Putting NFC to good use with Google Wallet

After years of having NFC technology available, Google starts the ball rolling with their implementation Google Wallet. It looks very promising, while not only allowing your credit cards to be loaded onto this “digital wallet” but also such items as loyalty cards and rewards programs. Google are planning to extend this to other items such as boarding passes and movie tickets in the near future. Unfortunately the rest of the world will have to wait a while longer as it is currently US only and being offered only on the Nexus S 4G.

MasterCard have announced plans introducing PayPass cards and terminals in time for the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. Currently ANZ is the only bank that offer PayPass enabled cards. It is unclear if/when Google Wallet would allow loading of such cards to be used locally.

Google Wallet will no doubt spur Apple, Microsoft and others into incorporating NFC into their upcoming roadmaps (if they already haven’t). With NFC-enabled mobile phones likely to become ubiquitous as credit cards it will be interesting to see new and inventive ways NFC is put to use next.

Make websites pinnable with IE9 and Windows 7

With the introduction of IE9 for Windows 7, pinning your favourite websites onto the taskbar has never been easier. An idea taken originally from Google Chrome has been further developed to integrate some of the new taskbar features from Windows 7.

BuildMyPinnedSite.com offers a comprehensive step-by-step guide to integrate these great new taskbar features onto your websites very quickly. It is highly recommended for anyone developing websites.

nush.co, my URL shortener

About 10 years ago TinyURL introduced the first memorable URL shortening service that spawned hundreds of similar websites through the years. One notable frontrunner was bit.ly, who got rid of more characters from the URL by using a top-level foreign country domain.

Now with the introduction of the top-level domain .co, it’s my turn. Introducing http://nush.co/ my very own URL shortener. Writing a hash function to shorten my links looked to be a trivial task but instead I opted to use bit.ly‘s “PRO” service due to its superior link tracking goodness (as shown below).

Bit.ly Link Tracking:

For enterprise users shortening can be taken a step further by using a feature called “End-to-end branding” which allows anyone shortening a long URL with a domain you own (using the bit.ly service) to automatically be substituted your short URL ie. http://www.theanushka.net/2011/05/26/metrotwit-the-twitter-client-for-windows/ into http://nush.co/jnvJRt.

UPDATE: The bit.ly PRO service has been integrated into the standard account and now available to all users.

MetroTwit, the Twitter client for Windows

From its inception last year, MetroTwit has matured into a fully featured Twitter client. It is in part designed and developed by Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com fame. The interface is inspired by Microsoft’s Metro design language which in turn makes it a joy to read tweets.  It is by far the best Twitter client I have used on Windows and with development speeding ahead it is likely to remain the Twitter client of choice.

NewsMap.jp, a visual feast of news

Bored with the plain old Google News? NewsMap.jp does an amazing job of visualising the news in a spatially logical way. The colour coding not only reflect different categories of news but also its age by using different shades of the same colour. The news is taken directly from a localised Google News feed. For those with large displays, it looks great in fullscreen mimicking a screensaver. Check it out.

Windows Phone 7 “Mango” Preview

The feature set for the “Mango” release of Windows Phone 7 was officially released today. This finally brings Windows Phone inline with iOS in terms of functionality. Next week it’s Apple’s move.

Some of the new features include:

• Internet Explorer 9
• New Bing capabilities – including Local Scout, Bing Vision
• Read aloud SMS messaging and spoken replies
• Linked Inboxes (bring multiple email accounts together)
• Pinning of email folders to the home screen
• Impressive Hubs: People, Office, Xbox
• Custom Ringtones
• Full Skydrive and Office 365 Support
• Twitter integrationIntegration of Instant Messaging (IM) with Text Messages (SMS)
• Multitasking
• Email conversation view
• Group IM and SMS
• Facebook chat
• Skype app
• Spoken Turn-by-turn navigation (in some countries)
• Visual Voicemail
• Album art on lock screen
• Rights Managed email access
• Ability to rollout apps to corporate users (bypassing the app store)
• New APIs supporting many new capabilities such as direct access to camera/video stream
• Ability to share beta apps with up to 100 users
• SQL CE and Linq to SQL
• Combining of XNA and Silverlight in a single app

UPDATE: Here’s Joe Belfiore showing off Mango.