Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball Is as Amazing as You’d Expect


RRDDD 1

Erik Asmussen



The scene: a neon-drenched arena of the future, pulsating with bright colors and thumping music. You: a gentlemanly, rectangular, rolling robot, somewhat like a neon, mustachioed version of Borderlands‘ Claptrap. The game: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball , a new multiplayer arena first-person-shooter of sorts from developer Erik Asmussen. Your mood: exuberant.


After floating around Steam’s Early Access paid-beta section for a while, Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball officially released last week for PC, Mac, and Linux, and it’s as fun to play as its name is awesome. At its core, technically you could classify it as an arena/deathmatch-type first-person-shooter, like Quake or Unreal Tournament. But RRDDD riffs on this in a number of creative ways.


For one: movement. The game is played on wheels, so everyone has momentum, maintaining movement even if you stop holding that directional key or look somewhere else. Also the arenas are designed like futuristic skateparks, and moving up a ramp will launch you slightly into the air. It’s an odd shift to traditional movement methods that takes a bit of getting used to. But just like other control styles, it’s the kind of thing that with time can be mastered, allowing for sliding trickshots and other advanced movements.


More importantly, Disco Dodgeball‘s first-person combat is wildly unlike traditional shooters. There are no guns, obviously—your weapons are balls. It’s also a one-hit-kill game, putting it in line with recent local multiplayer favorites like Towerfall and Samurai Gunn. It plays like dodgeball—pick up balls around the arena, fling them at your opponents to knock’em out, catch an incoming ball to eliminate the thrower in turn.



Review: Nocs NS2 Air Monitors v2


The updated version of Nocs’ NS2 wireless bookshelf speakers. The “v2″ has Bluetooth and Spotify Connect in addition to AirPlay,

The updated version of Nocs’ NS2 wireless bookshelf speakers. The “v2″ has Bluetooth and Spotify Connect in addition to AirPlay, Josh Valcarcel/WIRED



I hadn’t heard of the Swedish consumer audio manufacturer Nocs at all when it began sending WIRED review units of its goods a few years ago. But I quickly grew to respect Nocs, especially after it produced a few pairs of excellent earbuds, including the NS400 and the NS600, and a killer pair of on-ear headphones, the NS900.


A couple of Christmases ago, Nocs shipped over the NS2, its set of desktop AirPlay speakers. They’re well-designed: 80 watts, Kevlar drivers, compact 6-inch-tall enclosures, and dressed in either basic black and white or bright colors like orange and yellow. I liked everything about them except for the fact they ran AirPlay. Apple’s wireless media platform works perfectly for some people, but it’s still buggy and unstable for most of us, and too unreliable for me to commit to, especially in a set of speakers costing several hundred dollars.


The NS2s are back now in a “version 2” model priced at $400, and they’re much improved. Nocs has added two additional methods beyond AirPlay to wirelessly play music: Bluetooth and Spotify Connect. The adoption of Bluetooth is what really completes the package, turning a pair of nice-sounding but flawed desktop speakers into a well-rounded audio setup I can easily recommend.


In my testing of the new Nocs, AirPlay was still problematic—it’s susceptible to interference from other wireless networks and devices, and suffers from frequent dropouts in high-traffic areas. (It may work for you, but you’ll know what awaits if you already have a few AirPlay devices in your home). Whenever AirPlay acted up during testing, however, I could just switch to either the Spotify direct-connect mode (better but not perfect) or to Bluetooth (zero hiccups, near flawless).


It’s a shame about AirPlay that even years into the life of the platform and wide adoption among manufacturers, I’m still seeing so many products that barely work as streaming devices. Bluetooth, on the other hand, has done nothing but get better over the last few years. Audio quality, signal stability, and the drain on the battery of whatever mobile device you’re using for playback have all improved. Not to mention that it’s device-agnostic and super-easy to set up. At this point, all of my favorite wireless speakers are either Bluetooth-only, or they have Bluetooth in addition to another platform, like AirPlay or DLNA. And I almost always just use Bluetooth to avoid all the potential hassles of Wi-Fi-based audio.


But you didn’t show up here for a dissertation on streaming platforms. How do these guys sound? They’re great—nice and loud when you want them to be, still crisp and present when they’re playing at background level, and capable of kicking out a big, full sound for bottom-heavy stuff like dance music. I fed them a steady diet of Aphex Twin and Plastikman, and for me, that’s where they really shone. Techno-heads will love them.


By name, they are “monitors”—in the audio world, that term carries the expectation that the speakers will present an audio source as transparently as possible. You shouldn’t expect a “bass boost,” exaggerated mids, or any flavoring of the audio when you buy anything calling itself a monitor. The Nocs are faithful to what you’d expect. They sound tidy.


The cases themselves aren’t smooth, they have a rubbery coating. It’s a nice feature if you’re using them on a bookshelf or a crowded desktop, since you can lean books against them and they’ll provide some grip. One thing you may notice is that the Nocs NS2s look a whole lot like Audioengine’s A2+ desktop monitors. The design is very close visually, and they also sound very much alike (the Nocs are 80W and the Audioengines are 60W). But the Nocs have the wireless tech built in. And they come in all those pretty colors.



How Google’s Silence Helped Net Neutrality Win


Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, joins hands with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015.

Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, joins hands with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP



Before the FCC voted today to adopt new rules that will make it easier for the agency to enforce net neutrality, the agency’s commissioners heard from three people who believe in an open internet: Chad Dickerson, the CEO of Etsy; Veena Sud, the executive Producer of the Netflix-produced serial The Killing; and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.


But they didn’t hear from Google, one of the companies that spent the most money on lobbying five years ago when the FCC last examined the issue.


Google certainly cares about net neutrality. Three years ago, it hired the FCC’s top lawyer, Austin Schlick, and he’s lobbied the FCC several times over the past year, according to the FCC. But there was no Net Neutrality Google Doodle on the front page of the company’s search engine—not even a press statement from the company after the historic FCC vote this morning. And it wasn’t the only one.


We saw much the same thing from other internet giants—Facebook and Microsoft, for instance—that have benefited from the idea of net neutrality and stand to gain financially if big internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon are blocked from charging extra for priority access to their customers.


Aside from Netflix—the large company that would be most directly hammered by any attempt to put toll lanes on the internet—the trench warfare fight for net neutrality was largely waged by small companies, policy groups, and millions of Americans who are fed up with their internet service providers.


“In 2010 large companies like Google, eBay, Microsoft, and Skype, were really important partners in the fight for network neutrality rules,” says Barbara van Schewick, a Stanford professor who has written about net neutrality. “They lobbied the FTC; they send their lobbyists to Congress; they all submitted detailed comments to the FCC. This round of the net neutrality debate was very different.”


The question is: Why?


In some ways, it’s a sign of the times, and a broader, more politically connected tech lobby. Five years ago, there weren’t as many advocacy groups and tech companies with a Washington presence.


Google did not return messages seeking comment Thursday. But observers say that the company may have been discouraged by the results of its 2010 lobbying effort and reluctant to alienate Republican lawmakers by calling for internet regulation. This time around the FCC ended up going with very strong regulation. After today’s rules are adopted it will treat internet companies as easier-to-regulate telecommunications service providers. This is the Title II option, a reference to the “Title II” section that defines these providers in the nation’s telecommunications law.


“Remember when this debate started, Title II was thought to be the nuclear option. So even saying that you supported title ii was perceived to be taking a huge risks,” van Schewick says. “It risked drawing the ire of the Republicans in Congress who might retaliate in various ways.”


But Google and others did enough. In May, when it seemed like the FCC was going to steer clear of Title II, Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and around 150 other tech companies signed a letter warning that if they allowed the ISPs to tack on tolls to content providers, the agency’s proposed rules represented a “grave threat to the internet.”


That letter marked a turning point, van Schewick says. “It was significant that the large technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft also signed on to this letter, because it signaled to everyone in Washington that large companies do care about it.”


But from that point on, it was up to advocacy groups such as Public Knowledge and Engine and the smaller companies, like Etsy, Mozilla, and Reddit to carry on the fight. And they succeed. By September, the FCC’s website had been overwhelmed with nearly 4 million comments, most of which were in favor of net neutrality.


In November, President Barack Obama called for Title II regulation, and by then the momentum was unstoppable. The move toward net neutrality had tech industry support and populist momentum, and the White House offering political cover.


In retrospect, not having Google meant that this version of the net neutrality appeared to be less about big companies slugging it out, and more about the viability of the internet for startups and consumers. “Everyone just assumed that the Googles of the world would lead the way,” says Julie Samuels, Engine’s executive director. “That didn’t happen this time, and still they won.”



New Fabric Tech Could Be Outerwear’s Biggest Advance in 40 Years


Caption TK

A Colorado company has come up with a way to incorporate a waterproof membrane into a single-layer textile. Voormi’s so-called Core Technology can be used to make thinner and less bulky waterproof outerwear. Voormi



There’s a new way to brace yourself against the cold and wet the next time you hit the ski slopes. It’s a material that’s less bulky, more supple, and more comfortable than whatever is in that jacket you’ve been wearing the last few winters.


A small Colorado-based company, Voormi, is touting a technology that produces a waterproof, breathable textile with only a single layer of material. It could be the most significant advancement in outdoor clothing since the first Gore-Tex jacket with a waterproof-breathable membrane debuted in the mid-1970s.


Voormi’s new approach, announced late last month at the Snowsports Industry Association tradeshow, could eventually replace those stiff, bulky weatherproof shells and conventional layering systems in favor of garments that have multiple, customizable properties—wicking and waterproofing, or insulation and windproofing—all while remaining thin and light. At stake is nothing less than a shakeup of what is a $1.5 billion-per-year market in outerwear in the US alone.


“Our angle is to streamline waterproof breathables into a single-layer construction,” says Timm Smith, Voormi’s marketing director. “So it’s 1978 all over again and we just hit the re-start button.”


Let’s back up: William and Bob Gore invented Gore-Tex in 1969 from polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, the base material for Teflon). When rapidly stretched into a thin film, PTFE can become a thin membrane with pores that are smaller than liquid water molecules but larger than water vapor molecules. So it’s impermeable to liquid water like rain or snow, but the moisture you produce as you sweat passes through. Gore-Tex isn’t the only such membrane out there; when the main patent expired in 1997 a number of clothing companies brought out alternative versions.


Membranes—which can be waterproof or just windproof—are the heart of a lot of outdoor clothing, and Voormi’s new technology still uses them. What’s different is how the membrane is applied.


Unlike traditional waterproof-breathable fabrics, which need two layers, Voormi’s new technology is a single-layer textile with a membrane core. It’s lighter, more flexible, and more versatile.


On their own, membranes are pretty fragile. So textile companies laminate the membrane to an outer shell fabric to create a two-layer (2L) textile that can then be cut and stitched into jackets or pants or sleeping bag shells. Most of the time, a third layer—a liner—is added to further improve durability. Fun fact: often that liner layer is polyester tricot, the same material you find in bras.


All of that makes a reasonably functional piece of clothing. But it’s also heavy and bulky due to the layers of fabric, the laminate adhesive, and yards of seam tape needed to cover stitch holes. And all the layers can blunt the membrane’s breathability, making it less effective.


Voormi’s new technique gets rid of the lamination altogether. “Rather than glue a membrane to a fabric, we put the membrane into a knitting machine, knitting a yarn in and around and through the membrane, so we get a single-layer textile with a (membrane) core that’s constructed in the process,” says Smith. “It’s an entirely new platform.”


Caption TK

A cross-section of the single-layer Core Technology textile showing the placement of the waterproof membrane. Voormi



But wait: won’t punching millions of thread holes make the membrane into a sieve? That’s the alchemic moment. In a step Voormi won’t disclose, Smith says the company found a way to reconstitute the integrity of the membrane after the knitting process.


Smith also claims that Voormi can “tune” the membrane’s properties—the balance of waterproofness versus breathability, which is a function of the size of the pores in a membrane. If they’re designing a fabric for a cold but dry environment, like Voormi’s Colorado home, “maybe we cure the membrane back to 70 percent of its waterproofness,” he says. “The ability to custom-balance that level is part of the engineering.”


For anyone used to conventional laminates and ages-old layering approaches, it’s jaw-dropping.


The emphasis in waterproof-breathables has always been on waterproof. That’s why many jackets still have zippered vents. In fact, the standards (led by Gore) on what is truly waterproof are so high that Voormi makes no claim that its garments are 100 percent waterproof. But the company does say that, short of a full-on deluge, they’ll keep you dry, and that they’re more breathable and comfortable than traditional waterproof shells.


Smith says Voormi’s technology works with any kind of membrane, not just waterproof-breathables, and almost any kind of yarn or mix of yarns. Voormi’s own pieces are a wool blend.


“So you could have a single-layer baselayer that’s windproof but still wicks,” explains Smith. “It’s a whole new class of product where we can make a mid-layer that’s a single protective layer—a shirt I can run in and which blocks wind, but won’t get wet from sweat.”


Voormi Drift Hydro

Voormi’s Drift Hydro jacket is the first of the company’s products to feature the new material. Voormi



One of the company’s first offerings, the Drift Hydro, is a genre-bending softshell. It’s deceptively light for a shell piece, and looks and feels more like an insulating mid-layer, with a soft, looped wool on the inside and a brushed hardface outside. Pull on the four-way stretch fabric and a faint, white layer shines from within—the membrane peeking out. For anyone used to conventional laminates and ages-old layering approaches, it’s jaw-dropping.

It all sounds fascinating, but there are a lot of questions about whether they can make this work. Voormi is a tiny brand, located in the equally tiny town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and isn’t well known outside of the hardcore skiing and climbing communities.


The Drift Hydro is one of just three pieces Voormi makes that uses Core Construction, although more are on the way, and it costs $400. Voormi makes all of its clothing in the U.S. from exclusively U.S.-sourced materials, down to the sheep that produce the wool. That’s admirable, but even with flexible domestic manufacturing, you likely won’t find thousands of these on store shelves.


But Voormi isn’t aiming to necessarily become a giant clothing brand. Smith said the goal all along has been to license Core Construction to other companies, much like how W.L. Gore licensed Gore-Tex. From the beginning, Voormi has really been two companies: the clothing maker side and a research and development arm called SWNR (Starting With New Rules).


Both aspects are necessary, because it’s a different world than 1969, Smith points out. Licensing alone wouldn’t work like it did for Gore. “Any big (clothing) company out there has zero incentive to make this because they can sell a baselayer and a mid-layer and a portfolio of things,” he says. Voormi’s retail products are intended to be “a catalyst,” says Smith. SWNR produces the innovations while Voormi proves the concept works technically and commercially.


The company hasn’t signed any major licensing agreements yet. Several are in the works, but Voormi wasn’t prepared to announce partners at the SIA show. So for the time being, Voormi’s own pieces are the only place to find Core Construction. That’s fine with them, for now, because they have bigger plans.


While it has only a handful of employees, the staff is an enviable roster of textile engineers, chemists and other innovators. Founder Dan English was General Manager of Business Solutions at Microsoft; Executive VP of Development Doug Lumb spent 43 years at Polartec, where he helped invent synthetic fleece, among other innovations. English’s son, Dustin, has been testing the gear for years in the harsh Alaskan wilderness as a mountain guide. Even Smith, nominally Voormi’s marketing director, was a chemical engineer for W.L. Gore for 12 years prior to joining Voormi.


“There’s this very cool thing here that is only the very small tip of what’s actually going on (at Voormi),” says Smith. “The things you’ll start to see over the next few years, what you see today as Voormi will make sense in a much bigger context than people see right now.”



Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball Is as Amazing as You’d Expect


RRDDD 1

Erik Asmussen



The scene: a neon-drenched arena of the future, pulsating with bright colors and thumping music. You: a gentlemanly, rectangular, rolling robot, somewhat like a neon, mustachioed version of Borderlands‘ Claptrap. The game: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball , a new multiplayer arena first-person-shooter of sorts from developer Erik Asmussen. Your mood: exuberant.


After floating around Steam’s Early Access paid-beta section for a while, Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball officially released last week for PC, Mac, and Linux, and it’s as fun to play as its name is awesome. At its core, technically you could classify it as an arena/deathmatch-type first-person-shooter, like Quake or Unreal Tournament. But RRDDD riffs on this in a number of creative ways.


For one: movement. The game is played on wheels, so everyone has momentum, maintaining movement even if you stop holding that directional key or look somewhere else. Also the arenas are designed like futuristic skateparks, and moving up a ramp will launch you slightly into the air. It’s an odd shift to traditional movement methods that takes a bit of getting used to. But just like other control styles, it’s the kind of thing that with time can be mastered, allowing for sliding trickshots and other advanced movements.


More importantly, Disco Dodgeball‘s first-person combat is wildly unlike traditional shooters. There are no guns, obviously—your weapons are balls. It’s also a one-hit-kill game, putting it in line with recent local multiplayer favorites like Towerfall and Samurai Gunn. It plays like dodgeball—pick up balls around the arena, fling them at your opponents to knock’em out, catch an incoming ball to eliminate the thrower in turn.



Review: Nocs NS2 Air Monitors v2


The updated version of Nocs’ NS2 wireless bookshelf speakers. The “v2″ has Bluetooth and Spotify Connect in addition to AirPlay,

The updated version of Nocs’ NS2 wireless bookshelf speakers. The “v2″ has Bluetooth and Spotify Connect in addition to AirPlay, Josh Valcarcel/WIRED



I hadn’t heard of the Swedish consumer audio manufacturer Nocs at all when it began sending WIRED review units of its goods a few years ago. But I quickly grew to respect Nocs, especially after it produced a few pairs of excellent earbuds, including the NS400 and the NS600, and a killer pair of on-ear headphones, the NS900.


A couple of Christmases ago, Nocs shipped over the NS2, its set of desktop AirPlay speakers. They’re well-designed: 80 watts, Kevlar drivers, compact 6-inch-tall enclosures, and dressed in either basic black and white or bright colors like orange and yellow. I liked everything about them except for the fact they ran AirPlay. Apple’s wireless media platform works perfectly for some people, but it’s still buggy and unstable for most of us, and too unreliable for me to commit to, especially in a set of speakers costing several hundred dollars.


The NS2s are back now in a “version 2” model priced at $400, and they’re much improved. Nocs has added two additional methods beyond AirPlay to wirelessly play music: Bluetooth and Spotify Connect. The adoption of Bluetooth is what really completes the package, turning a pair of nice-sounding but flawed desktop speakers into a well-rounded audio setup I can easily recommend.


In my testing of the new Nocs, AirPlay was still problematic—it’s susceptible to interference from other wireless networks and devices, and suffers from frequent dropouts in high-traffic areas. (It may work for you, but you’ll know what awaits if you already have a few AirPlay devices in your home). Whenever AirPlay acted up during testing, however, I could just switch to either the Spotify direct-connect mode (better but not perfect) or to Bluetooth (zero hiccups, near flawless).


It’s a shame about AirPlay that even years into the life of the platform and wide adoption among manufacturers, I’m still seeing so many products that barely work as streaming devices. Bluetooth, on the other hand, has done nothing but get better over the last few years. Audio quality, signal stability, and the drain on the battery of whatever mobile device you’re using for playback have all improved. Not to mention that it’s device-agnostic and super-easy to set up. At this point, all of my favorite wireless speakers are either Bluetooth-only, or they have Bluetooth in addition to another platform, like AirPlay or DLNA. And I almost always just use Bluetooth to avoid all the potential hassles of Wi-Fi-based audio.


But you didn’t show up here for a dissertation on streaming platforms. How do these guys sound? They’re great—nice and loud when you want them to be, still crisp and present when they’re playing at background level, and capable of kicking out a big, full sound for bottom-heavy stuff like dance music. I fed them a steady diet of Aphex Twin and Plastikman, and for me, that’s where they really shone. Techno-heads will love them.


By name, they are “monitors”—in the audio world, that term carries the expectation that the speakers will present an audio source as transparently as possible. You shouldn’t expect a “bass boost,” exaggerated mids, or any flavoring of the audio when you buy anything calling itself a monitor. The Nocs are faithful to what you’d expect. They sound tidy.


The cases themselves aren’t smooth, they have a rubbery coating. It’s a nice feature if you’re using them on a bookshelf or a crowded desktop, since you can lean books against them and they’ll provide some grip. One thing you may notice is that the Nocs NS2s look a whole lot like Audioengine’s A2+ desktop monitors. The design is very close visually, and they also sound very much alike (the Nocs are 80W and the Audioengines are 60W). But the Nocs have the wireless tech built in. And they come in all those pretty colors.



How Google’s Silence Helped Net Neutrality Win


Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, joins hands with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015.

Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, joins hands with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP



Before the FCC voted today to adopt new rules that will make it easier for the agency to enforce net neutrality, the agency’s commissioners heard from three people who believe in an open internet: Chad Dickerson, the CEO of Etsy; Veena Sud, the executive Producer of the Netflix-produced serial The Killing; and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.


But they didn’t hear from Google, one of the companies that spent the most money on lobbying five years ago when the FCC last examined the issue.


Google certainly cares about net neutrality. Three years ago, it hired the FCC’s top lawyer, Austin Schlick, and he’s lobbied the FCC several times over the past year, according to the FCC. But there was no Net Neutrality Google Doodle on the front page of the company’s search engine—not even a press statement from the company after the historic FCC vote this morning. And it wasn’t the only one.


We saw much the same thing from other internet giants—Facebook and Microsoft, for instance—that have benefited from the idea of net neutrality and stand to gain financially if big internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon are blocked from charging extra for priority access to their customers.


Aside from Netflix—the large company that would be most directly hammered by any attempt to put toll lanes on the internet—the trench warfare fight for net neutrality was largely waged by small companies, policy groups, and millions of Americans who are fed up with their internet service providers.


“In 2010 large companies like Google, eBay, Microsoft, and Skype, were really important partners in the fight for network neutrality rules,” says Barbara van Schewick, a Stanford professor who has written about net neutrality. “They lobbied the FTC; they send their lobbyists to Congress; they all submitted detailed comments to the FCC. This round of the net neutrality debate was very different.”


The question is: Why?


In some ways, it’s a sign of the times, and a broader, more politically connected tech lobby. Five years ago, there weren’t as many advocacy groups and tech companies with a Washington presence.


Google did not return messages seeking comment Thursday. But observers say that the company may have been discouraged by the results of its 2010 lobbying effort and reluctant to alienate Republican lawmakers by calling for internet regulation. This time around the FCC ended up going with very strong regulation. After today’s rules are adopted it will treat internet companies as easier-to-regulate telecommunications service providers. This is the Title II option, a reference to the “Title II” section that defines these providers in the nation’s telecommunications law.


“Remember when this debate started, Title II was thought to be the nuclear option. So even saying that you supported title ii was perceived to be taking a huge risks,” van Schewick says. “It risked drawing the ire of the Republicans in Congress who might retaliate in various ways.”


But Google and others did enough. In May, when it seemed like the FCC was going to steer clear of Title II, Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and around 150 other tech companies signed a letter warning that if they allowed the ISPs to tack on tolls to content providers, the agency’s proposed rules represented a “grave threat to the internet.”


That letter marked a turning point, van Schewick says. “It was significant that the large technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft also signed on to this letter, because it signaled to everyone in Washington that large companies do care about it.”


But from that point on, it was up to advocacy groups such as Public Knowledge and Engine and the smaller companies, like Etsy, Mozilla, and Reddit to carry on the fight. And they succeed. By September, the FCC’s website had been overwhelmed with nearly 4 million comments, most of which were in favor of net neutrality.


In November, President Barack Obama called for Title II regulation, and by then the momentum was unstoppable. The move toward net neutrality had tech industry support and populist momentum, and the White House offering political cover.


In retrospect, not having Google meant that this version of the net neutrality appeared to be less about big companies slugging it out, and more about the viability of the internet for startups and consumers. “Everyone just assumed that the Googles of the world would lead the way,” Samuelson says. “That didn’t happen this time, and still they won.”



New Fabric Tech Could Be Outerwear’s Biggest Advance in 40 Years


Caption TK

A Colorado company has come up with a way to incorporate a waterproof membrane into a single-layer textile. Voormi’s so-called Core Technology can be used to make thinner and less bulky waterproof outerwear. Voormi



There’s a new way to brace yourself against the cold and wet the next time you hit the ski slopes. It’s a material that’s less bulky, more supple, and more comfortable than whatever is in that jacket you’ve been wearing the last few winters.


A small Colorado-based company, Voormi, is touting a technology that produces a waterproof, breathable textile with only a single layer of material. It could be the most significant advancement in outdoor clothing since the first Gore-Tex jacket with a waterproof-breathable membrane debuted in the mid-1970s.


Voormi’s new approach, announced late last month at the Snowsports Industry Association tradeshow, could eventually replace those stiff, bulky weatherproof shells and conventional layering systems in favor of garments that have multiple, customizable properties—wicking and waterproofing, or insulation and windproofing—all while remaining thin and light. At stake is nothing less than a shakeup of what is a $1.5 billion-per-year market in outerwear in the US alone.


“Our angle is to streamline waterproof breathables into a single-layer construction,” says Timm Smith, Voormi’s marketing director. “So it’s 1978 all over again and we just hit the re-start button.”


Let’s back up: William and Bob Gore invented Gore-Tex in 1969 from polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, the base material for Teflon). When rapidly stretched into a thin film, PTFE can become a thin membrane with pores that are smaller than liquid water molecules but larger than water vapor molecules. So it’s impermeable to liquid water like rain or snow, but the moisture you produce as you sweat passes through. Gore-Tex isn’t the only such membrane out there; when the main patent expired in 1997 a number of clothing companies brought out alternative versions.


Membranes—which can be waterproof or just windproof—are the heart of a lot of outdoor clothing, and Voormi’s new technology still uses them. What’s different is how the membrane is applied.


Unlike traditional waterproof-breathable fabrics, which need two layers, Voormi’s new technology is a single-layer textile with a membrane core. It’s lighter, more flexible, and more versatile.


On their own, membranes are pretty fragile. So textile companies laminate the membrane to an outer shell fabric to create a two-layer (2L) textile that can then be cut and stitched into jackets or pants or sleeping bag shells. Most of the time, a third layer—a liner—is added to further improve durability. Fun fact: often that liner layer is polyester tricot, the same material you find in bras.


All of that makes a reasonably functional piece of clothing. But it’s also heavy and bulky due to the layers of fabric, the laminate adhesive, and yards of seam tape needed to cover stitch holes. And all the layers can blunt the membrane’s breathability, making it less effective.


Voormi’s new technique gets rid of the lamination altogether. “Rather than glue a membrane to a fabric, we put the membrane into a knitting machine, knitting a yarn in and around and through the membrane, so we get a single-layer textile with a (membrane) core that’s constructed in the process,” says Smith. “It’s an entirely new platform.”


Caption TK

A cross-section of the single-layer Core Technology textile showing the placement of the waterproof membrane. Voormi



But wait: won’t punching millions of thread holes make the membrane into a sieve? That’s the alchemic moment. In a step Voormi won’t disclose, Smith says the company found a way to reconstitute the integrity of the membrane after the knitting process.


Smith also claims that Voormi can “tune” the membrane’s properties—the balance of waterproofness versus breathability, which is a function of the size of the pores in a membrane. If they’re designing a fabric for a cold but dry environment, like Voormi’s Colorado home, “maybe we cure the membrane back to 70 percent of its waterproofness,” he says. “The ability to custom-balance that level is part of the engineering.”


For anyone used to conventional laminates and ages-old layering approaches, it’s jaw-dropping.


The emphasis in waterproof-breathables has always been on waterproof. That’s why many jackets still have zippered vents. In fact, the standards (led by Gore) on what is truly waterproof are so high that Voormi makes no claim that its garments are 100 percent waterproof. But the company does say that, short of a full-on deluge, they’ll keep you dry, and that they’re more breathable and comfortable than traditional waterproof shells.


Smith says Voormi’s technology works with any kind of membrane, not just waterproof-breathables, and almost any kind of yarn or mix of yarns. Voormi’s own pieces are a wool blend.


“So you could have a single-layer baselayer that’s windproof but still wicks,” explains Smith. “It’s a whole new class of product where we can make a mid-layer that’s a single protective layer—a shirt I can run in and which blocks wind, but won’t get wet from sweat.”


Voormi Drift Hydro

Voormi’s Drift Hydro jacket is the first of the company’s products to feature the new material. Voormi



One of the company’s first offerings, the Drift Hydro, is a genre-bending softshell. It’s deceptively light for a shell piece, and looks and feels more like an insulating mid-layer, with a soft, looped wool on the inside and a brushed hardface outside. Pull on the four-way stretch fabric and a faint, white layer shines from within—the membrane peeking out. For anyone used to conventional laminates and ages-old layering approaches, it’s jaw-dropping.

It all sounds fascinating, but there are a lot of questions about whether they can make this work. Voormi is a tiny brand, located in the equally tiny town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and isn’t well known outside of the hardcore skiing and climbing communities.


The Drift Hydro is one of just three pieces Voormi makes that uses Core Construction, although more are on the way, and it costs $400. Voormi makes all of its clothing in the U.S. from exclusively U.S.-sourced materials, down to the sheep that produce the wool. That’s admirable, but even with flexible domestic manufacturing, you likely won’t find thousands of these on store shelves.


But Voormi isn’t aiming to necessarily become a giant clothing brand. Smith said the goal all along has been to license Core Construction to other companies, much like how W.L. Gore licensed Gore-Tex. From the beginning, Voormi has really been two companies: the clothing maker side and a research and development arm called SWNR (Starting With New Rules).


Both aspects are necessary, because it’s a different world than 1969, Smith points out. Licensing alone wouldn’t work like it did for Gore. “Any big (clothing) company out there has zero incentive to make this because they can sell a baselayer and a mid-layer and a portfolio of things,” he says. Voormi’s retail products are intended to be “a catalyst,” says Smith. SWNR produces the innovations while Voormi proves the concept works technically and commercially.


The company hasn’t signed any major licensing agreements yet. Several are in the works, but Voormi wasn’t prepared to announce partners at the SIA show. So for the time being, Voormi’s own pieces are the only place to find Core Construction. That’s fine with them, for now, because they have bigger plans.


While it has only a handful of employees, the staff is an enviable roster of textile engineers, chemists and other innovators. Founder Dan English was General Manager of Business Solutions at Microsoft; Executive VP of Development Doug Lumb spent 43 years at Polartec, where he helped invent synthetic fleece, among other innovations. English’s son, Dustin, has been testing the gear for years in the harsh Alaskan wilderness as a mountain guide. Even Smith, nominally Voormi’s marketing director, was a chemical engineer for W.L. Gore for 12 years prior to joining Voormi.


“There’s this very cool thing here that is only the very small tip of what’s actually going on (at Voormi),” says Smith. “The things you’ll start to see over the next few years, what you see today as Voormi will make sense in a much bigger context than people see right now.”



Good News! Kids Aren’t Dying as Much as They Used To


Children play soccer in Unification Town, Liberia, on Friday Oct. 3, 2014.

Children play soccer in Unification Town, Liberia, on Friday Oct. 3, 2014. Jerome Delay/AP



On a blog post at PLOS, the tropical disease expert Peter Hotez and postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Herricks take a run through the data on the biggest killers of children around the world in 2013, part of a new dataset from Global Burden of Disease study published in the January Lancet . The main one is malaria, which killed more than half a million kids in 2013, dwarfing the other causes of death—pneumonia killed about half as many, and whooping cough a tenth.


Hotez and Herricks rightly point out that what’s interesting here is how many of these diseases are preventable with vaccinations. The fact that a technology exists, though, doesn’t always translate into it being deployed. They write:



Just having a vaccine developed and manufactured is not always the complete answer. Of the dozen or so killer diseases of children, five of them are infections for which vaccines are available – pneumococcal pneumonia, rotavirus enteritis, Haemophilus influenza type b pneumonia, measles, and whooping cough.



In other words, getting medicine and vaccine to remote areas is hard.


Here’s a chart of the numbers they post from the study, which looked at yearly deaths for kids under 59 months for almost 200 countries between 1990 and 2013.


chart_grid_1


You look at that and you think, “Mmm, not so great.”


But that’s not the only takeaway from the Lancet data. One of the figures in the Lancet study, a fascinating slopegraph, shows the change in position of several dozen causes of death over time. And it makes the news seem not so grim for kids. For example, preterm birth was the third most common cause of death in 1990, but it dropped to 7th most common cause of death in 2013. Yay? Kinda? We wanted to get a sense of how diseases that specifically affect children have changed over time, so we looked at the percent shift in the main mortality factors for the under-fives (and in a few cases the under-one-months) between 1990 and 2013.


chart_grid_2


Ah! Suddenly that’s not looking quite so depressing. Deaths from a host of diseases, from tetanus (preventable with a vaccine) to malnutrition (preventable with food) are down. Death from HIV/AIDS are up from 1990. Malaria is holding steady.


Well, actually, it’s kind of even better than that. AIDS, for example, says Hotez, who is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, went up from 1990 until 2003, then started going down. He points to another Lancet study from last year.


Check out figure 7. AIDS deaths are higher in 2013 than they were in 1990, which is bad, but they’re heading in the right direction, which is downward. Same with malaria. It went up before it started going down, and this particular chart masks that hump shape. Hotez and I puzzled a bit over the drops in drowning (maybe a public education campaign?) and road deaths. Would those drops be due to better hospital care I wondered, for people who had been in accidents? Or said Hotez, maybe something simpler, even, than that: seatbelts.



As Search Revenue Growth Slows, Google Opens Play Store to Ads


In an apparent attempt to better compete with Facebook and others in the mobile advertising market, Google is now running ads in its mobile app store, Google Play.


The change, which Google revealed in a blog post, isn’t all that surprising. With its search-driven ads, Google effectively proved that digital advertising could be an enormous business. And yet, as the world has made the shift to mobile, Google’s search revenue growth has slowed, forcing the tech giant to seek out new avenues of expansion, including everything from self-driving car technology to wearables. Compared to these moonshot projects, moving into the world of app advertising should be a much simpler transition.


The Google Play store already reaches more than one billion people on Android devices, according to Google’s blog post. The company also says it has paid out $7 billion over the last year to developers who distribute their apps in the store. In other words, the Play Store is already a darn good place for developers, and now, Google wants to make it more appealing—and more lucrative for Google.


By enabling developers to promote their apps in the Play store, Google is competing head-on with Facebook, a company whose success in the mobile advertising space has a lot to do with its app install ads. According to The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, that’s one reason why this week, Google acquired Toro a startup that makes Facebook ads for developers.


An app store is, perhaps, one of the few places where ads are welcomed by consumers. With an ever growing sea of options, ads can help narrow a smartphone user’s search, just as they have with traditional search. Other platforms, like Pinterest, are also trying to solve this problem, recently announcing a partnership with Apple, which allows iPhone users to save apps to their Pinterest boards and install them directly from Pinterest. Though Pinterest said it wasn’t planning to monetize that feature just yet, there’s little doubt that apps will soon be part of Pinterest’s own advertising efforts in the near future.


Google, for its part, plans to roll out Google Play ads slowly, according to the company blog post. For now, they’re only available to a select group of advertisers, with plans to expand the platform in the coming months.



Digital Wallets: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?


apple-pay-ft

Alex Washburn / WIRED



Apple Pay is up and running and digital wallets are back in the limelight. Are merchants, consumers, and the market ready for mass adoption of digital wallets? Google Wallet’s poor early uptake comes to mind four years after its launch in 2011. We believe a combination of factors – part structural, part user experience – will drive the next and larger cycle in digital wallet adoption. Apple Pay will be a key enabler, it will neither be alone nor, the necessary winner.


The mobile wallet space has been fragmented without a clear leader. By this time next year we will have our leaders in place. Payment systems and currencies are either universal or limited, this has been true as long as records have been written down, carved into rock or told of around the campfire. The more limited the usability, the less likely a digital wallet is to keep users engaged as infrastructure catches up with entrenched payment methods. Past brushes with digital wallet greatness have withered on the cloud as insecure, less than seamless alternatives to boring analogue cash and plastic cards. Lack of a universal technology standard, disparate interests of stakeholders, and poor user experience, have severely limited adoption and growth. Apple Pay has begun to change this, quickly, given the short and still limited rollout of the service. Google’s recent moves with SoftCard from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and Samsung’s purchase of Loop Pay suggest the future is arriving fast.


Fortunately for the industry, a perfect confluence of contextual realities has formed to allow rapid evolution of wide spread digital wallets adoption. The secular facts on the ground are: near-ubiquitous presence of NFC (Near Field Communications) POS terminals; October 2015 deadline for retailers to upgrade to Europay Mastercard and Visa (EMV) enabled POS terminals; and several massive hacks costing merchants and banks millions while driving up interest in newer, safer, payment. New fears, financial institution desire to take information out of the seemingly vulnerable clutches of merchants and new EMV POS terminals are all constructive/compatible with NFC technology. Lastly, the introduction of Apple Pay- offering secure, seamless experience with Apple’s allure- has focused the markets and teased out rapid responses from cellular providers, Google, Samsung and other market players.


The biggest hurdle for digital wallets has been the lack of NFC-enabled terminals. We are 4 long years into Google Wallet, and nearly half a year into Apple Pay and there are only about 220,000 live contactless merchant locations out of about 8 million U.S. card-accepting locations. Further, many NFC locations are vending machines. It is expensive for retailers to upgrade their hardware and the consumer has not been demanding change. There is always a self re-enforcing cycle. Either, consumers demand and drive change through adoption or merchants build it and everyone hopes that they come. The retailers blinked, not necessarily by choice. In the U.S., retailers want data on browsers and shoppers, feel the hot breath of ecommerce on their necks and need to transition to EMV. Millions of merchants must move to EMV – a chip and PIN technology vs. magnetic stripe on a card – by October 2015 card networks will pass risk of fraudulent charges to retailers who haven’t adopted the new standard. The vast majority of chip-card-reading terminals being deployed are equipped with NFC chips, which work with EMV terminals and support contactless payment. NFC digital wallets will work with the majority of new terminals being rolled out this year.


Security and user experience are the key deliverables from digital wallets. While Google Wallet and others had security built in, Apple Pay has taken it to the next level with tokenization of card numbers, Touch ID fingerprint biometrics, and on-device storage. None of this involves new or difficult to replicate software, hardware, or integration. Apple has appealed, very successfully, to banks and credit unions by not claiming user data – like Google – and by assuming the liability and removing the merchant as a fraud breach point in the payment chain. Apple Pay has appealed to banks, credit unions, and consumers by offering a simple, fast and private way to pay. This is important because one of the factors holding back Google Wallet and Softcard has been scant issuer support. Apple is working with 11 credit card issuers that it says represent 83% of U.S. charge volume, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and American Express.


The oft projected and repeatedly announced digital wallet future is emerging. Apple Pay has jumped out to an early lead and breathed new life and urgency into this space. Google has already struck a new partnership with SoftCard and Samsung has purchased LoopPay. We expect the dominant hardware firms in the globe straddling smart phone business, the duopoly leaders in mobile operating systems and the largest financial institutions and cellular carriers will articulate and dominate next generation payments in short order. We are confident this is the beginning of the end of the battle for digital wallet dominance and not another end of the beginning.


Max Wolff, an economist and strategist, is managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners.



The FCC’s Vote to Protect Net Neutrality Is a Huge Win for the Internet


Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015.

Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP



The internet is getting a regulatory re-wiring.


In an historic 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission said it would change the way the nation’s internet service providers are regulated. For net neutrality advocates the vote is a major victory; for the nation’s internet service providers, a rebuke.


“The internet is the most powerful and pervasive platform on the planet,” said FCC Tom Wheeler during a public meeting ahead of the vote. “It’s simply too important to be left without rules and without a referee on the field.”


The 317 page order, entitled Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet, will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register, a process that’s expected to take several weeks.


With the vote, the FCC is changing the way it views both wireless and fixed-line broadband service providers, reclassifying them as “Title II” common carriers under the nation’s telecommunications laws. The Title II designation, which already covers voice services, gives the FCC the ability to set rates, open up access to competitors, and generally more closely regulate the broadband industry. It’s a reversal of course for the FCC, which until now did not even enforce net neutrality rules on wireless broadband services, and very lightly regulated fixed providers. But it’s also a return to the regulatory regime that governed consumer internet services 20 years ago, when hundreds of dial-up internet service providers competed on Title II-regulated phone networks.


Internet service providers and Republican commissioners on the FCC see the new rules as unnecessary and dangerous government interference. “The internet is not broken,” said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. “There is no problem for the government to solve.”


Ironically, today’s vote was first set in motion by a series of lawsuits dating back several years, which challenged the FCC’s ability to enforce it’s own net neutrality regulations. Last year the latest legal challenge ended when a D.C. court ruled in Verizon’s favor, saying that the way that the FCC had classified internet services didn’t give it the right to enforce net neutrality.


A year ago, Chairman Wheeler said that the FCC could find a new way to enforce net neutrality without the Title II designation. But in November, the man who appointed wheeler, President Barack Obama, called for Title II. In retrospect, that made today’s vote inevitable, although Wheeler said today that he was looking at the Title II option months before Obama’s statement.


Service providers are worried because, in theory at least, Title II now gives the FCC the authority to set rates in the cable industry, and to regulate the back-end of the internet—where service providers have recently begun charging content providers, such as Netflix, fees to host their content in their own data centers, a practice that is essential to smooth movie-streaming . The Commission has taken pains to say that it won’t regulate rates, but that it will ensure that nobody’s internet traffic is blocked or unfairly prioritized by service providers


“It is a historic day in the history of the Internet,” said the man who coined the term “net neutrality,” Columbia University professor Tim Wu in an emailed statement. “Net neutrality, long in existence as a principle, has been codified in a way that will likely survive court scrutiny. More generally, this marks the beginning of an entirely new era of how communications are regulated in the United States.”


Update: 14:00 02/26/2015 This story has been updated to add comment from the FCC’s press conference and from Tim Wu.



Ex-Amazon Cloud Computing Pioneer Joins Software Company Pivotal


Benjamin Black.

Benjamin Black. courtesy Benjamin Black



Benjamin Black—who claims a role in the creation of modern cloud computing at Amazon—is now joining one of the key companies providing the rather complex tools that allow the world’s businesses to fashion their own cloud computing services.


This week, Black moved to Pivotal, the rather ambitious outfit spun out of big-name tech companies EMC and VMware. From his home base in Seattle, the former Amazon and Microsoft engineer will run what he calls an “internet-of-things” lab, helping Pivotal develop tools that allow businesses to juggle data from a wide range of disparate computing devices, including environmental sensors.


“These are sensors that indicate a car went over a certain point on the road, temperature and humidity sensors in a soy bean field,” he says. “What you need is the ability to do sometimes-simple, sometimes-sophisticated analytics with these, so that, ultimately, you can see a picture emerge from a vast collection of tiny dots.”


Pivotal offers a wide range of tools for building online services that can drive sweeping software applications and juggle data across thousands of machines—in other words, online services for the modern world. The company’s work is centered around a piece of software called Cloud Foundry, and Black’s work will dovetail with this foundational tool.


While at Amazon a decade ago, Black helped gestate the idea of the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud, the service that kickstarted modern cloud computing, letting businesses and developers run websites and other software without setting up their own hardware. Such services changed the way the world built software. As a result, Microsoft and Google started offering similar cloud services, and old school hardware makers like HP, Dell, and EMC were forced to revamped their businesses.


Black’s move to Pivotal a convenient symbol for this changing world.



Audio Visuals: Sleater-Kinney Gets Cartooned for Their Bob’s Burgers-Themed Video


The glow of high-end music videos shines brightly in this week’s round-up. Beautiful cinematography, rich lighting, celebrity cameos—this collection of clips just oozes class. But true to the egalitarian spirit of the Internet, we’ve also made space for the budget ballers out there in music land. Here are WIRED’s favorite audio visuals of the week.


“A New Wave”—Sleater-Kinney



Digital Wallets: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?


apple-pay-ft

Alex Washburn / WIRED



Apple Pay is up and running and digital wallets are back in the limelight. Are merchants, consumers, and the market ready for mass adoption of digital wallets? Google Wallet’s poor early uptake comes to mind four years after its launch in 2011. We believe a combination of factors – part structural, part user experience – will drive the next and larger cycle in digital wallet adoption. Apple Pay will be a key enabler, it will neither be alone nor, the necessary winner.


The mobile wallet space has been fragmented without a clear leader. By this time next year we will have our leaders in place. Payment systems and currencies are either universal or limited, this has been true as long as records have been written down, carved into rock or told of around the campfire. The more limited the usability, the less likely a digital wallet is to keep users engaged as infrastructure catches up with entrenched payment methods. Past brushes with digital wallet greatness have withered on the cloud as insecure, less than seamless alternatives to boring analogue cash and plastic cards. Lack of a universal technology standard, disparate interests of stakeholders, and poor user experience, have severely limited adoption and growth. Apple Pay has begun to change this, quickly, given the short and still limited rollout of the service. Google’s recent moves with SoftCard from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and Samsung’s purchase of Loop Pay suggest the future is arriving fast.


Fortunately for the industry, a perfect confluence of contextual realities has formed to allow rapid evolution of wide spread digital wallets adoption. The secular facts on the ground are: near-ubiquitous presence of NFC (Near Field Communications) POS terminals; October 2015 deadline for retailers to upgrade to Europay Mastercard and Visa (EMV) enabled POS terminals; and several massive hacks costing merchants and banks millions while driving up interest in newer, safer, payment. New fears, financial institution desire to take information out of the seemingly vulnerable clutches of merchants and new EMV POS terminals are all constructive/compatible with NFC technology. Lastly, the introduction of Apple Pay- offering secure, seamless experience with Apple’s allure- has focused the markets and teased out rapid responses from cellular providers, Google, Samsung and other market players.


The biggest hurdle for digital wallets has been the lack of NFC-enabled terminals. We are 4 long years into Google Wallet, and nearly half a year into Apple Pay and there are only about 220,000 live contactless merchant locations out of about 8 million U.S. card-accepting locations. Further, many NFC locations are vending machines. It is expensive for retailers to upgrade their hardware and the consumer has not been demanding change. There is always a self re-enforcing cycle. Either, consumers demand and drive change through adoption or merchants build it and everyone hopes that they come. The retailers blinked, not necessarily by choice. In the U.S., retailers want data on browsers and shoppers, feel the hot breath of ecommerce on their necks and need to transition to EMV. Millions of merchants must move to EMV – a chip and PIN technology vs. magnetic stripe on a card – by October 2015 card networks will pass risk of fraudulent charges to retailers who haven’t adopted the new standard. The vast majority of chip-card-reading terminals being deployed are equipped with NFC chips, which work with EMV terminals and support contactless payment. NFC digital wallets will work with the majority of new terminals being rolled out this year.


Security and user experience are the key deliverables from digital wallets. While Google Wallet and others had security built in, Apple Pay has taken it to the next level with tokenization of card numbers, Touch ID fingerprint biometrics, and on-device storage. None of this involves new or difficult to replicate software, hardware, or integration. Apple has appealed, very successfully, to banks and credit unions by not claiming user data – like Google – and by assuming the liability and removing the merchant as a fraud breach point in the payment chain. Apple Pay has appealed to banks, credit unions, and consumers by offering a simple, fast and private way to pay. This is important because one of the factors holding back Google Wallet and Softcard has been scant issuer support. Apple is working with 11 credit card issuers that it says represent 83% of U.S. charge volume, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and American Express.


The oft projected and repeatedly announced digital wallet future is emerging. Apple Pay has jumped out to an early lead and breathed new life and urgency into this space. Google has already struck a new partnership with SoftCard and Samsung has purchased LoopPay. We expect the dominant hardware firms in the globe straddling smart phone business, the duopoly leaders in mobile operating systems and the largest financial institutions and cellular carriers will articulate and dominate next generation payments in short order. We are confident this is the beginning of the end of the battle for digital wallet dominance and not another end of the beginning.


Max Wolff, an economist and strategist, is managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners.