ios

PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Card.io, a company whose technology allows credit card information to be captured by a smartphone's camera.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

The acquisition is an apparent move to bolster its position against mobile-payments upstart Square, which revealed in March that it was processing $4 billion a year in payments. Square, which recently announced plans for international expansion, also offers an accessory that connects to mobile devices and lets people swipe their cards to pay for purchases.

The San Francisco-based startup attracted PayPal's interest when the two companies … Read more

Apple has given developers yet another update to iOS 6 ahead of its public release later this year.

This third beta comes 21 days after Apple's last update. Apple provided developers an early taste of the software at its annual developers conference in early June. Several more betas are expected ahead of a release to the general public, which Apple said will come in the fall.

Per MacRumors, the new update comes devoid of a changes list. Developers seeing the over-the-air update on their iOS device simply get the message that it contains "bug fixes and improvements."… Read more

Apple claims 500,000 apps in its App Store for the iPhone and over 700,000 when iPad apps are added in. Google Play claims 600,000 apps for Android. Windows Phone is estimated to have 100,000 apps in its marketplace.

But do the numbers really matter, especially when the "new apps" may be content like video, music, and books?

I'm not a big fan of numbers just for numbers' sake. I watched search engines play the numbers game for years, each trying to be "bigger" than their competitors by having more Web pages. … Read more

I'd Cap That+ is the paid follow-up to the wildly popular, free caption-generating app I'd Cap That. For 99 cents, "+" offers the same crude humor of its predecessor, but adds a few features that many felt the original were missing.

Like its free counterpart, I'd Cap That+ is a novelty app that automatically generates hilarious, sometimes crude captions for your iPhone photos. Just fire it up, choose to either take a new photo or use an existing photo from your phone's gallery, and hit Use. After that, watch I'd Cap That slap a … Read more

Is Apple taking aim at sites that sell access to its iOS 6 beta to non-developers?

Apple-tracking blog MacStories reported yesterday that a host of Web sites known for selling access to Apple's iOS beta are no longer online. After trying to contact many of the site's owners, the publication's e-mails bounced back. Finally, the publication was able to connect with one site owner who said that his hosting provider took his site down after Apple filed a copyright-infringement claim.

That followed a claim made by David, CEO of Web hosting provider Fused who goes by his … Read more

Foursquare has added a new feature to its app and Web site called Connected Apps. Basically, it's a showcase of apps that got a head-start on using the Foursquare API. In the choices you'll see apps such as: The Weather Channel, Instagram, and Eat This, Not That!

When you check in to a location, you'll see the Connected Apps information right below Foursquare tips from other users. Ready to add some to your Foursquare and check them out? Here's how:

Step 1: Open the Foursquare app and head to the Me … Read more

On the fifth anniversary for the iPhone and as we draw closer to the release of iOS 6 this fall (read our First Take from WWDC here), I can't help but think of how far Apple's iOS has come since the day the first iPhone was unveiled.

If you remember, that first iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs and Apple on January 9, 2007, and was more about the touch-screen interface than any extras, but it wasn't until June of that year the iPhone was released to the public. That first iOS wasn't even called iOS (… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO - Patrick Brady, director of Android partner engineering, has two big launches to celebrate this month. The first is the birth of his daughter three weeks ago. And the second is the launch of his other baby -- the Google Nexus 7 tablet.

At the Google I/O developer conference here this week, Google took the wraps off its first ever Google-branded tablet made by Asus. The new 7-inch tablet called the Nexus 7 runs the latest version of the Google Android operating system Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It's loaded with some impressive specifications, including an … Read more

The bottom line: Chrome for iOS gives iPhone and iPad users a modicum of comfort in the isolated iOS world: a familiar interface, tab and password syncing. However, without its own JavaScript engine powering blazing speeds, Chrome loses much of its shine.

Review: Google abruptly changed course with the iOS version of Chrome. The company used to say that it would only allow Chrome onto platforms that could replicate Chrome's speed. Thanks to browser restrictions from Apple, Chrome for iOS lacks Google's V8 JavaScript engine and Just-In-Time (JIT) technology, meaning that under the hood, it's not the … Read more