What I'm Reading Archives - Page 192 of 649 Azher Ahmed

07.15.11

kyle bean: pencil shaving portraits

these pencil shaving portraits are created by brighton-based british designer kyle bean.

read more

07.12.11

iPad as Kinect part 2: Air Touches

What can you do with an iPad 2 with its onboard cameras and it’s fairly able CPU? Quite a lot, it turns out. When TUAW first looked at Greg Hartstein’s Air Touch project, it required a completely dark room and could only handle a single measure of distance based on lighting levels.

Things have evolved since then. Hartstein provided this video that shows how using a tracking element attached to his hand (you can see it slightly in the video when his hand is at an angle to the camera) simplifies the interaction and provides a far greater range of possible interactions. Unfortunately, the YouTube video is slightly glitchy (the original version we received is not, but when we uploaded it to YouTube we got that weird pixelation in the beginning).

In addition to tracking distance and rotation, Hartstein has also been working on air-swipes and other motion-based gestures.

iPad as Kinect part 2: Air Touches originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

07.12.11

Google’s plan for mobile and online payments includes Google+

What I'm Reading

Google's vice president for commerce Stephanie Tilenius, onstage at MobileBeat 2011.

Google’s mobile payment strategy is just getting started, but that doesn’t faze Stephanie Tilenius, the company’s vice president of commerce.

“There’s going to be a ton of innovation in mobile payments,” Tilenius said Tuesday at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco.

“It’s sort of like 1999 was with e-commerce, with eBay and Amazon. We’re at the beginning of 10 years of innovation and competition,” she said.

Tilenius is responsible for Google Wallet, the company’s payment system, and Google Offers, a “daily deal” and loyalty program that beams coupons to customers based on their location and preferences. Google Offers launched Tuesday in New York and San Francisco, after a trial period in Portland, Ore.

Tilenius said that one Portland bistro saw its lunch traffic double after using Google Offers to promote itself.

Google has also recently launched Single Tap, a tool for making purchases by simply tapping your phone to a reader. Single Tap uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to wirelessly authenticate your credit card data stored in your phone. Google launched Single Tap with support from Citibank, but Google will eventually work with all the major banks in the credit card market, Tilenius said.

The company also recently acquired Punchd for a reported $10 million in order to beef up its mobile wallet and customer loyalty strategy.

About 15 percent of Android users already use a Google mobile app, Google Shopper, to get special offers, Tilenius said. Android has over 100 million users, so that would represent about 15 million people, although Tilenius said the actual number was “north of 5 million.”

In addition, she gave a glimpse of the company’s future roadmap for mobile payments. Google Wallet and Google Offers will be embedded in Google+, Tilenius said, as well as other Google properties such as Maps.

For online, non-mobile payments, Tilenius acknowledged that the company’s Google Wallet program is a relative latecomer to the scene.

“Paypal is doing fantastically online. We are behind in that,” Tilenius acknowledged.

But Google’s growing: Google Wallet now accounts for 25 percent of the Android market’s transactions, she said.

“80 percent of commerce is offline and local,” Tilenius said. Services, entertainment, restaurants and the like add up to a trillion-dollar industry, and Google clearly wants to own a piece of that.

Photo: Christopher Peri/VentureBeat

Filed under: VentureBeat