The Retail Force Awakens

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The Retail Force Awakens
Number 2649
Broadcast Date DECEMBER 18, 2015
Episode Length 42:13
Hosts Tom Merritt
Guests Patrick Norton, Len Peralta

Apple and Samsung get agreements to start mobile payments in China and Target is reportedly investigating their own. Patrick Norton and Tom Merritt discuss why mobile payments is such a mess.

Guest

Headlines

Samsung Pay and Apple Pay have both reached agreements with China’s UnionPay along with support from partner banks. UnionPay is the only bank in China that conducts interbank payments. Samsung Pay and Apple Pay still need testing and certification before they can launch. Oh, and Reuters has three people familiar with the matter who say Target is in the early stages of building their own mobile payments system. 'Cause their breach getting Patrick his third CC in 12 months wasn't enough.
Evernote is ending distribution, updates and support for several standalone apps including Skitch for Windows, iOS and Android (the Mac version will stick around), the Evernote Clearly reading extension and the Evernote Pebble app. The company said features from the apps are integrated into Evernote’s main app and Pebble users can use the Powernoter app. The apps will not be available after Jan. 22.
Networking vendor Juniper announced Thursday it had discovered unauthorized code in its ScreenOS that “could allow a knowledgable attacker who can monitor VPN traffic to decrypt the traffic.” Juniper has released a patch that fixes that backdoor and an SSH bug. The issues do not affect newer SRX firewalls running the Junos OS. Eweek points out Juniper was named as making devices that could be infiltrated by the US NSA in a December 2013 story in Der Spiegel covering documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
VLC is now available for Chrome OS. VideoLAN’s president Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote that the VLC team ported the Android version of VLC using App Runtime for Chrome letting them reuse 95% of the code instead of re-writing the app in JavaScript which would have taken more time. You can get VLC for Chrome OS on the Chrome Web Store.
Submitted by TVsTravis
Ars Technica reports the US FCC has asked Comcast, AT&T and T-Mobile USA to answer questions about their programs that exempt certain types of data from counting against customer limits. Relevant technical and business personnel are asked to be made available for discussions by January 15. AT&T allows advertisers to pay for data not to count, T-Mobile exempts video and audio services at no charge and Comcast exempts its own Stream TV service.
Submitted by tm204
Facebook holds the title for Top smartphone app in the US according a new Nielsen report. Facebook is estimated to have 126 million users per month with YouTube at number 2 with 97 million. Facebook messenger came in at number 3 with 96.4 million users. A 31% increase over 2014. Google search, Google Play, Google Maps and Gmail followed in that order. Apple Music landed at number 9 with 54.5 million users. Tech Crunch writes the ranking was based on the averaged number unique users based on a monthly survey of 30,000+ US mobile subscribers aged 13 and up.
Friday morning the US Congress passed its omnibus budget bill within which was the entire text of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, without any previously added privacy protections. If signed by the President, the law would allow companies to share data with government agencies without liability if needed to combat a cybersecurity threat. It also eases restrictions on the government sharing information among its own agencies for the same purpose.
BlackBerry reported its first revenue rise in 9 quarters at $548 million up 12% over the previous quarter. It’s still a drop over last year’s $793 million. The company lost 3 cents a share beating expectations of a loss of 14 cents a share. Software reevnue rose from $78 million last quarter to $154 million and 70% of that is recurring.
The Seattle Times reports that unnamed cargo-industry executives say Amazon has been inquiring about the possibility of leasing around 20 Boeing 767 jets. The hope would be to put them in operation by the end of January.

Discussion

Pick of the Day

Have you heard of an app called Seene? It's super neat. Basically, kind of like a 3D Instagram... you snap and pan horizontally for about a second and it works out the parallax.

Not only are they embeddable but it lets you export it as an animated gif or mp4 too. It's free on iOS and Android app stores. You can see their popular posts here http://seene.co/a/popular/ or my user gallery http://seene.co/u/alan_f/ to get an idea of what it's like. (Uses WebGL to present it on the browser I think.)

Sadly their fancy 3D scanning app demoed in the main site is not public, only their instagram'ish one, but it's still cool.
Submitted by Alan

YouTube

Links



Preceded by:
"WhatsApp Judge?" 		The Retail Force Awakens
 Followed by:
"Legally Binding Mug"
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