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Foursquare offers a new interface in version 5 that has been completely reworked to a much cleaner design so you can get to what you want quickly using only three tabs across the bottom of the screen (the former design had five buttons across the bottom). The Friends tab (which used to be only about checking in) now offers big photos you can swipe to browse along with tips, lists, and places your friends have saved. From here you can "Like" or comment on activity by touching a button for each. The new layout seems much better organized … Read more

Google Wallet is turning one, but the application that was supposed to transform the smartphone into a wallet and revolutionize how consumers pay for things has barely gotten off the ground.

Why? The reason may be that Google has bet on the wrong technology: NFC.

A year ago, Google execs, along with its partners MasterCard, Citibank, and Sprint, took the stage in New York City to show off the future of payments. No longer would people have to overload their wallets with cards and receipts. Google's plan was to virtualize it all.

Through an application for its Android smartphones, … Read more

Consumers waiting for a TV set from Apple may have to sit tight for a couple more years.

Apple won't launch any type of TV this year, says J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz. Instead, the company is likely to build up to such a product in two separate phases.

First, Apple would expand its current TV box by launching a more advanced set-top module sometime in 2013 at the earliest. Then the company could unveil a full-blown TV with a display and speakers in 2014 or later, the analyst said in a research note released today.

Why no … Read more

Get ready for another asteroid to zoom past the Earth, closer than the moon.

Space.com reports that Asteroid 2012 EG5 will get within 143,000 miles of the planet at 8:32 a.m. PT on Sunday -- that's a little more than half the distance to the moon.

About the size of a passenger jet (a mere 150 feet or so wide), this wee space pebble is nothing compared with the aircraft-carrier-size Asteroid 2005 YU55 that screamed by us all back in November.

Besides, the NASA-affiliated Near Earth Object Office assures us via Twitter that the stone … Read more

Harman International, in looking for a way to personalize the in-car experience, found that the most unique thing everyone carries is a phone. In its demonstration of a new dashboard electronics system, Harman pointed out that people are more likely to loan someone else their car keys than their phones.

At the 2012 Geneva auto show, Harman used Rinspeed's Dock+Go concept car to show off the new system. In the car we had a number of smartphones, each equipped with near field communications, belonging to a variety of different people (set up for the purposes of the demonstration). … Read more

If the camera industry doesn't change quickly, it will die.

Sound like an overstatement? Maybe. But canaries are gasping from deep in this coal mine: operations like Kodak, with a history deep in the print-processing business, were the first to go.

Smart camera manufacturers like Canon and Nikon will continue to sell--and delight photographers with--high-end dSLR cameras, especially as full-frame digital cameras become more and more accessible to those of us (like me) who fancy ourselves decent photographers but have no formal photo training.

As anyone with a high-end smartphone knows, however, the point-and-shoot can't compete for long with the likes of the iPhone 4S camera, especially considering the creative outlet apps extend to the smartphone camera.

Thanks to fantastic post-production software (Instagram, Tilt Shift Gen) and built-in social outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Path), smartphone camera dominance is a no-brainer. (Want some super-dry reading? Canon's Q4 2011 earnings call explains that the company hit its dLSR earnings targets, but not for point-and-shoots.)… Read more

Google has patched a hole in Google Wallet that could've allowed someone to access a user's funds simply by resetting the PIN and using a prepaid card.

The company said yesterday it has issued a fix that now prevents a prepaid card from being re-provisioned to another person. It has also restored the ability to issue new prepaid cards following a move on Monday to disable the use of such cards.

Osama Bedier, vice president of Google Wallet and Payments, said that he wasn't aware of any actual incidents of people abusing the prepaid cards or Wallet … Read more

Google has put the brakes on the use of its prepaid cards for Google Wallet after two hacks were discovered that could steal money from a user's account.

Osama Bedier, vice president for Google Wallet and Payments, wrote in a blog on Saturday that the company is taking this action temporarily until it can make a more long-term correction.

"To address an issue that could have allowed unauthorized use of an existing prepaid card balance if someone recovered a lost phone without a screen lock, tonight we temporarily disabled provisioning of prepaid cards," Bedier explained. "We … Read more

According to reports from tech industry site DigiTimes, smartphone makers are convinced that Apple will be adding near field communications, or NFC, to the next-generation iPhone, widely expected to be released in 2012.

The current smartphone market only has about 10 percent adoption of NFC technology, but according to Taiwan-based phone manufacturers, that number could rise to 50 percent by 2013.

Samsung, HTC, Nokia, and RIM all have NFC-enabled phones currently on the market. Rumors last spring had Apple adding the e-wallet technology to iOS and what is now the iPhone 4S. That, of course, did not come to fruition.… Read more