Mobile payments is a very active space with solutions like Google Wallet, PayPal wallet, Visa’s V.me, Isis mobile wallet and Square wallet transforming the way we make payments. The goal of all these services is to remove the wallet out of the picture and make your smartphone your wallet by storing credit card information on phones or in the cloud. Paytouch, a payments solution company in Spain, has introduced yet another new way to pay. Using your fingerprints.
ICANN is preparing for the massive rollout of new gTLDs. There are a ton of new gTLDs to replace the old .com, .net and .org. Some of the popular ones include .app, .home, .inc, .art, .blog, .book, .llc, .shop, .movie, .music, .cloud, .hotel, .news and .eco. These new gTLDs will allow bloggers, entrepreneurs, artists and other web creators to get catchy domain names without trying out hacks like using different spellings, using prefixes and suffixes or using a TLD from a different country. Large corporations will also be getting their own gTLDs like .ibm, .pwc, .cisco and .samsung. This will also help in identification of authentic sites and prevent phishing scams.
Google just announced a new product, Google Keep. Keep lets you capture all your ideas, tasks and notes in one place and organize them. Yes, like Evernote. Evernote has been everyone’s favorite online note-taking tool for some time now. Over the last few years, it has evolved by revamping their web app and building new iOS and Android apps from the ground up. It’s the ideal service with a decent pricing model. It has also expanded into the enterprise world with Evernote Business. With the success of Evernote, Google wants to get into the space with Google Keep. Google had a similar service in the past called Google Notebook which was very basic and did not have much development, and was eventually discontinued. Google Tasks acts as a basic ToDo app as a part of Gmail. Google Keep is the combination of Google Notebook and Google Tasks with a few more bells and whistles. Right now, it cannot be compared to Evernote but has the potential to take on Evernote in the near future.
Banks have been using Two Factor Authentication for a long time now. Some banks require entering a token during login, others only need it for money transfers. In the recent months, with growing cases of user account hacking, many online services are implementing Two Factor Authentication. The popular ones are GMail, Dropbox and Amazon AWS. But recently Facebook announced Two Factor Authentication support. The Facebook iOS/Android app acts as a soft-token and users that don’t have a smartphone, can use SMS to receive their tokens upon login. I think this is a good move, since a Facebook account acts as a persons identity due to all the personal information fed into accounts. But does Two Factor Authentication solve the problem? Can hackers not hijack account with Two Factor Authentication enabled? The answer is obviously No. It does make hijacking accounts much more difficult by adding a barrier and might make it not worth the while to hijack an account. But having a strong password along with Two Factor Authentication does make an account slightly more secure.
Evernote had also been hacked recently and is currently forcing password resets on all accounts. They are also going to introduce Two Factor Authentication very soon.
We have concluded 2012 and entered 2013. Here is a comic strip that summarizes the current scene in the technology space and gives an insight into 2013.
Smartphones have transformed from PDA devices used by business executives to a multimedia device primarily used for entertainment. Smartphones such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile provided E-mail service with sync capabilities to enterprise servers. It allowed executives to stay connected to their work network. Today, smartphones have almost nothing to do with E-mail, enterprise or even compatibility with enterprise systems. A smartphone is criticized if Angry Birds does not run on its platform or it does not have enough “apps”. Not many people review the different types of VPN protocols supported by the platform. The main consumers of smartphones have drifted from business to teenagers. The heart of the platforms has become social media. Facebook and Twitter have become core OS features which are built into the platforms. This has even drifted to Apple’s Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Microsoft’s Windows 8 systems, which have Facebook integration built-in across the system.
Spotify is doing pretty well after its debut in the United States. It closed a funding round for $100 million is is worth $3 Billion. It has a strong user base in the US and many users are switching from other music services like Pandora and Rdio. Spotify has been regularly pushing updates to its apps with new features like Apps and Radio. Today, it announced that its working on a web app. The beta is now live. After using the web app for some time, it looks pretty stable and might exit beta pretty soon.
Spotify users should expect an email blast as soon as the web app is out of beta. Stay tuned…
Google Maps is THE way to find routes while travelling. Street view lets you see better by showing images of the street and the surroundings. But this is all for the outdoors. Google Maps cannot show you around in a Walmart store or a Target store. Well, thats about to change! Google has started mapping indoor locations starting with their data centers. Just like street view, you can enter the building, navigate through the cubicles, and zoom in on places. Google has posted a video showing indoor street view with their data centers.
The Windows 8 launch is right around the corner. People that have purchased PCs recently will get incentives for upgrading to Windows 8 by either getting a license for a lower price or even a free upgrade. While the new Metro interface brings Windows to new tablet devices, its not the best interface for desktops or even laptop computers. The horizontal scrolling makes it tedious to use the Metro screen with many non-touch devices. Some users might want to use the good old Start menu in Windows 8 and disable the Metro screen completely. Windows does not have a setting for this but there are third party applications that let you do this.
Microsoft just released Windows 8 RTM (Release To Manufacturer) today. This is the version this is given to the manufacturers and will be shipped to consumers. This means that I had higher expectations from this release. When I first boted into Windows, I noticed the new blue logo (yes, the colored flag is not the logo anymore). The interface is completely Metro – feels like a Windows Phone device. The first startup screen asked me to login with my Microsoft Account (Hotmail/Windows Live Passport) and then I got an SMS asking me to confirm the association with Windows PC. I clicked on the link and confirmed the computer. After a few minutes, my desktop was setup. The first thing you see is the Start screen with Live Tiles and Apps. This version also has the Windows Store (which is separate from Windows Phone Store). There are a few apps published, I downloaded Box and iHeartRadio from the Store and was able to login and use the apps. I also used Connect with Facebook and the app worked as a mobile app would. The Desktop is similar to the old Windows desktop with a few UI changes. But the Windows 8 focus lies on Tiles and the tablet functionality.