PayPal Is Rolling Out Its New “Mobile First” Website Globally

PayPal, the eBay-owned online payments platform that made up some 40% of its $16 billion in revenues in 2013, has turned on a redesigned website — it’s biggest attempt yet at putting a contemporary, simplified face on one of the older services on the web (founded: 1998); and to introduce users to some of the newer features it’s hoping will take off, such as mobile and physical store payments.

The design was first announced last month but with little detail as to how the pages would look. Now, users in countries like the U.S., UK and France can see for themselves.

On first arriving, a site visitor finds a much more simplified “front door” that is banked on a full-screen, 15-second silent video clip that changes with each visit (or each refresh). The clip is slick in a very familiar way, reminiscent of the video Facebook used to have to promote its Android launcher Home, along with the homepages of countless other apps. In the middle of the silent video is a single call to action (“send money now”, etc.). One example illustrated above, and another here:

The idea behind taking away a significant portion of the text is to make the the whole experience more “mobile first,” in the words of Christina Smedley, PayPal’s Global Brand VP. So, too, is the touchscreen-friendly scrolling beyond the video, which introduces other services further down the page. Again, these are light on text and heavy on images.

(And yes, for those who are not visiting PayPal for the first time or don’t really care for the new song and dance, you still have a list of simple, utilitarian tabs at the top that take you directly to different actions on the site to pay people, request money and so on.)

This is not the first aesthetic update PayPal has made to its site in recent times. (It madeanother in back 2012, for example.) But as with the company’s general direction under new president David Marcus, you get a sense that it’s trying to accelerate how it iterates and keeps up with the times.

With all the noise that activist investor Carl Icahn has been making, arguing for eBay to spin off its PayPal payments division, that acceleration and growth are taking on perhaps an even more urgent note under the wing of the e-commerce giant.

Touchscreen-friendliness aside, what is perhaps most important about this round of refreshes to the website is that it’s part of a wider overhaul, both at the front and back ends, and deeper into specific services within PayPal.

“Imagine this as our new ‘front door’ to PayPal, the pages behind will also reflect our new approach over time,” Smedley writes. “So although the homepage and more will have this new look and feel, we continue to chip away at the rest of the older content that doesn’t reflect the very best of what we want to bring to you. More to come on that.” She doesn’t mention StackMob, the mobile backend service provider that PayPal acquired in December 2013, but you have to wonder if this is exactly where they are playing their part.

(A reader has pointed us to a tour of some of the new features which does not come up as a feature on the desktop version of the site but can accessed through this link. It explains a new interfaces for managing your PayPal balance, notifications, recent transactions and items bought under a grace period.)

But there will likely be more to come. I’ve seen promises of PayPal improving the user experience on third-party merchant sites — for example, making it unnecessary to go to new, PayPal windows to pay for things (perhaps a response to the very simplified UI of newer entrants like Stripe). But just earlier today I had to pay for something via PayPal and although I can see the new interface for PayPal in the UK, the merchant experience looked and behaved just as legacy-bound as ever.

This also points to another issue, though. Given how widely used PayPal is by third-party merchants on their own sites, updating will involve not just PayPal, but trying to get these thousands of partners on board as well.

PayPal noted in February that it will be rolling out the new look across all of its 194 markets eventually, but not all countries are seeing the new look yet. Take Portugal, for example — a reminder what all users were getting when logging into PayPal not that long ago.

Battery-free technology brings gesture recognition to all devices

Mute the song playing on your smartphone in your pocket by flicking your index finger in the air, or pause your "This American Life" podcast with a small wave of the hand. This kind of gesture control for electronics could soon become an alternative to touchscreens and sensing technologies that consume a lot of power and only work when users can see their smartphones and tablets.

University of Washington computer scientists have built a low-cost gesture recognition system that runs without batteries and lets users control their electronic devices hidden from sight with simple hand movements. The prototype, called "AllSee," uses existing TV signals as both a power source and the means for detecting a user's gesture command.

"This is the first gesture recognition system that can be implemented for less than a dollar and doesn't require a battery," said Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. "You can leverage TV signals both as a source of power and as a source of gesture recognition."

The technology is set to appear April 2-4 at the Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference in Seattle.

The researchers built a small sensor that can be placed on an electronic device such as a smartphone. The sensor uses an ultra-low-power receiver to extract and classify gesture information from wireless transmissions around us. When a person gestures with the hand, it changes the amplitude of the wireless signals in the air. The AllSee sensors then recognize unique amplitude changes created by specific gestures.

Sensors use three to four times less power than existing gesture recognition systems by harvesting power from wireless transmissions. This allows for mobile devices to always have the gesture technology on and enabled.

Gesture recognition already is possible on some mobile devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone. But users have to first manually enable the feature and be able to see the device for the gesture technology to work, and if left on, the gesture system quickly drains the phone's battery. In contrast, AllSee consumes only tens of microwatts of power and can always be left on. The user could gesture at the phone in a pocket or handbag to change the volume or mute the phone without having to touch or see the phone. This technology could allow sensors to be attached to household electronics, making it possible to interact with everyday objects using gestures and also connect them to the Internet and to each other in an "Internet of Things" world.

"Beyond mobile devices, AllSee can enable interaction with Internet of Things devices. These sensing devices are increasingly smaller electronics that can't operate with usual keypads, so gesture-based systems are ideal," said Bryce Kellogg, a UW doctoral student in electrical engineering.

The UW team tested AllSee's capabilities on smartphones and battery-free sensors using eight different hand gestures such as pushing or pulling to zoom in and out. The prototype could correctly identify the gestures more than 90 percent of the time while performed more than 2 feet away from the device.

Researchers have tested the technology for response time and whether it can distinguish between other motions and those directed at it. They found that the technology's response time is less than 80 microseconds, which is 1,000 times faster than blinking an eye.

"This enables a seamless and interactive experience for the user," said Vamsi Talla, a UW doctoral student in electrical engineering. The researchers also designed a wake-up gesture that allows the system not to confuse unintentional motions for actual gestures.

This technology builds on previous work by Gollakota on leveraging Wi-Fi signals around us for gesture recognition around the home. Prior wireless gesture recognition techniques, however, consume tens of watts of power and aren't suitable for mobile or Internet of Things devices
.

Solar power: Making it more efficient and less expensive

University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting early results on a way to make solar-powered panels in lights, calculators and roofs lighter, less expensive, more flexible (therefore less breakable) and more efficient.

Fei Yu, a University of Cincinnati doctoral student in materials engineering, will present new findings on boosting the power conversion efficiency of polymer solar cells on March 3, at the American Physical Society Meeting in Denver.

Yu is experimenting with adding a small fraction of graphene nanoflakes to polymer-blend bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells to improve performance and lower costs of solar energy.

"There has been a lot of study on how to make plastic solar cells more efficient, so they can take the place of silicon solar cells in the future," says Yu. "They can be made into thinner, lighter and more flexible panels. However, they're currently not as efficient as silicon solar cells, so we're examining how to increase that efficiency."

Imagine accidentally kicking over a silicon solar-powered garden light, only to see the solar-powered cell crack. Polymers are carbon-based materials that are more flexible than the traditional, fragile silicon solar cells. Charge transport, though, has been a limiting factor for polymer solar cell performance.

Graphene, a natural form of carbon, is a relatively newly discovered material that's less than a nanometer thin. "Because graphene is pure carbon, its charge conductivity is very high," explains Yu. "We want to maximize the energy being absorbed by the solar cell, so we are increasing the ratio of the donor to acceptor and we're using a very low fraction of graphene to achieve that."

Yu's research found that efficiency increased threefold by adding graphene, because the material was helping to rapidly transport charges to achieve higher photocurrent. "The increased performance, although well below the highest efficiency achieved in organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices, is nevertheless significant in indicating that pristine graphene can be used as a charge transporter," says Yu.

Yu's advisor, Vikram K. Kuppa, an assistant professor in the School of Energy, Environmental, Biological and Medical Engineering (SEEBME) for the UC College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), was a contributor to the research. Kuppa is leading the research of a variety of polymer-blend solar cells involving the use of graphene.

Future research will focus on device physics, film morphology and how to control and optimize these randomly distributed graphene nanoflakes by a variety of methods to achieve better performance.

Gadgets are becoming faster, smaller and more efficient by tackling the tiniest technology

University of Cincinnati researchers are discovering how to manipulate light to one day better view the world's tiniest objects through a super-lens, as well as how to hide an object in plain sight.

Masoud Kaveh-Baghbadorani, a doctoral student in the University of Cincinnati's physics program, will present this research on March 4, at the American Physical Society Meeting in Denver.

The research focuses on exciting collective oscillations of metal electrons called plasmons, and on directing light through nanometer-thin metal films, about a thousand times thinner than a human hair. The result could empower integrated circuits or facilitate a super-lens with seven times the strength of a standard microscope, opening further research into fields such as studying microorganisms and viruses.

Other applications involve bouncing light around an object by cloaking it with a metamaterial film. Instead of the object reflecting light and thus causing it to be seen, the light manipulation can make it invisible.

Plasmonics is an emerging field, but it has its limitations due to the loss of energy in the metal layers, which dissipate the plasmon energy into heat. Kaveh-Baghbadorani's research focuses on developing hybrid metal/organic nanowires that essentially work as an energy pump to compensate for metal losses in plasmonic nanostructures.

This energy pump results from exciton radiation, an electronic excitement in the semiconductor nanowires. Kaveh-Baghbadorani explains that the exciton functions somewhat like a hydrogen atom -- negative and positive charges are bound together. The research is examining energy transfer from excitons in semiconductor nanowires to different metal materials used to cover the nanowires, as well as the effects of the thickness of covering organic layers in energy transfer.

The researchers want to know how the dynamics of excitons are affected by the use of different organic materials, and how lifetime and energy transferring processes of nanowire excitons are modified by changing the design of the nanowires or the thickness of organic spacer layers.

Kaveh-Baghbadorani's advisor, Hans-Peter Wagner, a UC associate professor of physics, is one of the co-researchers on the project. "To achieve our goal, the knowledge of exciton relaxation and energy-transfer processes in plasmonic semiconductor nanowire heterostructures is of crucial importance," says Wagner, whose lab has a growth facility to allow researchers to produce a variety of plasmonic structures. The lab also has special optical methods to measure exciton relaxation processes on a sub-picosecond time-scale.

The power efficiency for future computer processors increased by Engineering team

Have you ever wondered why your laptop or smartphone feels warm when you're using it? That heat is a byproduct of the microprocessors in your device using electric current to power computer processing functions -- and it is actually wasted energy.

Now, a team led by researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has made major improvements in computer processing using an emerging class of magnetic materials called "multiferroics," and these advances could make future devices far more energy-efficient than current technologies.

With today's device microprocessors, electric current passes through transistors, which are essentially very small electronic switches. Because current involves the movement of electrons, this process produces heat -- which makes devices warm to the touch. These switches can also "leak" electrons, making it difficult to completely turn them off. And as chips continue to get smaller, with more circuits packed into smaller spaces, the amount of wasted heat grows.

The UCLA Engineering team used multiferroic magnetic materials to reduce the amount of power consumed by "logic devices," a type of circuit on a computer chip dedicated to performing functions such as calculations. A multiferroic can be switched on or off by applying alternating voltage -- the difference in electrical potential. It then carries power through the material in a cascading wave through the spins of electrons, a process referred to as a spin wave bus.

A spin wave can be thought of as similar to an ocean wave, which keeps water molecules in essentially the same place while the energy is carried through the water, as opposed to an electric current, which can be envisioned as water flowing through a pipe, said principal investigator Kang L. Wang, UCLA's Raytheon Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN).

"Spin waves open an opportunity to realize fundamentally new ways of computing while solving some of the key challenges faced by scaling of conventional semiconductor technology, potentially creating a new paradigm of spin-based electronics," Wang said.

The UCLA researchers were able to demonstrate that using this multiferroic material to generate spin waves could reduce wasted heat and therefore increase power efficiency for processing by up to 1,000 times. Their research is published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

"Electrical control of magnetism without involving charge currents is a fast-growing area of interest in magnetics research," said co-author Pedram Khalili, a UCLA assistant adjunct professor of electrical engineering. "It can have major implications for future information processing and data-storage devices, and our recent results are exciting in that context."

The researchers previously applied this technology in a similar way to computer memory.

Sergiy Cherepov, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar, was the lead author on the research. Cherepov, Khalili and Wang are members of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Translational Applications of Nanoscale Multiferroic Systems (TANMS), which focuses on multiferroic device applications.

The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Non-Volatile Logic program and the by the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative through the WIN.

Other authors included Juan G. Alzate, Kin Wong , Mark Lewis, Pramey Upadhyaya, Jayshankar Nath and Mingqiang Bao of UCLA's electrical engineering department; Alexandre Bur, Tao Wu and TANMS director Gregory Carman of UCLA's mechanical and aerospace engineering department; and Alexander Khitun, adjunct professor of electrical engineering at UC Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering.

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