Apple Pay’s proposal to enter Taiwan to be sent to the Cabinet before May 20

aiwan’s top financial regulator Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) is scheduled to gather opinions about Apple Pay’s planned entry into Taiwan from all sides and submit the information to the Executive Yuan before May 20, when the new administration will be inaugurated. 

The FSC recently met with representatives from the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank, the bankers’ association, the National Credit Card Center, the Financial Information Services Co., major credit card companies, local mobile payment operators, as well as Apple, HTC and Samsung to discuss potential Apply Pay entry into Taiwan. Much of the discussion surrounded the token service provider (TSP) that will work with Apple Pay. The FSC said all opinions will be submitted to the Cabinet, which will make the final decision.

The meeting also discussed potential issues that can arise with an overseas TSP. TSP is a service that generates a temporary alternate personal account number during credit card mobile payment. The service can increase transaction security because the alternate account number would have been useless after the transaction even if somehow obtained by a third party.

Lu Hui-rong, deputy director-general of the FSC’s Banking Bureau, said opinions were divided at the meeting. Lu said one group of the representatives favored a domestic TSP, while the major credit card issuing banks believed it should be decided by market mechanism, in which a mobile payment provider will choose its own TSP.

Representatives from Apple said the company is open to both ideas, but added that in consideration of the company’s resource allocation and timetable, using a domestic TSP may delay Apple Pay’s entry into the country.

Individuals at the meeting in favor of a domestic TSP expressed their concern about possible leakage of personal information and improper use of personal data. A TSP based overseas may affect or delay transaction and handling of controversies in the event of disconnection or system malfunction in the overseas locations, they added. These individuals also warned of a larger effect that other brands may follow in Apple’s footsteps — assuming Apple worked with an overseas TSP — and choose to work with foreign TSP, which will eventually hurt the local industry.

Local TSP operators contended that since over 90 percent of the transactions made with cards issue domestically take place in the country, Apple Pay should work with a local TSP. They also added that doing so may help domestic industries develop more advanced mobile payment technology.

However, major credit card issuing companies suggested returning it to the market mechanism. Currently, most countries allow mobile payment providers to choose TSP based on data security, transaction stability, operational cost and efficiency.

Representatives from the banking industry were also in favor of overseas TSP, saying that major issuing firms like Visa have all used the services of foreign TSP. These representatives said that using a local TSP may delay the process because the TSP operator will first have to obtain certification from EMVCo.

Meanwhile, in response to the Central Bank’s previous concern that a local TSP may make it earlier for the government for the purposes of regulation and tax audit. The Ministry of Finance said after the meeting that tax audit and collection will not be affected by where the TSP is based.

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Oculus Says Over a Million People Used Gear VR Headsets in April

Consumer virtual reality is still so new that we don’t know much about how it’s being used. But Oculus is sharing some details about the smartphone-dependent Gear VR headset it developed with Samsung—including the statistic that over a million people used it in April.

During a small media briefing Tuesday meant in part to show off some new content that will be coming out for Gear VR, Oculus’s head of mobile, Max Cohen, said, “We were not expecting to be at a million right now.”

Gear VR, which—unlike recently released higher-end headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive—relies on one of several high-end Samsung smartphones to work, has been out since late 2014; a new version of it launched near the end of 2015. On its own, the headset costs $100. There are now more than 250 apps for it, many of them games and videos.

One factor that might have helped reach that usage mark: Samsung gave away the Gear VR and six games with preorders of its new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones from late February through mid-March.

Cohen noted that people who are playing with Gear VR use it for about 25 minutes per day. He added that usage tends to increase over the holidays as those who own it share it with other people. 

And video in particular is what a lot of people are doing with their Gear VR headsets. Eugene Wei, Oculus’s head of video, said that 80 percent of people who use the device watch videos, and that they will soon have watched more than three million hours of video cumulatively (Facebook, which owns Oculus, and Samsung have previously said that users had watched two million hours of video). 

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Robots Learn How to Make Friends and Influence People

If robots are going to take over the world, they could at least have the courtesy not to bump into us while they’re at it. That’s not as easy as it sounds, though, especially when a robot is trying to make its way through a bustling space like a mall, hospital, or crowded city street.

Thankfully, researchers have developed an algorithm that could give robots the ability to deftly maneuver through spaces packed with unpredictable humans.

Robots are gradually leaving controlled spaces like labs and factories and edging into more settings in which they will inevitably encounter human beings (see “Are You Ready for a Robot Colleague?”). We navigate hectic spaces by reading other people’s movements and planning our paths accordingly. Robots tend to just barrel ahead, and then stop suddenly when someone gets in the way.

Stanford's JackRabbot robot will explore busy spaces while trying to respect people's boundaries.

“The challenge is how to program these devices to respect human social conventions,” says Silvio Savarese at Stanford University.

Savarese and colleagues developed a computer-vision algorithm that predicts the movement of people in a busy space. They trained a deep-learning neural network using several publicly available data sets containing video of people moving around crowded areas. And they found their software to be better at predicting peoples’ movements than existing approaches for several of those data sets.

Savarese's team is testing its algorithm on a mobile robot called JackRabbot developed at Stanford. The two-wheeled robot, which is equipped with cameras, range sensors, and GPS, will explore busy indoor and outdoor spaces to test the approach in real situations.

At the moment, the most notable example of robots interacting directly with members of the public is Google’s self-driving vehicles. The company has acknowledged that its cars, while predominantly safe, have indirectly contributed to accidents due to a failure to understand the social norms of the road (“Google’s Self-Driving Car Chief Defends Safety Record”). As robots begin to proliferate into settings like shops and offices, awkward run-ins could become more common.

“The first problem is to understand the mostly unstated rules that people follow,” Savarese says. “How do people behave in crowds? How do they share resources, like sidewalks, parking spots? When should a person (or a robot) take its turn?”

A startup called Starship Technologies, which makes robots that deliver packages, is also working on this problem. The company has been testing its robots at several locations in the U.S. and the U.K., and besides dealing with uneven sidewalks and navigating around random obstacles, encounters with pedestrians pose the biggest challenge.

“Our robots have now come into contact with over 230,000 people around the world,” says Henry Harris-Burland, a spokesperson for Starship. Engineers at the company monitor the robots remotely as they go about mock deliveries. “Social acceptance is a core focus at the moment,” he says.

That goes way beyond just predicting a person’s movement. Forlizzi’s own research has involved trying to get robots to move around spaces in such a way that they form natural-seeming clusters with people. She says there is a definite need to teach robots how to blend in.Jodi Forlizzi, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, says the Stanford algorithm adds to other research aimed at making robot behavior more humanlike. “Much research in human-robot interaction has looked at whether we can replicate the norms of human social interaction,” she says.

“There’s a whole class of robots that will be working with people and close to people also, so we need to understand how they should behave,” Forlizzi says.

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Automatic breaking may one day be required for new cars

Many new cars come with automatic braking as an option, but for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), this isn’t enough.

According to a report in The Detroit News, the NTSB is pressuring the U.S. Government to make automatic braking a federal mandate. Its argument is safety features like airbags and seat belts come standard, so more advanced safety like collision warning and automatic braking — which, they argue, can prevent injuries and fatalities— should come standard as well.

Collision warning systems use various combinations of radars, cameras and proximity sensors to warn a driver if they are too close to an object, with auto-braking taking it a step further by actually bringing the car to a stop if necessary. Generally, these features are available on high-end cars, though, they’re trickling down to the mainstream on models from Subaru, Chrysler and others.

In the European Union, cars must come equipped with these safety features in order to receive the highest crash test scores–- something the NTSB wants incorporated in U.S. crash testing. For this to happen, the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) would need to develop standards to test the performance of these active safety systems.

The NTSB wants NHTSA to mandate collision warnings first, with automatic braking mandated once clear standards are in place.

Automakers are opposed to the mandating of these active safety systems because they feel like the addition of these systems should be the consumers choice. In addition, automakers claim the inclusion of active safety systems would increase the cost.

It should also be noted that automakers generally make most of their profits on charging extra for options and packages consumers want. This is why a company like Porsche, which has notoriously expensive options for its cars, made $23,000 on average for every car they sold in 2013.

This is a tricky debate because on one hand a reduction in collisions is inarguably a good thing, but on the other hand maybe humans need to be more proactive in preventing them. Perhaps a combination of better driver training in America and wider availability of active safety is the answer.

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BlackBerry may use Android system in new device

BlackBerry is considering equipping an upcoming smartphone with Google’s Android software for the first time, an acknowledgement that its revamped line of devices has failed to win mass appeal, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

The move would be an about-face for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, which had shunned Android in a bet that its BlackBerry 10 line of phones would be able to claw back market share lost to Apple’s iPhone and a slew of devices powered by Android.

The sources, who asked not to be named as they have not been authorised to discuss the matter publicly, said the move to use Android is part of BlackBerry’s strategy to pivot to focus on software and device management. BlackBerry, which once dominated smartphone sales, now has a market share of less than 1 per cent.

It is not clear whether a move to use Android would spell the end of the company’s BlackBerry 10 line of devices that were initially launched to much fanfare in early 2013. After positive early reviews, the late-to-launch BlackBerry devices haven’t competed well with Android or Apple, mainly due to a lack of big name apps.

“We don’t comment on rumors and speculation, but we remain committed to the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which provides security and productivity benefits that are unmatched,” said the company in an email.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen is banking on the company’s new device management system, BES12, that allows corporate and government clients to not only manage BlackBerry devices on their internal networks, but also devices powered by Android, Apple’s iOS platform and Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.

One of the hurdles it faces in that transformation is convincing big customers that its device management software works across many different platforms.

Two sources said that by launching an Android-based device of its own, BlackBerry would be sending a signal to skeptics that it is confident that the BES12 system can not only manage, but also secure smartphones and tablets powered by rival operating systems.

BlackBerry will probably use Android on an upcoming slider device that is likely to be released this autumn, two sources said. The slider will combine a touch screen with a physical keyboard that users can use if they prefer.

BlackBerry briefly showed off the slider device on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, but it has provided little detail on it since then.

By making an Android device that boasts a large touchscreen and a physical keyboard, BlackBerry hopes to snag a niche in the touchscreen-dominated Android market. The device may attract those still using older BlackBerry keyboard handhelds but who want access to the larger app options Android offers.

HARDWARE CONUNDRUM

Two sources said that if BlackBerry moves forward on a plan to launch an Android device, it could come with some of the patented features in its BlackBerry 10 operating system.

In March, BlackBerry announced that it planned to deliver its patented security, productivity and communication tools to any mobile device running iOS, Android or Windows.

The company, which a while ago opened its popular BlackBerry Messaging app to those using rival operating systems, has said it plans to offer more in-house features on rival devices, including BlackBerry Hub and the predictive text capabilities of its virtual keyboard.

Chen in March said the company was still committed to its own devices business.

Since that time however, BlackBerry has cut headcount in its hardware unit even further. The company, which at a 2011 peak employed 17,500 people and in February was down to 6,225, said last month that it was making further cuts on the device side, without providing any numbers

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Microsoft releases Office for Mac 2016, pledges better OS X support

Microsoft is notorious for leaving Office for Mac users languishing for years between app updates. Now, five years after the last Mac edition, the company is officially releasing Office for Mac 2016 to subscribers of Office 365, and promises that the Mac will be less neglected in the future.

“We’re working at a pace of monthly updates,” said Han-yi Shaw, the engineering lead on Office for Mac. “The days of waiting years for new software — those days are over.”

Shaw says that Microsoft will be able to maintain frequent updates because Office for Mac and Office for iPad share a common codebase, so the two will be built out simultaneously. Yet the new Office for Mac suite — already seen in the Office for Mac preview available for public beta testing since March 5 — is far more like the Office suite you’d find on a PC, Shaw says.

For instance, like the PC, Office for Mac 2016 has the coloured “ribbon” of tabs and menus sitting atop Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and OneNote (now making its Mac debut). In the past, Shaw noted, Mac users would have tabs and menus for the same functions as their PC counterparts placed in different locations.

Microsoft brought the two suites of apps into parity, in terms of looks and feature set, to make things easier for those who work across Macs, PCs, mobile devices and the Web, he said. “If you’ve used Office on any device. you’ll be able to dive in and use Office and any other device now,” Shaw said. “It wasn’t that way in the past.”

Powerpoint, an app included in Office for Mac 2016. Microsoft

There are, however, a few Mac-specific tweaks. For example, Office for Mac 2016 supports Apple’s multi-touch trackpad gestures, and OS X’s full-screen app view. Mac users will also be able to change the colour of each app’s ribbon to grey, if they like a more subdued look. And while the Office apps natively tie into Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service (1TB of data is included in the Office 365 subscription), Mac users can also pull files from services like Dropbox and Box, as long as those cloud services have been set up for access from OS X’s Finder windows.

Office for Mac 2016 is available for download now to Office 365 subscribers. Month-to-month access to Office 365 (which offers access to Office apps on PCs, Android, iOS and the Web, too) starts at $6 per month for individuals and $US10 per month for families and businesses. Microsoft will offer free and subsidised subscriptions for students and teachers at office.com/student

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Apple Watch review

• Update: Apple Watch is being upgraded to WatchOS 2 this fall, so this revised review takes its changes into account.

The Apple Watch is ticking away on my wrist right now, and while it's no longer called the iWatch, it really is "my watch" and Apple's most personal gadget yet.

The iPhone 5-and-up-compatible smartwatch comes in 38 flavors, with different case materials, colors, sizes and interchangeable Apple Watch bands. None are inexpensive.

• Buy Apple Watch 38mm Silver Aluminum Case Blue Sport Band at Amazon for $370.00

It starts at $349 (£299, AU$499) and peaks at an exorbitant $17,000 (£13,500, AU$24,000), meaning it's for impatient early adopters and boutique store regulars. Apple's vague sales numbers hint at just that.

But every iPhone owners who desperately wants a smartwatch should have this one on their wish list. By then, software update Watch OS 2 launches to open up its Engine, Digital Crown, microphone and even more to developers. Apps should be better suited to function on your wrist by year's end.

The Apple Watch update also features Wi-Fi connectivity, new watch faces with different customizable options, better Siri capabilities, email replies and even Transit directions courtesy of iOS 9.

Is it worth that tough-to-swallow Apple Watch price right now? Well, beaming apps like Messages, Mail and every iPhone notification to an always-on-hand gadget is certainly a convenience.

I no longer retrieve my seemingly always-hiding iPhone 6 every time someone texts me, yet I can ping it whenever I really can't find it, usually buried beneath the couch cushions. It has easiest to use Find My iPhone app yet.

Apple is supposed to be building upon this novel idea with a proposed Find My Watch feature, which is the reserve of this handy retrieval system, and an Android Wear-like "smart leashing" detector to deploy a light tap on the wrist when the wearer wanders too far from his or her phone.

Apple Watch OS 1.0.1 fixed a few sensor errors and expanded the number of languages supported, and a full update is due this fall thanks to WatchOS 2 and iOS 9.

Similar conveniences are carried over to the thousands of apps. Checking into a flight thanks to a wrist-mounted QR code sure beats scrambling for my phone or paper boarding pass while moving my bags up in the security line step-by-step.

Those steps, it turns out, are being counted in the Apple Watch's fitness app. It's not the most comprehensive fitness tracker, but it lets me keep tabs on metrics like my steps walked, calories burned and heart rate. Surprise: I need to move more when I'm writing reviews.

But not having to fetch my phone for each and every vibration in my pocket is very much a luxury rather than a necessity, and not one every iPhone user needs - at least for the current asking price.

Why buy an Apple Watch?

Apple Watch is often oversimplified as an iPhone on your wrist, and almost everyone I have demoed it to has accidentally referred to it as "your phone." Even I slipped up once.

It's not an unreasonable comparison. The square-shaped smartwatch is like a mini iPhone; it lets me read emails, summon Siri and make and receive phone calls from my wrist.

The size is just right too. While many Android Wear watches look and feel chunky to most, the 42mm Apple Watch fits my wrist much more unobtrusively.

An even smaller 38mm size is also available, though most people should for opt for the bigger of the two. It offers better battery life and more useable touchscreen space (but does come at a higher cost).

What feels strange about writing this review is that there's no point in really comparing it to Android Wear at all. Nobody chooses a smartwatch first and then decides on which phone to go with it – no, if you're reading this review you're probably either doing it on the iPhone or with one close to hand, wondering if it adds enough convenience to be worth the extra cost.

But do I need this Watch? On the one hand it's been great to change my behavior, as too many times I have instinctively run to my phone, charging in another room, because it's ringing or because the default SMS chime has turned me into one of Pavlov's dogs.

How many times have I missed an important call or text? Just as important, how many times have I rushed to the phone and it was an unimportant telemarketing call or a friend replying with text that simply says "OK" to something I said three hours ago?

These missed connections and potential disappointments are less insufferable thanks to the Apple Watch and its ability to either pick up or dismiss these alerts in a tenth of a second.

Custom watch faces, like we've seen from Android Wear watches, are here (although only those that Apple makes, as it's sadly not permitting third parties to do the same thing), as well as new exclusive technology like the pressure-sensitive Force Touch touchscreen.

There are also a large number of Apple Watch apps already, including the easy-to-use Apple Pay in the US and frequently used Uber car hailing service, equivalents of which have been slow to launch on Android Wear.

What's missing?

There are plenty iPhone features that aren't carried over to the wrist. Apple Watch is not a fully-fledged iPhone replacement.

It makes calls, but it can't add new contacts. It listens to dictated texts and sends them as an audio message or transcription, but it doesn't have any sort of edit function.

It tracks basic fitness goals, but not it's GPS-enabled, doesn't track sleep and third-party workout apps require an iPhone close by. Likewise, it can name songs through the Shazam app, but it listens with the iPhone microphone, not its own.

Having to carry a phone still is a weird disappointment to a lot of people who are missing the point of a current smartwatches. "Wait, I still need my phone?" is the response I've heard from baffled people. Of course you do. The Watch isn't big enough for watching YouTube videos on its tiny display size and trying to comment on Facebook posts while pecking away on a teeny keyboard would be terrible.

Who would want to don a giant watch capable of such specs or a large enough battery to run that? You still need an iPhone with you at all times, but you'll use it less than before.

The bigger questions: can is do enough to be worth its price, and is it fashionable enough to wear everyday, by geek chic and non geeks alike? Let's examine the design first.

Sourse: http://www.techradar.com/

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