The Fitbit Blaze ‘fitness watch’
With the Apple Watch the most convenient way to use Apple Pay, Fitbit appears set to bring contactless payment tech to its fitness bands from next year.
After acquiring mobile payment company Coin earlier this month, Fitbit hinted to TNW that it would add NFC payment capabilities to one or more of its devices next year …
Remember MCX CurrentC, the QR-code based mobile payment system that attempted to take on Apple Pay? Launched two years ago, it immediately started creating waves when it required its retail members to switch off Apple Pay or be fined. If that weren’t bad enough, it was quickly hacked.
Apple Pay fans made fun of the service in app reviews, and it wasn’t long before retailers started to break ranks and we saw some rapid back-pedalling on Apple Pay from one CEO before he was replaced by another.
Little has been heard from MCX since, and it’s no surprise that the consortium finally appears to be giving up on the idea – though it has stopped a little way short of admitting as much …
With Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other services transforming the way people carry out transactions, Apple has joined forces with four other companies to ensure that lawmakers don’t end up ‘inadvertently’ stifling innovation in the financial services field.
Technology industry leaders Amazon, Apple, Google, Intuit and PayPal today announced the formation of Financial Innovation Now, a coalition that will promote policies to help foster greater innovation in financial services.
While the new organization uses relatively diplomatic language, it’s pretty clear that the aim is to ensure that politicians don’t screw things up by introducing poorly thought-out legislation, like the infamous example proposed by Democratic Rep. Joshua Peters …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Samsung announced in a press release this evening that it has purchased LoopPay, an Apple Pay-like mobile payment company. LoopPay turns existing magnetic stripe card readers into secure, contactless receivers. This means that, in an ideal world, LoopPay would be available in nearly every retailer that accepts magnetic strip cards. A specific acquisition price is unclear at this point.
Starbucks has confirmed a finding by security researcher Daniel Wood that both username and password in its iOS app are stored in plain text.
It’s not the big deal some are making it out to be – to make use of it, someone would need physical access to your unlocked iPhone, in which case you likely have bigger things to worry about than someone being able to order tall skinny lattes on your dime. Additionally, as Engadget observes, a far easier hack by someone with access to your phone would simply be to take a photo of the on-screen barcode used to authorise payments.
All the same, it is pretty poor design on the part of a payment app from a major company, and it’s surprising that Starbucks apparently has no plans to fix it with an updated app.
