Kiran Upadhyay

Spare a thought for Microsoft, a relative newcomer to the mobile making business, after Redmond completed its $7.2BN+ acquisition of former European mobile making powerhouse Nokia earlier this year. If Microsoft was hoping to see quick marketshare wins in Europe once its hands were fully on the levers of production that has not come to pass. The latest 12-week smartphone sales figures from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, up to this September, indicate that Windows Phone’s already small share of the smartphone market has shrunk in Europe — dropping 0.3 percentage points in aggregate across the top five markets in Europe (the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany). Breaking those markets out individually, only Italy continues to see marketshare gains for Windows Phone, with a 1.5 percentage point rise on the year ago period in that market — giving Microsoft’s OS a 15.2 per cent share on smartphone sales in the country (where it is second only to Android’s 71.8 per cent). But Italy rem...

Two companies targeting the “mom” demographic with a product lineup that includes party supplies, crafts, toys, and more, Seedling and P.S. XO, are now merging. The combined companies have also now raised $7 million in new funding from UpFront Ventures and Greycroft Partners, in light of the deal and the revenue projections as a combined entity. The two are expected to hit $10 million in revenue by year-end, and more than double that by year-end 2015. You may recall that earlier this month, the family oriented startup Moonfrye, which is best known as the company that claimed child star Soliel Moon Frye (Punky Brewster)’s involvement, officially announced its rebranding and pivot to P.S. XO, an e-commerce company focused on selling invitations and party supplies. With a new iOS application and a growing e-commerce business, the company led by CEO Kara Nortman, now Chairman at Seedling, was still targeting the parenting crowd the Moonfyre photo editing app once did, but in a far m...

Tired of looking at all that extra space around your smartphone screen? Let’s ignore for a second that that space serves a rather important function (giving you somewhere to put your thumb/fingers that isn’t on the screen) and just marvel at this thing. Built by LG, that 5.3″, 1080p display up top has a bezel that comes in at just 0.7 millimeters. That’s just crazy. It looks like something out of one of those fan-made “next iPhone” mockups that always tend to pop up before each new iPhone’s release, with their endless wish lists of mostly impossible features. Best part? It sounds like LG actually intends to mass-produce these rather than just using it as a demo to show off their tech prowess. Alas, all of us stateside might have to wait a while; LG specifically notes that these screens will head to smartphones in China first. Now, to figure out how anyone is actually supposed to hold that thing… Of course, you can really only cut down the top and bottom bezel so much wit...

Lenovo has completed the $2.91 billion acquisition of Motorola from Google today. The deal, which was announced in January, comes just three years after Google itself shelled out $12.5 billion to buy the phone-maker. Now a Lenovo subsidiary, Motorola will continue to be based out of Chicago with offices worldwide. Motorola Mobility President Rick Osterloh will retain in his position following the deal, with Liu Jun, Lenovo’s executive vice president and president of its Mobile Business Group, becoming chairman of the Motorola board. Writing on Motorola’s company blog, Osterloh made a point of explaining that it will be business as usual despite the change in ownership: “The iconic Motorola brand will continue, as will the Moto and DROID franchises that have propelled our growth over the past year. We will continue to focus on pure Android and fast upgrades, and remain committed to developing technology to solve real consumer problems. And we will continue to develop mobile devi...

Wireless power seems like one of those things everyone always dreams about. I mean, how great would it be to have your phone just charge while it’s sitting in your pocket with no need to plug it in? That’s the premise uBeam is setting out to deliver on, and to do so, it’s raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Upfront Ventures. The investment brings total capital raised to about $12 million, with other investors that include Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, CrunchFund*, Ludlow Ventures, Marissa Mayer, Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh, Troy Carter, Shawn Fanning and Mark Cuban. With the new funding, Upfront managing partner Mark Suster will join the uBeam board. uBeam is just one among a large number of companies we’ve seen over the years that have sought to solve the problem of charging your devices without having to plug them in. So far most seem to have been focused on magnetic resonance charging, which still requires devices to be close to the charger. By contrast uBea...

Google will begin rolling out a change to its search algorithm that the media giant says will "visibly affect" rankings of piracy sites globally. The Mountain View, California company promised to do this in 2012. But at the time, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and others said the changes to its search algorithm had "no demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy." Google said the latest global algorithm changes, to roll out this week, will work. “In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notices,” Google’s senior copyright counsel Katherine Oyama wrote in a Friday blog post. “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites." The announcement of the algorithm update came as Google unveiled its latest ...

The holiday season is fast approaching, and for mobile gaming studios it’s make or break time. How can you earn one of the coveted spots in Apple Store’s Top 10 list without exhausting your marketing budget? Below are five steps to help you develop an effective strategy for getting your mobile game apps noticed by consumers this holiday season. Before we get started, just a brief warning. As the holiday season advances, expect to see lots of mobile ad companies promising you a spot in the Top 10 list in any and every country you desire. Beware of such claims – they may be scams. Many, of course, are quite legit, but you should always question their sources and methodologies before turning your burst campaigns over to them. Step 1: Soft Launch — Test and learn By now you should have your contours of strategy in place (i.e. OS release, app title, countries to launch in – all benchmarked by market). Plan a soft launch for early November. That means you need to choose the right ic...

Xiaomi is now the world’s third largest smartphone maker, due in large part to the success of its high-end Mi4, says new research by IDC. This is also the first time that Xiaomi has broken into the research firm’s list of the top 5 smartphone makers in the world. Samsung remains at the lead despite declining shipment volume, followed by Apple, Xiaomi, and Lenovo and LG, which tied for fourth place. A new report by Strategy Analytics also puts Xiaomi in the number three position. Its focus on China and adjacent markets like Southeast Asia helped boost Xiaomi into the top 5 by resulting in triple-digit year-over-year growth in Q3 2014. IDC said that the launch of Xiaomi’s flagship phone MI4, which is meant to compete against Samsung’s Galaxy S5 and Apple’s iPhone, in August was key to its success. But while Xiaomi is doing well in China and other Asian countries, it’s still unclear how well it will fare in other markets where it faces greater competition from Samsung and Apple. In...

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve heard much about Project Ara, Google’s effort to build a phone out of components that can be swapped out, piece-by-piece. Google showed off the device a bit back at I/O and, alas, things got a bit crashy during the presentation. In a new video released today, the Phonebloks team shows the Ara prototype in its most recent form — and it’s working! It looks a bit slow right now, sure — but it boots! The best look at the device in its current state comes at around the 2:30 mark. So what’s changed? Outside of the fact that it looks like the device actually boots and can be operated to some degree, not a lot — at least not from the outside. Particularly worth noting, however, is the tidbit they drop at the tail end of the video: currently, about 50 percent of the available space on this first prototype (“Spiral 1″) is dedicated to just making the modularity possible. In the next prototype (“Spiral 2″), however, they’ve freed up a ton of space...

After years of capping video playback at 30 frames per second, it looks like YouTube is finally upping the bar. Back in June, YouTube announced that 60 FPS video playback was on the way in “the coming months”. Alas, the only examples of this to pop up since were a handful of EA game trailers that YouTube handpicked to showcase the new, ultra-slick framerate. Sometime in the past few hours, however, it seems the roll out started spreading far and wide. A good number of user uploaded videos shot at 60 FPS are now playing back at their proper framerate, rather than being sliced down to a relatively chunky 30 FPS. It may not work in all browsers (if all else fails, try Chrome. Safari also seems to work. And make sure you’re using the HTML5 Player, though most people will be on that by default by now) — but when it works, it’s gloriously obvious. See, for example, this video of someone playing Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 (as spotted by Kotaku). Bump the quality up to at least 720p, an...

Need to make an international phone call, but don’t want to deal with the mystery connection fees and huge minute-by-minute charges? Google has just quietly launched a rather nifty new feature: free international calling to 25 different countries through Hangouts/Gmail/Google+. The catch, if you want to call it that: only the first 60 seconds are free. After you burn through that first minute, it’ll go back to costing a few cents per minute. One other weird bit: according to Google’s instructions on how to make this work, you’ll need to have some calling credit on your Google account (presumably for them to charge if you go over the 60-second limit.) On the (huge) upside, the account being pre-paid means no massive surprise charges. 60 seconds, or just enough time to say “Hey, man — you’re not online. Get on [insert your favorite free Voice Over IP service here] so we can talk for more than 60 seconds.” The countries that can be called for a minute on the house: Australi...

Android’s newest update is coming soon, with devices running 5.0 Lollipop beginning to ship November 3. While the visual update might be the one that most users pay the most attention to, Android 5.0 also has a number of under-the-hood changes, including some major updates to the overall security of the platform. Google has put a lot of effort into addressing the biggest threats to Android user security, which still overwhelmingly represent lost or stolen devices, and today the company is detailing a few of these efforts. Lollipop adds some new lock methods that make it easier to keep your device secure, which is a huge boon to the overall integrity of the platform. The biggest roadblock to mobile device security is actually user apathy, which sees people skipping basic security practices like implementing a lock screen pin code because it’s inconvenient when you’re checking your device every few minutes. Lollipop offers Smart Lock to help address this, which uses paired devices t...

Google has released its Fit app, which acts as a central storehouse for activity recorded via your Android device, and via apps that use the Google Fit SDK introduced at the I/O developer conference back in June. The dedicated Android app is pretty spare, but it provides a way for users to see an overview of their collected health and fitness data in one central location. The Google Fit app doesn’t present me with much as of right now, but it uses your device’s sensors to tracking walking and other activity, and you can manually enter information about workouts not tracked, or your height and weight. Heart rate info from compatible devices, including Android Wear smartwatches, are also fed to the app. In short, it’s a competitor to Apple’s Health application, but with a very different approach to UI that appears to want to aim for simplicity above all else. Google Fit also has a web-based destination at Google.com/fit which doesn’t appear to be live just yet, and it’s likely we’...

More than four years ago, Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and heralded HTML5 as the way to go. You could be forgiven if you thought the HTML5 standard — the follow-up to 1997’s HTML 4 — has long been set in stone, given that developers, browser vendors and the press have been talking about it for years now. In reality, however, HTML5 was still in flux — until today. The W3C today published its Recommendation of HTML5 — the final version of the standard after years of adding features and making changes to it. As a user, you won’t notice any changes. Chances are your browser already supports most HTML5 features like the element and vector graphics (unless your employer forces you to use a really old version of Internet Explorer, that is). Other important new features that HTML5 has brought to the web over the last few years are things like the element for rendering 2D shapes and bitmap images, support for MathML for displaying mathematical notations in the browser, and APIs ...

Detecting cancer could be as easy as popping a pill in the near future. Google’s head of life sciences, Andrew Conrad, took to the stage at the Wall Street Journal Digital conference to reveal that the tech giant’s secretive Google[x] lab has been working on a wearable device that couples with nanotechnology to detect disease within the body. “We’re passionate about switching from reactive to proactive and we’re trying to provide the tools that make that feasible,” explained Conrad. This is a third project in a series of health initiatives for Google[x]. The team has already developed a smart contact lens that detects glucose levels for diabetics and utensils that help manage hand tremors in Parkinson’s patients. The plan is to test whether tiny particles coated “magnetized” with antibodies can catch disease in its nascent stages. The tiny particles are essentially programmed to spread throughout the body via pill and then latch on to the abnormal cells. The wearable device then...

Facebook disclosed financials of its $22 billion acquisition of WhatsApp for the first time today, and it looks like the 600 million user messaging app’s revenue is still small. In the six months ending June 30, 2014, WhatsApp brought in $15.921 million in revenue, but had a net loss of $232.5 million. However, $206.5 million of that loss was for share-based compensation expenses and issuance of common stock below fair value. Its net cash used in operating expenses during the first half of 2014 was $13.5 million, which sounds much more reasonable. Essentially, due to WhatsApp’s quickly rising valuation, it used share-based compensation to attract top talent. Eventually, the $22 billion acquisition by Facebook would largely make the “expenses” of issuing that stock moot. This wasn’t cash that WhatsApp was burning, but paper money it was doling out. For the year ending December 31, 2013, WhatsApp had $10.2 million in revenue and a net loss of $138.146 million. Net cash used in ope...

The public life-cycle of a Kickstarter rarely ends in tragedy. Often, if a Kickstarter manages to get covered by the media before its funding round end, or even starts, it can meet its goal within days, and superfluous funds continue to roll in over the next few weeks. By the time its crowdfunding stage closes, the creators, backers, and media alike are excited and proud to have ushered this new project so quickly to a place of prosperity, eager for it to continue to grow. Plenty of projects manage to deliver the goods, even if the timeline slides a bit. That was the case with Tim Schafer's Kickstarter game Broken Age. If creators miss deadlines, backers typically continue to receive updates via e-mail and the Kickstarter page. But sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn't pan out according to the orderly delivery sche...

Scenario: It’s 12:30 am. You’re in Taco Bell. You’d do pretty much anything for a crunchwrap supreme. The problem: If you open your mouth and try to speak, it’ll become immediately obvious that you just smoked what you’re at least 90% sure was all of the weed in the entire world. Solution: You can now order Taco Bell on your phone. The company is prepped to announce that they’ve launched a mobile ordering application for iPhone and Android. Once the respective apps go live, you should be able to find the iPhone app here and the Android app here. This is great, because sometimes saying “Two tacos, please” and waiting 19 seconds is way, way too much work. Oh, and good news for the sober folk: food ordered via the mobile app can be picked up through the drive-through. They’ve eliminated the need to get out of the car; they’ve mostly eliminated the need to speak to anyone… you know what this means? The only logical next step is, clearly, tacocopter. Some of the key ingredien...

A Los Angeles International Airport flight bound for London was cancelled Sunday when a passenger's phone picked up the Wi-Fi signal "al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork" (sic) that was emanating from a fellow flier's hotspot minutes before the United Airlines flight was set to liftoff. After a concerned passenger notified a flight attendant of the network at about 9:30pm, the plane taxied to a remote section of the Los Angeles airport and was held there for three hours. The plane was searched as passengers of Flight 136 were ordered to power off electronic devices, local media said. "After an hour, (the captain) said there was a security threat and that we didn't have clearance to take off," passenger Elliot Del Pra told ABC7.com. The person responsible for the hotspot was not discovered, LaWeekly said. "After further investigation, it was determined that no crime was committed and no further action will be taken,"LAX said in a statement. Am...

Solid Concepts, a company that specializes in 3D printing in metal and now owned by Stratasys, as announced their second 3D-printed metal gun, the Reason. Their first gun, the 1911, as well as this one were made by sintering – melting – metal powder with a laser. However, from the detail on the barrel and handle it’s clear the company has improved the technology immensely over the year. “We’re proving this is possible, the technology is at a place now where we can manufacture a gun with 3D Metal Printing,” wrote Kent Firestone, Vice President of Additive Manufacturing at Solid Concepts last year. “Now, if a qualifying customer needs a unique gun part in five days, we can deliver.” There have been a number of plastic guns available to hobbyists for some time now. These metal models, however, are far more rugged and safer to fire. In fact, the original 1911 has been successfully fired at least 5,000 times. This new gun, which features an excerpt from the Declaration of Indepen...

This morning, Microsoft announced that all Office 365 accounts will come with unlimited OneDrive storage. Gone are the 1 terabyte caps that were recently introduced. If you pay for Office, your storage is free. It’s a good, if not surprising, move from Microsoft: The company has worked to improve the value profile of its Office 365, productivity-as-a-service offering for some time. Free storage is a good feature. Storage is a feature. The more you can offer, the better. The price of storage has been in free fall for years. Bundling an unlimited dollop into Office 365 is the penultimate step in that particular progression. The final zero-cost level will occur when large platform companies offer free, unlimited storage to all users, period. For now, Microsoft is following other cloud providers in selling unlimited storage capacity, like Box. Office 365 has been a win for Microsoft. If the company can improve the product’s growth rate, it will assist the aging software giant in i...

About once a week, if not more, I find myself typing these words or something similar on Facebook: “I just PM’d you, check your ‘Other’ inbox.” Or, “sorry, I’m on mobile, I can’t get to the ‘Other’ inbox right now.” Or sometimes, just “bump.” If any of these phrases sound familiar, you’re probably also a member of several Facebook Groups like I am. Over the years, Facebook’s Groups product has evolved beyond being a private place for a few friends to chat outside of a traditional Facebook post and comment thread scenario. Instead, today’s Facebook Groups section is a busy, semi-public area on Facebook’s network which resembles a Facebook-flavored Craigslist competitor…or a Meetup competitor…or a Nextdoor competitor, depending on your use case. Here, users are busy selling on virtual yard sales, networking around topics of interest (health, parenting, politics, hobbies, etc.), helping each other find work, chatting with neighbors, and more.

Earlier this year Google acquired DeepMind in the UK to expand the work that it is doing in artificial intelligence, and today the company announced that it is making some more significant moves to build this out even further. It is acqui-hiring the two academic teams of founders, seven people in all, behind Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, two deep learning startups based in the UK, and it is also partnering with Oxford University, which had spun out the two startups, to build out wider research efforts further in the area of AI. The Oxford partnership will be coming with a “substantial donation”, according to a blog post announcing the news from Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and VP of engineering at Google. It will also see at least some of the people behind Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory continue to lecture and research at the university. We are reaching out to Google to see if we can get a more specific figure for the Oxford investment and also for the acquis...

Meet Fitbit’s latest: The Charge, Charge HR, and the Surge. These activity trackers will sit atop the brand’s masthead going into 2015 and beyond. But don’t look for most of these products this holiday season. Only the $130 Charge will be available this year. The $150 Charge HR and $250 Surge hit stores in early 2015. Fitbit had a tough 2014. After launching the flagship Fitbit Force in late 2013, the company trudged through a public recall of the product in the first quarter of 2014. Yet Fitbit pushed forward sans a true flagship product but managed to retain a dominating position in the growing activity tracking market. The Charge is the rebirth of the Force. This time around, though, the wrist band is slightly different and textured. Unlike the Force before it, the Charge can display caller ID information from a connected smartphone. The Charge HR packs all the goods as the Charge, but also includes a heart-rate monitor. Because of this addition, the battery life is only fi...

The telco industry has resisted change for years. That anti-innovation attitude, coupled with the rise of smartphones and fast data networks, provided ample opportunities for over-the-top startups to circumvent moribund and expensive telco offerings with VoIP and messaging apps that were both less expensive and more feature rich. No surprise, then, that OTT messaging apps have blown up. And things are only going to get more moveable on the phone front as telcos start to wake up to the need to sanction their own disruption where they would previously have dug their heels in. Really they’re playing catch up now. Case in point, U.K. startup Swytch — founded in April this year — is bootstrapping a cloud based mobile network and dialer app that will let you use multiple phone numbers on a single SIM, so doing away with the hassle of juggling multiple physical SIM cards. (Which in turn has led to phone makers offering devices with dual SIM slots to make SIM switching easier — albeit,...

This past week, Tesla CEO/Living, Breathing Tony Stark/Space X Founder Elon Musk was interviewed at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium. While the whole interview is worth watching (and is embedded above), one answer to a question from the audience takes a particularly intense turn. Asked about his thoughts on AI, Musk starts by noting that we ought to take care in closely regulating AI development, calling AI our “biggest existential threat.” But wait, there’s more! And by more, I mean demons and holy water. Musk’s full answer is transcribed below (if you want to watch it for yourself in the video up top, it starts at 1 hour, 7 minutes, and 20 seconds in.) Musk: I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national an...

Skyscanner, the travel search company headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland (and a veteran of the space), is consolidating its mobile strategy today with the acquisition of Budapest-based app developer Distinction. The deal — terms of which remain undisclosed — sees the Scottish company pick up Distinction’s 30-strong team of mobile designers and developers who will form the basis of Skyscanner new Budapest, Hungary-based mobile ‘hub’, effectively bringing its mobile app development in-house. The two companies had already been working together, most recently to develop Skyscanner’s hotel app which launched in August this year on iOS and Android. However, I understand the relationship harks back to 2011, including Distinction helping to build the travel search company’s Windows Mobile 8 flight search app a couple of years ago. Along with its new Budapest mobile development hub via today’s acquisition, Skyscanner says it plans to create additional roles to drive mobile growth, wh...

On the heels of acquiring satellite startup Skybox in August, Google and Skybox have announced the Skybox for Good program, which will provide real-time satellite imagery to organizations and programs that save lives, protect the environment, promote education and positively impact humanity, according to the official blog post. The program launches today in beta with a small group of partners. The images provided to these organizations will be publicly available under a Creative Commons license. This will allow organizations like Sky Truth and Appalachian Voices to keep an eye on “mountain-top removal mining,” which threatens to devastate the forests of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. Another example given in the announcement was images of a Northern Sri Lanka village called Nagarkovil, which were given to HALO to help them verify that the area was safe, after previously removing land mines. The initiative comes from the Google Earth Outreach team, the main goal be...

HP had 317,000 employees as of October 2013. The company got rid of 36,000 people by July of this year. HP was planning total "employee reductions" of 45,000 to 50,000 people, but it will now push that to 55,000 "to fund investment opportunities in R&D and sales," the company said in a presentation for investors today. HP plans to break into two by the end of October 2015. One of the new, separate companies will be Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, focusing on "servers, storage, networking, converged systems, services and software as well as its OpenStack Helion cloud platform," HP said. HP CEO Meg Whitman will be CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HP's personal systems and printing businesses will become HP Inc. and have "a strong roadmap into the most exciting new technologies like 3D printing and new computing experiences," HP said. Dion Weisler, executive VP of the printing and personal systems division, will be HP Inc. CEO. Whitman wi...

When Google+ head Vic Gundotra abruptly left Google earlier this year, it quickly led to rumors that Google would be scaling back its ambitions for the social network and cutting the division's resources. In an interview with Re/code today, new head of social media Dave Besbris said that the Google+ team is still going strong, and the service won't be going anywhere anytime soon. “We’re the largest we’ve ever been,” Besbris told Re/code. "We’re actually very happy with the progress of Google+, [Larry Page] said this at the time that Vic transitioned that he’s going to continue working on building this stuff, that he’s very happy with it. The company is behind it." The full interview is worth a read—while Besbris didn't give surprising answers to any of the questions asked, he did talk about Google+'s ad policy and the challenges of battling peoples' "pre-conceived notions" about the social network. He also attempted to reassure those who fee...

SAN FRANCISCO—“My… name… is… Ryan…” In a world where most electric devices can talk and an increasing amount can listen and answer, a seemingly unassuming tablet speaking these words isn't at all impressive. But this particular tablet wasn't replaying a recording or broadcasting some typed message. Instead, Ryan Hait-Campbell, the CEO for an Alameda-based company called MotionSavvy—signed just inches above the device as it sat flat on a table. Instantly, it interpreted American Sign Language (ASL) into written and spoken English. The tablet is also able to listen to speech and convert it into text. As Stemper looked up and smiled, the "Uni" had impressed again. As someone who isn't deaf or fluent in ASL, it’s hard to fully appreciate what the Uni tablet could mean for many. Still, the potential implications are clear. MotionSavvy's concept earned the group $25,000 from Leap Motion’s LEAP AXLR8R program, an investment competition run by Leap Motion its...

Long before Apple Pay, big brick-and-mortar retail chains were conspiring to sidestep the typical 2% to 3% fees they’re charged by credit card companies when consumers pay with credit. A company called MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange), spearheaded by Walmart, was started to build a mobile payment solution that would become an app called CurrentC that’s preparing to launch, but is already in the app stores. Rather than NFC, CurrentC uses QR codes displayed on a cashier’s screen and scanned by the consumer’s phone or vice versa to initiate and verify the transaction. The system is also designed to automatically apply discounts, use loyalty programs, and charge purchases to a variety of payment methods without passing sensitive financial data to the merchant. Retailers including CVS and Rite-Aid were planned partners for CurrentC. Now those businesses have pulled unofficial support for Apple Pay through their existing NFC readers, according to a report from MacRumors and a memo obt...