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- Apple Card won't drive Google, Samsung to offer their own credit cards - CNET
- Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award - The New York Times
- GameStop Sponsors Team Envy and Dallas Fuel - The Esports Observer
| Apple Card won't drive Google, Samsung to offer their own credit cards - CNET Posted: 27 Mar 2019 05:00 AM PDT  Apple CEO Tim Cook launches Apple Card. Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNETThe hot new thing in payments is... plastic? Apple on Monday introduced the Apple Card, a credit card that exists as both a virtual card in Apple's Wallet app and a physical card (to be fair, it's titanium not plastic). Apple's card comes out after digital money companies PayPal, Square and PayPal-owned Venmo all introduced their own physical credit, debit and prepaid cards in the past few years. Surely all this excitement for good ole reliable cards means Google and Samsung won't be too far behind, trotting out their own Google Pay Card and Samsung Pay Card, right? Well, not so fast. Wipe away the Apple mystique, and you're left with a credit card that's got underwhelming features and is unlikely to draw in savvier consumers, several payment experts say. That means its chief payment rivals probably won't rush to come up with competing cards. "I doubt that Google and Samsung are losing a lot of sleep over this card," said Ted Rossman, analyst at CreditCards.com, a card comparison site owned by Bankrate.  Watch this: The Apple Card is Apple's new no-late fee credit card 1:52 The Apple Card arrives at a time when adoption of mobile payment services like Apple Pay has stagnated for years, with most US customers instead opting for simpler cash or cards. The lack of ubiquity is a major hurdle for mobile payments, since many customers would rather pay at checkout with what they know will be accepted, not ask over and over again if a mobile option is available. The physical Apple Card could help solve that issue, since cards are accepted at just about every store. The card is an acknowledgement from Apple that mobile payments haven't caught on just yet. Less than a third of iPhone owners have used Apple Pay at least once, according to a study by PYMNTS.com. The Apple Card also illustrates how the tech industry needs to work in the present while trying to usher in the future. Tech companies like Amazon building stores is further evidence that consumer habits take time to change and that there's still money to be made using old-fashioned, nondigital methods. No Google or SamsungConsidering a potential Google or Samsung card, payments experts mostly saw challenges for the two companies. The credit card industry is heavily regulated and extremely competitive, preventing tech players from diving in. Plus, neither company has the same fanboy-fueled brand power as Apple or a bunch of its own retail stores, making things even harder for them to create waves in payments. Google did offer a physical debit card for Google Wallet, a predecessor of Google Pay, but it shut down that program in 2016.  A look at the Apple Card in the Wallet app. Apple"My gut on that is they wouldn't necessarily jump in unless they saw that this Apple move was successful," said Matt Schulz, an analyst at CompareCards, a LendingTree-owned card comparison site. But Rivka Gewirtz Little, a payments analyst at research firm IDC, said she wouldn't be surprised to see Google and Samsung show off their own cards soon, since big tech companies are looking for more ways to push into the financial world and create more services to get people to spend money. "I don't see any reason why they wouldn't do it," she said. "I don't think there's any mistake in doing it." Apple declined to comment for this story. Google and Samsung didn't respond to a request for comment.  Watch this: Apple Card FAQ: What you need to know 4:02 Apple Card: MehThe Apple Card, which will be available in the US this summer, gets rid of annual fees, late fees, over-limit fees and international fees -- but it'll raise your interest rate if you pay late. The card also offers daily cash rewards, with 3 percent back when buying directly from Apple, 2 percent back when paying through Apple Pay and 1 percent back when paying using the card. The company also touted the Apple Card's security features, with each digital payment authorized using Touch ID or Face ID and a onetime security code. Apple also won't collect customers' data on where they shop, what they buy or how much they spend. Apple teamed up with Mastercard and Goldman Sachs to offer the card. Mastercard spokeswoman Chaiti Sen said her company expects to create more digital-first cards like Apple Card eventually but confirmed that Mastercard is working only with Apple on such a concept right now. Several payment analysts thought Apple Card's features were far from game-changing and said other, existing cards offer similar, if not better, benefits. The lack of a sign-up bonus -- typical these days for a credit card -- was seen as a missed opportunity. "A lot of the Apple Card stuff just feels like a series of half measures," Rossman said. "I'm surprised they didn't go all in on something." Apple clearly wants to use the card to get more people to use Apple Pay and keep them loyal to its ecosystem of products and services. These experts didn't think it offers enough to do that. Considering that, the pressure for Google and Samsung to move on their own cards isn't as great as if Apple had introduced a card that could shake up the card industry. "It's definitely not enough to make people jump over," Little said of Android users. "It might be enough to get iPhone users to stick around a bit longer." |
| Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award - The New York Times Posted: 27 Mar 2019 03:00 AM PDT Advertisement Supported by Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing AwardImage  By Cade Metz SAN FRANCISCO — In 2004, Geoffrey Hinton doubled down on his pursuit of a technological idea called a neural network. It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines couldn’t really do any of that. Backed by the Canadian government, Dr. Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, organized a new research community with several academics who also tackled the concept. They included Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share. Over the past decade, the big idea nurtured by these researchers has reinvented the way technology is built, accelerating the development of face-recognition services, talking digital assistants, warehouse robots and self-driving cars. Dr. Hinton is now at Google, and Dr. LeCun works for Facebook. Dr. Bengio has inked deals with IBM and Microsoft. “What we have seen is nothing short of a paradigm shift in the science,” said Oren Etzioni, the chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle and a prominent voice in the A.I. community. “History turned their way, and I am in awe.” Loosely modeled on the web of neurons in the human brain, a neural network is a complex mathematical system that can learn discrete tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of old phone calls, for example, it can learn to recognize spoken words. This allows many artificial intelligence technologies to progress at a rate that was not possible in the past. Rather than coding behavior into systems by hand — one logical rule at a time — computer scientists can build technology that learns behavior largely on its own. The London-born Dr. Hinton, 71, first embraced the idea as a graduate student in the early 1970s, a time when most artificial intelligence researchers turned against it. Even his own Ph.D. adviser questioned the choice. Image  “We met once a week,” Dr. Hinton said in an interview. “Sometimes it ended in a shouting match, sometimes not.” Neural networks had a brief revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After a year of postdoctoral research with Dr. Hinton in Canada, the Paris-born Dr. LeCun moved to AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he designed a neural network that could read handwritten letters and numbers. An AT&T subsidiary sold the system to banks, and at one point it read about 10 percent of all checks written in the United States. Though a neural network could read handwriting and help with some other tasks, it could not make much headway with big A.I. tasks, like recognizing faces and objects in photos, identifying spoken words, and understanding the natural way people talk. “They worked well only when you had lots of training data, and there were few areas that had lots of training data,” Dr. LeCun, 58, said. But some researchers persisted, including the Paris-born Dr. Bengio, 55, who worked alongside Dr. LeCun at Bell Labs before taking a professorship at the University of Montreal. In 2004, with less than $400,000 in funding from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Dr. Hinton created a research program dedicated to what he called “neural computation and adaptive perception.” He invited Dr. Bengio and Dr. LeCun to join him. By the end of the decade, the idea had caught up with its potential. In 2010, Dr. Hinton and his students helped Microsoft, IBM, and Google push the boundaries of speech recognition. Then they did much the same with image recognition. “He is a genius and knows how to create one impact after another,” said Li Deng, a former speech researcher at Microsoft who brought Dr. Hinton’s ideas into the company. Dr. Hinton’s image recognition breakthrough was based on an algorithm developed by Dr. LeCun. In late 2013, Facebook hired the N.Y.U. professor to build a research lab around the idea. Dr. Bengio resisted offers to join one of the big tech giants, but the research he oversaw in Montreal helped drive the progress of systems that aim to understand natural language and technology that can generate fake photos that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Though these systems have undeniably accelerated the progress of artificial intelligence, they are still a very long way from true intelligence. But Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio believe that new ideas will come. “We need fundamental additions to this toolbox we have created to reach machines that operate at the level of true human understanding,” Dr. Bengio said. Follow Cade Metz on Twitter: @CadeMetz. Related CoverageAdvertisement |
| GameStop Sponsors Team Envy and Dallas Fuel - The Esports Observer Posted: 27 Mar 2019 07:15 AM PDT Update: GameStop has also announced a similar deal with OpTic Gaming and the Houston Outlaws. Videogame retailer GameStop has announced a sponsorship deal with Overwatch League GameStop’s Power Rewards program will also feature exclusive contests and giveaways from the teams. The announcement comes on the same day that the videogame retailer acquired the naming rights to the headquarters of another Texas-based esports organization, compLexity Gaming. The Esports Observer has reached out to Team Envy for more information and will provide additional details as they become available.  |
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