Eideard

Starbucks customers apparently are finding buying via mobile as addictive as the company’s coffee.

Less than a year after Starbucks launched an app that allows mobile payments, it has hosted 26 million such transactions on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, according to the chain. One in four Starbucks card transactions is now executed via mobile.

The mobile-payments initiative has built momentum recently: In the nine weeks after it was released, there were 3 million transactions. But in the past nine weeks, there have been 6 million, says Adam Brotman, SVP and general manager of Starbucks. He adds that New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and San Jose, California, are the top cities by volume for mobile purchases…

When asked why mobile payments seem to have caught on at Starbucks, Brotman said he thought convenience was a major factor. “It’s a faster, easier way to pay,” he said. “We not only developed the feature, but we also rolled out scanners in our locations.”

As we all know, once a feature catches on in one chain – because of ease and convenience – other competitors, other chains had better climb on board with the concept or lose a measurable increment of business.

This will seem incongruous to many Americans. That is a description of your own parochialism. The extension of cellular networks throughout the 3rd World – leapfrogging the construction of landlines – has become commonplace.

Japanese mobile phone giant NTT DoCoMo is developing a smartphone that will measure radiation levels. The design was inspired by worries over the health implications of the radiation leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The phone will come with changeable “jackets” which will also be able to measure bad breath and body fat…

At the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technology, hosted near Tokyo next month, DoCoMo will show off three smartphone ‘jackets” that are fitted with sensors, to monitor body mass as well as level of skin-damaging ultraviolet light.

But the shell that measures radiation levels is likely to prove the most popular.

“Many customers have been nervous about radiation since the Great East Japan Earthquake,” said DoCoMo’s spokesman Daisuke Sakuma.

“We had been thinking what services we can provide to address these needs as a telecom carrier,” he added.

Just think of the possibilities:

Record a speech from a political candidate and it will tell you the percentage of lies.

Diagram from the patent application

Jeff Bezos is worried about phone safety. Not your safety while you’re distracted by your phone. No, he’s worried about the gadget itself.

The Amazon boss and his colleague, Vice President Gregory M. Hart, filed a patent application to protect their idea of an air bag that inflates around your mobile device if you drop it. Broadly, the duo are seeking to patent the idea of a “system and method for protecting devices from impact damage…”

The idea is to use a device’s built-in gyroscope, camera, or other sensors to determine if the device its moving quickly toward the ground or some other object. If it determines that damaging impact is imminent, it triggers a protection system to absorb the fall…

And the patent filing isn’t just attempting to cover device air bags. Bezos and Hart also envision a “reorientation element” that would turn the device so that it hits the ground on the side of the device where the air bag has been deployed. And it doesn’t have to be an air bag. The filing also contemplates using “a propulsion element, a spring, an impact absorbing structure, and a reinforced edge,” among other protection elements.

Of course, you still could buy a humungous case or just quit dropping the bloody thing. I presume the addition of the air bag also makes it float if you drop your phone into the toilet.

 
Thanks, Ursarodinia

A technology startup backed by Google has unveiled the world’s first personal base station for international travelers, enabling them to cut roaming fees and make mobile calls like in a home country. Ubiquisys said the timing of devices reaching consumers depended on telecoms operators and it was in talks with several operators.

The telecom network base station, which is plugged into the travelers computer, is slightly larger than a smartphone, and needs an Internet connection…

The new device, called attocell, is designed for use with Apple’s iPhone, but it works also with Google’s Android phones, RIM’s Blackberry and Nokia’s smartphones.

Ubiquisys is one of the top firms in the new market for femtocells — small, low-power indoor base station for 3G mobile phone networks — enabling operators who struggle with network capacity to improve indoor coverage at a much lower cost…

The devices are plugged into a customer’s broadband Internet connection, like a wireless Internet base station, and allow users to make calls or use data services with their regular 3G mobile phones.

Phone service providers generally end up charging you their regular rates – even for home use. Home femtocells are especially useful for folks with mediocre service, insufficient tower coverage. This truly portable device seems like it should be a hit with business travelers.

In fact, there probably is a market for vacationers renting something like this to carry along on holiday.

In a deep and sonorous study by the dating site OkCupid, there seems to be no doubt: iPhone owners have more sex than BlackBerry owners and a lot more sex than the worthy, solemn, dedicated purchasers of Android phones.

The numbers for women might leave some readers breathless–as they rush to their local Apple store to buy an iPhone.

For this analysis of 30-year-olds with smartphones suggested that women with iPhones had an average of 12.3 sexual partners (I am sure the 0.3 knows exactly who he is), while their age-equivalents who had opted to put an Android into their purse scored a mere 6.1. (It was 8.8 for the BlackBerry owners, but some might feel these more businessy types would most likely be having sex while still on their BlackBerrys, so that hardly counts.)

For men, the disparity was only slightly more narrow, which perhaps merely reflected a proportionate reduction in the width of their minds. Interestingly, though, Android-owning men seem to have exactly the same amount of sex as Android-owning women…

OkCupid’s calculations also offered that the sexual attraction that seems clearly to be offered by the Apple logo stretches to all ages.

Android owners from 18-40 seem to consistently droop into relative sexless oblivion by comparison…

There will be those who believe that the iPhone makes them look and feel sexier. Others will claim that only sexy people purchase an iPhone in the first place.

Cripes! Apparently, there’s no need at all to count users of smartphones running Windows Mobile.

Is this how you sell smartphones?
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

At the D8 conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer questioned Google’s dual strategy of building Android and Chrome OS. Two operating systems doesn’t make sense, he said.

Microsoft is apparently listening to Ballmer’s advice, killing off its two-month old Kin line of social networking phones. The company confirmed to CNET that it is not going forward with a European launch of Kin and is instead folding the Kin team into its Windows Phone 7 unit.

The phones, Kin One and Two, were developed as more social phones able to connect users to their friends and allow them to easily broadcast their lives. But the devices sold through Verizon Wireless were criticized early for lacking some features and for its data plans, which were priced the same as other more full-featured smart phones.

Even so, big box retailers like Best Buy sold the critters as part of their – obviously unquestioning – commitment to Microsoft.

Verizon over the weekend slashed prices on the Kin One and Two, even as commercials continued to run on the new devices. Microsoft said it will continue to sell current Kin phones with Verizon.

Microsoft has got a lot to prove and killing off Kin just means even more rests on Windows Phone 7 getting off to a successful launch.

If you believe.

Demand for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Google Inc.’s Nexus One will help propel smartphone sales past those of personal computers in two years, Gartner Inc. forecasts.

The chart of the day shows that smartphone sales will more than triple to 491.9 million units by 2012 from 139.3 million in 2008, according to the Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm. The PC market will expand to 443.1 million units from 290.8 million in the same period, Gartner predicted.

“Smartphones are headed towards that billion-unit category that handsets are in today,” said Jim McGregor, an analyst at research firm In-Stat in Scottsdale, Arizona. “The smartphone is the billion-unit pot of gold that everyone wants.”

The rise of the smartphone has prompted the computer industry to respond with their own products in an attempt to retain control over consumer access to the Internet.

Intel Corp., the largest maker of computer chips, has revived an earlier failed attempt to get its processors into phones. So far, only LG Electronics Inc. has said it will make a phone using an Intel chip. Microsoft Corp., the biggest maker of computer software, unveiled a new version of its Windows mobile phone operating system earlier this month, aiming to hold off gains made by Apple and Google.

Ain’t competition fun?

I still get the biggest laughs from pundits who say they’re libertarian free market competition freaks – and then spend their spare time explaining why no new designs will ever be successful.

Smartphones with GPS and talking map applications are increasingly competing with sat-nav devices, experts say.

In response Garmin and TomTom, two major players in the sat-nav industry, have joined the smartphone market. Both companies have launched their own smartphone applications for various handsets. Garmin has also decided to enter the handset market directly, with the launch of its Nuvifone smartphones in the US…

Because of its plans to tap the market directly, Garmin has steered clear of developing applications for other Android phones (as well as the iPhone), focussing instead on apps for Blackberry, Windows and Symbian-based smartphones.

TomTom meanwhile has aligned itself with Apple and launched a navigational application for the iPhone, which retails in the UK at £60.

If I still was on the road, I’d probably rely on a dedicated GPS for my motor vehicle. In fact, that would be something built-in from the factory.

The only reason I ever had a GPS-enabled cellphone was so a rescue crew could find me if I crashed my mountain bike somewhere in the boonies.