Confusion but hope as U.S. faces mobile payment revolution

In just under six months, a behind-the-scenes switch in the payments industry will change the way U.S. consumers shop and could bring wider acceptance for Apple Pay and its competitors.

Beginning in October, liability for transactions with fraudulent credit and debit cards will shift from the card companies to retailers, if the retailers haven't invested in terminals that don't accept chip-based cards. The chip cards are already being sent from banks to customers, and some stores have them in place, but much is still up in the air.

At this week's Transact 15 expo in San Francisco, a gathering of companies in the electronic payments industry, everyone has questions and there are few answers. Could the shift be delayed, will banks mandate PIN numbers instead of signatures for purchases with the new cards, and will cybercriminals just shift their attention online?

The switch to chip-based cards happened a decade ago in many European countries and is now common around the world, but the U.S., with its complex financial and retail system, has lagged. No one had wanted to put the investment into new cards and new terminals.

The Target transition

And then Target happened.

The breach of Target's payment system last year, which exposed the card numbers of tens of millions of consumers, is credited by many as the final push the industry needed to finally make the switch.

The new chip cards add a digital signature to transactions that lets the payment network know that the card being presented is the official one and not a fake—magnetic stripes don't have this ability and have proved vulnerable to copying.

But to accept the cards, retailers have to upgrade their payment terminals.

The largest retailers in the nation are already well prepared, said Rod Hometh, senior vice president of strategic development at Ingenico, a credit card machine retailer. They've been preparing for the last two years and even large regional retailers are expected to be ready at or near the deadline, he said, but most small businesses are well behind.

Pain at small businesses

This is partly due to cost and partly to lack of awareness of the shift.

With a small handheld terminal costing about the same as a smartphone, upgrading can cost thousands of dollars for small businesses, and there are many such businesses in the county.

Of the 6 million retail terminals in the U.S., a million of them account for 95 percent of all transactions. Small retailers make up the remaining 5 million terminals.

Some retailers are taking the opportunity to upgrade their entire systems to benefit from new technology and software that has been introduced in recent years, said Kevin Colaco, innovation mentor at Retail Cloud, a California start-up that offers a free point-of-sale system with premium add-ons.

An advantage of this approach is that the new terminals also include readers for NFC [near-field communication] systems like Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Samsung Pay.

For consumers eager to adopt mobile payments, the switch could bring wider acceptance. But the new cards are also expected to bring some confusion. In most countries, chip cards also ushered in an era where PINs, rather than signatures, are used to verify a transaction. Many banks and retailers are expected to stick with signatures, but some automated terminals such as gas pumps might start requiring PINs.

With six months to go, card issuers appear resolute on the October 1 deadline and most people involved agree that a further delay would cause a loss of faith in the switchover.

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Cloud gaming pioneer OnLive sold to Sony, will cease operations April 30

Cloud gaming service OnLive said Wednesday that Sony has bought many of its assets, and the company will wind down operations on April 30. (Full disclosure: I began subscribing to OnLive late last year.)

Users will continue to have access to OnLive's services until April 30, including the OnLive Game Service, OnLive Desktop and SL Go, and the company's Second Life browser. After today, no further subscription renewals will be charged for any of these services, the company said. Users whose subscriptions renewed on or after March 28 will be refunded. 

Why this matters: Onlive's subscribers are losing a unique service that had no real competition—perhaps for good reason. At its inception, OnLive was a pioneer: Network-based computers like Citrix had existed for some time, but no one had adapted the same principles to gaming. Users, armed with either a microconsole or basic PC, could tap into OnLive's network of servers and render a high-end game at maximum settings without the need to invest in a high-end PC. 

OnLive

OnLive allowed subscribers to buy games elsewhere and play them using OnLive's servers.

OnLive's magic relied on allowing its users to play those games without latency issues, as the information was passed back and forth between the player and the OnLive servers. But the business model apparently wasn't sustainable. In 2012, OnLive unexpectedly imploded, as founder Steve Perlman unexpectedly sold and restructured the company.

In March 2014, OnLive was reborn. Although Perlman was no longer with the company, the revamped OnLive kept many of its features: the cloud gaming technology, now tied in with Valve's Steam service, and the PlayPack, the library of 250 or so older games that was available to users to play for a monthly fee.

When OnLive underwent its restructuring in 2012, employees said that OnLive had drastically underestimated the number of servers it needs, versus the number it actually used. It's possible the same situation occurred, again.

Now, OnLive's assets will join Gaikai, the OnLive cloud gaming rival that Sony bought in 2012. Gaikia is widely believed to be powering the Sony PlayStation Plus service, which allows owners of the Sony PlayStation 4 to play older PS3 games via the cloud.

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LIFX adds a more affordable white bulb to its smart lighting lineup

The battle for control of the emerging smart lighting market is heating up, with new products coming in thick and fast from companies big and small. Yesterday Dutch lighting behemoth Philips announced the Hue Go—a portable version of its now iconic Hue connected LED bulb—and Aussie smart-lighting startup LIFX Labs follows suit with a new product of its own.

The company, which pioneered Wi-Fi-enabled color-changing LED bulbs in 2012, has finally gotten around to adding a white-light-only bulb to its portfolio. It's called the LIFX White 800 and is the company's cheapest offering yet at $40 each. Being Wi-Fi-enabled, like its color-changing predecessors, means it requires no hub.

The timing of the announcement is just a touch off, though. It comes just a day after Philips slashed the price of its own white-light-only offering, the Hue Lux, by a third to $20 a pop. Granted, the ZigBee-enabled Lux is useless without the Hue bridge, but getting one is cheaper now that Philips has also lowered the price of its two-bulb-and-a-hub starter kit from $100 to $80.

LIFX

LIFX bulbs connect to your Wi-Fi network, so they don't require a hub for control. But if you're deploying a lot of them, they're still more expensive than Philips Hue bulbs that do require a hub.

Put differently, the Hue Lux is the cheaper option if you need more than two bulbs, with the savings adding up as you scale up. That's true even if you buy the White 800 in packs of five or ten.

But is Hue Lux the better bulb? Not necessarily. A quick look at their respective specs suggests the White 800 has a slight advantage: At 890 lumens (equivalent to a 60W incandescent), it is a good 140 lumens brighter than the Lux. Further, the company claims the White 800 is the first bulb in the entry-level segment to feature a "choice between rich warm to cool white lights all in one bulb." The official product page, however, makes no mention of the exact color temperatures. A spec sheet gets more specific, listing the bulb's color-temperature as ranging from 2700- to 6500K.

Why this matters: Entry-level smart bulbs like the White 800 should please those who desperately want in on the home automation action, but find most other connected-home devices either too expensive or too intimidating for their liking. In fact, they should please anyone and everyone who just can't wait for the smart-home party to get started in earnest. Confused? Let us explain.

Over the last couple of years, we've often heard smart bulbs being described as a potential Trojan horse for the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon. Bulbs, the argument goes, trump most other home devices and appliances in this regard due to their almost unparalleled ubiquity and indispensability. And since we're already in the middle of a global transition from incandescent bulbs to more efficient LED lighting, many will be tempted to go whole hog and get smart bulbs. But for that to happen on a large enough scale, smart bulbs must become more affordable.

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Securifi’s Almond 2015 and Almond+ routers pull double duty as connected-home hubs

A year introducing  the Almond—the world's first touchscreen wireless router—Securifi decided to go one better by adding home-automation features to its follow-up product. It turned to Kickstarter, where many deemed the idea of a router/connected-home hub good enough to pour more than $850,000 into the effort. But even the staunchest believers must have had their faith tested when an undercooked device showed up in July, 2014, more than nine months behind schedule.

The home-automation functionality was nowhere to be seen at launch and, as is apparent from the many frustrated comments on the product's Kickstarter page, the whole experience was riddled with bugs. The company has been working hard to remedy those shortcomings.

While a firmware update released in February gave the Z-Wave- and Zigbee-enabled Almond+ its missing home-automation chops, a fresh update that Securifi rolled out Tuesday includes a new and improved user interface. The company also recently introduced a lower-cost model—the Almond 2015—that is slightly less powerful and loses the Z-Wave connectivity, but costs $100 less than Securifi's flagship.

Securifi

The Almond 2015 is a 2x2 802.11n router with  an integrated ZigBee radio. 

Securifi's press release touts just how easy it is to create automation rules with the new UI, likening it to building something with Lego blocks. Since these rules run locally, you don't have to worry about your connected home suddenly becoming dumb the instant you lose access to the Internet. It also means that both Almond routers can deliver response times that their cloud-based automation rivals can only dream of.

Securifi boasts of its routers' ability to create conditional rules that can be more complex than "if this happens, do that." You'll need to have the appropriate sensors and devices for these rules to work, of course, but the examples the company provided are compelling:

• When the mailbox is opened, turn the kitchen light on, set the color to yellow, and ring the door-chime.
• If it's hotter than 100F between 1- and 5PM, water the lawn for 5 minutes and close the shades
• Set the bedroom light to 20% at 7AM: after 2 minutes set it to 40%: after another 2 minutes set it to 60%; after another 2 minutes set it to 80%

Securifi

The more powerful Almond+ is a 3x3 802.11ac router with both ZigBee and Z-Wave radios. 

The Almond+ and its newer sibling, the Almond 2015, are available from Amazon for $199 and $99, respectively, prices that reflect limited-time discounts on each router. The company is also giving away one of its Peanut smart plugs with each purchase.

Why this matters: Some believe the days of dedicated smart-home hubs are numbered. They depend on a router anyway, so why not include their features in a router. If that reasoning wins the day, and Securifi's Almond series perform well as both hubs and routers, they'll be ahead of their time.

We have both the Almond 2015 and the Almond+ in hand now, so we should be able to answer those questions soon.

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Philips introduces Hue Go, a portable version of its Hue LED lighting collection

Philips has achieved no small measure of success with its Hue LED lighting system, which is controlled by Philips' own Wi-Fi bridge and can be integrated into other connected-home systems, such as the Wink and Wink Relay. Now the company has introduced a new self-contained lamp that can operate on a base connected to a wall outlet or on its own internal battery for up the three hours.

The hemispherical design and translucent surface enables the Hue Go to cast its light in various directions. You can position it flat to direct its light up, or at an angle to cast accent lighting on a nearby wall or to illuminate an object of art or other point of interest. Touching a button on the bottom of the lamp cycles through seven effects—the usual warm white and cool daylight—plus five that Philips calls "natural dynamic effects:" Cozy Candle, Sunday Coffee, Meditation, Enchanted Forest, and Night Adventure.

Philips

The Hue Go can operate on AC power or its own internal battery. 

Beyond that, the lamp is capable of producing more than 16 million colors. As with other Philips Hue products, the light can also be programmed to change in response to events—such as email arriving, or a change in the weather—when the Hue hub is connected to your Wi-Fi network and the Hue app is installed on your smartphone or tablet.

Like the original Philips Hue, the Hue Go won't be cheap: It will carry an MSRP of $100 when it ships in June. You'll also need a Hue bridge to manage it. A starter kit with two white-only Hue Lux bulbs and a bridge is priced at $80, while a kit with three color-changing bulbs and the bridge costs a cool $200.

Why this matters: LED light bulbs consume much less energy and last considerably longer than the incandescent models that are being phased out, and the light they produce is more pleasing to the eye than fluorescent models. LED bulbs remain more expensive to manufacture than both alternatives, though, and adding features such as variable colors drives the cost up even further.

Still, Philips has achieved significant traction in this space with its Hue product line. The bulbs have sold well, and manufacturers of other connected-home products have taken notice—Philips says its Hue bulbs are compatible with more than 300 other products.

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Texas wants RadioShack to specify what customer information would be for sale

The dispute between U.S. states and RadioShack over the sale of customer information continues, with the state of Texas requesting a bankruptcy court to ask RadioShack to specify in any motion for sale what information would be included and the number of people likely to be affected.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is concerned that although the personally identifiable information (PII) was not sold in a recently concluded auction, in argument and testimony during the sale hearing, RadioShack "has indicated that PII remains available for sale and will likely be sold in the future, attendant to the sale of trademarks and/or intellectual property," according to a filing Wednesday.

Paxton, who is leading the action in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on behalf of several states, had on Tuesday welcomed the decision by RadioShack to table plans to offer for sale the PII of its customers.

"We urge RadioShack to make a blanket vow that it will live up to the assurances it provided 117 million customers and entirely rule out any such sale in the future," he added.

The state of Texas has objected to the sale, citing both in-store and online privacy policies of the consumer electronics retailer. The case has privacy implications across the industry as a decision to allow the sale of personal information could be a precedent, for example, for large Internet companies, holding consumer data, if they happen to go bankrupt.

Asking for a case management order to govern any future sale of any PII by RadioShack, Paxton is asking that any motion seeking the sale of the PII should specify whether the information is limited to only contact information, such as name, address, phone number, and email address, or whether it also includes other information such as credit card numbers or account history. The motion should also specify the number of customers affected by the sale.

The state had earlier held that the number of customers affected would be 117 million, based on a deposition by RadioShack on March 20. But it has since found from testimony in court that the number of customer files offered for sale might be reduced to around 67 million.

The filing by Texas state also asks that a consumer privacy ombudsman shall file a report after the filing of any motion seeking to sell PII. The witness for any purchaser of the PII should be able to testify "regarding the purchaser's business and what the purchaser intends to do with the PII."

Texas' opposition to the sale of PIIs by RadioShack was joined by the states of Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Oregon. Governmental consumer protection agencies in 32 states have also extended their support to the action. Georgia, Missouri and West Virginia also sent letters of support to the Texas attorney general's office, according to the filing.

The Delaware judge on Wednesday approved a plan by RadioShack to sell about 1,700 stores to hedge fund Standard General. Most of the stores are planned to be rebranded with wireless operator Sprint.

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In a haystack of data, Alation helps find the needle

One of the paradoxes of today's data-driven world is that the very data we seek for competitive advantage can be both a curse and a blessing. Businesses need the right data to gain a leg up, but each new bit they acquire makes it harder to uncover the data they need.

That's where Alation says it can help. The two-year-old startup came out of stealth mode on Tuesday with a new product focused on helping enterprises find the information that will help them get ahead.

"Every time we write a mobile app, build a Web application, write a data pipeline, build a dashboard or develop a sensor, we create a new container of data," said Alation cofounder and CEO Satyen Sangani, a former Oracle executive. "All of these containers come with a lot of complexity, a lot of implicit knowledge. And this complexity, in turn, makes data inaccessible."

Alation says its namesake platform can simplify data access and make it easier for organizations to get the insights they're after. It offers collaborative analytics, data search and discovery, data optimization and effective data governance.

The technology taps a combination of machine learning and human insight to capture a wealth of information about an enterprise's data, including what it describes, where it comes from, who's using it and how it's being used.

"Another way of understanding information is by looking at the human activity surrounding it," Sangani explained. "Like Google, we crawl hundreds or thousands of data systems within an enterprise and look at not just the data but the usage logs."

Equipped with that information, Alation generates a rich, centralized inventory of data—including details that might otherwise be visible only to machines—and can tell users the fastest way to find the right database, formulate a query, ask an expert or identify a best practice.

"If you want to answer a question, knowing that someone else has already asked it and then finding them can be much more efficient than rediscovering the answer all over again," Sangani said. "We try to use the knowledge that's already inside these systems to uncover hidden insights."

Alation is used by companies including eBay and Square. The benefits, according to Alation, include a reduction in analyst on-boarding from years to months and the ability to write ad hoc queries in less than half the time that was required previously.

Alation took in $9 million in Series A funding earlier this year. Its software is available now.

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Apigee aims to unify IoT with APIs

Internet of Things devices aren't terribly useful without apps and services. Apigee says it can help glue these elements together using APIs.

Makers of connected gadgets like lightbulbs, thermostats and motion detectors know how to build objects that can talk to each other across a room, often through a hub that can corral different types of devices together. But there are a lot more layers of software and communication between that and the Internet, where the rubber really hits the road in terms of making IoT useful.

That's where Apigee thinks it can fit in. The company specializes in APIs (application programming interfaces), the intermediaries between devices, apps and services from different providers. It already works with many vendors and carriers, including SAP and AT&T, to help them give outside developers access to their back-end platforms. On Tuesday it introduced Apigee Link, a software product specifically for IoT.

Apigee Link is based on Zetta, an open-source IoT platform that Apigee launched last year. Like a Linux distributor, the company provides the underlying technology free through Zetta but sells enterprise support and cloud services to customers that don't want to do all the work themselves. As a result, it's not necessary for the whole IoT industry to buy into proprietary Apigee technology to ensure many different products and applications can work together, according to Brian Mulloy, the company's IoT research head.

The first customer using Apigee Link is CentraLite, which makes home automation products for brands including Lowe's and Comcast. CentraLite builds hardware with the ZigBee protocol for short-range, low-power networking, and uses open-source ZigBee drivers. It turns to Apigee for APIs to connect with the Internet through protocols like WebSockets, Mulloy said.

Apigee Link doesn't directly address the standards battle between groups like the AllSeen Alliance and the Open Interconnect Consortium over how to make a house full of tiny low-power devices find each other and form networks. Instead, it's focused on the Internet side of IoT. Apigee Link software runs mostly in the cloud, as well as on the larger, more powerful hub devices at the center of local networks. It also includes libraries for iOS and Android for creating mobile apps that talk to IoT devices.

It may also have a role to play in enterprise. There's a huge need for mechanisms to connect products that are built on industry-specific standards to the Internet world and its common standards, said James Brehm, an IoT industry analyst at James Brehm & Associates.

"The greatest problem that most companies are going to have is that there still are all these standards out there," Brehm said. In industries like construction, both hardware and applications often are built to work with those standards. The problem comes when users want to make use of the data coming from IoT devices and don't have a common way to work with it. Apigee Link could help to solve that problem, he said.

Apigee Link also taps into the company's API management system, Apigee Edge, and its predictive analytics platform, Apigee Insights. It's available now for select customers and will be widely available later this year, the company said.

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Comcast denies ever being approached for Apple’s rumored streaming TV service

A streaming TV service from Apple is once again rumored to be in the cards, as it has been at various times during the last five or so years. But this latest outbreak of speculation, which began with a March 17 Wall Street Journal report , is perhaps the most intense in recent memory. Not only does it have an unprecedented air of credibility, but it also possesses something else that had been missing until now: a tense "will they or won't they" side plot.

According to the report mentioned above, Apple's putting together a "skinny" bundle of around 20 to 30 channels for a Sling TV- or PlayStation Vue-like streaming service that it intends to launch sometime this fall. It further claimed the likes of ABC, CBS, and Fox are onboard, with Comcast-owned NBCUniversal being the most notable absentee.

It attributed NBC's absence to a breakdown in talks after Apple came to fear it was being strung along by Comcast as the latter worked on its Xfinity X1 service. We now have the cable giant's version of events, thanks to a letter it sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week.

It appears, based on the letter first picked up by Re/Code, that the Journal's report was accurate insofar as NBC's absence from Apple's streaming TV plans is concerned, but not as to its cause.

"Not only has NBCUniversal not 'withheld' programming from Apple's new venture, Apple has not even approached NBCUniversal with such a request," Comcast attorney Francis Buono wrote in the letter, responding to a note filed recently with the commission by Stop Mega Comcast, a group opposed to the company's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable.

In its note, dated March 25, 2015, the group had called FCC's attention to recent "press reports that Comcast may be withholding its affiliated NBC Universal ('NBCU') content in an effort to thwart the entry of potential new video competitors."

The story behind the story: As Stop Mega Comcast went on to explain in its letter, Comcast cannot withhold NBCU content from Online Video Distributors (OVDs) as that would violate one of the conditions it acquiesced to while securing regulatory approval for its $30 billion acquisition of the media outfit. And this would be the worst possible time for it to flout those conditions (or to give such an impression); it is trying to get another big-ticket merger—a $45.2 billion deal with TWC—approved by regulators.

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Google cloud platform can now be managed from a phone

Google is testing a version for Android smartphones and tablets of a console that will help its customers monitor services in the cloud while on the move.

Following the beta launch of the Cloud Console for Android, Google said a version for Apple's iOS operating system is expected to launch later this year.

Using the app, users can set up alerts, manage Google cloud platform resources and access health graphs to gain insights into the performance and availability of their cloud-powered applications on Google's Cloud Monitoring feature, wrote Michael Thomsen, a product manager at Google, in a blog post Monday.

The console also integrates with Cloud Monitoring to enable automated incident tracking when system metrics deviate. Users can, for example, ask to be alerted if Google Compute Engine instances cross their expected load of 50 percent CPU for one hour. Google's Compute Engine runs large workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google infrastructure.

"When investigating an issue, you often need to check the health and properties of your resources, such as running state, zone or IP," Thomsen said. Users can also do a number of core operations such as changing the App Engine version or starting or stopping a Compute Engine instance. App Engine is Google's platform-as-a-service for running applications.

The beta version of Cloud Console for Android is available for download on the Google Play store.

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