| 'I want to be chipped' |
| Charlene Li wants to be chipped. |
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| "I am so ready," says the author and principal analyst for San Francisco-based research and advisory firm the Altimeter Group. |
| She's referring to having a microchip embedded in her body, one that would do many of the things her smartphone could do now. |
| This week science fiction came to the heartland when a small Wisconsin company announced that it would begin implanting microchips into employees hands. The pitch: this will be a convenience for them to ditch the company badge and corporate log-on for computers. Instead, the chip identifies them. |
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| For Li, "as a woman, we don't generally have outside pockets in our clothes, so we have to carry a purse for my keys, and phone and other things. If I had a chip, I wouldn't have to lose things, and I could pay for things, open my car doors, so many options." |
| Tuesday, the Wisconsin firm, Three Square Market, will stage a "chips and salsa," party at its company headquarters near the Minnesota border, where it expects to chip up 50 of its 85 employees. |
| The announcement set up off alarm bells with some readers, who asked about the health risks (experts say they're minimal, for now) and worried about them being evasive. |
| First, a reality check. The tiny, rice-shaped microchips do not have GPS. They are similar to the chip inside smartphones that let us pay for goods at the store by holding it under a reader. They can identify us, but they can't track us—yet. |
| Still, it got us wondering. Beyond company ID and logging onto the computer, how else could an implanted chip improve (or worsen) our lives? |
| We went to a farmer's market this week to ask folks. Their take: |
| —Replace passwords forever. Haley Cameron, 20, a hostess for a Hermosa Beach, Calif. restaurant says she has so many passwords and always forgets them. If they were already in you, "you wouldn't have to memorize things or write them down." |
| —Goodbye passports. "It would be more efficient. At the airport it would be really quick to scan your ID" from the chip, "and you wouldn't have to worry about carrying a lot of paperwork," says Mari Calisto, 17, a Hermosa Beach student. |
| —Ditch the phone. Implant a chip that would allow you to receive phone calls through an accessory earpiece. Like how they communicated in the 2012 remake of Total Recall , when actual phones were implanted in bodies, and the characters held their hands to their ears to make calls. "I wouldn't want to use the phone anymore. It's all about the chips," says Stephen Blackshear, 17, a Hermosa Beach student. |
| —Medical Safety. You could put vital information into the chip, says Bob Hoffman, 71, a retiree in Hermosa Beach. "If someone passed out, they might be able to read from the chip what allergies or medical problems they had." |
| —Keeping track of criminals. Instead of ankle bracelets that monitor the movement of those under custody, "maybe they could trade it for chipping," says Joe Terry, a farmer from Lawndale, California. (Obviously they would have to outfit the chip with GPS as well.) |
| —Buy goods at stores quicker. Amazon is testing a new supermarket concept in Seattle that eliminates cash registers and lets customers pay with an app. For Li, an embedded chip would do even better. "Walk in, walk out, and it knows." (Three Square Market sells kiosks that replace vending machines for employees, and is encouraging paying for food with the chip.) |
| —Business cards are so yesteryear. "When I meet people and they would say, can I connect with you, I say, read my chip," says Li. "There's no exchange of business cards, I'd just show up in their contacts." |
| Click here to listen to our complete interview with Li about being chipped on the #TalkingTech podcast. |
| Meanwhile, in other tech news this week: |
| Apple killed off most of the remaining iPods, marking the end of an era. Apple officially (and quietly) killed off the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle, leaving the iPod Touch as the only remaining version of the company's iconic portable music players. It was the original iPod, introduced in 2001, that led to Apple's massive comeback. |
| Microsoft also put another old favorite on the chopping block—Paint, the program we've used for 32 years to doodle in Windows. A creators update arriving this fall for PC operating system Windows 10 will shift Paint to "deprecated" status, which means the app isn't under active development and may be removed in a future release. Paint will still be around and available for a download in the Windows Store, but it won't be updated in the future. |
| Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was briefly the world's richest man, surpassing fellow Seattle-ite Bill Gates Thursday morning with a net worth of $92.3 billion compared to Gates' $90.8 billion. But by the end of the afternoon, as Amazon shares slid 0.7% ahead of second-quarter earnings, Bezos was back in second place. A drop in Amazon shares Friday, after profits slumped due to high operating expenses, meant Bezos will play second fiddle to the Microsoft co-founder for a while longer. |
| Struggling action-cam maker GoPro revamped two apps aimed at solving a big sharing problem—how to get awesome clips of surfing, biking, roller blading, skateboarding and the like onto social media. With the updated GoPro and QuickStories apps, GoPro users won't have to pull out the memory card, insert it into the computer and wait for the clips to import before pushing them out to social sites like Facebook and Instagram. Now, the updated GoPro app will wirelessly pull the footage directly from the camera to the smartphone and QuikStories will create an automatic edit and tools to share the final product. |
| The huge Total Eclipse is coming on August 21. If you haven't picked up your accessories for viewing yet, and want tips on how to best photograph and get videos of the event, you'll want to read this primer. On the accessories, take it from our Doyle Rice: "Eclipse Blindness ," is a real thing. You'll want to stock up on glasses and filters before they're unavailable. |
| Our Week in Audio: |
| —WTAM. It's not Veteran's Day or Memorial Day today, but there's a website for that, where everyday is Vet's day. We talk with We are the Mighty co-founder David Gale about what he's doing to honor and support the military vet community on this extended #TalkingTech interview. |
| —Review: Moment Accessory Lenses for smartphone. We've all done it: composed a photo on our smartphone, and been disappointed. Gee, I wish there was a real zoom that would get me closer to the action. Well, there are, in the form of accessory lenses that snap right onto your smartphone. We take a hard look. |
| —All about the chips. Our report on the Wisconsin firm embedding chips into the hands of the employees. |
| —The machine helps pick the winners. The German photo app EyeEm has a novel twist on a photo contest. It's using artificial intelligence, the computer, to help select the winners. |
| —In streaming boxes, Apple is way behind. A new report shows Roku, Google and Amazon at the market share top, with Apple TV a distant fourth. Why is that so? We explore, on #TalkingTech. |
| —Those new GoPro apps. We review the revamped GoPro and QuikStories apps for automatic downloads and movie edits, on #TalkingTech. |
| That's it for this week's #TalkingTech newsletter. Ready to be chipped now? |
| If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Just click this link and sign up: usat.ly/2qaIVVQ. We also invite you to subscribe to the #TalkingTech podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Tunein and wherever else you like to hear great online audio, and please follow me on Twitter and on Facebook |
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