Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has sent out a second round of event invitations to media today – this time directed specifically at Chinese publications and journalists, for a follow-up event to their September 10 shindig at Apple Campus in Cupertino. The invites have the same graphic as the original, but will occur September 11 at 10 AM CST at Beijing’s World Trade Center. This marks the first time Apple has held a standalone event specifically for Chinese media.

Recently, Apple has been doing a lot more to bring special focus to its operations in China. The company has been seeking new hires in China, for instance, as recently discovered via a considerable crop of LinkedIn job postings, and there are also rumblings that Apple is looking to build an engineering and R&D center in Taiwan, which it counts as part of its Greater China market. Greater investment in a local presence could be due to setbacks Apple faced earlier in the year apparently orchestrated in part by the Chinese government’s media agencies, which have reason to prefer local tech companies over outside influence.

Some suggest that Apple’s decision to host a separate event in China regarding its upcoming iPhone refresh is about it wanting to reveal a new partner in China Mobile. The carrier, which is China’s largest, hasn’t yet officially offered the iPhone, but recent reports suggest that both Apple and China Mobile had been nearing an arrangement to offer the smartphone on the network with this coming hardware update. That would give Apple access to some 744 million potential new customers (or at least 147 million, if you’re limiting yourself only to China Mobile customers with 3G access).

That’s a big carrot to be sure, and reason enough for a separate celebration, but there’s more at stake here than just a new carrier partnership (big as that is alone). Apple saw its China business suffer a setback during the last quarter, which is a very good reason for renewed attention being paid to customers in Greater China. A unique event for Chinese media should arguably do a better job of addressing the needs and wants of Chinese consumers.

There’s also the iPhone 5C, Apple’s low-cost iPhone hardware, which is rumored to be making its first official appearance at the September event. As Romain Dillet has noted, if real, this is clearly a device aimed at markets beyond the U.S. border. How better to highlight its international appeal than with an international spotlight?

Chances are the event in China will share much more in common with the one in Cupertino beyond just the invite graphic, but it’s still very noteworthy that it’s happening at all. In the past, Apple has seemed content to let China grow as a market key to its business organically; now, it seems more interested in taking an active role in shaping that side of the business.

Passwords could be passé if this Toronto-based startup has its way. Bionym, which was founded in 2011 and closed a $1.4 million (CAD) seed round last month, has devised a biometric recognition system in the form of a wearable wristband — called Nymi, just launched as a pre-order for $79 for early 2014 shipping.

The wristband relies on authenticating identity by matching the overall shape of the user’s heartwave (captured via an electrocardiogram sensor). Unlike other biotech authentication methods — like fingerprint scanning and iris-/facial-recognition tech — the system doesn’t require the user to authenticate every time they want to unlock something. Because it’s a wearable device, the system sustains authentication so long as the wearer keeps the wristband on.

To authenticate via Nymi, the user puts the wristband on and touches a topside sensor with one hand to complete an electrical loop with the bottom-side sensor touching their wrist. That generates the ECG data used to authenticate their identity, and the wristband transmits the ECG (via Bluetooth) to the corresponding registered app, on a smartphone or other device in proximity to the user, to verify the wearer is who they say they are.

Bionym says Nymi is a three-factor security system, being as multiple pieces have to be in place for authentication to be achieved. However the system skips some ongoing hassle of multi-factor systems by maintaining an authenticated state and only requiring the user to offer up their biometric data once per day (or however often they remove the wristband).

As well as an ECG sensor and Bluetooth low energy for transmitting data, the wristband contains a gyroscope and accelerometer so it can support gesture unlocking scenarios, too (it has 6-axis motion sensing) — so you could use a particular wrist twist to unlock a car door, for instance. That sort of scenario will depend mostly on third party developers getting involved and building out an app ecosystem around the device. Bionym is releasing an API that will be open source so it’s hoping to attract broad interest.

Proximity is another parameter developers could build into unlocking scenarios — a payments application would make sense to require the wristband to be in close proximity to a reader to confirm a transaction, for instance, whereas a smart TV might want to configure a profile to a particular user when they walk into the room.

The wristband device itself could also be used for health/activity tracking, says CEO and co-founder Karl Martin. “We will support basic gestures ourselves, and we will also give access to the motion information for other uses. For example, people might want to use it for activity tracking, in addition to the gestures,” he tells TechCrunch.

The Nymi device will include a battery to power the data capture and transfers — which Martin said will support about a week’s use between charges. The corresponding Nymi app will let users create custom notifications if they so desire, so they could configure the app to alert them to new emails or messages when they authenticate the device in the morning. The app will be available on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OSX initially. An open-source SDK will allow for developers to port support to other platforms.

Bionym, which was originally spun out of the University of Toronto (where Martin got his Ph.D.), claims it doesn’t have any “real direct competitors” for the specific functionality it’s offering.

“We don’t view this as just a product to unlock your devices, smartphones, etc. Those are security applications. We’re looking beyond that to smart environments. How do we enable hyper-personalised experience? These are all applications of identity. Security is one application but not the only one, and as far as I know nobody else is doing that,” says Martin.

There’s no doubt plenty of others are eyeing up the password-alternative space, though. Google is one and is part of the FIDO Alliance that’s seeking to come up with a new framework for digital authentication. Anyone who can crack the ‘passwords are broken’ problem with a robust, low-friction alternative is clearly in for a very lucrative ride.

Add to that, there’s potential for capturing extremely granular user data if users are required to wear a sensor at all times when accessing their gadgets and services. However Martin stresses that Nymi is building in privacy “by design,” as well as security — with a hardware-secure element where the user’s ECG data is cryptographically stored and which — crucially — other applications will require user permission to access.

“We have a cryptographic chip on the wristband,” he notes. “We’re not just depending on software, we have hardware-based cryptography there. It … allows that communication to be encrypted. It doesn’t just depend on just the Bluetooth standard which has some weaknesses.

“When it’s transmitting your identity… to your devices around you you don’t want anybody to know that it’s you unless you opt in, you don’t want to be  tracked, you don’t want somebody, say, a Bluetooth scanner to know when you’re around so we encrypt that information so that it becomes opt in. Nobody can know that it’s you without your permission.”

Using hardware-based cryptography also allows the Nymi to bolster its defences against identity spoofing attacks. “If your identity is essentially a long binary string, can’t somebody just copy that and retransmit it? And the answer to that is we digitally sign all the data coming off the wristband so that it’s impossible for anybody to spoof that data and essentially steal your identity,” he adds.

So what will Nymi offer its early adopters? At launch, in the beginning of 2014, it will support built in device unlocking capabilities, and be supported by a range of third party apps, says Martin.

“We’re going to be working very closely with developers this fall,” he says. “We already have lots of developers signed up for that. So we’re going to be ourselves offering basic capabilities ourselves for unlocking personal devices and computers. And then at the same time we are engaged with several companies that make consumer electronic products… that’s going on behind the scenes. And then there are third party developers — and we’re going to be all about nurturing that to happen so that by the time we launch there will definitely be some high quality third party applications.”

Looking ahead, the grand vision is surely for a password-less future, based on authentication via wearable biometrics. That’s a ways off, right now though, as Martin concedes. ”The goal is not to simply manage passwords, the goal is to replace passwords,” he says. “That being said it obviously takes time for these things to be adopted in a ubiquitous way so we are looking at some intermediate solutions to integrate with password managers, things like that.

“Part of our launch right now is to see what are the kinds of integrations people want the most… We want to get people’s ideas for what the vision for this kind of a product is so we can focus on that.”

A big request from parents regarding iOS has been that Apple implement user accounts on its mobile devices, in order to make it so that a parent can sign in with greater access to device features and apps than a child, for instance. It’s a system that already has an analogue on the desktop, and that Google has seen fit to implement with multiple user accounts with varying levels of permissions for tablets running Android 4.3 and higher. A new patent granted to Apple today (spotted by AppleInsider) describes a way of changing device access depending on who’s doing the accessing.

Apple’s newly awarded patent describes a system wherein the method used by a user to unlock a device via gesture-based input would determine what apps are made available, as well as what hardware functions are available. So, for instance, one gesture (could be the drawing of a specific shape or letter with a fingertip) might allow access only to games content on the phones, while another could offer up access to an entire category of apps provided through corporate deployment, but not to other features.

The system Apple has patented also allows for gestures to unlock the phone directly into specific apps, so that one could launch the email app and keep a user within that bit of software exclusively, for instance. Other incarnations could limit access to certain phone features, including the camera and mic, or to in-app purchases, locking down a device for worry-free sharing with a child.

Aside from finally effectively enabling “guest mode” on a device, this patent in action would allow Apple to build a lockscreen launcher that can be operated not only via gestures, but also by voice and by keyboard, mouse or stylus events (all of which are covered by the patent). The potential applications, for use not only among parents but also in schools, in secure data enterprise environments and more are extensive, so hopefully this is one of the patents that Apple actually puts into practice.

Spotify is today adding a new feature to its iOS app that represents the streaming company’s most ambitious move yet to position itself as the go-to music app on connected devices — and in the process entice more people to pay the $9.99 per month required to use the app. It’s launching Spotify Connect, a new button in the app that will let users seamlessly shift Spotify music playing between their handsets and different Wi-Fi-connected devices in the home, starting with audio devices from 10 manufacturers.

Spotify Connect also has a social twist: if you have other Spotify users on your Wi-Fi network, they, too, can take control of the decks through the feature. (But just make sure you only let friends connect to your Wi-Fi whose musical taste won’t clash with yours because Spotify, maybe betraying its benign Scandinavian roots, is relying on a kind of civility code for how this gets used. Adding in any kind of blocking or controlling feature would just “make things needlessly complicated,” Pascal de Mul, Spotify’s global head of hardware partnerships, told me in an interview.)

Ultimately, the aim is for Spotify — now live in 28 countries and with a catalog of 20 million tracks — to become as widespread as possible, and therefore the most convenient music app for consumers to use. “Remember when every music device came with a tape deck or CD player or radio? We would like that ubiquity for Spotify, to be that way on every device,” said de Mul. (He used the word “ubiquitous” a lot.)

But not all platforms are created equal. Spotify Connect is coming out on iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices today, and de Mul tells me that the company is working on updates for its Android and desktop apps that will also add the new Spotify Connect feature. But for now there are “no plans” to update its Windows Phone or BlackBerry apps.

How it works

I had a look around Spotify Connect, and it works like this: if you’re listening to some music on your phone, and you come home and want to continue listening but through a bigger sound system, you select the little speaker icon to the right of the music navigation bar. Up pops a screen with a list of devices that are connected to the network. You select the device and the music instantly transfers to playing on that device. Your handset, using the Spotify app, becomes the controller of that music. When the desktop app with Spotify Connect comes out, you can include that in the list and use it to control the music, too. For someone that had to call Sonos support more than once to get her system to work properly (to be fair… we had a tricky analog integration) this is dead simple to use.

For now, the initial list of device makers are Argon, Bang & Olufsen, Denon, Hama, Marantz, Philips, Pioneer, Revo, Teufel and Yamaha, with more brands getting added before the end of the year — basically hardware makers that have built in chips made by companies that have cut deals with Spotify to embed its technology. That list of chipmakers, meanwhile, right now only has two names on it, SMSC (now part of Microchip) and Frontier Silicon, but just as Spotify is talking with more hardware makers, De Mul says he expects that chipmaker list to grow, too. For now, those who are Spotify Connect compatible will include a compatibility badge on their packaging.

So what happens to existing hardware deals?

Spotify Connect is not the company’s first foray into home entertainment systems, but it represents a new chapter in how Spotify wants to be in better control of the experience in the future.

Before today, if you wanted to stream Spotify music in your home, you had a couple of options. One was to buy specific connected hardware that would have made a bespoke integration with Spotify, and you would connect to control those devices using Airplay or Bluetooth. But de Mul notes that this was not ideal.

“Yes, we have made partnerships with a lot of hardware makers, but in taking stock of that, we’ve realized that it’s a time-consuming process that was only getting us into high-end devices, those where device makers felt justified in making the extra investment.”

And besides, he told me, Spotify wants to target users buying devices at all price points, not just the most expensive ones. The other issue, he said, was that updates to these bespoke integrations were not easy. “All that stuff lagged in the innovation cycle,” he said. “Every time we did something new it would take a while for it to come up in new devices.” What this means is that while these existing integrations can continue to be used with Spotify, they won’t work with the Connect service, and they won’t be updated with any other new features, either.

The other important aspect of Spotify’s hardware strategy up to now has been tied up in its relationship with hardware makers that specifically make app-based systems. The biggest of these, and Spotify’s first-ever hardware partner, was Sonos. While Sonos has been a very important partner for Spotify, and de Mul described it as “very awesome,” he also noted that there is “no plan to extend Connect to Sonos and no plan to continue to develop with Sonos” longer term. Part of this goes back to Spotify’s intention to centralise and better control the experience on its service: with Sonos you control the music experience using the Sonos app, and of course Sonos only works with… Sonos, “and we want ubiquity.” Update: Spotify says the quote is taken out of context, in that it cannot share future plans, not that it doesn’t have any at all. “We will continue to support and improve the Spotify experience on Sonos,” a spokesperson noted, once again not confirming any timescale or specifics.

So, some pretty clear signs of Spotify centralizing and consolidatng in the home audio space today, but what is perhaps more interesting is how Spotify Connect will longer term link up with its wider connected device strategy.

The company has been making some inroads with connected cars — for example a deal cut with Ford earlier this year to integrate and stream Spotify music on Ford’s SYNC in-car system. And Spotify has been appearing on connected TVs from the likes of LG and Sony.

Challenges

Car and connected device integrations also fall under the remit of de Mul (who himself worked for Philips before joining Spotify three years ago), and the landscape that he sees ultimately has all of them working in complete synchronicity. There remain some big challenges, however.

The first is whether consumers are interested enough in something like Spotify Connect to pay for the premium app to get it if they don’t have Premium service already. So far, there are no plans to take services like Spotify Connect out from behind the paywall. But that’s not to say it won’t ever happen. “We’re always evaluating putting more services into the free tier,” de Mul noted. “There is always a balancing between what we do for free and what for premium. In the U.S. we already have radio for free on mobile, so we’re trying to have those discussions. You will see more features moving to free.”

The second is whether consumers will be willing to make the investment in devices that will work with Spotify Connect. If Spotify and its investors have the patience, it may also just take time for users to make the leap to buy compatible stereo equipment, since, so far, things like speakers and amplifiers haven’t proven to have the same kind of purchase cycle as a computer or laptop.

The third is whether Spotify will extend this service beyond Wi-Fi and into cellular networks, so that even when Wi-Fi is not present the service could still work — such as in a car. “We are talking to everyone, including carriers,” de Mul said. “Everyone is playing every card.”

We’ve had an analogue film to digital smartphone scanning device on Kickstarter, so here’s pretty much the reverse: a smartphone digital photo to analogue print photo enlarger on Indiegogo.

Phone-owning humans’ love affair with digital photography continues charging along at full tilt — fuelled by the ubiquity of cameraphones and the apps that allow easy digital photo remixing, whether it’s Instagram filters, or Frontback‘s dual aspect, or Rando‘s serendipity. All that snapping means a mountain of photos on mobile devices and social networks (not to mention sitting unloved on servers in the cloud). Sure you can browse them digitally, and repurpose a few as e-wallpaper, but this kind of photography is mostly a communication medium. The photos keep flowing to keep the conversation going. But what if you want to stop and linger on a few choice shots — and maybe even see real-world photo filters in action?

The Enfojer is a photo enlarger designed to make it (relatively) easy to translate digital photos into analogue black and white prints — so you can put a few digital shots up on your wall and get involved in the creation process yourself. It doesn’t reproduce colour, to keep the photo development process simple (and non-toxic), and does require you to get your hands dirty with dipping prints in and out of developing and fixing fluids but its creators claim to have streamlined the process so it’s suitable for Generation App. Once all the kit is set up they reckon you can turn an Instagram into a B&W artefact in a mere six minutes.

Enfojer can enlarge images from any smartphone (the cradle is compatible with phones up to 141 mm x 71 mm) or film up to 6×6 format. Prints can be created up to 20x20cm. The smartphone photo enlarger uses the phone’s own LED screen as the light source to expose the photographic paper. The device also has a wide angle polycarbonate “toy camera style meniscus lens” — which blurs the image slightly so it doesn’t end up looking pixellated. Think of it as an analogue filter (to go with your digital filters); “we tried sharper and better ones, but the results were too sterile,” note Enfojer’s creators.  The rest of the required kit is classic darkroom stuff like photo developing trays, fluids and a red LED light to work to.

Of course there’s no shortage of services offering to pro print your Instagram photos for you, in a variety of ways — such as Piccolo, Instantgram.me, Kanvess.com to name three — but Enfojer has an educational/enthusiast angle since it’s DIY photo printing. Enfojer’s creators say they’re aiming the device at ”budding photographers” who don’t already have access to a pro photo enlarger and are interested in learning about the dark (fading) arts of analogue photography. They also reckon it’s a cheaper photo-printing option than “average” photo printers.  Which may well be true, since printer ink is apparently more expensive than blue diamond dust.

Enfojer’s Croatian creators are seeking $100,000 on Indiegogo to fund manufacturing costs of the device — but it’s not a fixed funding campaign so they’ll get to take home whatever the crowd decides to shower on them. Backers can pay to bag an Enfojer on its own for $200, or pay up to $450 for a full kit that includes several trays, tongs, a  tray rack, darkroom light and a pack of photographic paper.