Obesity

Obesity is a medical condition  in which unnecessary body fat accumulates to the level that it may have an unfavorable effect on health that pave the way to reduced life expectancy and/or increased health problems. A dimension which evaluates and compares weight and height is the Body mass index (BMI).  It classifies people as overweight i.e. pre-obese if their BMI ranges between 25 and 30 kg/m², and classifies as obese when it is more than 30 kg/m². Obesity increases the incidence of various diseases like, Heart problems, Obstructive sleep apnea, Type 2 diabetes Mellitus, Osteoarthritis, hypertension, etc.
Causes
Weight gain or obesity is the hallmark of a sedentary lifestyle and intake of too much food energy like fast and junk foods.  Gaining a weight is very easy in contrast to losing it. People spend an indolent life devoid of any exercise. Genetic susceptibility is also responsible while few cases are primarily due to psychiatric illness, due to endocrine disorders, or certain medications. Stress, depression, anxiety, or improper sleep are some of the other factors that can lead to gain of weight.
For most of the women:

ü  Menopause -- during menopause women may gain 12-15 pounds

ü  Not losing the weight that is gained during pregnancy

How You can Loss or Maintain weight?

Diet programs may induce weight loss over the short period, but sustaining and maintaining this weight loss is difficult and often requires exercise and lower food energy diet as a permanent part of a person's lifestyle. Lifestyle changes and dietary changes are effective in restricting excessive weight gain in pregnancy and improve effects and outcomes for both the mother and the child.

Increase the body metabolism can also help. The great way to make your metabolism speedy is to select those foods that facilitate quick digestion such as fiber rich foods. It is also a great to lose weight fast. You need to do certain exercises as well. Your metabolism will become fast if you lift weights or do aerobic exercises. Their combination would be more perfect in increasing the rate of your body metabolism.

There are some drugs that help in lowering extra fat from the body such as:

ü  Orlistat: One medication is widely available and approved for long term use. Its use is associated with high rates of gastrointestinal side effect and concerns have been raised about negative effects on the kidneys.

Two other medications available are:

ü  Lorcaserin brings about loss 3.1 kg weight (3% of the total body mass).

ü  A combination of phentermine and topiramate is also effective.

Several recommended weight loss drugs are available. Many people lose between 5 and 10 pounds by taking these drugs. Even most people also regain the weight when they stop taking the medicine, unless they have made permanent lifestyle changes, like exercising and cutting unhealthy foods from their diet.

The most efficient and effectual treatment for obesity is bariatric surgery. Surgery for severe obesity is concerned with long-term weight loss and decreased overall mortality. However, because of its cost and the risk of complications, researchers are searching for other effectual yet less insidious treatments.

Changing Lifestyle
Regular exercise and an active lifestyle with healthy eating are the best methods to lose weight. Even moderate weight loss can improve health. When dieting, the main focus should be to learn healthy and new ways of eating and make them a part of daily routine.
Follow the advices of dietitian and health care provider to set practical daily calorie counts that help to lose weight while staying healthy. If pounds are dropped slowly and gradually, you are more likely to keep them off. The dietitian can teach you about:

·         Sweetened drinks

·         Healthy food choices

·         Portion sizes

·         Healthy snacks

·         New ways to prepare food

·         How to read the nutrition labels

Learn effective and new ways to manage stress, rather than eating. Examples include yoga, meditation or exercise.

References

1.      No evidence that popular slimming supplements facilitate weight loss, new research finds. July 14, 2010. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100712103445.htm. Retrieved 2010-07-19.

2.      Curioni C, André C, Veras R; (Metabolic and Endocrine Disorders Group)  (2006). Weight reduction for primary prevention of stroke in adults with overweight or obesity.

3.      Being underweight poses health risks. Mayo Clinic. Archived from the original on March 4, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070304150801/http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2005-mchi/2796.html. Retrieved January 13, 2007.

4.      De Mello Meirelles, C.; Gomes, P.S.C. (2004). "Acute effects of resistance exercise on energy expenditure: revisiting the impact of the training variables" (pdf). Rev Bras Med Esporte 10: 131–8. http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbme/v10n2/en_a06v10n2.pdf. Retrieved 2008-02-06

5.      National Nutrition Survey, Nutrition Divison, National Institue of Health, Govt of Pakistant, Islamabad 2000.

6.      Natl.Acad. of Science.1999. Recommended Dietary Allowances: Reports of Food and Nutrtion Board, Washington, D.C, 7^th Edition.

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Cisco Wifi Camera | Cisco Best Cheapest Gadgets

Cisco is famous in network gadgets. But they are working on new ideas now a days. Cisco has great plans for its final users. They promise to deliver high quality products to its consumers. They said that we will capture more than 30% of market customers. One of the snippets taken from a recent interview at the recent Cisco Live! event at Las Vegas with Marthin De Beer, Senior Vice President of Emerging Technologies at the network solutions giant, was that their mobile video camera Flip will soon have WiFi baked in before the end of the year. De Beer also hinted that they might just put in some FaceTime integration in there as well. FaceTime is Apple’s new video chat technology that is available on the recently released iPhone 4. The company will also be introducing an app for iPhone that will leverage their new video technology based on Movi. No word on pricing and availability on that app as of yet, though

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LUMIX DMC-G3 – Big Camera in a Small Package

Photography is a fun hobby which most people enjoy immensely but photography in older times meant carrying around huge cameras and hefty lenses. Also, a proper setup was required and it was not possible to capture instantaneous scenes. However, new times introduce new technologies.
Panasonic just announced a brand new addition to the LUMIX G Series of Compact Cameras, the LUMIX DMC-G3; this is the smallest and lightest digital interchangeable lens camera with a viewfinder that they have ever made. This allows users enhance creative control. Body is made of aluminum and there are variety of colors to choose from like black, red and white. Featuring sixteen mega pixel sensors, it gives a true to life images and a high quality video. The LUMIX G3 allows the users an opportunity to express their creativity with pre-sets like Creative Control mode, letting images to be taken with popular visual effects like Retro, High Key, Sepia and High Dynamic.  The conventional film mode has also evolved with a new effect control, Photo Style, which has Standard, Vivid, Natural, Monochrome, Scenery and Portrait settings that allow finer adjustment of contrast, sharpness, saturation and noise reduction.

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WD My Passport Essential SE with 1TB

Western Digital has updated its portable hard drives, coinciding with the launch of the Scorpio Blue 1TB. The new model is called WD My Passport Essential SE, and its main innovation over previous Passport is its ability: two models of 750 GB and 1 TB of capacity.
Maintaining the vast majority of characteristics: same size (15 × 80 × 126 mm), weight (180 grams) and USB 2.0 interface to connect the disk to the computer. As is customary in external hard drives for the vast majority of manufacturers, the new WD My Passport Essential are several additional software, such as to add a certain level of security to encrypt data, or programs for backup and synchronization information.
For now only be available one color, gray titanium, but Western Digital is likely to increase the range of colors in the future to maintain the range of previous models.

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Latest Gadget Uncovered

Modern Phenomenon
These days you are nobody until you have the latest gadget to boot. The younger generation is particularly enamored of the gadgets that flood the market and will do almost anything to get that desired piece of gear that gives them street recognition. Long gone are the days when latest gadgets were all about convenience. Now it is a status symbol that says something about your place in the world and your aspirations.
Perhaps it is alarming to look at the pace at which the latest gadgets are coming onto the market. There seems to be limited breathing space before yet another new gadget is brought to bear. The shelf life of the latest gadget is severely limited and manufacturers are constantly fighting a losing battle to update their equipment and keep up with the trends. The variety of gadgets on the market can also cause confusion among the bewildered public who have to choose among so many options.

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Latest Laptops on Offer – Computing with Modernity

Computing with Modernity

The provision of the latest laptops seems like a sacred task for the market today. Consumers demand that they have the best quality of products that money can buy. Even those who are of limited means are joining the revolution. It really is not on to ignore the latest laptops if you want to remain part of the mobile computing revolution. One can argue as to whether this is a good thing or bad thing but the reality is that the laptop is here to stay and people had better get used to it.
The latest laptops have becoming something of an obsession with the younger generation and the office class. If you use the underground train you can observe a number of people busy typing away on their laptops as if the limitations of the office no longer apply to their working life.

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Latest Laptops – Fashionable Portable Computers and Netbook

In order to carry out a useful review of the latest laptops, it is necessary to look at the different categories that they lie in. The growth in the market sector and the variety of providers means that this is not an easy task. Moreover it is not a strictly scientific process because there has to be some supposition and conjecture. Each laptop will have a unique selling point as well as failings which will determine which type of buyers will go for it.
The latest laptops are just like portable computers and their development is still ongoing so we do not know what they will look in fifty year’s time. This constant development in technology is very much welcome given the stagnation in some other industries. That is why some consumers are getting confused because they do not know whether the latest laptops will become yesterday’s news in a few hours time.

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Samsung Galaxy S

Since the Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung’s most popular Android phone, has been released there has been a great deal of talk, from both phone reviewers and by members of the general public who have bought the phone about it being one of the best smartphones on the market. I have to admit that I do agree with this assertion, the Galaxy S is a fantastic handset. But what is it that makes the phone so good, and why is it better than other phones on the market? Here are some of the better features on Samsung’s flagship phone that will hopefully help you realize just why this is thought of as a very special mobile indeed.
Firstly, the phone has a more than impressive camera. This has become something that is very important to mobile phone owners over the last decade and customers will no longer settle for a below par camera. Although the Galaxy S does not rival the Nokia N8, for example, in terms of mobile phone cameras it does boast a great 5 mega pixel camera with 2592 x 1944 pixels and features such as autofocus, geo-tagging and face and smile detection so you can just snap away to your heart’s content.

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Blackberry Smartphones

Anyone who knows anything about mobile phones will know about Blackberry. The mobiles, best known for their business features and their peerless email and messaging services, have become one of the most popular ranges of mobiles since their launch in 1999. The firm that develops the Blackberry, Research in Motion, a Canadian electronics company, is less well known but should none the less be applauded for their continuing development of impressive hardware and efficient software that has gathered an army of fans over the last decade.
RIM first developed a Blackberry device at the end of the 20th century, releasing a two way pager that was known as the 850 and first stamping their mark on the world of communications. The first smartphone to be developed by the company was the real beginning of big things for RIM though.

Released in 2002, the 5810 ran on Java and included such features as push e mail, web browsing, internet faxing and, of course, mobile telephone. This could truly be considered a ground breaking model but Blackberry in 2002 was very different than it is today. The 5810 and it’s contemporaries were aimed entirely at the business market but it is RIM’s move into the general public that has seen them truly become big players in the mobile phone business.

Blackberry is now one of the most popular mobile phone ranges all over the world and they contain far more than the business features that made them famous previously. Features such as touch screen displays, optical trackpads – which replaced the extremely popular trackballs that used to be common on Blackberry mobile devices – and top social networking features are common on Blackberry phones, showing just how far the range has come along in the last 9 years.
One of the latest phones to come out in the Blackberry range is the Blackberyy Pearl. First developed in 2006, the Pearl has been redeveloped several times and the latest model, the 9100 boasts the optical trackpad, full e-mailing and messaging services from Blackberry and a 3.2 megapixel camera. This shows that the future looks just as impressive as the past for Blackberry.

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Without Own Payment Service, Isis Recasts Itself as ‘Delivery Engine’

The Isis joint venture has revealed more details of the new business model for its planned NFC rollouts, following its decision to abandon plans to launch its own payment network at the retail point of sale.Isis, which is made up of three of the four major U.S. mobile carriers,  AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, has recast its role as a “delivery engine” for banks and payment networks to provision and manage their applications on NFC phones. Isis said it will also serve as a distribution channel for merchants and consumer product companies for their digital coupons, loyalty programs and other offers, Isis chief marketing officer Ryan Hughes told NFC Times.
For this, it would charge fees to the banks and payment service providers for managing their applications on the carriers’ SIM cards or other secure chips that the telcos control on the phones. Isis would also take a small fee when it delivers a coupon or enables consumers to receive advertising or other offers on their phones, Hughes said.
These mobile offers could be initiated by the consumer tapping a smart poster in or near a store, for example. Isis could take a small fee for delivering the advertisement, when the consumer clicks on an offer or when he redeems a coupon–or all three. All are part of the pricing model, said Jaymee Johnson, head of marketing for Isis. “(It’s) the same way it exists today in the online world.”
According to the new business model, the consumer’s mobile-commerce experience would center around the Isis wallet, which the mobile operators would offer to their subscribers on the NFC phones they distribute. The wallet would store various bank card accounts supported by different payment brands, along with the loyalty accounts, coupons and other offers.
“We do customer service very well,” contends Hughes. “We distribute handsets on a large scale very well, and with respect to Isis, we create a (single) TSM (trusted service manager). The banks don’t want to do this five, six or seven times over. If they can define it with us, that’s a collaborative discussion.”
Seeking to Remain Relevant
After the joint venture confirmed earlier this month that it would no longer launch an Isis-branded payment scheme at the point of sale, many in the industry interpreted it as a retreat from the market.
Isis is more aggressively communicating its plans for NFC as it seeks to retain its relevancy in what is shaping up to be a hotly competitive U.S. mobile-payment market. There are plans for NFC-enabled wallets from Google, Visa and competing telco Sprint, though Isis insists it could work with all of these parties.
“The industry is still emerging; there is a bit of a fog around different players in the industry and how services will eventually compete or complement,” Johnson told NFC Times.
Isis’ Hughes confirmed earlier statements by a top AT&T executive, John Stankey, head of business solutions, who told Reuters recently that the Durbin amendment of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was partly to blame for killing the plans for the Isis payment scheme, which would have competed directly with Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide.
Durbin’s ImpactThe amendment, which will slash interchange rates on debit purchases, “changed the business model,” Stankey reportedly said, making it less profitable for the telcos to launch a payment network since the transaction fees Isis could collect from merchants would be much lower.
“We recognized there was going to be an investment required to get the merchants deployed, and we were participating in discussions with them,” Hughes told NFC Times.
Isis representatives also insist the joint venture scrubbed the plans for the new payment scheme because it became clear that it wasn’t necessary, since banks, established payment networks and merchants are willing to roll out NFC without it.
Some observers have said, however, that taking on Visa and MasterCard was a losing battle to begin with, and the joint venture found it was not making much headway in recruiting merchants to accept the Isis brand of mobile payment.
Competitive LandscapeEven with a new business model that welcomes established payment networks, Isis faces a challenge in getting its wallet established on consumer handsets.
Visa Inc. last week announced its own digital-wallet program, which seeks to put Visa-branded wallets onto the various devices consumers might use for payment and to store their payment applications in them.
And Google and other mobile platform providers and device makers are vying for a share of the “secure-NFC” market, planning to use embedded chips on their NFC phones to store bank applications and other services. Google plans to unlock the embedded secure chip on its Nexus S NFC phones for a prepaid application to be issued by U.S.-based Citigroup, supporting MasterCard PayPass, NFC Times has learned.
Google would control the chip, sources have told NFC Times. There are apparently no plans to include mobile operators directly in the launch.
Isis’ Hughes told NFC Times the Isis-branded wallets would not conflict with Visa’s plans, though he declined to provide details.
“What Visa announced last week is not competitive with Isis, period, end of story,” Hughes said. “We are talking with them. What we bring to them, and they bring to us, is very much hand in glove,” adding: “We don’t have any deals to announce.”
As for Google, Hughes, formerly director of new business development at Verizon, said U.S. mobile carriers have been “huge partners with Google.” He added Google has released few details of its plans for NFC phones or whether it would control the secure element on the handsets.
Isis’ Johnson added that the Nexus S is one of the few handsets sold outside of carrier distribution channels in the United States. The Isis telcos plan to control the secure elements of the phones they sell, both embedded chips or on SIM cards, he said, adding he has no direct knowledge that Google’s plans to enable Citi and MasterCard to put an application on the embedded chip in the Nexus S.
In addition, Google’s mobile-commerce plans could be complementary to those of Isis, since Google likely would serve smaller, more localized, merchants seeking access to mobile consumers, compared with the larger merchants Isis is targeting, he added.
Still, by dropping its own payment plans, questions persist over whether the Isis joint venture remains an important NFC player.
Johnson said that even with the large footprints AT&T and Verizon could offer separately, banks and merchants want to reach all of their customers with their NFC payment or loyalty applications. Sticking together enables the Isis telcos to deliver almost all of those customers, he contends.
“You need a way to solve the complexity and fragmentation of mobile, which is what Isis provides, reaching the handsets of three quarters of the U.S–220 million subscribers,” he said.

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Announcement Involving Google, Citi and MasterCard Expected This Week

 
announcement by Citigroup and MasterCard Worldwide with Google of an NFC-based payment service is expected by the end of the week, sources told NFC Times.As NFC Times May 19 plans call for Citi to issue a prepaid MasterCard PayPass application to be loaded onto Google’s Nexus S and perhaps other Android phones.
Google would provide the mobile wallet and is expected to offer other applications, such as mobile couponing. A report today said Google is planning to hold a “partner event” in New York City on Thursday. This happens to be Citi’s home base and is not far from MasterCard’s headquarters. The parties have declined to comment on the launch.
But contrary to an MAy 24 by Bloomberg news service, Google is not planning to offer its own payment service. The article makes no mention of either Citi or MasterCard.
The article also reports that the new service, to be announced Thursday, will only be available on NFC phones from mobile operator Sprint. The telco recently started selling Google’s Nexus S 4G NFC phone, but this will not necessarily be the only model involved in the launch. The Nexus S 3G phone sold by T-Mobile USA might also be used, along with other phones yet to be introduced supporting NFC and Google’s Android mobile operating system.
As NFC Times reported last week, the initiative will put the Citi-issued PayPass application inside Google’s new mobile wallet, where it will be stored on the embedded secure chip in the Nexus S, sources said. Google is expected to have overall control of the secure chip, said the sources.
Google is also talking to other banks and service providers to offer applications for its wallet and plans pilots, sources have said.
The main part of the launch involving Citi and MasterCard is expected in the fourth quarter of 2011, although a smaller launch could happen earlier in the year, sources said.
Bloomberg in its recent article also repeated its earlier statements that Apple also plans its own NFC payment service, using NFC-enabled iPhones, citing consultant Richard Doherty.

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Orange and Barclaycard Launch ‘Quick Tap’ NFC Payment Service

Orange UK and Barclaycard today announced their much-anticipated commercial launch of NFC, a mobile-payment service called “Quick Tap.”The service, announced earlier than expected, is only available with one NFC phone so far, the 2G Samsung S5230, known as the Tocco Lite in the United Kingdom. And the phone is currently only available in only 42 Orange UK shops. But it qualifies as one of the first NFC rollouts worldwide.
Consumers will be able to tap their phone to pay for purchases up to £15 (US$24.35) at more than 50,000 stores in the United Kingdom, including McDonalds, Pret A Manger, EAT and Subway.
Barclaycard’s payment application, supporting MasterCard PayPass, is stored on SIM cards issued by Orange. A Quick Tap app will sit on the home screen of the phones offering a menu for users and will let them see prior purchases.
Orange is part of a joint venture with T-Mobile UK, Everything Everywhere, and Barclaycard is the credit card issuing and acquiring arm of Barclays bank.
Update: The payment application on the phone is similar to a prepaid account. Consumers will use their Barclaycard credit, Barclays debit or Orange credit card account to transfer up to £100 into the payment application before they can tap to pay. The value is stored on the network and the account can hold up to £150.
“There's a number of reasons why we did that,” Tom Gregory, head of digital payments for Barclaycard, explained to NFC Times. “We did lot of research with consumers and did some focus groups. This resonated very strongly with them. They wanted to be in control of their money.”
Consumers will be able to top-up the payment accounts on their phones or their computers. For phone top-ups, they'll enter PIN codes on their handset keypads.
But purchases of more than £15 are not permitted with the phones, even by entering a PIN. Barclaycard had trialed higher-value purchases on NFC phones with employees in early 2009, allowing users to enter PINs on the handset keypad. Gregory said enabling consumers to do high-value payment on their NFC phones is on the roadmap, but standards oragnizations and the international payment card networks have yet to agree on a uniform approach.
“Industry standards for high-value transactions are being approved by EMVCo, by Visa and MasterCard, but they are not in wide circulation,” he said. “It’s something we’re pushing hard to accelerate. We want the consumer to be able to use that phone anywhere.”
To encourage consumers to use the service, Barclaycard is offering Orange customers £10 cash added to their accounts upon activation. They can receive 10% cash back on all purchases made with the phone in the first three months.
Single Application So Far
The NFC service launched by Orange and Barclaycard offers only payment for now. There are no other applications available for users, including those that would use the other communication modes of NFC technology–tag reading and peer-to-peer data transfer. For example, with tag reading, users could tap their phones on NFC tags embedded in smart posters to download coupons or information. Bank payment uses NFC's card-emulation mode.
Representatives of Orange UK, or Everything Everywhere, have said in the past that when the telco rolls out NFC, the mobile wallet would offer much more than just NFC payment at the retail point of sale. The phone would instead become a “lifestyle device.”
The additional applications could mean not only enabling subscribers to tap their NFC phones to pay for morning coffee, but to ride the London Underground to work, exchange digital business cards in meetings, redeem loyalty points to buy lunch, buy concert tickets over the network and later tap to enter the venue, and download movie trailers or music videos by tapping smart posters, said the telco. Orange UK was not immediately available for an interview today.
Putting London’s popular transit application, Oyster, onto the phones is not yet an option since the application is too slow when loaded onto a SIM. But transit authority Transport for London plans to accept PayPass and other open-loop contactless payment on its buses in time for next year’s Summer Olympics.
“We’ve launched with payments today; there are other applications and services (to launch) in the near future,” said Barclaycard's Gregory. “Payment is potentially one of the most difficult things to get right, and we’re pleased we’ve managed to achieve that.” End update.
Lite on HandsetsOrange and Barclaycard had promised an early summer launch for the NFC service, which follows on from their partnership formed in 2009. But there are still no NFC-enabled smartphones on the market that support the standard single-wire protocol connection, or SWP, between the NFC chip and SIM. The SWP would be needed to run the PayPass application on the Orange SIM cards, which are provided by France-based Gemalto. The vendor also serves as trusted service manager for Barclaycard to download and manage the PayPass application.
Orange UK, like most other mobile operators in Europe, is requiring SWP-enabled handsets for its NFC launches because the SIM is key to its revenue model for NFC.
But the NFC version of the Samsung S5230 did not make a splash when Orange UK’s sister operator, Orange France, and other French telcos introduced it for their precommercial NFC launch in Nice a year ago.
The French operators together sold about 3,000 of the phones, known as the Player One in France, and subscribers have activated only about 20% of those for NFC, confirmed French operators and service providers. But they contend the activation rate is not disappointing, since for most of the year, the main NFC service available was transit ticketing and only about 40% of people in Nice regularly use public transit.
Orange UK is promising “more handsets from a selection of leading manufacturers,” though it’s unclear when NFC versions of such top-tier smartphones as the Android-based Galaxy S II from Samsung will be available in the UK market. Android NFC phones are expected from HTC and LG Electronics, but later in the year.
Google’s Nexus S Android NFC phone apparently only supports secure applications on embedded chips in the handsets. And recently announced NFC-enabled models from BlackBerry, the Bold 9900 and 9930, are not due until late summer and may not support the SWP at first, just secure applications on embedded chips.
Samsung’s Wave 578, supporting Samsung’s own bada smartphone operating system, will support the SWP, and France Telecom-Orange operators in France, Spain and Poland expected to use it. It will not be ready until at least the middle of this year. It’s not clear whether Orange UK wants the phone. An announcement at the Mobile World Congress in February by parent France Telecom of the Wave 578 and its use for NFC did not mention the United Kingdom.
Stela Bokun, UK-based senior analyst for Pyramid Research, told NFC Times she thinks Orange UK was eager to launch the mobile-payment service, and the low-cost Samsung Tocco Lite is affordable for younger, early adopters.
Orange is also sending a message to handset makers that it wants phones that support the single-wire protocol, she believes.
“This might give Orange an advantage and have some (phone) vendors reconsider whether they want to build the secure element into the phone, or they want to form partnerships with operators and promote the SIM-based mobile payments model.”
Orange UK, is part of the joint venture with T-Mobile UK, Everything Everywhere, but only Orange is participating in the launch.

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Chen One Pareesa Lawn collection 2011

Bringing high end designs, luxurious fabric and colorful palette, latest lawn collection by ChenOne contains supremacy of style and summer trends to allure fashionistas across world.

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Google Building an NFC Mobile Wallet; U.S. Banks are Interested

Google is building a mobile wallet nicknamed "Cream," which it plans to integrate with Android NFC phones that consumers could tap to pay in stores, sources told NFC Times. Among banks showing strong interest is U.S.-based Citigroup.
At least one other major U.S. bank has expressed interest in Google’s NFC mobile-payment initiative, JPMorgan Chase, said a source, who added that MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. have also been in talks with Google about possible participation in the Web giant’s plans to launch the wallet and enable a mobile-payment and advertising service on NFC smartphones. Among those phones is expected to be Google’s own Nexus S, said sources.
If the parties go ahead with the plans, an announcement of a launch could come early this year, with some sources predicting it could happen in a matter of weeks. Several Android-based NFC handsets are expected on the market this year, but at present there is only one, the Nexus S, launched last month, which still doesn’t support payment.
'Cream' of the NFC Phone Crop?But contrary to reports Tuesday, most sources agree that Google is not planning its own mobile-payment service. Instead, it would likely act as an enabler for mobile payment by banks and other payment service providers as part of a strategy to capture mobile advertising revenue for itself. In particular, Google would target consumers when they are in the store or right at the point of sale terminal.
Google makes the vast majority of its revenue now from advertising on the fixed Internet, but as more and more Web browsing and searches move from desktops and laptops to smartphones, Google needs to adapt its business model. With mobile phones, the company could locate consumers using global positioning or NFC’s tag-reading capability and charge advertisers, such as merchants and consumer products companies, for access to shoppers.
"Google is not interested in becoming the next MasterCard; they’re interested in enhancing the payment device with pinpoint accuracy for advertising and marketing," said a source with knowledge of the initiative. "It’s the holy grail of every marketing company–to impact the consumer in the place where they can buy."
The Cream wallet would be a default feature on Android phones, just like Google Maps. And just as Maps uses GPS to help render its services, Cream, or whatever the wallet app would be called, would have NFC technology as an enabler, said a source.
At present, the Nexus S and the latest version of the Android operating system running on it, called Gingerbread, only supports tag reading. As part of its Hotpot service, Google has launched a pilot enabling consumers with the Nexus S to tap NFC-tags displayed by merchants in their store windows in Portland, Oregon. With the service, users could pull down information about the merchants, including reviews and recommendations, and Google could gain information about the users, said Nick Holland, senior analyst with U.S.-based technology research and consulting firm Yankee Group.
"While the mass media is lit up about Google becoming the next Visa or MasterCard, they are totally missing the point," Holland told NFC Times. "Google makes 97% of its revenues from advertising and will continue to look for ways to do this. There is a huge dormant opportunity for them with physical world merchants. Tapping an NFC-enabled phone at a physical merchant location is equivalent to clicking an advertising link to get to a Web page–it is evidence that a potential consumer has been there and, for Google, monetizeable. Why would Google want to squabble over interchange fees and transaction share when they can own location-based advertising instead?"
Citi and MasterCard perhaps see the Google m-wallet initiative as a way to gird for expected competition next year with the Isis joint venture made up of three of the top four mobile carriers in the United States, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile USA. The telcos plan to introduce their own payment brand at the point of sale, using the Discover Financial Services retail network. They also are keen to use NFC phones sporting the popular Android platform–in this case, to load with their Isis application.
This might create a battle for control of the primary secure element in the phones, where the payment applications would be stored. Many of these secure elements are expected to be embedded chips, as in the Nexus S, not on SIM cards, which are strictly under the control of cellular operators that issue them. But since mobile operators in the U.S. exercise much control over distribution of phones to subscribers, they might also demand control of the master keys from handset makers to any embedded secure chip in the phones.
One source also said Chase and Visa have expressed interest in working together on a prepaid payment application for the Google wallet. Google had also tried to recruit Bank of America, which was initially receptive, but then dropped out, said the source.
Citi and MasterCard could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman at Chase said the bank would not comment "on this speculation." Visa declined all comment when reached.
"If this is true, it will make an enormous splash in the market," said Todd Ablowitz, president of the U.S.-based payments consulting company Double Diamond Group, speaking of a possible launch of mobile payment by Citi and MasterCard involving Google, given the Web giant's powerful consumer relationship.
Going Beyond Stickers and microSDsCiti and MasterCard are working together on a passive-sticker program, launched last spring, which to date is Citi’s only actual mobile-payment offer at the point of sale. But the bank has indicated that much more is to come with NFC and contactless-mobile payment. Chase and Bank of America have been testing contactless microSD cards with Visa. All three banks have participated in NFC phone trials.
Visa may not be so keen to be part of the Google wallet, said a source, but its banking customers are clamoring for products they can use to enter the mobile-payment market and ward off feared competition at the physical point of sale from such payment services providers as PayPal and the Isis joint venture. Visa’s only answer so far to these threats have been some shopping apps and its contactless microSD card program, which some say is not yet ready for the market.
"Visa is trying hard to remain in the race," said a source.
Even with the banks and card networks involved, launching NFC payment will still be a challenge. At present, fewer than 2% of merchant point-of-sale terminals in the United States support payment from contactless cards or NFC phones.
Some observers believe Google might want to introduce payment, but mobile advertising still would be at the core of the company's strategy for making money with NFC phones. One option would be for Google to bypass the problem of the scarcity of readers at the point of sale by using low-cost tags. Consumers could tap their NFC phones on the tags at the point of sale and conduct cloud-based payment transactions. Instead of an actual payment application stored on a secure element in the phone, perhaps a credential of some type would be secured there, authenticating the user to the network.
"The next wave of eyeballs at devices will be with mobile smartphones," said Charles Walton, chief operating officer for NFC chip supplier Inside Secure, who sees the cloud-based payment option as viable. "Based upon their current business model, I might theorize that their (Google's) next step could be mobile NFC commerce services that are a giveaway to gain continued and growing dominance in their core-revenue segment of advertising. This would turn the industry upside down."

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Google Mobile Wallet Payment Service Will Replace Plastic and Paper Money With Smartphones

With on-going tablet and smartphone fiasco, we have already witnessed a paradigm change in the way we do things. Google Inc has finally taken the wraps off its NFC based Wallet payment service which will allow US shoppers to use their phones to pay up at the check-out counter. The tech giant intends to prod consumers and merchants into a world where your smartphone would easily replace your both paper and plastic money. The service will be first made available in summer this year in New York and Sans Francisco and eventually reaching out to other regions.

MasterCard, Citigroup, Sprint and transaction processing company First Data have joined hands with Google for this venture which seeks to compete with a similar service that will be soon unveiled by Visa and its allies. For now, the Sprint Nexus 4G will be the only compatible phone but the support basket will be enlarged in future. This service will either be funded through either a Citi MasterCard or Google Prepaid where the latter can be fueled with any other card. This certainly means that no matter which company’s debit/credit card you use, you’ll still be able to make the best out of this.For now, the app will only work on Android phones and it will ride on MasterCard's "PayPass" technology, which lets shoppers tap cards for payment. Google has also partnered with several retailers including Macy's Inc, American Eagle Outfitters Inc and Subway to extend loyalty programs and discount offers to their users.

With this Wallet mobile payment service, Google also announced ‘Goggle Offers’ which will tip its users on daily deals and coupons. So if the user happens to pass by a signed up retailer’s poster, say Subway for instance, he can simply tap on an icon-like area which would trigger a coupon in his mobile wallet. He can then save the coupon and later redeem it for his purchases.

It’s going to be a while before this wallet mobile system actually becomes a way of life for people just the way credit/debit/gift cards are today. You could be wondering what would happen if one ever lost their smartphone. Google has made this service password secured and in case of loss or theft, it would deactivate the card pretty much the same way a bank does for its card holders. No word on iOS and other OS integration but if we are looking at unified payment system here, multi-platform support is inevitable.

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The shape of cars to come

A new Renault Captur concept car is displayed during the first media day of the 81st Geneva Car Show at the Palexpo in Geneva
Visitors look at Italian carmaker Pagani's new Huayra sports car on the first media day of the 81st Geneva Car Show at the Palexpo in Geneva.

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A new Alfa Romeo 4C concept car is displayed during the first media day of the 81st Geneva International Motor Show at the Palexpo in Geneva.

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A visitor takes a picture of a the new Agera R sports car by Swedish carmaker Koenigsegg at the 81st Geneva Car Show.

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The new Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 at the 81st Geneva Motor Show at the Palexpo in Geneva

The Wiesmann Spyder Design Study at the 81st Geneva Motor Show

A battery-powered Renault DeZir concept car is displayed during the first media day of the 81st Geneva International Motor Show.

 

The new Tata Pixel car is displayed at the Geneva Car Show.

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The new Lotus Elise Club Racer car.

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The Wiesmann Spyder Design Study

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Members of the press inspect the Saab PhoeniX concept car at the New York International Auto Show in New York City.

Visitors and media walk past a Subaru concept car at the Geneva International Motor Show.

A model poses next to a Mercedes Benz Concept A-Class at the Shanghai Auto Show.

A 'disco-ball' mirror covered Electric Drive Smart Car is seen on display at the New York International Auto Show in New York City.

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A model poses next to a battery powered Rolls Royce 102ex experimental car displayed at the 81st Geneva International Motor Show.

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RIM Launches BlackBerry Style 9670 CDMA Smartphone

RIM the Makers of BlackBerry Smartphone announced the launch of the BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone for the CDMA customers in India .The new smartphone comes in a elegant compact flip design along with dual high-resolution displays and a full-QWERTY keypad. One of its amazing feature is the powerful new BlackBerry 6 operating system.The smartphone also features a full-QWERTY BlackBerry keypad that makes messaging, email and real-time chats with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) pretty easy.
It also comes along with many advanced features, which includes a 5MP camera with flash and it also supports video recording, built in GPS for location based apps and geo tagging, Wi-Fi for faster connectivity to internet, extended data coverage and an expandable memory card slot for up to 32GB of additional memory storage.
This comes with an optical trackpad for fluid navigation and a couple of large displays, an external screen which helps quickly viewing messages, notifications and a high-resolution internal screen that makes watching videos and Web browsing a pleasure.The new BlackBerry 6 OS retains the trusted and familiar features of the BlackBerry brand.
It also has a 512MB flash memory, along with an 8GB microSD / SDHC memory card.This smartphone also comes with 4.5-hour talktime along with a standby time of 10.5 days.In addition to the preinstalled applications for accessing the YouTube, BBM, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, the BlackBerry Style offers enhanced multimedia capabilities, including a redesigned media application for a richer experience with music, pictures and vi

 

 

Key features:
* Operating System: BlackBerry 6
* Full-QWERTY keyboard and two high resolution displays
* Support for 3G-EVDO networks
* Powerful new Web-Kit browser
* Enhanced media player for music, pictures and videos
* 5 MP camera with autofocus, video recording, scene modes and geotagging
* Built-in GPS and Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n)
* Additional Specs:
* Approximately 3.8? x 2.4? x 0.7? (closed)
* Approximately 4.6 oz.
* 512MB Flash memory, plus an 8GB microSD/SDHC memory card included (slot supports up to 32GB memory cards)
* Internal display measuring 2.7? diagonal (360 x 400); external display measuring 2inch diagonal (240×320)
* Audio formats supported: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, FLAC, OGG
* Video formats supported: MPEG4, H.263, MPEG4 Simple Profile H.264, WMV
* Talk Time: ~4.5 hrs and Standby Time: ~ 10.5 days
* Network support: Dual Band CDMA/EVDO Rev A: CDMA 800; CDMA 1900

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Technology's Rock-stars !!!!

There’s a disconnect for many kids in America between the science and technology they study in school and the real world. Most kids know what an iPhone is but have no idea who Steve Jobs is.

“I need scientists and engineers who would be what LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal are to their industry,” said Dean Kamen the inventor of the Segway personal transporter and founder of FIRST , an organization designed to help foster innovations by kids in science and technology. “You need to put world class pros in front of kids.”

The tide of cool is starting to turn when it comes to science, technology, engineering and math, thanks to tech superstars like Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. And, seeing the names of Microsoft's Bill Gates, Apple's Steve Jobs or the Google guys on the list of the world's billionaires doesn't hurt either.

Still, if you do an informal poll of kids, more would want to be LeBron James than Mark Zuckerberg, even though statistically, that kid is more likely to get struck by lightning than to become a rich sports superstar.

A lot of companies and organizations like FIRST are trying to change that, investing in programs that encourage innovation — and teaching kids that innovation is cool. In order to help connect the dots between what those kids are tinkering with now and what they might become, here are more than a dozen of the most influential innovators of the last century, names you probably haven't heard of, even though their innovations changed our lives. They are the rock stars of tech.
Dean Kamen

Famous for: Segway personal transporter

Dean Kamen holds more than 440 U.S. and foreign patents, and is probably the most famous for inventing the Segway personal transporter.

In order to get that many patents in one lifetime, he started pretty young: He got his first patent when he was 17 for an insulin pump. His mom had to sign the papers!

Frustrated by how far behind the U.S. has fallen in innovation, and how kids are more inclined to be sports stars than engineers, he started FIRST and organized the FIRST Robotics competition to get them as jazzed about science and technology as they are about sports.

Why is it called FIRST? “Because you never heard a kid say he wanted to be No. 2!” Kamen quipped

Ted Hoff

Famous for: inventing world’s first single-chip microprocessor

Ted Hoff joined Intel in 1967 as employee No. 12. He came up with the idea for putting all the parts that comprise the brain of the computer on a single chip, called the Intel 4004, which he created along with fellow Intel engineers Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor.

1n 1954, he was a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Finalist (now known as Intel STS), which just goes to show those students of today that those innovation contests work . He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1996.
Steve Wozniak

Famous for: co-founding Apple and creating Apple I and Apple II computers

Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer along with Steve Jobs, the current CEO of the company, and Ronald Wayne, who famously cashed out before Apple went intergalactic. Known as “The Woz” or “The Other Steve,” Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the 1970s, which helped launch the personal-computer industry.

He’s also in the Inventors Hall of Fame and is a strong believer in technology education, having donated many computers and even entire computer labs to schools. Tim Berners-Lee

Famous for: inventing the world-wide web

Despite what Al Gore told you, Tim Berners-Lee is the man who really invented the Internet. He first proposed the idea in 1989 and in 1990 made the first successful connection between an HTTP client and the Internet.

He is a Britis

Vinton Cerf

Famous for: being the“father of the Internet”

Cerf was a program manager for the defense department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, providing funding to groups that were developing TCP/IP technology that is critical to connecting computers to the Internet. At MCI, he helped develop MCI Mail, one of the first Internet email systems. He’s also one of the founders of ICANN, the Internet domain-name registry and organized the system to distribute “keys to the Internet,” to secure the world wide web in the event of an attack.

He’s currently the vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, a title he’s held since September 2005, and working on the “Interplanetary Internet” (IPN) with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for communication between planets. And yes, he’s also in the Inventors Hall of Fame .

h physicist and professor at MIT. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004

Ray Tomlinson

Famous for: creating inter-system email and adding the @ symbol

In the early days, two people had to be using the same computer system in order to email each other. Tomlinson, who worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman, the company the defense department hired to build the first Internet, developed a system in 1971 that allowed users to exchange email, no matter what system they were on. He is the one who first came up with the idea to use the @ symbol, to let other users know which computer the user was “at.”

Ironically, the very first email was sent between two computers side by side. Though some of us do that now — not much has changed! Marc Andreessen

Famous for: inventing the first web browser

Andreessen was the co-author of Mosaic, the first web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications. Think of "cookies." Think of your browser's "back" and "forward" buttons. Think of the fact that you can go online through a graphic interface, rather than while looking at lines of code, in the first place. That was all Andreessen, and he invented a lot of that while still an undergraduate at the University of Illinois and a mere intern at IBM. While still a student, he legendarily jotted out the business plan for Netscape on a napkin, over lunch in Champaign-Urbana. The company generated one of the largest IPOs of its time.
The Netscape browser dominated the market until Microsoft came along with Internet Explorer, spawning the famous Browser Wars, which Nestcape, despite being the first, ultimately lost

Jeff Bezos

Famous for: founding Amazon.com

Jeff Bezos worked as a financial analyst on Wall Street for eight years right out of college before founding Amazon in his garage in 1994. It started out as an online bookseller and is now one of the largest online retailers in the world. He was named Time’s "Person of the Year" in 1999.

Elon Musk

Famous for: founding PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors

In 1999, Musk founded X.com, an Internet financial-services company that would ultimately become PayPal, the now ubiquitous Internet-payment system that was bought by eBay. Musk then went on to found SpaceX, a space-exploration company, and Tesla Motors, which makes electric vehicles

Linus Torvalds

Famous for: Inventing the Linux kernel

Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer who invented the Linux kernel, which spawned the open-source Linux operating system, which now runs 10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers and many things that we all use every day, including Facebook, Twitter, and Android phones. The operating-system war between Microsoft and Linux raged on for years but the two seemed to have settled in now where they’ve staked out their territories — Microsoft in the personal-computer market, Linux on the server side and in mobile computing.
Vic Hayes

Famous for: being the “father of wi-fi”

Hayes, born in the Netherlands, is credited with establishing the IEEE 802.11 standards for wireless networks, a feat that has earned him the nickname, “the father of wi-fi.”
Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin

Famous for: creating Friendster

In 2002, Abrams (pictured left) and Chin created Friendster, one of the first social-networking sites, paving the way for sites like MySpace and Facebook. In 2010, Facebook bought seven patents and 11 patent applications from Friendster for $39.5 million. Abrams was also the founder and CEO of the online-invitation site Socializr and social-bookmarking site HotLinks. He is currently a managing partner of Founders Den, a group of entrepreneurs, and co-owner of the San Francisco night club Slide

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