Author: Julie Campbell

This new tech could provide regular consumers with the same level of security as used by the military.

Professor Bill Roscoe and his team at the University of Oxford have been pursuing what has been called “spontaneous security” for about a decade and have now been able to create it in the form of a very powerful, defense-grade security in mobile payments technology.

This would make it possible for people to use their smartphones as wallets without being worried about theft.

The team has come up with a mobile payments technology that would make it possible to easily and inexpensively create secure ad hoc communication networks so that two or more devices could safely communicate in a way that they have never been able to at any other time. Professor Roscoe explained that “What we have been working on all this time is contextual authentication: ways of identifying someone by the context they are in when you don’t have their mobile number, name or anything like that.”

The security protocols followed by the algorithms in this mobile payments technology are very high.

These security levels are great enough to be appropriate for the US Navy, that contributed $1 million to the project, in addition to the £100,000 from the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence. The tech was taken to Kenya by the British Army, which used the security software in protocols on maneuvers. That software was spun off by the commercialization company at Oxford, Isis Innovation, which then formed OxCept. This allowed it to be converted for use in transactions.

There has already been considerable interest in OxCept within the industry, as even PayPal has been looking into the research being conducted and the outcomes produced by Roscoe’s team. This has also led to another first, which will occur as the Oxford spin-out, when it has a base in both London and Silicon Valley. The purpose will be to try to grab hold of a good sized share of the market for mobile payments, which is predicted to become massive in the next few years.

In fact, KPMG has predicted that the mobile payments technology marketplace will be worth over $1 trillion by the close of 2015.

After having been developed in Montreal, the gadget is now being sold in the country.

The world’s cheapest tablet has now been created by DataWind, a company that was formerly based in Montreal, Canada, and that is now the third largest seller of these gadgets in India.

Under CTO Raja Tuli, the least expensive of the devices was developed and is now available in Canada.

One of the secrets behind the world’s cheapest tablet is in the special touchscreen, which is made of a sheet of glass with a photoresist coating. The devices are currently so inexpensive, that twenty of them could be purchased for the same price as a single premium iPad.

At the moment, the world’s cheapest tablet is going for the highly affordable price of $37.99.

Although the specs may not come anywhere near matching the iPad, for that price, many people who would otherwise not be purchasing that type of mobile gadget will be willing to pick one up either for some basic functions around the house or even for a gift to a child.

The device has a 7 inch screen and runs on a low 512 megabytes of RAM, with storage of 4GB. The machine, itself, has been named the Ubislate 7 Ci. An upgrade of the device is available for twice the price, to provide cellular connectivity. That version is called the Ubislate 7C+.

The special inexpensive touchscreens for the DataWind devices are currently manufactured in Montreal, Canada, the country where the company was founded. Since moving to India, the company has managed to become the top tablet seller, in part because of the low price tags that it can attach to its products. Moreover, it is also preferred because the devices are compatible with the antiquated cellular network in India. Hundreds of thousands of these machines have been supplied to school children in India, by way of a partnership that it has forged with the Ministry of Education in the country.

What has yet to be seen is whether or not these world’s cheapest tablets will find themselves as welcome in Canada as they are in India. It is likely that people will choose to purchase them for more basic functions, for kids or seniors, as an alternative to the top models for those who cannot afford them, or to be able to bring one along on trips that come with a risk of breaking or losing the device.