Apple Promotes Apple Pay on Web With Exclusive Holiday Offers

Following the launch of Apple Pay on the web on iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, Apple is now offering a selection of exclusive holiday discounts and benefits in order to entice customers to use the mobile payments service online.

Some of the offers, for example, include 50% off a one-year subscription to The New York Times, a free $50 iTunes gift card with the purchase of a Casper mattress, and a free $25 gift card if you spend over $150 at athletic apparel retailer Lululemon.

Free shipping, discounts, and other offers are currently available from Adidas, Casper, Grubhub, Instacart, JackThreads, Jet, Lululemon, The New York Times, 1-800-Flowers, Overstock, Seamless, Shopify, Spring, and Vacatia.

• Adidas — Enjoy one- or two-day free shipping.
• Casper — Buy a mattress and receive a $50 iTunes gift card.
• Grubhub — Win a $50 gift card for you and a friend! New diners will also receive $10 off their next order.
• Instacart — First-time customers get one month of free Instacart delivery.
• JackThreads — Get 20% off great holiday looks.
• Jet — Get 10% off your first three orders and $5 JetCash to use on future purchases.
• Lululemon — Get a $25 gift card if you spend over $150.
• The New York Times — Get 50% off a one-year subscription.
• 1-800-FLOWERS — Enjoy free shipping.
• Overstock — Enjoy a free year of Club O Rewards Membership, a $19.99 value.
• Seamless — Win a $50 gift card for you and a friend! New diners will also receive $10 off their next order.
• Shopify — Explore unique gifts and deals from Shopify stores.
• Spring — Get 20% off perfect looks for holiday.
• Vacatia — Get 7% off resort bookings and a chance to win a one-week stay in Hawaii.

Apple said more offers are coming soon from retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, Bank of America, Caviar, Chase, Poshmark, Tumi, Under Armour, Warby Parker, and The Washington Post. The offers are valid in the U.S. only.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
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Apple Seeds Second macOS Sierra 10.12.2 Beta to Developers

Apple today seeded the second beta of the upcoming macOS Sierra update 10.12.2 to developers, one week after releasing the first 10.12.2 beta and two weeks after the public release of macOS 10.12.1.

macOS Sierra 10.12.2 beta 2 is available for download through the Apple Developer Center and through the software update mechanism in the Mac App Store. A public beta will likely be available for public beta testers later this week.

macOS Sierra 10.12.2 includes new emoji introducing Unicode 9 characters like clown face, drooling face, selfie, face palm, fox face, owl, shark, butterfly, avocado, pancakes, croissant, and more, plus many profession emoji available in both male and female genders.

Apple has also updated the artwork on many existing emoji, adding detail and making them look less cartoonish and more realistic.

The update will also focus on bug fixes and performance enhancements to address issues that have popped up since the release of macOS Sierra 10.12.1.

Available since September, macOS Sierra is the latest Mac operating system. It includes Siri support, Apple Pay for the web, Universal Clipboard, Apple Watch auto unlocking, improved iCloud Drive integration, Picture-in-Picture multitasking, and dozens of smaller features that can be found in our macOS Sierra roundup.

Related Roundup: macOS Sierra
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Canadians can now sign up to use Samsung Pay with CIBC cards

Samsung and CIBC are teaming up to offer Samsung Pay to Canadians with “select” CIBC credit cards, as we previously reported.

Now, Samsung Canada has put up a landing page allowing users to sign up to receive an email to receive a link to download Samsung Pay on a compatible Galaxy device. Seems fairly convoluted, but there we go.

Says Samsung, (via SamMobile):

As a valued customer, we are excited to present you with early access to Samsung Pay. Samsung has partnered with CIBC so that our customers can make payments using a Samsung Galaxy device with select CIBC credit cards. Samsung Pay works with the latest Samsung Galaxy devices almost anywhere you can tap or swipe your card3, so you can enjoy all the convenience you need on one Samsung device.

There are a couple caveats: CIBC users can only sign up Visa cards at this point, so MasterCard fans are out of luck; and there is no compatibility with US Dollar or prepaid Visa cards.

Still interested? Already signed up? Let us know in the comments!

Play Catan for cheap with the latest Humble Mobile Bundle

I used to love writing about new Humble Mobile Bundles, the Android equivalent of HB’s excellent pay-what-you-want software packages that benefit charities, and great indie developers. Sadly, those days don’t come as often anymore, but this latest one — board game-themed — is worth mentioning.

Carcassonne: fine. Scotland Yard: meh. Great games, I’m sure — but you’re really here for Catan, one of the greatest trading strategy board games ever conceived.

Catan, along with Splendor and THE aMAZEing Labyrinth, are unlocked when you spend more than $3 on the bundle (remember, it’s pay-what-you-want); Ticket to Ride, San Juan, and Galaxy Trucker are also part of the deal.

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Sorry, the OnePlus Australia website is fake

We know you want to see OnePlus sales in Australia, but this isn’t going to help.

OnePlus has yet to bring its phones to Australia, and it still doesn’t have any public plans to do so despite the appearance of a new oneplus.com.au website. Going to that URL sure looks legit, closely mimicking the main OnePlus website design and saying “We’re Bringing OnePlus to Australia” — but as Ausdroid found, the website actually has no affiliation with OnePlus at all.

Once you dig a tad, you’ll now see the message in the website’s “About” section:

We’re not affiliated with OnePlus, but we are determined to bring them down under, and that’s why we’ve set up this site. The more interest we have here, the better chance we’ll have convincing the folks at OnePlus that Australia is a market they want to enter.

Well, they didn’t do a great job making that clear from the start, and the website is extremely misleading in order to try and collect email addresses. OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei has indicated that a “cease and desist” order will be headed to the OnePlus fan’s copycat website.

@JM77 C&D coming up

— Carl Pei (@getpeid) November 8, 2016

Usually a website like this wouldn’t get too much traction, but when someone is able to snag an otherwise-legitimate URL like that it makes it a bit more believable. OnePlus is known for having extremely passionate and engaged fans, but this is definitely not the best way to go about convincing the company to expand to new countries.

Soylent blames product recalls on algae

It’s been a tough few weeks for Soylent. After recalling its new food bars for giving customers vomiting and diarrhea, the startup ended up pulling its famous meal-substitute powder from shelves as well. The company said a handful of powder customers were reporting similar gastrointestinal issues to those causes by the bars. The problem was affecting less than 0.1 percent of all customers, but the complaints were obviously severe enough to halt all sales of two of the company’s four product lines.

At the time, Soylent noted that its tests came back negative for food pathogens, toxins or outside contamination, and also said that it only affected the most recent iteration of its powder. “This possible connection allows us to narrow the field considerably given there are only a few ingredients that are specific to only our bars and Powder 1.6,” it said. Well, the culprit has been found: algae.

Soylent co-founder Rob Rhinehart told Bloomberg that the company’s new powder and bars “will no longer contain algal flour.” Use of the algae-derived powder, in this case supplied by biotech company TerraVia, has grown in recent years as an alternative to animal-derived proteins.

TerraVia, for its part, says that its algal flour “has been used in more than 20 million servings of products, and we are aware of very few adverse reactions. In no cases was algal flour identified as the cause.” However, Bloomberg reports to have seen a letter between TerraVia and a distributor warning that it received a “modest number of reports” showing that algal protein can cause gastrointestinal distress.

Whatever the case, Silicon Valley’s favorite shake should be returning early next year.

Source: Bloomberg

Tesla buys an engineering firm to meet Model 3 production goals

Tesla is going to need to make a lot of cars if it’s going to fulfill all those Model 3 pre-orders… 500,000 per year by 2018, to be exact. And it’s making a big purchase to help it reach that lofty goal. The company is acquiring Grohmann Engineering, a German firm specializing in automated manufacturing. The buyout (which creates Tesla Grohmann Automation) should give Elon Musk and crew more of the expertise and systems they need for high-volume production not only at the Gigafactory, but elsewhere in the world. Grohmann will serve as the base for Tesla’s Advanced Automation Germany facility, with more locations coming.

If regulators greenlight the deal, it should close sometime in early 2017. As you might guess, Tesla is painting this as a positive for the German economy: it plans to add more than 1,000 “advanced engineering and skilled technician jobs” in the country over the next 2 years.

The move isn’t coming out of the blue. Tesla had already been partnering with Grohmann on manufacturing upgrades for months, and the two sides found themselves making such major strides that they felt they could do better together. As it stands, Tesla has its work cut out for it beyond just the Model 3. Between new Powerwalls and Powerpacks, promises of full self-driving capabilities and everything that will come from buying SolarCity, it’ll have to understand how to manufacture a wider range of products in short order.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Tesla

Scientists built a chip without semiconductors

Remember when you saw those old-timey photos of room-sized vacuum-tube-powered computers, and laughed and laughed? That tech might be making a comeback, thanks to work from scientists from UC San Diego. They’ve built the first semiconductor-free, laser-controlled microelectronics device using free electrons in air, much like how vacuum tubes work. The research could result in better solar panels and faster microelectronic devices that can carry more power.

Semiconductors based on silicon and other materials are great, obviously, having helped us squeeze billions of transistors into a few square inches. But they have some issues: Electron velocity is limited by the resistance of semiconductor materials, and a boost of energy is required to just to get them flowing through the “band gap” caused by the insulating properties of semiconductors like silicon.

Vacuum tubes don’t have those problems, since they use free electrons in the air to carry (or not) a current. Getting free electrons at nanoscale sizes is problematic, however — you need either high voltages (over 100 volts), high temperatures or a powerful laser to knock them loose. The UC San Diego team solved that problem by building gold “mushroom” nanostructures with adjacent parallel gold strips (above). By combining a relatively low amount of power (10 volts) with a low-powered laser, they were able to dislodge electrons from the gold metal.

The result was a tenfold (1000 percent) increase in conductivity in the system, a change sufficient “to realize on and off states, that is, the structure performs as an optical switch,” according to the paper in Nature. The device can thus act as a transistors, power amplifier or photodetector, much as semiconductors do. However, it can theoretically work with less resistance and handle higher amounts of power.

So far, the research is just a proof-of-concept, but it’s very promising. “Next, we need to understand how far these devices can be scaled and the limits of their performance,” says author Dan Sievenpiper. The team aims to explore applications not just in electronics, but photovoltaics, environmental applications and, possibly, weaponry — the research was funded, after all, by DARPA.

Source: UC San Diego

Five exciting new engineering inventions set to change the world

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has just launched its Start Your Story campaign for young engineers and innovators on their journey to becoming entrepreneurs.

The IET has highlighted a selection of inspirational winners and finalists from its Present Around the World and Global Challenge competitions who have been recognised for developing five ground-breaking inventions for the future.

As an organisation whose purpose is to inspire the next generation of engineers and technicians, Start Your Story has been launched to celebrate that, with the right platform and a helping hand, every engineer and innovator can be catapulted to success.

hipsterIce: a revolutionary product for aid organisations operating abroad

University of Cambridge engineering students Joshua de Gromoboy, Gwilym Rowbotton and Siddharth Gupta created their product hipsterIce as part of the IET’s 2015 Global Challenge competition.

hipsterIce is an inexpensive, non-powered cooler that gives laptops five hours of efficient use every day, increasing performance and lifespan. This was recognised as a revolutionary product for humanitarian aid workers operating in hot countries, addressing the issue of heat negatively impacting the performance of laptops.  

FREDsense

Robert Mayall a PhD student at the University of Calgary won the 2015/2016 IET’s Present Around the World competition for his innovative biosensor technology that can detect infectious agents rapidly, both in the air and in the human body, something which usually takes more than three days.

Robert explains, “The detection sensor is as sensitive as the body’s immune system, so if a person was suffering with an illness such as the Zika Virus, the sensor will detect and respond to it within just five minutes, relieving the usual three day wait. Since winning the competition I’ve presented my work to the Canadian military and set up a company, FREDsense for another of my sensory innovations.”

Nura

Nura headphones: the word’s first headphones to learn and adapt to our unique hearing

Co-founder of Nura Kyle Slater has a passion for music, sound, electronics and the brain. After winning the IET’s Present Around the World competition in 2010 for his revolutionary new headphones, his invention became the most funded Australian Kickstarter campaign ever this summer.

The “light bulb” moment for the Nura headphones came to Kyle on a research visit to the University of California. One of his colleagues was using an expensive pair of headphones that she loved (and he didn’t). This triggered a thought experiment: How do you make the perfect headphones? Since we all hear differently Kyle realised that no one pair of headphones could be perfect. So, Kyle invented the Nura headphones – the world’s first personalised headphones.

Kyle explains: “Nura headphones work by detecting the otoacoustic emission – a sound that your ear produces in response to sound you listened to. When you first use the headphones you download an app which runs you through a 30 seconds calibration to automatically detect your hearing profile”.

Navi Stick – an innovative product to aid visually impaired people

Nourah Al-Saad, an industrial engineering student at the American University of the Middle East and Africa, made it to the final of the IET’s 2015 Present Around the World competition with the Navi Stick – a game-changing navigation aid for the visually impaired, which she hopes will eventually improve the lives of blind people around the world.

Nourah explains: “The Navi Stick uses a GPS system and an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) to allow greater mobility in unknown indoor and outdoor areas. The most impressive element is the image recognition feature – a recently developed technological innovation that allows Geographic Information System maps (GISM) to work alongside existing smart phone systems. This happens through an algorithm that employs the relative positioning of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates so that the user can navigate more accurately than ever.”

Smart Windows – the solar powered solution for the homes of the future

Co-workers and engineering students Muhammad Ali Babar Abbasi, Saleem Shahid and Rafay Iqbal Ansari worked together to help Muhammad make the Global final of the IET’s Present Around the World Competition this year for developing a solar powered solution for the homes of the future.

Smart Windows provides a thin sheet of solar panels which can be fixed to an existing window to harness solar energy and also be used as an antenna to transmit Wi-Fi. 

The team explained: “The cities of the future will need infrastructure that is sustainable, energy efficient and spatially-unobtrusive and this is an innovation that solves a lot of urban problems.”

The IET supports young engineering and technology entrepreneurs through two competitions –The Global Challenge and Present Around The World – both with the aim to develop their skills in presenting ideas and solving global problems. It also runs a Young Professionals Community that brings together young engineers and technology experts from around the world to connect and share ideas.

Read about how young engineering and tech entrepreneurs have taken their first steps to success at http://www.theiet.org/start.