Category: Apps

Oxygen has now launched its smartphone payments app service that provides users a new way to pay and get paid.

Provider of payment solutions, Oxygen, has now announced the launch of its mobile wallet service, called the Oxygen Wallet, which provides users the ability to transfer money and buy gifts for family and friends with whom they are connected over social networks.

This service can also be used for bill payments, refilling cell phone service accounts, and shopping.

According to the chairman and managing director of Oxygen, Pramod Saxena, “Ours is the country’s first social mobile wallet service through which people can share money with their friends and family over their preferred social networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+, and Twitter.”

It is expected that the top users of this mobile wallet will be youth when they want to split bills with friends.

The service will give these individuals the chance to send smaller but frequent amounts of money or gifts to their friends. When they head to restaurants and they want to split the bill, they can easily transfer their share of the total to the individual who has covered the whole thing.

Saxena explained that they will be able to use the Oxygen Wallet to be able to pay their bills, to make payments on mobile commerce sites such as when purchasing movie tickets, to pay for pizza orders, to make travel ticket bookings, to pay for movie and music downloads, and to pay for their mobile service charges.

He added that “Oxigen now sees the opportunity to leverage the social connect to India’s 900 million mobile users and 100 million Facebook accounts, where the youth is rapidly adopting social media apps like WhatsApp, Twitter etc.”

The mobile wallet apps is now available on both the Google Play Store and on the Apple Store. According to Saxena, it gives users the ability to be able to send funds to their connections through their favorite social media channels without ever having to actually share any of the information about their own bank account or about the accounts of the recipient.

Crowdsourced policing apps allow mobile users to report illegal fishing.

Although reporting illegal fishing using smartphone apps will not eliminate the problem of overfishing entirely, certain mobile technology, such as reporting apps like ShipWatch, make it easier for users to quickly and conveniently report suspicious fishing activity they might witness, which could help improve local enforcement in the area.

Countries do not lack fishing rules but they have a hard time enforcing laws.

Globally, it is estimated that three quarters of fishing grounds are overfished. What this means is that fish are being removed from waters at a quicker rate than the population is being replenished. One of the main reasons this problem exists is people engage in unlawful fishing practices.

Strict laws do exist around the world for fishing grounds, but it is not always easy to enforce them. For instance, in Ghana, there are certain fishing bans, but the country does not have the necessary resources that would enable it to adequately police its coastline. Approximately a third of all fishing that takes place across this West African region is done so illegally.

Mobile technology may be key in helping this problem.

According to Nature Conservancy Senior Technologist Matt Merrifield, “There are laws in place to say [the fishing] is illegal. The problem is they lack any kind of reporting mechanism. Our idea is to build out a little citizen science tool for any fisherman who’s out there on water. They can take a photo and report these guys.”

Merrifield recently worked on ShipWatch, a reporting app, for a Fishakathon event that was organized by the US State Department. He said that once everyone owns a location-aware phone and they have the ability to document illegal fishing activities and what is being caught, innovation will result. He added that the infrastructure did not exist in the past but once people have the ability to submit data and centralize it, this will help to solve the issue.

The ShipWatch mobile technology app is simple software that is based around the online mobile media sharing and social networking service, Instagram. Whenever a user witnesses what they believe is questionable fishing activities, they can snap a photo, create a tag, and upload what they have captured to a central map.