Demo 2013 – New ideas not just for smartphones
October 2013 – The Demo Fall 2013 event in Santa Clara had a large diversity of software and solutions. In a time when new developments and innovation seem constrained to just being an android or iOS app, the Demo team located a number of new products in a larger variety of spaces. The show covered security for mobile and the enterprise side, health care, finance and transactions, and several new software solutions that supported new hardware including Google Glass.
We found three products that stood out at the show – GlassPay by Red Bottle Design, the NuRoast system from NuRoast Inc, and SnoopWall by SnoopWall, Inc.
GlassPay is a software solution from Red Bottle Design that is designed for Google Glass to serve as a payment solution for small businesses and artisan merchants. Based in NY, they created a solution that can read bar codes for products or QR codes for products and store them in a virtual shopping cart in the glasses. From there the transactions can be handles with Bitcoin or Litecoin without the typical 2.5% merchant card processing overhead of standard credit cards. The solution is encrypted between the glasses and the phone and the transaction follows security protocols for the virtual currency provider. They are targeting the product as an alternative to Square and PayPal, to the community of both major retail shopping with on-shelf bar codes and artisan/boutique product sellers who have common skus for multiple products.
NuRoast is bringing out the next generation of gourmet coffee to the general consumer and businesses. They have introduced a self contained personal roaster for coffee beans that produces 10-12 cups of brewed coffee’s worth of beans in a desktop enclosure in 6-10 minutes. The all steel can cartridges are full recyclable after use and can be programmed in the machine for a variety of roasts. The different types and batches of beans are actually brewed and taste tested at NuRoast and the different roasting settings are described on the boxes. The whole beans are then available for use in the coffee maker of choice of the customer, and this produces the richest and freshest tasting coffee possible – fresh roasted, fresh ground and fresh brewed – entire cycle under 15min on your counter top. The product is currently undergoing UL certification for home and business conference room use.
SnoopWall was showing a countersurvellience product for smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Unlike standard malware and viruses, the SnoopWall product checks for active but non-standard or un-necessary activity on these devices by programs that have been intentionally installed. Examples include messaging programs that enable the camera or GPS, gaming programs that send malevolent status and banking information if you try to access in game purchases. For most simple activities, enabling the microphone and cameras are un-necessary and their use is a sign that some non-standard activity that was not planned is being performed. The SnoopWall software is a program that runs in the background on the devices even on single core CPU devices, and monitors the I/O traffic and peripherals activity. These are checked against known performance profiles, and unplanned activities are halted until a user prompt identifying the activity is either cancelled or accepted by the user. These capabilities have been available for some time in enterprise solutions based on policy control and central administration definitions, but have not been available to the standard consumer and non-administrator user on mobile platforms. Their solutions is multi-platform and supports Android, iOS and Windows hardware.
