THE WHOLE SCOOP ON THE APPLE PAY MONDAY LAUNCH

From his lips to your ears. It’s official. Tim Cook, Apple CEO, said that Apple Pay with be released on Monday (Oct. 20) along with the iOS 8.1 update.

Apple Pay will be available on the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus via Passbook and the service will also work on the new iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 devices, which were unveiled today at the special event held at the Apple campus in Cupertino.

“We think it is going to be profound. It’s going to change the way we pay for things,” said Cook.

Apple says that the new service is safe and secure because it utilizes tokenization and strips away any vulnerabilities, instead of transmitting credit card numbers and security codes.

Cook made sure to note that “It’s easy, it’s secure and yes, it’s a private way to pay for things.”

Since the company already lets about 800 million+ users buy music, books and applications via iTunes (which is linked to a credit card), expanding to mobile payments seemed like a natural and feasible shift for Apple.

But the way that Apple did it surprised many – digitizing the existing payments ecosystem.

Apple’s initial launch partners included:

- Navy Federal Credit Union

- USAA

- PNC

- Citi

- Bank of America

- Capital One

- Wells Fargo

- American Express

- US Bank

- Barclaycard

But since the Apple introduction in September, 500 additional banks have committed to integrating with Apple Pay by early 2015.

With that, Apple Pay was also able to persuade in-store (and in app) retailers to support the service.

In addition to its launch merchant partners, some of the recent in-store supporters to sign are:

- Free People

- Sports Authority

- Footaction

- Champs

- Wegmans

- American Eagle Outfitters

- Office Depot

Preorders for the new iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3, both starting at $399, will start on Friday (Oct. 17) and will incorporate Touch ID and Apple Pay technology for which will allow users to make purchases from their device more seamlessly through applications for online shopping.

Although the rumored larger iPad was not released. the iPad Air 2 is a bit more retailer friendly. It’s thinner (18 percent thinner, measuring 6.1 millimeters), has a longer battery life (10 hours) and weighs less than one pound. It also has much stronger anti-glare capabilities courtesy of an antireflective coating. That’s good for reading in the sun, but even better for store associates working beneath florescent retail lighting.

From a consumer perspective, Apple is counting on all of those tablet shoppers (of which there are increasing numbers – 4 out of every 5 tablet owners use it to shop) to be motivated by a faster, convenient andsecure in app shopping experience, which, of course, they hope will stimulate more merchant demand.

Digital wallets are nothing new but have struggled to gain traction. Google Wallet launched in 2011 as a way to eliminate consumer credit cards, loyalty cards and coupons and instead have them stored in a Google Wallet app on their Android phone. It was sort of a great idea that went nowhere, a year after launch Google Wallet still only worked with one credit card and bank combination that only worked on one wireless network, Sprint. Today, Google Wallet still struggles to gain traction, although the launch of Apple Pay has started a race to enable the Android ecosystem with a digital payments “wallet.”

Never a first mover, Apple tends refrain from launching new technologies until it can determine a path to reinvention. While the current Apple Pay payment method mirrors what consumers do today at the point of sale, with their phone substituting for a card, there are aspects of the holistic experience that are innovative – the tokenization protocol upon which it is built, its voice activated payments option and use of biometrics to trigger payments.

Source:- http://goo.gl/8qf2HV

Intel Unveils A Trio Of New Mobile Chips: Atom x3, x5, and x7 - Coming To Phones, Tablets, And Other Stuff

This week at MWC, Intel revealed its 2015 and 2016 mobile chipset lineup, as well as the fact that the company is adopting a similar naming scheme to its Core line of processors with these new chips. They've been dubbed x3, x5, and x7, and as with the Core processors, bigger is generally better. Intel has long been something of a dark horse in the mobile industry. The company has seen negligible penetration in smartphones to date (though not none ) and competes almost exclusively in the low to mid-range segment in Android tablets. Of course, as the ultraportable market changes and small, super-thin laptops and convertibles become more common, Intel is swooping in with design wins left and right, keeping the likes of Qualcomm, NVIDIA, MediaTek, and Samsung out of a lucrative market. The Ultrabook swing was a huge help to Intel, a beacon of hope as the world's top chipmaker failed to break into mobile. While Intel struggled to foist itself into a viable position in the ...

Game Of Thrones Game Leads Into Season 5

Telltale Games has kept their Game of Thrones project under tight wraps over the past year. On Tuesday, they finally shed some light on the adventure game based on the HBO show. Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series stars House Forrester. They appeared in George R. R. Martin's novel A Dance with Dragons but haven't been seen in the TV show yet. The Forresters reside in the Wolfswood in northern Westeros. Their stronghold of Ironrath has stood at the edge of Westeros' largest ironwood forest for fifteen hundred years. "Ironrath is a testament to the strength and endurance of Ironwood," Telltale explains . "The Forrester house words are 'Iron from Ice', which echoes their belief that - like the ironwood itself - the adverse conditions and unforgiving landscape of the North only makes them stronger." Like their bannermen at House Glover, the Forresters are loyal allies of the Starks. This puts them right in the middle of the War ...

HTTPS As A Ranking Signal

Security is a top priority for Google. They invest a lot in making sure that their services use industry-leading security, like strongHTTPS encryption by defaul t. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google. Beyond their own stuff, they are also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of this is, they are making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, they have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites. They want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, They called for “ HTTPS everywhere ” on the web. They have also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS , or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging. For these reasons, over the past few months they have been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, en...

Think Create & Do

Search This Blog