Skip to main content

Owe Someone Money? Just Bump Your Phones


People have predicted the death of cash and checks for a long time. But there are certain transactions — like paying a friend back for dinner or buying vegetables at the farmers’ market — for which they remain essential.

PayPal’s new iPhone application could finally change that. It promises to let you quickly divide a restaurant bill and send a friend the portion you owe just by bumping your iPhones together.

The application is free to download from the App Store. Users log in with their PayPal credentials or with their cellphone number and a numeric PIN, and they can send or request money and manage their account on the phone.

To send money, users choose a recipient from their cellphone contacts or bump two phones together. For that, the app uses technology from Bump Technologies, which developed it to swap contact information between two phones. The money is transferred immediately.

The app includes a feature to help split a check, factoring in tax and tip and whether someone owes more than the others at the table. Payments are free from a bank or PayPal account, and there are varying fees if the payer uses a credit card.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google leaps language barrier with translator phone

GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages. The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign ...
1 comment
Read more

Keyboard First Impressions: Kinesis Advantage Mechanical Ergonomic Keyboard

An ergonomic keyboard with mechanical switches that’s looking to attract users interesting in a high quality, highly ergonomic offering and don’t mind the rather steep learning curve or the price. The  TECK  isn’t the only such keyboard, of course, and I decided to see what other mechanical switch ergonomic keyboards I could get for comparison. Next up on the list is the granddaddy of high-end ergonomic keyboards, the  Kinesis Contour Advantage . I wanted to provide my first impressions of the Kinesis, along with some thoughts on the initial switch and the learning curve. This time, I also made the effort to put together a video of my first few minutes of typing. It actually wasn’t as bad as with the TECK, but that’s likely due to the fact that I already lost many of my typing conventions when I made that switch earlier this year. I’ll start with the video, where I take a typing test on four different keyboards and provide some thoughts on the experience, and then ...
Post a Comment
Read more