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Get Ready to Tap Away: Google Wallet NFC App now Live in Limited Locations

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September 21, 2011
  • Google’s long-awaited Wallet app, which works via near-field communication (NFC) technology, is now officially live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, DC.
  • The service allows users with a current Paypass-enabled Citi Mastercard to pay at retail stores (and any other businesses with a contactless payment — or “tap payment” terminal) simply by waving their NFC-enabled phone.
  • “In the app, users will be able to link their Citi card with Google Wallet,” explains TG Daily. “That is, when they go to a drug store or fast food restaurant, or take a cab, or anywhere else that has a contactless payment terminal, all users will need to do is open the app on their phone, tap it to the credit card terminal, and that’s it.”
  • While there are still many limitations — users must also have a Sprint Nexus S phone (for now) — this is the first step toward a mobile payment system for which Google has big plans.
  • “For those of you worried about security, Google tells us that your card information will be stored in a single place, on a chip,” reports The Next Web. “That means that it should be at least somewhat firewalled from unauthorized software access. However, there is another failsafe that limits new cards to $100 until the owner releases the limitation so that should help to quell any fears.”
  • Google explained in May that the system was ready for action at over 300,000 merchants, with another 120,000 possible. And additional credit card companies will be joining the effort soon. According to a Google blog post: “We appreciate Citi and MasterCard for being our launch partners. And today, Visa, Discover and American Express have made available their NFC specifications that could enable their cards to be added to future versions of Google Wallet.”

Will Future Intel Chips Provide MacBooks with Infinite Battery Life?

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September 14, 2011
  • Intel introduced its new Haswell architecture this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The Haswell technology is a few generations away, but is already impressing analysts.
  • John Brownlee, writing for Cult of Mac, explains that Haswell was created using a 22 nanometer 3D transistor process, which makes possible ARM-like power consumption on an x86 chip. “That means all day battery life, as well as ten days of connected standby,” writes Brownlee.
  • The architecture reportedly uses up to 20 times less power than current Intel chips, and can actually run on a solar cell, suggesting that future MacBooks would theoretically have no constraints on battery life.
  • According to Brownlee, the Haswell architecture has some serious potential: “You think those new Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros are beasts? Just wait a couple years. That’s when Apple will be able of releasing bleeding edge MacBooks capable of not only running for 24 hours on a single charge, but of recharging their cells as they run by sucking up the ambient light in the room around them. Wow.”

IBM Phase Change Memory Prototype: 100x Faster than Flash

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July 5, 2011
  • Big Blue announced a potential breakthrough in digital storage, with the unveiling of a new kind of phase change memory (PCM) chip.
  • Though still an early prototype, the chip demonstrated impressive advances over Flash memory, including a 100x speed increase, and a hundred-fold increase in the number of read-write cycles the chip can handle.
  • The need for fast, reliable data storage is projected to increase exponentially in coming years, as more data moves into the cloud.
  • IBM predicts that this new technology will cause a “paradigm shift” in data storage in the next five years.

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