Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Device Under Skin Tells Doc You're OK (or Not) : Discovery News

  • Thanks to a tiny new medical implant, doctors of the future might be just fine with that.

     

    A team of scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne(EPFL) have developed a miniature electronic device that can be implanted under the skin to provide immediate analysis of substances found in blood.

• The Future of Retail: How Mobile Payments Are Changing the Retail Experience

  • NFC is available on only a few dozen phones—meaning it is in few consumer hands—and it is not on iPhone," reports MainStreet.com. "Nor is it, as far as anyone knows, on the iPhone roadmap for near-term deployment. Merchant adoption of NFC readers also has lagged, with only a handful of national retailers (and few local stores) offering the capability. Even if you have an NFC phone, there is nowhere to use it to pay." This prompted Doug Aamoth of TIME to suggest "the true power of NFC lies in its ability to unlock doors without using traditional keys
  • All of a sudden the mobile phone is about to be transformed beyond a spy in your pocket to your bank, your mortgage lender and your landlord,"
  • In a way, it's kind of a privacy tipping point, because one single device knows wherever you go, your geographic history, your social media connections and your financial behaviors,

• Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller, Michael Cera, And The Rebels Saving Hollywood | Fast Company

• Apple's Rumored iPhone 5s Could Jump Start Mobile Payments - Forbes

  • half  of the Harris poll respondents said they don’t want to store sensitive information on their phone, and 40% don’t want to transmit sensitive information to a merchant’s device. One preferred solution among consumers is using a PIN or password.
  • the chatter that the new iPhone model would include fingerprint recognition technology that Apple acquired when it bought AuthenTec last year. If that turns out to be true, Apple would be able to leverage it’s growing Passbook ecosystem along with its more than 500 million iTunes account that have a credit card on file to jumpstart the mobile payments in an easy to use and secure way.

  • Odds are if Apple does introduce an iPhone model that includes fingerprint recognition technology either as a general security function, for mobile payment safety or both, others will follow suit.

     

    Apple is not the only company that recognizes the use of fingerprint and biometric interfaces in device security and mobile payments. Several weeks ago, 3G, 4G and LTE licensing and technology company InterDigital (IDCC) entered into a R&D collaboration agreement with BIO-key International (BKYI), a leader in fingerprint biometric identification solutions and advanced mobile credentialing and identity verification technologies.

• And That, Google, Is How You Lose The Influencers - Forbes

  • the Google Reader decision is going to cause ripples down the line. The number of influencers online is not a huge number and their support of a new project can be vital to a start-up launching a new app or to an existing company with a new product to promote

• As Smartphone Growth Slows, Carriers Turn To The Connected Car - Forbes

  • 2013 is shaping up to be an inflection point in the smartphone space
  • But 2013 is not just a tipping point for smartphones. It’s also one for the Connected Car, a part of the machine to machine or M2M space being targeted by mobile carriers
  • it can turn the car into a 4G LTE hot spot for tablets, smartphones and other devices
  • Connecting the dots among these relationships — GM, AT&T and Apple for example — make for solid prospects for the Connected Car in the coming years, just in time as smartphone shipment grow starts to really slowdown

• Music Streaming will be Apple, Google and Amazon's next big thing | Firstpost

• Music Streaming will be Apple, Google and Amazon's next big thing | Firstpost

  • All of them see a viable music streaming and subscription service as crucial to growing their presence in an exploding mobile environment. For Google and Apple, it is critical in ensuring users remain loyal to their mobile products.
  • Now, as smartphones and tablets supplant PCs and virtual storage replaces songs on devices, mobile players from handset makers to social networks realize they must stake out a place or risk ceding control of one of the largest components of mobile device usage.

• New Study Confirms Correlation Between Twitter and TV Ratings

  • By analyzing Tweets about live TV, the study confirmed a relationship between Twitter and TV ratings. It also identified Twitter as one of three statistically significant variables (in addition to prior-year rating and advertising spend) to align with TV ratings
  • How well does Twitter align with TV program ratings? The recent Nielsen/SocialGuide study confirmed that increases in Twitter volume correlate to increases in TV ratings for varying age groups, revealing a stronger correlation for younger audiences.
  • The TV industry is dynamic and it was important for us to analyze multiple variables to truly understand Twitter’s impact on TV ratings,

• Amazon in talks with record labels about subscription music service | The Verge

  • The signs point to an arms race among online music services

• This Is the Scariest Statistic About the Newspaper Business Today - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic

  • Here it is: In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads. And it's getting worse, according to a new report by Pew. In 2011, the ratio was just 10-to-1.
  • Since 2003, print ads have fallen from $45 billion to $19 billion. Online ads have only grown from $1.2 to $3.3 billion.
  • Who killed newspapers? The classic response is the classifieds,

• ABC Works on an App for Live Streaming Shows to Mobile Devices - NYTimes.com

  • The app will live stream ABC programming to the phones and tablets of cable and satellite subscribers, allowing those subscribers to watch “Good Morning America” on a tablet while standing in line at Starbucks, for instance, or watch “Nashville” on a smartphone while riding a bus home from work
  • With the app, ABC, a subsidiary of Disney, will become the first of the American broadcasters to provide a live Internet stream of national and local programming to people who pay for cable or satellite. The subscriber-only arrangement, sometimes called TV Everywhere in industry circles, preserves the cable business model that is crucial to the bottom lines of broadcasters, while giving subscribers more of what they seem to want — mobile access to TV shows. The arrangement could extend the reach of ads that appear on ABC as well.

• Liquidity of corporate US at record level - FT.com

  • The swelling cash reserves of Apple and a handful of other technology companies have raised the overall liquidity of corporate America to record levels, data revealed on Monday.

     

    Around $6 out of every $10 added to the corporate sector’s cash mountain over the past three years has come from tech companies,

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.