Apple News: Apple Pay accounts for 50% of McDonald’s tap-to-pay transactions
The New York Times reported on Friday that Apple Pay now accounts for 50% of the tap-to-pay transactions at all of McDonald’s 14,000 US stores. Additionally, the outlet claims that Walgreens’ mobile payments at its 8,000+ stores have doubled since the service launched. The figures were nestled in a broader piece regarding Apple’s role in mainstreaming mobile payments. Google Wallet and Softcard—backed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon—both say that Apple Pay has been a huge tailwind, as they’ve seen an increase in usage since it debuted.
Read full story => iDownloadBlog
Technology News: Here’s How To Figure Out Everything Google Knows About You
When you use Google, you are making a deal. You get to use Gmail and search and YouTube and Google Maps for free and in exchange, you agree to share information about yourself. Google gets to sell that information to advertisers. The more Google knows about you, the more it can match you to an advertiser who thinks you are an ideal customer. Advertisers are willing to pay more for ads served to ideal potential customers. For instance, airlines want to target people who love to travel. Children’s clothing makers want to target parents.
Read full story => BusinessInsider
Programming News: AWS Lambda – Run Code in the Cloud
We want to make it even easier for you to build applications that run in the Cloud. We want you to be able to focus on your code, and to work within a cloud-centric environment where scalability, reliability, and runtime efficiency are all high enough to be simply taken for granted! Today we are launching a preview of AWS Lambda, a brand-new way to build and run applications in the cloud, one that lets you take advantage of your existing programming skills and your knowledge of AWS. With Lambda, you simply create a Lambda function, give it permission to access specific AWS resources, and then connect the function to your AWS resources. Lambda will automatically run code in response to modifications to objects uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, messages arriving in Amazon Kinesis streams, or table updates in Amazon DynamoDB.
Read full story => Amazon
Photography News: Flat, soulless and stupid: why photographs don’t work in art galleries
Photography is a miracle of the modern world. It gives us instant visual information from all over the planet and far beyond. It is a unique documentary record of our own lives, a simple source of creative pleasure and fun. I just wish people wouldn’t put it in art galleries. Let me be clear: photographs on the page or screen are fascinating. Who can fail to be entranced by the first-ever pictures from the surface of a comet that were taken this week? The power of photography to show and to tell has never been greater, as modern technology takes it simultaneously to the far reaches of the solar system and ever deeper into the heart of daily life. But that does not make it sing on a gallery wall.
Read full story => TheGuardian
