All posts tagged ‘Hardware’

Look out, Square — you have a new competitor, and it should go on sale in Apple stores before month’s end.

Intuit and mophie have teamed on a credit card-swiping iPhone accessory called Complete Credit Card Solution that will allow any approved iPhone owner to walk out of an Apple store in as little as 15 minutes with the ability to accept credit card payments.

Unlike other solutions, this one comes with the attachment, the payment app, and a merchant account, also operated by Intuit. All you need to accept credit and debit cards is this product and a 3G or 3GS iPhone.

Intuit introduced a mobile payment product 18 months ago to help mobile professionals like plumbers accept payments on the go, but quickly realized that without that familiar credit card swipe, customers weren’t ready to use the app. In addition, feedback from Intuit customers and the buzz around new companies like the delayed Square, from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, demonstrated to Intuit that there was untapped demand to help local businesses swipe credit cards with iPhones in both stationary and mobile settings.

Intuit announced a partnership on Thursday with Apple accessory manufacturer mophie, which makes the one-million-plus-selling JuicePack battery supplement for the iphone, to create hardware for the $180 Create Credit Card Solution. Its card-swiping hardware fits onto the bottom of the iPhone, while the Intuit GoPayment app (also available separately) sends the money to an Intuit merchant account, also included. By the end of the month, Apple will sell the complete package in its retail outlets and on Apple.com, according to Intuit.

The hardware attachment only works with the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Due to Apple’s policy not to alert accessory manufacturers about upcoming design changes (with one notable exception), Intuit and mophie have not yet been able to manufacture a version that works with the new iPhone 4 design, but they say they’re working on that. And for the iPhone 3G and GS, set-up is a snap, and does not require a long-term contract.

Customers at establishments using Intuit's GoPay app can now swipe credit cards rather than filling their information out manually.

“Something that’s important to Apple, because this is going to be sold in their stores, is they wanted it to be incredibly easy to communicate what it’s going to cost, and how quickly you’ll be up and running — and that you’re up and running before you leave the store,” said Ross Howe, mophie’s vice president of marketing and new business development.

“And also the fact that there’s no contract. Most merchant service providers require hefty contracts and incredible termination fees, and the fact that you can turn this on if you’re in a farmers’ market for the summer and then just call and cancel your account until next summer, for really reasonable rates — and there’s something to be said for that.”

About those rates: Complete Credit Card Solution from Intuit and mophie costs $12.95 per month regardless of how much or how little you use it. It also costs 1.7 to 3.7 percent of each transaction plus $.30 to $.40 per transaction. Those fees are competitive. (Assuming you can get your hands on the hardware, Square charges 2.75 percent plus 15 cents.)

But the big payoff here is that there are no long-term contracts, and $13/month isn’t a lot to pay for the ability to accept credit cards and a merchant account. Up to 50 sellers can funnel money into a single account, for the same price, and sellers can create preset buttons for certain items, just like at McDonalds.

Intuit is best known for its Quicken line of financial management software, but the company has also offered merchant accounts since 2001, so it has experience acting as the bank in a credit card-payment scenario.

In addition, said to Mary Lunneborg, Intuit’s GoPayment senior product manager, some customers who paid using the manual-card-number-entry test run trusted it more because they had heard of Intuit before. Both of these advantages are crucial, because people need to trust a product before they’re going to swipe their credit card into an iPhone and sign it with their fingers.

Mophie’s Howe said the system encrypts credit card information at the hardware level before it passes through the phone, through the app and its data connection, and stays encrypted all the way to Intuit’s cloud-based merchant account, providing end-to-end security even if a virus or hacker has compromised the phone itself.

“[The credit card and user information] is basically data that the hardware has encrypted, so the iPhone sees it as just an encrypted packet of data,” Howe told Wired.com. “It’s NSA-level DUKPT technology. The key is created at the time of manufacture and impossible to decrypt without that key, which is kept in two unique locations — on both sides. The credit card is not a secret, because it’s on the card, but it was important to Apple and for mophie and Intuit to have that security, so that if somebody did have a jailbroken phone, they’re still not going to be able to just use this as a card scanner.”

Go Payment app integrates tightly with Intuit Quickbooks, as one would expect, Complete Credit Card Solution users can access all of their sales data through the website and aren’t forced to use Intuit’s other software in order to use this package. And while users don’t need a merchant account, they will need another account for accepting cash and personal checks.

Customers sign with their fingers directly onto the iPhone's touchscreen.

Intuit’s Lunneborg said the Intuit/mophie offering beats Square because it includes a merchant account and requires no minimums, whereas Square pays out $1,000 per week into an account at an outside bank, increasing that limit “as it gets to know you.” And this system beats non-hardware apps such as PayPal’s because it can swipe credit card information securely rather than relying on people typing it in. And while Verifone has a hardware solution, Howe points out that it does not include a merchant account for actually accepting the payments.

Meanwhile, the advantage over a traditional credit card set-up is that it’s mobile and handheld, and allows retailers, service-people, and other salespeople to take normal credit cards without a standard terminal, and without relying on the customer to have certain hardware, the way Visa’s payment system will.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Square Mobile Credit Card System (Beta)
• The Death of Cash? Square’s Personal iPhone Credit Card Reader
• PayPal Fist Bumps Square
• 2010: The Year Of Mobile Banking & Payment
• Visa Seeks to Extend Retail Dominance With Pay-With-iPhone Service
• Starbucks Payment App Goes Viral, But One-Size-Fits-One Is Doomed
• Twitter Creator Launches ‘Square’ — Like Smartphone Paypal for Retailers

Photos courtesy of Intuit and mophie

Intel designs and manufactures processor chips at plants such as this one, in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Chipmaker Intel Thursday announced a $7.68 billion bid to buy computer security company McAfee, a huge bid to secure the “internet of things” — the billions of chips in connected devices beyond computers.

Intel is the dominant player in traditional computers but the action is moving far away from the desktop, and even from computers in the traditional sense. Now the opportunities are not only in smartphones and tablets but in cars, TVs, ATMs, sensor networks, and medical devices: places and devices where we are just as exposed but have less personal control.

This is a huge growth industry for chip makers, and providing an integrated security layer could make Intel more competitive and trusted among enterprise customers deploying these systems en masse in the next few years.

Intel’s not the only hardware company to start snapping up security companies. Only two days ago HP said it would acquire Fortify, an enterprise security firm. As reported by Computerworld, EMC purchased RSA in 2006, and IBM has bought from Rational, Ounce Labs and WatchFire in recent years.

“With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online,” said Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini during the announcement. Today’s security software for cellphones, televisions and other connected devices leaves much to be desired, he said.

Otellini also said that “in the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.”

“We have lots of activities going on in growing connected devices … from connected television to mobile devices,” Intel software and services chief Renee James told Reuters. “As we look at the businesses we’re in, we see that security is the No. 1 purchase consideration. We believe that we can enhance security with hardware and come up with a better solution.”

Not everyone sees this quite this way, which may explain why Intel’s stock declined slightly on the news.

“I’m baffled,” Peter Firstbrook, an analyst with Gartner in Stamford, Conn., told Computerworld. “I don’t see any synergy at all between McAfee and Intel.”

The boards of both companies will likely approve the acquisition, according to Intel, and regardless of its reasons, Intel wants McAfee very badly indeed. The company offered 60 percent more than McAfee stock cost when the stock market closed on Wednesday, causing McAfee shares to rise 58 percent in early morning Thursday trading in anticipation of the deal.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Brad Friedman

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Why Intel Wants to Get into Energy
• Intel and Vice Launch Creators Project: Selling Out or Boosting Creativity?
• Report: Google Working With Intel, Sony on TV Project
• Intel’s Cure for Home Energy Management: Answering Machines
• FTC Settles With Intel Over Monopoly Accusations
• Intel Heads Up $3.5 Billion Green/Clean Tech Investment Fund
• Intel Cash Register Knows Who You Are, What You Want

Bug Labs founder Peter Semmelhack

The iPhone is a direct descendant of the Model T Ford — you can get one in any color you want, so long as it’s black (or white).

That’s the viewpoint of Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, whose modular, open source hardware company aims to fix that shortcoming by making it easier for people and companies to create their own electronics products using a Linux processor module, a camera module, a touchscreen LCD module and so on.

Bug Labs made a big splash a couple years ago as the tech media slavered over the possibilities of it bringing us products that Apple or Sony would never make, like the Bug Labs-powered device that detects when Semmelhack’s sailboat is rocking too much, and sends him a text message so he can alert the marina owner to tie it down more securely. Or the one he made for his diabetic sister that wakes up her family if her heart rate increases too much, indicating dangerously low blood sugar.

Or the one an 11-year-old friend of the company wants to build, which would snap a photo every time someone opened the door to his room so he could tell when his brother was snooping around in there (not cool), as opposed to his mother (cool).

But so far, Semmelhack’s vision of enabling long-tail electronics for niche markets hasn’t totally materialized.

Some progress has been made — one particularly powerful example being Bug4Good, a “tamper-proof evidence-gathering device” designed to support human rights. To document infringement of those rights, witnesses can use it to take photos, shoot video and record audio, automatically encrypt them with hardware, upload them to the cloud and delete them from the device automatically.

In Bug’s view, just as software is opening up new possibilities for everyone — consumers, developers, businesses and so on (when else in history could you buy an Ocarina for the price of a candy bar?) — the hardware market is increasingly dominated by only a few huge companies with the scale to churn out mass-market products with millions of potential buyers because that’s the only way to keep costs down.

Semmelhack still believes that within the next 10 years, there will be an explosion of niche devices, as open source hardware like his democratizes hardware design and manufacturing. The key, he says, will be content companies building their own gadgets.

Continue Reading “SXSW: Bug Labs Says Content Will Drive Open Source Hardware” »

Things are not looking good for PC and chip manufacturers as consumers held back on electronics purchases during the holidays.

Intel reported a 90 percent drop in fourth-quarter profit Thursday, Advanced Micro Devices just announced that it will be cutting its workforce by 9 percent, and worldwide PC shipments were down for the first time in 6 years in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a new report from IDG.

While annual volume was actually up for 2008 by 10.5 percent, there was a .4% decrease in shipments year on year for the fourth quarter.

“As expected, demand for PCs in the U.S. faced a challenging environment, with a substantial reduction in spending among both consumer and commercial segments amid tightening credit, eroding confidence, and growing unemployment,” said Doug Bell, research analyst, United States Quarterly PC Tracker.

“Unfortunately, the first half of 2009 looks pretty shaky as the economic fundamentals need to recover before spending on PCs will resume.”

AMD is equally as pessimistic for the new year.  In addition to the layoffs, it is planning on temporarily cutting salaries (both the CEO and executive chairman are also taking a 20 percent cut).  It is expected to announce Q4 results on Thursday, but warned that revenue will come in lower than expected.

Intel investors have high hopes that things will get better for them in the first half of 2009. Analysts have a different opinion.

"We believe demand will continue to be impaired throughout [2009], and as a result we believe the company’s gross margins and revenue growth will remain below normal," writes JP Morgan analyst Chris Danely.

See also:

• Circuit City Goes Out of Business; Shutters 567 US Stores

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that his organization will be cutting half its staff and ending in-house development of Sugar, the Linux-based operating system that ships on its tiny XO Children’s Machine laptops.

Even though the OLPC project has been praised by the mainstream media, the free software elite and humanitarian organizations for its goal to supply low-cost, educational computers to developing countries with little or no technology infrastructure, the project has been beset by a host of problems and delays. The worldwide economic downturn has slowed hardware orders, but the project was largely sidelined by the revolution it helped create — a wave of low-cost, low-powered laptops built to run Windows, like Intel’s similar Classmate PC. Now, even the OLPC project is transitioning to Windows after realizing it’s what customers want.

Sugar is another issue altogether. I received an OLPC XO as a gift over the holidays through the Give 1, Get 1 program, and I was confounded by Sugar. It’s a very simple operating system with a icon-based user interface that’s designed to be universally accessible. Navigating around takes some getting used to, but that’s expected. However, trying to get the machine to connect to a protected network was a three-hour ordeal.

Continue Reading “OLPC Cuts Staff by Half, Drops Sugar Development” »

Stephen Myers has a dog, an iPhone and not much time. As a University of Florida Ph. D student, he’s rarely home. So he did what any engineer would do: he created a way to give his dog a treat remotely, through his iPhone. Okay, maybe he has too much time.

Myers posted a video (embedded above) of the gizmo in action and wrote up a how-to. He used a beta version of an ioBridge module, hardware that can connect to both the internet and the physical world.

Viewing a simple webpage on his iPhone, Myers can click a treat button to activate a spindle. The prototype is a little rough, but it achieves its objective, spitting out a dog treat to the floor. Myers also has a webcam fixed on his dog’s bed, so he can see when the morsel has been successfully dispensed.

Myers claims that no programming was required, but that’s coming from an engineering grad student. Still, hardware hacking like this is bringing a whole new suite of options to the layperson with enough gumption to figure out the controls.

We’ve come a long way from the Netscape fish cam.

[via John Murrell]

Over the past few years, Intel has made no secret of its grandiose plans for the mobile space. As luck would have it, the two key ingredients in the chipmaker’s new mobile stew are on display at this week’s Intel Developers Forum in Shanghai: a new breed of mobile internet devices and a low-power platform to run them called Atom.

The latter ingredient is really a series of redesigned processors, formerly known as Silverthorn and Menlow. In early March, they were rebranded as “Atom” and “Centrino Atom,” respectively.

According to Intel, Atom will feature some of the zippiest processors under 3 watts of power, and will run at speeds of up to 1.8GHz and sport a thermal ceiling of 0.65 to 2.4 watts. Your average laptop, in case you were wondering, runs at 3.3GHz and gobbles up 35 watts.

But the Atom platform isn’t intended just for lappies. These new the 45nm chips are also slated to be the driving force behind what Intel refers to as MIDs, or mobile internet devices. (Think of UMPCs, but slightly less awful).

Continue Reading “Intel’s Mobile Vision Takes Shape in Shanghai With ‘MIDs’ and ‘Atoms’” »

Oh lithium-ion batteries, is there no limit to your exploding, fizzling, spark-spewing abilities? According to the AP, Japan’s trade and economy ministry is now investigating a possible defect in older versions of Apple’s iPod Nano (model number MA099J/A) after one particularly nasty incident where the device reportedly shot out sparks while recharging.

Overall, details remain spotty about the case, but the problem supposedly surfaced in January in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo. Once again, officials are blaming those occasionally unstable lithium-ion batteries. While no one was injured during the mini fireworks show, Japanese officials have publicly chastised Apple for failing to report the incident earlier (the company submitted its report on March 7). In the meantime, Apple has been ordered to look into the matter further and report back to the Ministry.

Lithium-ion batteries, of course, have caused numerous headaches for laptop manufacturers around the world over the past year and a half. Sony kicked things off with its own massive recall in September of 2006. But after a series of additional battery-induced laptop blazes, companies like Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and, yes, even Apple, began recalling thousands of their own laptops and battery backs. As of last April, more than 10 million notebook batteries had been recalled worldwide.

As for the sparky iPod Nanos in Japan, a Google translation of the Korean news site ETNews has this to say:

Apple ‘iPod’ in the United States, Japan and the ignition was causing the accident belatedly. Asahi Shimbun, 12 days to charge the iPod Nano bolt fireworks accident during sex industry report said Japan’s economy.

We’re not sure about that sex industry bit, but ETNews sure gets it right when it says: "lithium-ion batteries are endless-related accidents in the world."

To date, Apple has shipped about 425,000 of the possibly defective models into Japan, according to the Ministry. Those shipments began in September 2005 and were discontinued after September 2006.

[Via AP]

Hollywood’s role in deciding the ultimate HD format winner shouldn’t be underestimated. But Yankee Group’s Carl Howe points to another important factor that may very well have sealed the fate of HD DVD before the war was even underway. In a follow-up to a discussion we had with Howe about Apple’s potential plans for Blu-ray, he made one particular point that’s spot on:

…Two of the big supporters of HD DVD were Microsoft 
and Intel, each of whom could account for exactly zero million HD DVD 
drive sales. Whenever I see “Barney alliances” — ones where no money 
changes hands, but all the partners agree to love each other and their 
technologies — I always consider it a sign that the partnership is 
going to fail.

At a time when “I love you, you love me” partnerships are flourishing in the tech industry, this observation is key. Even when the two biggest names in software and hardware get behind a specific technology (or format), if there’s no money at stake for either company, you can bank of that technology not lasting long — or at least not being helped in any discernable way by their “support.”

All indications are that the Blu-ray camp paid a lot for studio support it received — a hell of a lot more than Toshiba anyway. Precise numbers still aren’t known, but Warner Bros. is rumored to have received $500 million clams to go Blu-ray exclusive. Fox was also reportedly paid an undisclosed amount to remain exclusive to Blu-ray after it threatened to switch to HD DVD.

There were other factors at play in the HD format war, too, like the Blu-ray Disc Association’s adoption of BD+, an anti-copying, re-lockable DRM technology that HD DVD ultimately rejected, and that studios happen to love. But if you want to gauge the success of any alliance or coalition, there’s still no better way than to look at where money is coming from, and who’s giving and receiving it. As Howe reiterates, anything worth doing in business, is worth doing for money.

“When there’s no money at stake, there’s no business. The death of HD DVD proved that rule again,” he said.

Photo: Flickr/discopalace

As this week’s ‘Take Two’ update gives Apple TVs a much needed UI and feature makeover, Apple’s commitment to improving some of its hardware with major software upgrades shows no sign of slowing down.

On Wednesday, Apple users got another tantalizing hint at what was possible through the magic of software updates. U.K. gadget site T3 published an article claiming that Apple will be spreading the multi-touch technology found on the MacBook Air to other MacBooks through software upgrades — not full-fledged hardware refreshes. The post cited an “Apple spokesperson” as confirming this was possible, but the article was mysteriously removed from T3 a few hours after it was posted with no explanation. (See UPDATE below.)

According to Synaptics, a major developer of touchpad interfaces for mobile phones, notebooks and other peripherals, upgrading touchpad capabilities through software is technically feasible, but not just yet.

“There is firmware in the touchpad…and some silicon technology can be enhanced to recognize different multi-finger gestures,” says Mark Vena, vice president of Synaptics’ PC business unit.

Continue Reading “Confirmed: Multi-Touch Tech Will Be Software Upgradable; But Not Just Yet” »