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By now, most have heard of Swipe, the credit card terminal/scanner that plugs into the iPhone and that Apple has begun featuring in their brick-and-mortar stores.  That gadget may be outmoded now, though, because a new one called Card.io, based in San Francisco and founded by two former AdMob employees, lets you swipe the card using just the phone’s built-in camera.

The Card.io app scans a temporary photo taken of the card and gleans the card’s information (number, owner’s name, expiration date) and uses that to process the card for a purchase.

Right now, Card.io is targeting the app at iOS developers who build e-commerce and similar apps (like local ticketing, travel, and so forth) as they are the ones most likely to quickly benefit from the technology.

Eventually, you could be simply holding your card up to someone’s iPhone at the mall, the pizza joint, or whatever and paying for your stuff quickly.

Card.io only began nine months ago and didn’t have a beta version of their app until three months ago, when it entered testing.  The app is entirely automated – no human visual required.  It pops up a square on your phone’s screen with test telling you where to hold the card.  It then scans it, pulls the information, and then any merchant account plug-in (through the Web, a register, whatever) can process it.

Currently, Card.io hasn’t partnered with any merchants and is offering the app for developers who have their own.  That will likely change in the future, of course. The information is pulled, but card images are not stored on the phone or card.io’s servers.

This is a very cool (and obvious) next step for card-present transactions on mobiles.  The company claims high accuracy in the scans and the more the app gets used, the better it will become at it, since it learns over time.

The Board of ICANN, which controls top-level domains and Internet connectivity, has voted to allow for expansion of new top-level domains (TLDs) to include an almost unlimited number of broad, unlimited strings as new dots.  So brands like Coca-Cola could ask to create “.cola” or “.coke” and banks might ask for “.bank.”

While there are obvious brand and trademark issues in this decision, the $185,000 price tag to apply for a new TLD makes it only available to the big boys.  So you won’t see me getting “.Craig” approved anytime soon.

Even the ICANN board can’t really predict (or at least won’t try) where this will go.  It’s obvious that some in-fighting in various industries could erupt, but most likely, we’ll see obvious brands (“.Walmart”?) appearing as their own TLDs and many industries may see cooperatives joining to create industry-specific TLDs like “.pizza”.

Overall, it’s a nice move forward in some ways, but as with anything, it will likely devolve into a lot of lawyers making money through lawsuits over trivial questions.  Sort of like the patent process for the Internet, I guess.

ICANN believes that it will see between 300 and 1,000 new applications for TLDs in the coming year.  Several hosting and registration companies are already marketing services to apply for and create new TLDs.  A flurry of mad press releases from various players immediately hit the wire after ICANN’s decision Sunday.

Pandora, the popular music streaming service has successfully navigated the choppy waters of floatation, going public – and raising a whopping $235 million in the process. That is an awful lot of money for a company that hasn’t made a dime yet.

The public valuation puts the company at a total of $2.6 billion – which is even more money – and that’s twice as much as the company hoped for when it announced its plans back in February. Consider the planned rise in royalty costs, the fact that again the company haven’t made any money, and that is some serious investor confidence. Pandora currently expends a total of 49% of its revenues in royalties, but these are set to increase year on year until 2015, as streaming services become ever more popular. Major labels like to make as much money as they possibly can at all times, and they seem to have cottoned on to the paradigm shift that’s awkwardly moving across the globe.

The main difference between Internet radio and its terrestrial based counterpart is that public radio has to only spend about 10% rather than the 49% Pandora currently pay. In spite of the fact that Pandora isn’t profitable, Kurt Hanson, Internet radio vet, says that it kind of is profitable already. He says that the fact Pandora only plays about 80 seconds of advertising per hour rather than the 10-15 minutes that terrestrial radio does is definitely in the former’s favour. With logic like that, who needs economics?

One of the many London health authorities have recently admitted to the ‘loss’ of a laptop containing a massive 8.63 million health records. The laptop is completely unsecured and while it doesn’t contain any names on the information, it does contain information on age, gender, postcode, medical history, hospital visits, HIV status and mental illnesses. Combine this with a little bit of sleuthing and it’s 8.63 million cases of blackmail waiting to happen. How exciting.

They sent the following message to The Register: ‘NHS North Central London is investigating the loss of a number of laptops. One of the machines was used for analysing health needs requiring access to elements of unnamed patient data. All of the laptops were password protected and our policy is to manually delete the data from laptops after the records have been processed. We are liaising with the office of the Information Commissioner.’

20 laptops were lost in total, and while 8 have been recovered, the other 12 are still out there. One pictures 20 laptops taking up a significant amount of room, so losing all of them would appear to be a hugely difficult feat to accomplish. The ICO will be ‘making enquiries’ in order to establish the full facts of the data breach. There do appear to have been a rather significant number of data breaches over the past few months or so, and this is a relatively small one compared to some of the others. Still- anonymous data can be fairly easily turned into very personal data, and it’s unlikely the ICO will take a lenient approach to its enquiries. Good luck to them.

Apple has announced that when iOS 5 releases this fall, it will include deep integration with Twitter, but have nothing for Facebook.  Why would Apple ignore the world’s largest social networking platform in favor of Twitter? 

I can think of two reasons: lack of terms and conflicting strategies.

The first is obvious.  Apple has been in talks with Facebook for most of this year, but so far neither company has made any announcements of headway in terms of ironing out what the two companies want to do together.  A lot of people in the industry aren’t even sure what the talks are for, really, since neither side has said anything beyond the usual corporate-speak of “to synergize..”

The second reason is strategic approach.  The two companies are on opposite sides of the field in that regard.  Facebook is all about the cloud – putting everything out there for everyone else to see.  Apple is about the individual user experience, pulling content into a device in the user’s hands.  In many ways, these two approaches are contradictory.

A good illustration of this is how content is used by a Facebook user and an iPhone user.  A photograph taken by that user and posted on Facebook becomes instantly shared with potentially tens of thousands of Facebook users.  A photo taken on an iPhone becomes sharable, yes, but also can be used to change a background during a specific song being played, added to a sharing app that manipulates photos, pasted as additional content in an augmented reality game, or otherwise used to enhance the iPhone user’s experience in any of thousands of ways – thanks to apps and the device itself.

While these two things aren’t mutually exclusive, their underlying corporate strategic approaches may be.   That is probably why Apple is not integrating Facebook into iOS 5.

Twitter have finally bitten the bullet and started their own first party service to rival services like Twitpic and Yfrog. The native photo sharing experience, as Twitter are referring to it, will utterly demolish the userbase among third party services, most likely. Twitter said that ‘[The] experience will be rolled out to 100% of users over the next couple of weeks. [The service will also] surface the most popular videos and tweets.’ The ‘surfacing’ of popular videos and tweets will be directly connected to the Twitter homepage.

While the official mobile version of Twitter currently uses Twitpic in order to allow users to send photos in from their phones and attach them to tweets, updates will soon mean that photos and videos will be done via the first party service directly from the mobile application. Photobucket are Twitter’s ‘technology partner’ in the new service.

And interestingly and importantly, considering Facebook’s ownership of users photographs and videos, is the fact that Twitter will preserve the user’s rights to all photographs and uploaded videos. Which is quite good, isn’t it?

While this is all superb news and a jolly good chance for everyone using Twitter to pat themselves on the back, some may take a look at the increasing media services provided by first-party extensions and consider these against the ethos of what the site is designed to do. Regardless, users want to share photos and videos (and often do via URL shorteners born from Twitter) and Twitter isn’t one to be behind the times, as its short history has shown.