Orange and Barclaycard launch 'Quick Tap' NFC mobile payments in the UK
Yay for the UK, it's now one step closer to catching up to the Japan of last decade. Mobile carrier Orange is today launching the UK's first mobile phone contactless payment service, dubbed Quick Tap, for purchases up to £15. It works on MasterCard's PayPass system and requires you to have a Barclays debit or credit card or, alternatively, a credit card from Orange itself. Gemalto is providing the SIM-based NFC compatibility, with Samsung's Tocco Lite being the launch handset. Then you just need to trust the Quick Pay app to be as secure as promised and you'll be ready to go off and use your phone as a payment terminal at over 50,000 locations, including joints run by McDonald's, Eat, Pret A Manger, Subway, and Wilkinson. A quick intro video and a more expansive press release follow after the break.
PlayStation Network 'security hole' sparks hacking concerns among users
When Sony said that its PlayStation Network (PSN) had been hacked in April, potentially releasing the personal details of 77 million people - such as their email address, physical address and date of birth - people understood that restoring the service might be difficult, and that to ensure security they might be asked to change their password. What users hadn't expected was that Sony would bring the service back up and require them to change their password - but that all you'd need to provide would be an email address and date of birth. In other words, exactly the details that the hackers putatively already have. That oversight has forced Sony to take down a website it had set up to help those 77 million access the network, which is still struggling to get back online after weeks out of action. Sony spokesman Dan Race admitted that there was "a security hole" in the system: "If I had your email and your birth date I could get access to your account," he said.
But he insisted that no hacking had taken place on the website and that PSN account holders can still change their password on their consoles at home. However, the reaction from web users was obvious: how would Sony know if a hacker had used the details?
Angry Birds tops 200m downloads
That includes 35m downloads for the latest Rio-branded version of Rovio Mobile's feathery franchise. Rovio Mobile's Angry Birds mobile game franchise has passed another huge milestone: 200 million total downloads. The company's marketing boss Peter Vesterbacka announced the news at the PaidContent Mobile conference in New York, while also saying that the latest Angry Birds Rio game has notched up 35 million downloads in its own right. According to PaidContent, Vesterbacka used his appearance at the conference to repeat his comparison of Rovio to a Disney in the making, while also suggesting that "entertainment franchises will emerge first on mobile". TechCrunch has more details of Rovio's success, saying that since the game launched on Google's Chrome web apps store last week, it has generated five million downloads through that channel. That article also claims Rovio is 'experimenting with Angry Birds oriented location based services and other schemes to blend the game's footprint into the real world'. Angry check-ins rather than Angry chickens, you could say. Or not.
Top 10 Mobile TV Moments:
MobiTV released an interesting list yesterday that sheds light on what kinds of live events drive people to watch television on their phones. Turns out it’s really not that different from what drives humanity in general: Death, sex and soccer. Or as Mobi put it: The result is a list of the ten most-viewed live events in MobiTV’s history, among them a major mea culpa, the biggest soccer match in four years, one wedding and a funeral: Coverage of Michael Jackson’s death and memorial took spots 1 and 4, respectively. The United States vs. Algeria 2010 World Cup Soccer match was 2. Other notables: President Obama’s inauguration took a high spot, but the Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden debate beat out Obama vs. McCain. In the marriage vs. divorce category, Tiger Woods’ confessional press conference beat out last month’s Royal Wedding. A spokesperson for Mobi said the rankings didn’t come with actual viewer numbers because phone companies generally don’t release that information. But for some sense of scale, Mobi’s CEO Charlie Nooney told me in an interview two months ago: Last year alone MobiTV delivered more than 1.5 billion minutes of content to its base of 15 million managed subscribers, up from 9 million at the start of 2010.That Jackson’s 2009 death remains number 1, then, shows just how large of a news story that was — and what time of day it broke. For many people in the U.S., the news arrived during work or commute-home hours. On the other hand, the debates do not fit that model — they were held when most people are expected to be home. Maybe soccer moms and dads at games and practices drove up those Palin vs. Biden numbers.
83-year-old YouTube star leads the way online
Peter Oakley is a pensioner from Leicester. At 83, he’s part of a growing population of older people, living alone and often lonely. Except Mr Oakley isn’t lonely, in part because more than eight million people have seen the videos he has posted on YouTube. Perhaps unexpectedly, that means he’s also a poster boy for tomorrow’s “Silver Surfer’s Day” that aims to get more older people online. Using the jocular “handle” of Geriatric1927, Mr Oakley signed up to YouTube in 2006. Widowed in 1998, he says his aim in buying a computer was simply to communicate with new people and to make new friends. “I thought having a computer and the internet and would enable me to have a life,” he says. “That didn’t really work because I went into chat rooms which were full of kids. But somebody mentioned YouTube. In everyday life, the old don’t have communications with the young outside the family, but the internet can address that.”
EU Demands Explicit Geo-Location Permissions
The hopes of companies planning to use geo-location data to push products and services to mobile device users have taken a beating in the European Union, following a pronouncement from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Peter Hustinx. His opinion that geo-location data should be considered private has been approved by the Article 29 Working Group. This means that mobile service providers will have to gain the user’s explicit permission to collect or relay location data. he opinion documentreleased by the working party states: “If telecom operators want to use base station data in order to supply a value-added service to a customer, according to the revised e-privacy directive they must obtain his or her prior consent. They must also make sure the customer is informed about the terms of such processing.” When it comes to phones and tablets using satellite geo-location, the situation is much the same. The report points out that processing location data and seeking patterns in a user’s daily travels is a sensitive area. Here too, prior “informed” consent should be sought, the group said.
MPs push for better rural broadband
Rural broadband campaigners received a boost in parliament yesterday when a debate urged communications regulator Ofcom to extend superfast mobile broadband to 98 per cent of the UK. A motion proposed by backbencher Rory Stewart, Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border, said that Ofcom should compel mobile companies bidding for new spectrum that will enable superfast broadband to cover 98 per cent of the UK population, rather than 95 per cent. The motion received cross-party support, and Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said that the auction should not, under EU law, be a money-making exercise. "This is the last chance we have for a generation to provide good mobile broadband coverage for six million people who will not otherwise get it," Mr Stewart told MPs. He suggested that Ofcom feared increasing the coverage obligation under the auction’s terms because it is worried about "losing some money in the auction".
Modders Make Android Work the Way You Want
CyanogenMod is one of the biggest hacks to ever hit the Android mobile platform. It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices. Essentially, CyanogenMod is a tricked-out version of the software you’re already running on your Android phone. Every Android-powered device comes running a version of the operating system, from 1.5 (Cupcake) all the way up to 3.1 (Honeycomb). CyanogenMod replaces that stock OS with a custom build, letting you make adjustments to your phone that the official version prevents. It opens the door to more sophisticated custom wallpaper, changing the graphic that appears when the phone boots up, or more significantly, tethering your laptop to your phone’s data connection. “You can customize the hell out of it,” says Steve Kondik, founder of the CyanogenMod project.
Amazon UK selling twice as many e-books as hardbacks.
Since April 1 2011, for every hardback book Amazon.co.uk has sold, it has sold 242 Kindle e-books. This figure includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition and excludes free e-books, of which there are over one million. Last July Amazon announced that digital books had been consistently outselling hardback books for the previous three months in the US. However, it has taken longer for the UK market to follow the same pattern of buying activity. The increased uptake in e-books can partially be explained by the slashing of e-readers’ prices, including Amazon’s own device, the Kindle.
French P2P monitoring firm hit by hackers
French net piracy firm Trident Media Guard (TMG) has been attacked by hacktivists. The government-appointed company, who were employed to track down net pirates and monitor peer-to-peer networks as part of France's efforts to find those guilty of copyright infringements, confirmed it had 'temporarily suspended' with the government. According to The Register, Eric Walter, France's secretary general of internet piracy, made the announcement over Twitter on Tuesday, saying that Hadopi, short for the High Authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of rights, was taking control of Trident Media Guard 'following the leak of IP addresses'. Edy Almer VP product management and marketing at Safend, said: “The data breach suffered by TMG highlights the need for vendors, as well as government organisations whose role is to protect data, IP and personal information, to bear in mind that the data they collect for protection purposes can be used against them. “Organisations must take extra diligence to enable protection of all data, collect only what is absolutely necessary and ensure it is stored in a secure manner. While no system is perfect, having best of breed security will take you a long way towards avoiding the headlines”.
Highlights From The Google, Apple, Facebook, Senate Privacy Circus
Deja vu. Google and Apple were grilled by Congress about location privacy in mobile phones, just a week after being grilled by Congress about location privacy in mobile phones. To spice things up, the Senate Committee invited Facebook to join the grill-out, giving one privacy advocate from Common Sense Media the opportunity to make fun of the social network for its recent failed PR attack on its co-testifier. My sense from watching numerous hearings about privacy in the Internet age is that tech companies would benefit most from lobbying the children of Congressmen. Most politicos seem to view the world of technology and online privacy through the eyes and experiences of their teen and pre-teen kids. Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas started the hearing off by lamenting the fact that his two children have loaded their phones up with apps and didn’t realize that the apps could then gather information about him. He pushed hard for apps to have privacy policies. (Because that solves all privacy issues…)
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