Mobile payments offer a plethora of benefits for consumers, retailers and financial institutions. For consumers, mobile wallets provide a convenient, “tap and go” frictionless commerce experience that seamlessly integrates loyalty cards, boarding passes, ID cards, coupons, event tickets, alerts and notifications. For retailers, mobile wallets offer businesses the ability to engage users with an immersive, in-app experience that starts at the beginning of a retail journey and continues indefinitely with notifications, reminders of upcoming expiration dates, archived digital receipts and a real-time tally of current loyalty bonus points. For banks, digital wallets, which are far more secure than credit or debit cards, has fast become a strategic focus as consumer interest ramps up.
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Cash, card or mobile wallet?
A new survey conducted by Moneris finds that 25% of Canadians between the ages of 18-34 prefer paying with a mobile wallet over cash or card.
“Of Canadians aged 18-34, 46% said they would be more likely to use a mobile wallet if it were available for the kind of credit card they used,” Moneris stated in a recent press release. “[Meanwhile], 47% said they would use a mobile wallet if it were available for the kind of phone they used – responses collected prior to the full rollout of Apple Pay.”
Eyeing the future of smart cities
Rambus principal research scientist Patrick Gill recently penned an article for Telecoms Tech about how lensless smart sensors (LSS) can potentially play an important role in building future smart cities. As Gill notes, LSS technology offers a fundamentally new approach to visual sensing by shifting the function of traditional optics to computation, thereby eliminating the need for expensive lenses by replacing them with tiny, inexpensive diffractive gratings.
Managing memory more efficiently with Milk
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have introduced a programming language extension known as Milk that allows app developers to manage memory more efficiently in programs with scattered data points in large data sets.
Global NFC transaction market to grow at a CAGR of 55.23%
A new report published by Research & Markets states that the global NFC transaction market will grow at a CAGR of 55.23% during 2016-2020. The report also names host card emulation (HCE) as one of the “latest trends” leading to market growth.
The role of FPGA acceleration in the data center and beyond
The International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications recently convened in Lausanne, Switzerland. As Christoforos Kachris, a senior researcher at the National Technical University of Athens notes, exploring the role of FPGAs in the data center took center stage at the conference.
“Christoph Hagleitne presented IBM’s view of the major applications where FPGAs can provide differentiation such as cognitive computing, high performance computing and the Internet of Things (IoT),” Kachris wrote in a recent EE Times article.
