apps
Google Wallet Acquires TxVia
Over the past few months, things have not being going so well for Google Wallet but in just one day the mobile payment system took one step backward followed by another one forward. For the bad news first, Google engineer Rob von Behren who is said to be one of the two Google employees responsible for the creation of Google Wallet’s NFC payment system, left the company to join up with rival mobile payment firm, Square. According to AndroidCommunity, the reason for his leaving the company could be for low adoption among retailers, security concerns, or increased pressure (because of the previous two reasons) from credit card/mobile operator backed ISIS program.
Now for the good news, Google Wallet acquired TxVia, a company that specialized in electronic payment systems earlier today. The general assumption is that the acquisition is more about personnel that it is about technology but TxVia has been around and should bring with it sufficient experience in this relatively new field. While Google has not mentioned how it intends to use TxVia’s technology except for enhancements to the current Google Wallet, all five of TxVia’s managing partners have allegedly been given positions at Google.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!