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Stabilizing footage of Steve Storey’s mountain bike ride down a bumpy trail almost turns it into a casual cruise around the park. That is, if you only stare at the top half of the footage. If you look at the bottom half, you’ll see how much thrashing is actually going on. And if you try to look at both at the same time, you’re probably going to get a little bit sick because it looks so impossibly smooth that your brain will crash.
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Mobile payments are all the rage among tech companies, but how successful have they been, really? Quite successful, if you ask Apple. While discussing its latest earnings, the Cupertino firm revealed that Apple Pay purchases were up 500 percent year-over-year in the third quarter. In fact, there were more transactions this September than in all of Apple’s fiscal 2015 — not bad for a tap-to-pay service that’s still unavailable in many parts of the world, not to mention many stores. Apple didn’t say what prompted the spike, but there are a handful of factors beyond any increases in popularity.
One major component: regional expansion. The launch of Apple Pay in China may have played the biggest role, but there was also a steady stream of expansions to key markets like Australia, Canada and swaths of Asia and Europe. Also, there were simply more people with Apple Pay-capable devices. You had to buy one of two high-end iPhones (the 6 and 6 Plus) to use Apple Pay throughout most of fiscal 2015, but the service was an option across all of Apple’s phone lineup by the time the iPhone SE arrived in March of this year. That’s also excluding those people who may have an iPhone 5 or 5s and are using an Apple Watch for their payments.
Whatever is involved, it’s likely that Apple Pay will see continued growth for at least a while. The payment system reached both Japan (as of iOS 10.1) and Russia in October, and there’s still room for both more countries as well as additional cards and stores in existing regions.
The question is whether or not Apple still has a lead in this fledgling industry. The company hasn’t divulged its latest transaction numbers, you see. Samsung was quick to boast about having 100 million transactions for its own service in August, but the lack of context makes it difficult to say whether it’s catching up (Apple is estimated to have racked up $10.9 billion in purchases in 2015) or trailing behind. About the only certainty is that Google’s Android Pay will need to grow faster if it’s going to latch on. It only just reached the UK in May, and card support isn’t as broad as you get with its rivals.
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In wake of the Galaxy Note 7 disaster, Samsung may need to bump its launch timeline of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Edge. If that is the case, it should be no shock to see many rumors and supposed leaks flooding the web as we enter the last part of 2016.
In the latest piece to make the rounds, specifications for the yet-to-be-announced device have surfaced, though, there’s no telling how accurate they might be. With the best guess being that Samsung will unveil its newest phones at MWC in February of 2017, there’s still plenty of time for things to change.Â
As of right now, rumored specifications for the Galaxy S8 Edge include a 5.5″ 4K AMOLED display, featuring an impressive resolution of 3840 x 2160. In a 5.5″ panel, we’re talking a pixel-per-inch (ppi) of 806. In the current market of flagship smartphones, that’s huge. Other specs listed include 6GB and 8GB variants, which aligns rather well with Samsung’s latest DRAM package announcement. However, we wouldn’t expect Samsung to launch two RAM variants for the US, keeping either the 6GB or 8GB model available for the US. No word yet on which we might see.
For a processor, the Galaxy S8 and S8 Edge are reported to feature Qualcomm’s yet-to-be-unveiled Snapdragon 830 or an Exynos 8895, depending on the market. Considering the Snapdragon 830 isn’t expected to be announced until 2017, it’s hard to say whether we’re giving any credit to that notion, but things do look promising for fans of 10nm FinFET technology.
Again, if Samsung does plan on introducing the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Edge at MWC next year, you can expect to be seeing a lot more hypebeasting from the internet.
What are your hopes and dreams for the Galaxy S8? And please, don’t say anything about explosions.
Samsung Galaxy S8 Specs Reported to Include 4K AMOLED Display, 8GB RAM is a post from: Droid Life
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And it’s costing the economy $1.2 trillion a year, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum.
The forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Report found that American women are actually worse off in terms of gender equality than they were just a year ago.
The U.S. is now ranked 45th of 144 countries by the WEF. That’s 17 places lower than last year’s ranking, landing the U.S. behind countries including Trinidad and Tobago (44th), Argentina (33rd) and the U.K. (20th).
While the U.S. ranking has dropped dramatically, its net overall score has also slipped.
“The U.S is not making much progress in closing the economic gap, which means it is falling in the rankings compared to other countries that are improving more rapidly,” said Saadia Zahidi, a member of the WEF’s executive committee and one of the report’s authors.
Related: Why Japan is failing its women
The pay gap, which is based on a poll of CEOs about the salaries of their employees, stands at 65% in the U.S., meaning that women earn about two-thirds of what men make for similar work.
The number of U.S. women participating in the labor force has also declined over the past year.
Zahidi said the U.S. could take fairly simple steps to boost opportunities for women. Most notably, it’s one of the few advanced economies that doesn’t provide women with paid maternity leave, she said.
Related: Female CEOs are at record level in 2016, but it’s still only 5%
According to the report, no country in the world has achieved gender parity. That means women are paid less and have fewer opportunities at work than their male counterparts the world over.
Even Iceland, the country near the top of WEF’s ranking, is still struggling to close the gap. On Monday, thousands of women in the country drew attention to inequality by walking off the job at 2:38 p.m.
That’s the point in the work day when women have maxed out their prorated salaries, while men keep on earning.
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MIT is launching a startup accelerator, called The Engine, aimed at driving social change.
The university said on Wednesday it will invest $150 million in startups developing technology breakthroughs in expensive, time-intensive areas such as clean energy, climate change, nuclear power and clean water.
While the school will contribute $25 million of its own money for the initiative, it plans to raise the rest from outsider investors.
“This is putting a piece in the puzzle that is missing,” MIT treasurer Israel Ruiz told CNNMoney. “There’s a deficiency in the ecosystem to support these startups.”
The startups will receive funding, guidance, and access to a network of experts and MIT facilities — rather than spending millions on their own tools. The university boasts $100 million worth of equipment for use in its new nanotechnology building.
The program is not limited to MIT students and graduates. Anyone can apply.
Leslie Dewan, CEO of Transatomic Power, knows what it’s like to run a startup that’s a bit outside the box. As an MIT PhD student in 2011, she started a company to build better nuclear reactors.
But finding funding was tricky. Venture capitalists — often accustomed to software startups working on apps — weren’t used to a concept like hers.
“They’d say ‘Oh, that’s great. Can you build a reactor in six months?'” Dewan said. “And we’d say ‘That’s impossible, it’s going to be a decade before we were able to do this.'”
Related: MIT scientists use radio waves to sense human emotions
In the end, she found investors familiar with the aerospace industry, which develops products that take awhile to deliver. She has since raised two rounds from Founders Fund, an early SpaceX investor.
Dewan believes MIT’s program will be crucial for startups pursuing longer-term tech projects that are pricey and take years to build.
“If this program were around five years ago, it would be ideal for us” Dewan said.
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