Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘android’

At the moment, the FDA does bestow its approval on some apps, including a radiology tool called Mobiel MIM, but that approval at the moment is both pretty scarce and totally optional--it's a nice bonus if your app is FDA-approved, but the only organization an app developer really needs approval from is Apple. The FDA strikes a tone of total support for the surge in medical apps, but states concern that there is no real approval process that vets medical apps prior to release. If you've got a weird rash or a pain somewhere in your abdomen (could it be the spleen? What is a spleen, anyway?), or want to use your phone's sensors to monitor your organs (like a spleen, which I am 99% sure is in the abdomen), you might consult an app, and the FDA wants to make sure you're getting the right information.

The FDA proposed a guideline that would have the organization overseeing certain kinds of apps. Specifically, they'd want to examine any app that is "used as an accessory to an FDA-regulated device," which seems reasonable--of course the FDA would want to make sure that any device they approve would be used with accessories of which they also approve. The other kind of app the FDA wants to regulate is any software that turns a smartphone into a "regulated medical device," like an electrocardiography machine. Again, pretty understandable--the FDA monitors EKG machines, so if you're using an iPhone as an EKG machine, that should also be monitored.

There's no mention of the FDA examining WebMD-type diagnosis apps--the proposal seems much more geared to apps that turn smartphones into legitimate medical tools, rather than just references. FDA approval might slow down the release of some of these apps, but the agency thinks added oversight will be worth the delay.

[FDA via Gizmodo]

Zoosh me a $20?

You can read our full primer on NFC here, but as a basic summary, NFC is a short-range wireless tech similar to RFID, in which small chunks of information can be passed among devices like smartphones and all sorts of other appliances like point-of-sale units, subway entry points, and even less mechanical items like movie posters. There's only one major NFC-enabled smartphone--the Samsung Nexus S--in the U.S. at the moment, and the infrastructure is in its infancy, but other countries have robust NFC or NFC-type setups and all signs point to a North American embrace as well.

But NFC is a few years off, and Zoosh is here right now. Zoosh, coming from a small Silicon Valley startup, is a software solution that uses the audio hardware found in phones to communicate. As every phone is necessarily equipped with a speaker and microphone, Zoosh saw an opening to use that hardware, rather than create something new. To send data (whether it's a URL, a phone number, or payment information), Zoosh broadcasts ultrasonic audio in a frequency not audible to human ears, around 20,000Hz. A speaker in another phone (or, later, a point-of-sale unit, which the startup claims can be upgraded for only $30) picks up that audio and translates it back into the intended data. You can see it in action in this wholly Silicon Valley video.

What's most intriguing about Zoosh is its ease of adoption. All a smartphone needs is a simple app that unlocks its ability to communicate in this way, and there's no need to worry about compatibility, as all phones have the required hardware. We don't know many specifics at the moment--the speed of transfer and amount of data that can be transferred is still unknown--but it's a surprising and seemingly very practical solution. At least, it's a practical stopgap until NFC gets here.

[ComputerWorld]

...and will shower your phone with deals, offers, and ads

Starting with the basics, we'd recommend anyone confused about NFC (and it can be confusing!) to check out our primer on the tech, which covers just about everything you'd want to know about the future of wallets (including the fact that we won't even be using wallets--we'll just be reaching into our robo-pockets for our superphones). All caught up? Good! So what's Google Wallet anyway?

Google Wallet is a combination of a few different mobile payment features. It's an Android app, both because Google is behind both Wallet and Android and because an Android phone (the Samsung Nexus S) happens to be the only NFC-wielding smartphone in the country. Google expects NFC to be in around 50% of all smartphones by 2014--a conservative guess, but the tech will need time to mature, so it seems pretty likely. Google's open to moving Wallet to other platforms like iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, but phones need an NFC chip to be compatible with Google Wallet. Theoretically, that could be done with a simple sticker.

The first and most obvious feature is mobile payments--you can tap your Wallet-enabled phone on a point-of-sale system (the thing on which you swipe your embarrassingly 20th-century plastic credit cards right now) to pay. Easy! But NFC is a two-way protocol, which means you can (and will) receive stuff from retailers and Google as well. Google is encouraging the use of loyalty cards (you know, the "buy 20, get one free" things that are undoubtedly cluttering your wallet right now) and coupons or deals. This feeds into Google's second new app, Google Offers.

Buy something from a store, and that store will be able to send you a coupon, right to your Google Offers app. Plus, Google's doing a little Groupon-type deal that'll send new offers to you every day. You won't have to keep track of these deals, though--Google Offers is designed to play nicely with Wallet, so that single tap at Subway will enable your $1-off coupon, pay for your sandwich, and make a digital stamp on your loyalty card so you can keep working your way towards that free meatball sub. That's what's available now, but it's just the start, and depends on how far the retailers want to go with the system. Theoretically, as in an example Google showed, you could make up a shopping list on your phone, and when you walk into a grocery store, be informed immediately of what's on sale, snag the coupons automatically, and be offered a loyalty card if you're a regular shopper. Then, you'll have the receipt saved, so if you get home and find that your milk has expired, you can take it back without having to worry about holding onto paper receipts. No more receipts! Ever!

Interestingly, even though the NFC chip itself doesn't require power, the Google Wallet app does, so if your phone battery is dead, you won't be able to use it. Once NFC spreads to essential items like transit passes and driver's licenses, they may have to rethink that--smartphone battery life is not outstanding, and it would be pretty awful to be stranded with a dead phone that can't check Twitter or buy a smoothie from Jamba Juice.

Google has already lined up a few partners, including Sprint (which just released the Nexus S 4G), retailers like Subway, Macy's, and Walgreens (and several more), and money-types Citibank and MasterCard. MasterCard is the real trump card here--they've already got a pretty extensive NFC system in place, called PayPass, that currently allows you to wave your card or keychain dongle instead of swiping it (a feature of dubious use, to be sure). But that means that field-testing of Google Wallet starts right now (in New York and San Francisco, at least), with 100,000 merchants nationwide fully set up to handle your phone-tapping.

Of course, not everyone has MasterCard, which is the only official credit card partner of Google Wallet at the moment. So Google's providing a pre-paid sort of account to every Google Wallet user, which works sort of like a debit card, allowing users to fill up their card with money from any bank account or non-MasterCard credit card.

Security-wise, we're happy to see Google is acting very proactive. The fears about someone swiping your credit card information wirelessly while your phone is in your pocket seem to be mostly unfounded. To make any purchase, you'll have to enter a PIN number. Even better, when you're not actively using the Google Wallet app, the physical NFC chip is shut down, with no communication to the outside world. If you lose your phone, there's a remote wipe in place that allows you to banish all traces of your financial information from your phone.

It's pretty obvious why retailers are excited about Google Wallet--they get an entirely new way to draw in customers, whether it's beaming them ads as they walk by their stores or putting up NFC-enabled ads that Wallet users can tap for offers. But for customers, it has the potential to be pretty intrusive, and even unsettling, from a privacy perspective. Google knows this, and have a few safeguards in place--geotargeting is opt-in, meaning retailers will not know your location unless you want them to, and they're emphasizing that they'd rather have offers delivered when users are looking for them than simply spam-blasting every NFC user in sight with ads for $0.50 off nail clippers at Walgreens.

Google keeps touting openness, transparency, and control, all important when people's money is in the mix. Hopefully Google can make Wallet useful for consumers as well as retailers, without being too annoying for consumers. The field testing is starting now, and Google says the full rollout will come "soon" after, probably sometime this summer.

[Google Wallet]

The app (which is not in the Android Market, so don't even bother looking for it) is called Caribou, and relies on a vulnerability in these sorts of security systems that allows them to be unlocked remotely. It's actually a surprisingly lo-fi sort of app: You have to input the IP address of the system you're trying to hack, and then the app will perform a brute force attack (basically trying every single possible combination) until it lands on the correct one. Then the app will unlock the door for 30 seconds while you scoot inside the not-so-secure door.

This isn't exactly cause for panic--more of a warning to those in charge of security system upkeep to make a few easy changes to block this sort of attack. For one thing, if the data the app needs to access is simply behind a firewall, the app won't be able to access it. Some lackadaisical systems make the error of leaving it out in the open for anyone to swipe, which this app does ably.

There's also the small problem of the app needing the IP address of the door it's trying to unlock. It's not clear whether that information is easily obtained, but the fact is that it has to be obtained, somehow. You can't just walk up to any door and hit a button; there needs to be some recon work to secure the IP addresses first. Still, it's a nice illustration of a weakness in this sort of security system, and the team is actually working with US-CERT (the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team) to ensure that the loophole is patched.

[CyberSecurityGuy via Engadget]

Plenty of phones have journeyed to the upper atmosphere aboard high-altitude balloons and homemade rockets, but SSTL’s phone will be the first one we know of that will be put into orbit as part of the functioning hardware of a satellite. Engineers at SSTL want to explore the ways smartphones—which have become increasingly powerful computers in recent years—can be integrated into satellite systems and whether or not the phone can control a small satellite.

The mission, known as STRaND-1 (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration, will integrate the whole phone into the satellite—that is, they won’t strip the insides out and repurpose them in some other way. In fact, while the phone’s own camera will be used to snap images of Earth, a second camera will be mounted inside the satellites housing to gather imagery of the phone’s screen as the team operates the phone remotely. The whole idea is that phones are already inexpensive technology packages containing various sensors and accelerometers, Wi-Fi and GPS receivers, and camera technologies.

Initially the phone (the specific model has not yet been disclosed) will act as a backup to the main computer on the satellite, but in time mission handlers want to phone to take over all functions of STRaND-1, including control of the guidance, navigation, and pulse plasma propulsion systems. The idea is to see how the phone’s open-source Android software can be modified to optimize the phone’s functions for spacecraft control.

If it works, ostensibly software designers could design all kinds of apps for future microsatellite missions. That would essentially turn Android into an open source platform not just for phone OS design but for satellite design as well, making space a far more open place.

[BBC]

Learning a new language is hard. All those new grammatical rules, the new spellings, new tenses, irregular verbs--it's a serious pain. Luckily, Google Translate just issued an update to enable what Google's calling "Conversation Mode." Basically, it translates a multi-language conversation in real-time, spitting out a translation just as soon as you finish speaking. Now you can quit those painful language classes!

Translate, available in the Android Market for all Android phones with at least version 2.1 (read: almost every Android phone), now packs conversation mode. It's meant to simulate the duties of a translator: After each person is finished talking, the app translates and regurgitates the translation on the fly. It only works with English and Spanish at the moment, though as Translate supports 53 different languages (!), if Conversation Mode is a success, Google will probably bring it to more languages.

In my quick tests, Translate worked exceedingly well half the time--Google's skill with English voice commands is pretty much unparalleled, so it's no surprise that Translate can interpret English and spit it out as Spanish fairly easily. The other side, Spanish to English, gave the app more problems, though I'm not sure if it's the app's fault or my fault for reading Spanish news articles in what I'm sure is an offensively awful accent. Either way, it got a lot of my Spanish wrong, though if you're careful to ignore the nonsense words that litter the translation ("Bluetooth" and "cowboy" popped up repeatedly for some reason), you can get the basic gist of what's being said.

This isn't the first app to attempt this kind of on-the-fly translation; in fact, the U.S. military is testing a similar app, and Google's own Goggles app can do something similar with text. But it's one of the more intuitive ways to translate real-world conversation we've seen, and it's freely available to millions. Just search for "Google Translate" in the Android Market.

[Google via Gizmodo]

The team behind Tunerfish, the social TV application launched by cable TV giant Comcast earlier this year, just announced that it’s releasing an application for Android smartphones.

Like a number of other applications, Tunerfish takes the “check in” idea (popularized by location services like Foursquare) into the TV world. Users can tell their friends what they’re watching, see what’s trending among other users, and earn rewards. Tunerfish has already launched an iPhone application and a website. In today’s blog post the company says the biggest demand from users was a downloadable Android app — until now, Android users had to check-in through the website.

This idea has attracted a lot of interest from companies big and small, with Time Warner investing in GetGlue’s media check-in platform and Google Ventures backing social TV app Miso. I asked Tunerfish general manager John McCrea (who, like other members of the Tunerfish team, came to Comcast through the acquisition of contacts startup Plaxo) about how he sees the competitive landscape, and he responded:

It wasn’t too surprising that a lot of startups would enter this space, but just how many has been a surprise. We’re pretty excited about our prospects in the best-of-both-worlds scenario. We remain a small and independent team, making great product in a very agile way, but we’re also part of Comcast, which should allow us to do some really exciting things in 2011 and beyond.

You can go here to download Tunerfish’s Android app.

Tags: Android, social TV, Tunerfish, TV check-ins

Companies: Comcast, Tunerfish

People: John McCrea