Amazon is the latest company to move into the ultra-hot area of mobile payments with a new hardware/software combination called Amazon Local Register.
It’s essentially a credit card reader that attaches to your tablet or smartphone, and is accompanied by an app, allowing small business to take credit card payments.
Having shut down Justin.tv on the back of a reported $1 billion Google acquisition, live video game streaming service Twitch is now blocking copyrighted music.
Twitch uses software called Audible Magic which scans videos for music that is owned or controlled by Audible Magic clients. This could take the form of either in-game or background music. Live broadcasts will not be scanned.
“The Audible Magic technology will scan for third party music in 30 minute blocks,” reads a blog post from Twitch. “[I]f Audible Magic does not detect its clients’ music, that portion of the VOD will not be muted. If third party audio is detected anywhere in the 30-minute scanned block, the entire 30 minutes will be muted.”
As revealed by Steven Levy in his great book In The Plex, in the early days of Google one of the founders’ ideas for advertising the new search engine was to project a lazer image of the Google logo on the moon.
That idea obviously didn’t happen, but a new Easter Egg for Google Maps on PC does at least let users explore the surface of the moon, alongside that of Mars, to celebrate the second anniversary of the Curiosity rover touching down on the Red Planet’s surface.
Some apps are about transforming productivity and making it easier to achieve the kind of tasks we need to carry out on a daily basis. Others are just about annoying your friends.
CatFacts has all four paws firmly in the latter camp. You see, several years ago a super-popular thread turned up on Reddit, telling the story of a user whose young cousin shared his new phone number on Facebook. Without letting him know who was behind it, the older cousin began trolling his younger relative with unprompted “Cat Facts” which he had apparently signed up to, but which didn’t provide an easy way to unsubscribe.
Over a series of messages, the young cousin’s initial bewilderment turns into fury, while transforming the thread itself into pure Internet gold.
Picture: ExtremeTech
Up until the present, the various paintjobs of our phones have existed primarily as a means of personalization. In the near future, they could well be the way that our phones are charged.
A new study by the UK’s University of Sheffield is investigating the possibility of spray-painted solar cells which could be used to power anything from smartphones to electric cars.
While the energy generating effectiveness of paint-on solar cells was just one percent a couple of years ago, Sheffield University currently gets about 11 percent efficiency versus 19 percent at optimal performance.
