When Aharon Zeevi Farkash enters the offices of his company south of Tel Aviv, he needs neither key nor code. As soon as he leaves the elevator, a camera captures his face and body shape, and feeds the information to a computer that recognises his features. The door unlocks.
Should the face recognition software fail, Mr Farkash will be prompted to speak a few words into a receiver. The computer will switch to voice recognition – and unlock the door.
Tech news from around the web:
MasterCard is to invest in mFoundry, a company that provides mobile banking solutions for more than 500 US banks, TechCrunch reports. As part of the deal, mFoundry will offer MasterCard’s PayPass Near Field Communication technology to the banks and credit unions it works with.
Tech news from around the web:
Microsoft is planning an iPad version of its popular Office software suite, The Daily reports.The product is set to cost around $10 – about the same price Apple charges for its Pages, Numbers and Keynote products.
Tech news from around the web:
Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry smartphone, is rolling out a new system that aims to help its corporate customers maintain and manage the security of their employees’ BlackBerrys as well as rival devices such as the iPhone, according to The Wall Street Journal. The new system, the first from RIM to incorporate competitors’ products, is seen as a tacit acknowledgment that an increasing number of employees are calling on their employers to allow work e-mails to be pushed to smartphones other than the Blackberry.
Let them eat data
The UK government does not have a lot of money to pump into the technology sector so it is trying to be generous with something it does have in plentiful supply – data.
On Tuesday, as part of the government’s Autumn Statement George Osborne, the chancellor, is expected to announce plans to open up access to more government data, including transport data, health records, house prices and Met Office weather information.
DataSift tames Twitter firehose
DataSift’s full launch this week comes in the nick of time for those seeking to filter out trends and sentiments in Twitter’s ever-expanding tweet stream.
Nick Halstead, DataSift and TweetMeme founder, says Apple’s integration of Twitter in iOS5 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch has sent traffic soaring in recent weeks.
Tech news from around the web:
Facebook users are becoming increasingly concerned over a hack that turns their newsfeeds into a stream of hardcore pornography and gory pictures, ZDNet reports. The source of the hack is yet to be discovered, however Gawker speculates that an Anonymous ‘Guy Fawkes Virus’ could be to blame.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, said the US’ inefficient health care system is a problem Silicon Valley technologists and data scientists are positioned to solve.
“It is my view that the health care system could be dramatically better,” he said at a conference for doctors on Friday. “The intersection of computer science and information technology in health care, and some kind of automation, has to be the obvious next step.”
Did Apple kill Adobe’s mobile Flash? That is the question many asked this week after Adobe announced that it would end development of Flash for mobile devices.
Tech news from around the web:
British billionaire Sir Richard Branson has made a ‘multimillion-dollar’ investment in mobile payment start-up company Square, a spokesperson for the company has told Reuters. The move follows a $100m investment led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an injection by credit card company Visa.
Adobe Systems is said to be scrapping its move to bring its Flash Player software to smartphones and tablets, CNET reports. The Flash browser plug-in is widely used on personal computers but has so far only reached a fraction of the mobile phone market.
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