PayPal just announced that it has acquired card.io, a company that allows developers to capture credit card information by using a smartphone’s built-in camera. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. As we reported earlier this year, PayPal’s PayPal Here feature is already being powered by card.io’s service, so the two companies already had a close relationship before this acquisition. According to card.io, the company’s iOS and Android SDKs will continue to remain available for developers.

According to Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s VP of global product, he and his team were “simply blown away by the creativity and drive of [card.io's] employees.” The Card.io team will join PayPal’s global product team in San Jose to help the company “create new experiences to make it even easier for consumers and merchants to use the PayPal digital wallet.” Besides PayPal, Card.io’s client include Uber, LevelUp, TaskRabbit, Lemon and 1-800-Contacts. Developers pay $0.15 for every card they scan.

The company was founded by former AdMob employees Mike Mattler and Josh Bleecher Snyder. According to its website, the company currently has six employees (including the founders).

Card.io raised a $1 million funding round in 2011 but hasn’t taken any funding since. Some of the company’s competitors, including Jumio, for example, have taken far larger funding rounds over the last year or so.

Source http://techcrunch.com

YouTube today launched a new feature that allows its users to easily blur the faces of everybody in a video with just one click. This, says YouTube policy associate Amanda Conway in a blog post today, can have a number of uses. It can, for example, help users ensure they can share a video of activists during a protest without putting them at risk for later repercussions. As YouTube becomes an increasingly important part of how news spreads, having the ability to ensure the safety of those captured on these videos becomes imperative. At the same time, of course, this new feature can also help users share video of their children without broadcasting their faces to the world. This new visual anonymity, says Conway, will allow “people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not.”

Google freely acknowledges that this new tool, which can be found in YouTube’s Video Enhancements tool, doesn’t always work perfectly. “This is emerging technology, which means it sometimes has difficulty detecting faces depending on the angle, lighting, obstructions and video quality,” says Conway. Some faces, for example, may not be blurred in some frames. In these cases, YouTube recommends that users keep their videos private. The tool probably uses the same algorithms that Google’s StreetView does, by the way, but we’ve asked Google for clarification.

Currently, it seems, this new tool only allows users to blur all faces in a video. You can’t just selectively blur some faces but leave others untouched. Still, this will likely become a very useful feature for those who want to share video without putting those filmed at risk.

 

Source http://techcrunch.com

¿Quien no esta contento con Dropbox?  Desde que descubrimos Dropbox nos hemos olvidado casi por completo de las memorias USB, o bien de llevar a todos lados nuestra lap-top para poder ver el archivo que tenemos ahí, claro siempre tenemos en cuenta que la capacidad extra en Dropbox nos costara un poco mas, pero es un poco mas barato que una memoria USB y mucho mas eficiente.

Pero bien ya es suficiente de hablar sobre Dropbox y puede que algunos por ahí no les agrade del todo Dropbox, así que aquí tenemos 6 alternativas de Dropbox, como antes ya habíamos mencionado algunas propuestas distintas a dropbox como: SurDoc o CX entre otras, las cuales pueden ser tal vez una mejor opción ya que no tienes que ser usuario de Dropbox o registrarte nada de eso únicamente subes compartes y listo aquí te dejo estas propuestas:

Dropcanvas:

Dropcanvas es una opción realmente fácil de usar la cual si no quieres registrarte, entras directamente a la pagina cargas tu archivo y listo ahí tienes el enlace de tu archivo, y bien también puedes registrarte y hacer lo mismo es una interfaz muy usable la cual te va a sorprender, también puedes cargar varios archivos y cuando termines de cargar los que quieras generas tu enlace puedes cargas hasta 5 gb.

Pastelink

Pastelink es muy similar a Dropcanvas, aquí también únicamente elijes tu archivo lo cargas y listo te genera tu enlace y tampoco sin necesidad de registrarte, al usuario que se lo compartas le aparecerá el enlace de descarga no tiene una vista previa, si eres un usuario registrado puedes compartir archivos de hasta 2 gb, también los puedes compartir por redes sociales y enviar por correo electrónico.

Snaggy

Snaggy por otro lado es un poco diferente porque bien puedes compartir imágenes, pero esas imágenes no necesariamente puedes tenerlas en tu computadora, puedes copiar y pegar la imagen, o si la tienes en tu computadora puedes arrastrarla y listo ahora una de las mejores partes, esa imagen la puedes editar antes de generar el enlace y puedes compartirlo por las redes sociales, una muy buena manera de compartir imágenes no hay duda.

Droprl

Droprl es otra herramienta que también es muy fácil de usar pero aquí las cosas cambian a comparación con las otras les explico, aquí puedes hacer lo mismo seleccionar tu archivo y generas tu código y listo, que es lo malo que únicamente tu archivo puede ser no máximo a 25 mb y tus archivos desaparecen después de 7 días, pero si te registras tus archivos siempre estarán ahí.

Ge.TT

Es otra excelente opción para compartir multimples archivos de igual manera arrastras, cargas o pegas lo que desees, puedes cargar los archivos sin que tengas ninguna cuenta y los archivos estarán ahí hasta por 30 dias, si creas una cuenta estarán siempre.

Clipica

Si bien nos gusto como es Snaggy antes mencionado aquí mismo, pues Clipica es similar a el y funciona de la misma manera, copias y pegas pero, ¿Que es lo que lo diferencia de Snaggy? Esto es que Clipica te proporciona un código QR el cual te servirá de mucho, también puedes compartir de manera anónima tu archivo.

Así que bien si estamos casados con Dropbox que pasara después de esto será igual o cambiaremos, pues vale la pena probar estos servicios y elegir el que mas se adapte a nuestras necesidades o bien usar un poco de todos para tener mas alojamiento gratuito.

Fuente http://techtastico.com

Smack-dab in the middle of earnings season, Microsoft has officially announced that the long-awaited Windows 8 operating system will be available to upgraders and new PC buyers alike come October 26, 2012. For those of you keeping count, that’s about 14 weeks from now.

Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that Windows 8 would be available in “late October” which was soon enough to be excited and vague enough to be an understandably unreliable timeline. But Microsoft has set a date, and that date is October 26.

Expect to hear a few friends freak out about a missing Start button around Halloween.

This is a huge turning point for Microsoft. The company is just starting to be cool again, and not even in a retro-vintage kind of way. They are actually getting aggressive with smart acquisitions, Windows Phone is on the road to success, and Windows 8, the mack-daddy of all that effort, is Microsoft’s apology for ever offering up Vista.

A while back Microsoft released a concept video detailing the company’s aspirations for the future. It’s an incredibly cool portrayal, and now that I’ve played around with Windows 8, it’s clear that Microsoft is going for it in a tangible way.

 

Source http://techcrunch.com

Así lo anunció Steven Sinofsky en la reunión anual de ventas en Microsoft, tanto la actualización como la versión para nuevas PC’s.

Cosa que no es sorpresa para nadie ya que Tami Reller ya había comentado en la Conferencia Microsoft Worldwide Partner que iba a ser lanzado en Octubre, aunque ahora ya sabemos la fecha exacta.

Así que hay que aprovechar, ya que la actualización costará 39 dólares hasta el 31 de Enero del 2013 si la descargan y 69 dólares si quieren el DVD.  Además con la actualización pueden obtener Windows Media Center gratis.

Recuerden antes de actualizar de consultar que es lo que sucede con sus programas y ficheros ya que depende de la versión de Windows que tengan instalada al momento de la actualización a Windows 8.

[Fuente Blog de Windows Team]

Mozilla today launched Firefox 14, the latest version of its popular browser. As usual, this new version doesn’t introduce any major new interface redesigns or other radical changes, but it does come with a number of welcome new features that should make the browsing experience a bit more pleasant and safer. The most interesting change from a user perspective is probably that Firefox now automatically uses a secure HTTPS connection for all your Google searches using the location bar, search box and right-click menu. This should make searching with Firefox safer on public and shared WiFi networks. According to Mozilla, “Google is currently the only search engine that allows Firefox to make your searches private, but we look forward to supporting additional search engines with this feature in the future.”

With this release, Firefox users can now also configure their browser to only load plugins on click. This opt-in activation of plugins does take a change to Firefox’s about:config page, however, so it’s not something the Firefox team thinks is quite ready for primetime just yet. Mozilla promises that one of the next versions of the browser will offer a more complete integration of this feature.

Mac users will be happy to hear that Firefox 14 now supports native full screen browsing for OS X Lion. While Firefox always featured a full-screen mode, this wasn’t integrated into Lion’s native ability to run apps full screen, though. The advantage of Firefox’s old approach, however, was that you could still use a second screen while in full-screen mode. This isn’t possible using Lion’s native full-screen mode.

For developers, this new version includes a new API that can prevent displays from going into sleep or screensaver mode, as well as a pointer lock API that gives developer the ability to hide the cursor and lock it to just the browser screen, for example. This may sound like a minor feature, but is actually quite useful for games and 3D apps.

The full release notes are available here.

http://techcrunch.com

Android is now most-used smartphone platform worldwide, and that swing is being reflected in other areas like mobile advertising. Today some numbers out from Adfonic indicate that in Q2, Android accounted for the majority of mobile ad impressions on its network worldwide, with 46 percent compared to iOS’s 34 percent of impressions. This is the first time Adfonic says it has recorded Android being more popular than iOS. In that, it joins other big ad networks like Millennial Media and InMobi, which both noted Google’s OS overtaking Apple’s earlier this year.

Adfonic’s Global AdMetrics Report is based on 4,000 rich-media campaigns run monthly for brands like Samsung, Warner Bros, eBay, McDonald’s, Groupon and Google, reaching 200 million mobile unique users monthly over 80 billion ad requests. The company notes that today’s Android popularity is a near-mirror switch from the quarter before, when iOS took 45 percent of traffic to Android’s 38 percent. The only region where Android has yet to dominate over iOS, Adfonic says, is South America, and overall iOS lost marketshare in every region. The U.S., on the other hand, has seen the most drastic flip:

In Q1 in the U.S., Android and iOS were nearly level, with just four percentage points separating Android’s 46 percent to iOS’s 42 percent. This last quarter, iOS dropped down to 30 percent while Android shot up to 63 percent. Given that the U.S. is leading the charge with smartphones, this could potentially be read as a bad sign for Apple in the months to come — although the launch of a new iPhone will likely change the balance once again.

And that’s because this is not just a story of platforms but of devices — and for Apple, it’s still winning massively where that is concerned. Adfonic notes that taken as individual devices, Apple’s are still proving to be the most popular — by quite a long shot.

The iPhone accounts for 26.5 percent of all impressions among all the smartphones on Adfonics’ network. Although that is a decline of eight percent on the quarter before, the runner-up device, also an iOS handset (the iPod Touch), is only at 5.2 percent (also a decline). Samsung and Blackberry round out the top five, and both actually grew their market shares, albeit from a small base.

The same story appears in tablets, where the iPad accounted for almost 54.8 percent of all traffic. Again it’s a decline, this time of 12 percent, but still comfortably ahead of number-two — in this case the Kindle Fire from Amazon with 6.6 percent of impressions and growing.

That could also be a testament to how well the Kindle Fire might perform in the long run: the device is still only available in the U.S., and yet it’s still ranking as the second-most-popular worldwide for ad impressions (and, hence, content usage) on Adfonic’s network.

Taken together, Android and iOS accounted for 80 percent of Adfonic’s global ad inventory — a pretty stark statement, once again, of how dominant these two are together at the expense of Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian and the rest. This is as much about attracting advertisers to buy ads on attractive devices as it is about consumer popularity. Paul Childs, CMO at Adfonic noted: “iOS and Android smartphones and tablets have the most compelling user interfaces, comprising touchscreens, geolocation features and attractive displays. They are fulfilling their tremendous advertising potential to show engaging ad formats, such as rich media.”

Adfonic’s extensive report (which you can read in full here) also covers a lot of detail on successful verticals, the difference in ad performance by gender and other metrics. One notable graphic that caught my eye was this one on impressions based on different verticals, which shows that music is currently having the biggest pull for advertisers, taking 39 percent of all ad spend on its network; technology ads were the second-highest at 28 percent. In terms of publisher channels, sites and apps in the entertainment and lifestyle categories are seeing increases in their ad requests, while games, social networking, and news/sport/information all saw declines.

Source http://techcrunch.com