e. If you get a lot of mail on particular days and if you don't check mail every day).
• Change the size and amount of tiles on your start screen.
• Wallet supports tickets and membership cards.
• App Syncing.
• Backups now include application data.
• Screen Reader functionality.
• Screen Recording functionality.
• Inner Circle of contacts. Up to 40 contacts can be in the inner circle.
• You can favourite photos by tapping a heart icon.
• Virtual SmartCard support

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Researchers claim to have developed 'hack-proof' geographical passwords

Computer scientists are developing a new system of 'hack-proof' and easy-to-remember geographical passwords.

Ziyad Al-Salloum of ZSS-Research in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, has devised geographical passwords as a simple yet practical approach to access credentials that could provide secure access to different entities.

The new "geo" approach exploits people's remarkable ability to recall with relative ease a favourite or visited place and to use that place's specific location as the access credentials.

The prototype system, developed at ZSS-Research, has proven itself capable of protecting a system against known password threats, researchers said.

"Proposing an effective replacement of conventional passwords could reduce 76 percent of data breaches, based on an analysis of more than 47,000 reported security incidents," Al-Salloum said.

The geographical password system utilises the geographical information derived from a specific memorable location around which the user has logged a drawn boundary - longitude, latitude, altitude, area of the boundary, its perimeter, sides, angles, radius and other features form the geographical password.

For instance, the user might draw a six-side polygon around a geographical feature such as the Eiffel Tower, Uluru (also known as Ayer's Rock), a particular promontory on the Grand Canyon, a local church, a particular tree in the woodland where they walk their dog or any other geographical feature.

Once created, the password is then "salted" by adding a string of hidden random characters that are user-specific and the geographical password and the salt are "hashed" together.

Thus, even if two users pick the same place as their geographical password the behind-the-scenes password settings are unique to them.

The research was published in the International Journal of Security and Networks.

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Tags: Cyber, Cyber security, Geographical passwords, Hack, Hack-proof, Hackers, Hacking, Internet,Password, Passwords, Security

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New app utilises phone processor for medical research while user sleeps

A new app has been developed that allows users to donate the processing power of their mobile phone for scientific research while they sleep.

Mobile phones lie dormant when users are asleep, which means that millions of powerful processors are going unused for hours at a time.

The University of Vienna's Faculty of Life Sciences and Samsung Austria are teaming up to tap the potential of all that unused processing power.

They developed the 'Power Sleep' app which provides users with a simple alarm clock function.

When the alarm is set and the user's phone is plugged in, fully charged and connected to a Wi-Fi network, the app begins to process data sent from the Similarity Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP) database.

The research is focused on deciphering protein sequences in order to help with medical advancements in disciplines such as genetics and heredity, biochemistry, molecular biology and cancer research, 'Gizmag' reported.

"In order to fight diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, we need to know how proteins are arranged," said Thomas Rattei, professor of bioinformatics at the University of Vienna.

(Also see: Smartphone users help find cancer cure with 'Genes in Space' game)

"This requires trials that need a tremendous amount of processing power. Power Sleep is a bridge between science and society. It promotes not only our research, but allows people in Austria to become part of the project and, at the same time, to do good in their sleep," Rattei said.

Power Sleep is connected to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), a network that links around 60,000 PCs worldwide and harnesses their processing power for computational-based research.

The app can be downloaded from Play Store.

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Flickr at 10: stop trying to be the biggest and start trying to be the best

This week Flickr celebrated its tenth birthday, and its glory days look far behind it.

The site that helped define Web 2.0 is now just another photo site, and it's long been eclipsed by another ten-year-old called Facebook. But while the numbers do look worryingly low, they don't tell the whole story.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: Flickr boasts 92 million users and 10 billion photos, which sounds pretty good until you look at its rivals.

Instagram has 150 million people and 16 billion photos. Google+ has 540 million uploading 1.5 billion photos a week. And Facebook has 1.26 billion people sharing 250 billion pictures.

Clearly, Flickr can't compete on quantity - but it can and is competing on quality.

If Facebook is YouTube, a huge repository of often-terrible content, Flickr is more like Vimeo: not as big, but generally better.

Flickrs of interest

"I trust Flickr with my photos in a way I wouldn't trust Facebook or Google."

Numbers can be misleading. Facebook may have 250 billion images, but 50 billion of them are inspirational quotes superimposed on sunsets, 50 billion are cat GIFs and the remainder are mainly baby photos.

Flickr is more focused on what it calls "interestingness". While it's quite possible to use Flickr for Instagram-style shots of soup or to bore friends senseless with your holiday snaps, that's not what it's really about.

In addition to "interestingness", Flickr is about usefulness. Websites like ours use it to find royalty-free Creative Commons images. Big companies use it to show off their products, or to let the world find out more about what makes them tick. Groups dedicated to every conceivable subject from art to zoos use it for social networking. Photographers use it not just to show off their stuff, but to store the high-res originals.

Flickr also has something even more important: trust.

I trust Flickr with my photos in a way I wouldn't trust Facebook or Google, the former because of its ever-changing privacy settings and the latter because I don't want its imminent Terminator armies to know what my family looks like.

But there's another trust issue, and that's whether I trust Yahoo not to mess it up. Last year's renewed investment and interest in Flickr was great, of course, but that came after years of neglect - and this week's news thatFlickr can't be bothered updating its Windows Phone app might not affect me, but it makes me worry that Yahoo's attention is already beginning to drift.

I hope not. It's too late for Flickr to reclaim the photo sharing crown from Facebook, or to tempt all those photographers back from Google+. But it's not too late to double down on Flickr's mission statement: "We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them."

Flickr can't be the biggest photo sharing service, but it can still be the best.

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