Tech Trends- April 30- May 1
Alexa goes non-Echo, Delta looks to RFID for luggage accuracy, PayPal takes on NFC and more in this week’s Weekend in Tech Trends.
Tech Trends 1) The first non-Echo Alexa enabled device will be available this week
Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo, is making its third-party debut on Thursday on a device called Triby. Triby is a family friendly voice command device that your kids can use. Last year, Triby joined Amazon’s Alexa Fund, a $100 million initiative to support startups looking to integrate Alexa functionality into their products.
“As one of our first Alexa Fund companies, it’s great to see Triby offer their customers Alexa integration today,” Steve Rabuchin, vice president of Amazon Alexa, said in a statement sent to Mashable. “We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with technology in your home, which is one reason we’ve made access to the Alexa Voice Service available to device makers and developers for free.”
Triby is the first of the many products that will have Alexa in the future. Check out the Triby in action below.
https://vine.co/v/iP5w55za0ha
Source: Mashable
Tech Trends 2) Delta is hoping to lose your bags less
In an effort to make traveling by air easier, Delta will start tracking your luggage with an RFID tag by the end of next year. Instead of having the paper barcodes that are placed on your luggage currently, United envisions a future where RFID scanner will be placed at various points along the bag’s journey and will read a bags signal in order to make sure that it is going to the right place. While this program has been in the works for awhile, Delta claims they will be the first to implement at such a large scale.
Right now, Delta has a 95 percent accuracy rate when it comes to routing bags. Once this is implemented Delta hopes to achieve a 99.9% accuracy rate, which would be extremely nice for frequent Delta flyers.
Source: Engadget
Tech Trends 3) Windows 95 on an Apple Watch may be useless, but it shows how far we’ve come
A software developer by the name of Nick Lee successfully ran Windows 95 on an Apple Watch. According to the specs, the Apple Watch should be able to run the operating system no problem. The Apple Watch sports a 520MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of storage, well above the original minimum specs Microsoft recommended at the time.
While the operating system hardly works on the Apple Watch simply because it is not designed to be used on a mini touch screen, that doesn’t really matter. What makes this cool is we now have more operating power on our wrist than computers did 20 years ago. I can’t wait to see what the next 20 has in store for computing power.
Source: DigitalTrends
Tech Trends 4) PayPal CEO announces NFC payments
PayPal NFC payments are now live in Spain and are expected to be available throughout Europe by the end of 2016.
“Our partnership with Vodafone in Europe will have tens of millions of European customers [able] to use PayPal as their preferred way to fund their payments,” Schulman(CEO of PayPal) told investors. “We are now live in our first market, Spain, and we anticipate expanding across Europe throughout the back half of 2016.
PayPal is thinking bigger than just their app being able to process mobile payments.
“It’s all moving towards mobile and we basically want to be able to utilize for merchants this underlying platform so that we can be their OS, do 100% share of checkout, enable merchants to create their own application, tie their rewards into our platform, do things like split tender at checkout and create a real value proposition change for consumers so that merchants can use mobile to get closer to their customers.”
PayPal wants to become the go to platform that can be placed in any companies OS. This way major retailers can have NFC enabled apps and the payments would be run through PayPal. This shows once again that mobile payments are still being pushed by major companies and will likely have a place in the future.
Source: NFC World
