field

Start-up Lytro tries refocusing camera industry

A start-up called Lytro hopes to revolutionize photography by selling a camera later this year that lets people focus their images after the fact.

The technique used is called light-field photography, and it's been an active area of research for years in the optics realm. With it, lens and image sensor technology doesn't focus on a particular subject, but instead gathers light information from different directions; processing after the fact means different aspects of the scene can be recreated.

Lytro has been working on the technology for years--I interviewed Chief Executive Ren Ng three years ago when his … Read more

Naratte: Mobile payments using sound waves

All mobile phones have microphones and speakers. Hardly any have near-field communications chips. At least for now. And that's what a new company, Naratte, is planning on leveraging as it launches a technology that allows fast, secure, short-range, point-to-point communication over ultrasonic sound waves.

Compared with other device-to-device communication technology, its Zoosh tech is about as fast as NFC (the tap-to-communicate technology Google and other companies are pushing), but slower than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. However, like NFC, the "setup time" for communication is extremely fast--there's no waiting around for a handshake to be established between devices.

Naratte CEO Brett Paulson says, "We built an acoustic baseband in software," and he points to two big benefits to doing communication this way. First, it's cheap, since there's no additional hardware required on mobile devices. Big point-of-sale terminals, he says, can be retrofitted with microphones and speakers for about a dollar (they already have the input ports on their motherboards); smaller credit-card terminals might need a bit more hardware, but they can piggyback on the input ports that exist for barcode scanners.

The other big benefit: Paulson showed a Zoosh demo using Java on a currently available feature phone. In other words, this NFC competitor can be rolled out to the world as a download on pretty much every mobile handset there is. NFC requires new phones (or for people to put stickers on their existing phones.)

NFC mobile payments could hit $50 billion by 2014

Consumers around the world could generate as much as $50 billion in sales through NFC-based mobile payments by 2014, according to a report released yesterday by Juniper Research.

NFC, or near-field communication, lets consumers pay for goods and services on the go through their mobile phones simply by touching or passing them over another NFC-equipped device such as a register or terminal. The funds themselves are transferred from the user's credit card account stored through the mobile phone.

A variety of industry players have kicked off their own efforts to tap into the potential of NFC.

Google recently announced … Read more

Could magnets replace aspirin as blood thinners?

Temple University physics department chair Rongjia Tao made headlines in 2008 when he developed a simple device that creates an electric field to thin fuel, thereby reducing the size of the droplets injected into the engine and improving fuel efficiency.

Now, Tao and former graduate student Ke Huang are unveiling their latest research that this same principle, when applied to the human body, can help thin blood and reduce one's risk of heart attack--without the side effects of blood thinners such as aspirin.

After testing numerous blood samples at Temple, the physicists were able to use a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to what is used in an MRI) for just one minute to polarize the red blood cells, which contain iron, thereby causing those cells to link together in short, streamlined chains flowing down the center of blood vessels and reducing friction along the walls.

The result: smoother blood flow. In fact, after just 1 to 12 minutes of exposure to the magnetic field via a 1,000-pound magnet, blood viscosity decreased by 20 to 30 percent for several hours. Eventually, blood viscosity returned to previous levels.… Read more

Better than a shoebox

If your card collection survived your mother's cleaning campaigns, there's a good chance it could be valuable, now or in the future. Sports Card Collector can help you catalog and organize your treasures. Duck Software's database engine is optimized for collectors, with quick access via name or category, customizable fields, and easy data entry.

Sports Card Collector's interface is plain but businesslike and easy to understand and use. It's divided into two halves. The left half has a window listing entries sorted by player name or card brand with a series of customizable category tabs … Read more

Google to dub its mobile-payments service 'Google Wallet'?

It appears that one of Google's mobile-wallet partners has stolen some of the Web giant's thunder ahead of tomorrow's planned announcement.

Google, which is widely expected to unveil a long-rumored mobile-payments system on Thursday, will dub the service "Google Wallet," according to what appears to be an internal memo from The Container Store. According to the memo, which was published by Thisismynext.com, the Web giant plans to launch Google Wallet near the end of summer:

...this summer Google will launch a test of "contactless" payment through a mobile device--so customers will be … Read more

Report: Google to unveil mobile-payments service

Google appears to be ready to outline its plan to turn smartphones into mobile wallets.

The Web giant is expected to unveil a mobile payments system on Thursday that will operate on select Android-based Sprint phones, according to a Bloomberg report that cited unidentified sources familiar with the matter. Google reportedly plans to introduce the service initially in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

A Google representative declined to comment on the report.

The service, which will reportedly tap near-field communications technology, would allow users to pay for retail purchases by holding the devices up … Read more

Free movie database app

Duck Software's Organizer series of personal database applications share a common core that is then optimized for a specific use, such as keeping track of your movie collection. That's the job of Film Tracker v5.0, a free movie database. It can help you keep track of your far-flung video collection with more than 19 customizable data fields. Like all such databases, you must enter the information bit by bit, but Film Tracker's efficient entry form makes that job easy, and it can also import and export data in CSV files.

Like its stablemates, Film Tracker shares … Read more

Survey: Young more eager to pay via mobile phone

The mobile and banking industries have been all abuzz lately about offering consumers the ability to pay for items through their cell phones. But how do consumers actually feel about this?

Survey results released yesterday by MasterCard tried to gauge how comfortable people would be using their cell phones to pay for items on the go at stores, restaurants, and other retail outlets. And like many surveys focused on new technologies, this one showed a fairly big gap in feelings between the young and the not-as-young.

Among those 18 to 34 years old, 63 percent said they would be at … Read more

NFC system to let you pay for dinner via cell phone

You may soon be able to pay for dinner at your favorite restaurant directly through your cell phone courtesy of a new NFC system slated to become available later this year.

Announced today by electronic payment company VeriFone and software developer Micros Systems, the new system would tap into the growing technology of near field communication (NFC) to let customers pay for dinner bills through a digital wallet stored on their mobile devices.

By storing credit card and bank account information, cell phones equipped with the necessary NFC technology can exchange information with other equipped phones as well NFC-based registers … Read more