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Square, the mobile payment startup founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies right now. It’s no surprise then, that German clone factory Rocket Internet, which is run by brothers Mac, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, is now rumored to be developing its own blatant Square clone.

This is a consequence from the World Wide Web. If there’s a good idea somewhere in the world, the rest will find out easily and replicate it.

Is this a pain in the butt for Square though? In a sense, it is, because if Square really is planning to expand internationally then this has the potential to take customers away.

However, on the other hand, it could prepare the market for Square’s arrival. More people will have heard about the concept, more businesses will have considered its benefits. It will be easier for Square to convince customers.

Sunday night at the Coachella Festival, the crowd could hear Tupac Shakur shout “What the fuck is that Coachella?”

MTV News has a few details about what was Dr. Dre’s idea:

The Tupac hologram was several months in the planning and took nearly four months to create in a studio and though Smith was not able to reveal the exact price tag for the illusion, he said a comparable one could cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than $400,000 to pull off. "I can't say how much that event cost, but I can say it's affordable in the sense that if we had to bring entertainers around world and create concerts across the country, we could put [artists] in every venue in the country," he said.

It looks so good. You can discuss the real interest of this kind of performance, but you can’t deny how impressive this technology is.

The first trailer for Ice-T’s film about rap culture is out. A lot of famous rappers are featured. It’ll be in theatres June 15th.

Impatient to see how it turns out.

Nothing sure here, but interesting bet:

Apple will become a trillion-dollar company based not on iPads and Apple TV, but payments. Imagine taking out your iPhone and instead of buying Angry Birds you bought the latest Groupon.

It makes sense when you look at the number of cards info Apple has, the habit people have of paying for music, apps on their iPhones and the change payments are seeing with Square for example.

It can be a good marketing argument to sell more iDevices to consumers for Apple, but aren’t payments delicate operations to manage? Is it worth the risk for Apple? Time will tell.

Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened next was crazier than they could have imagined. In a matter of hours, thousands downloaded it. The computer systems handling the photos kept crashing. Neither of them knew what to do. “Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline.

The recent stories that came out after Instagram’s deal with Facebook have been interesting to read, but the previous three paragraphs seem to be the closest to the reality. It’s been a big ride from that night to the Facebook deal for Systrom and Krieger. For me, it’s important to remember that they found hiccups along the way. It didn’t go as smoothly as we can imagine.

The rest of the NY Times article will tell you more about the helpful connections that played a role in Instragram’s growth. It’s a bit concerning how important Stanford University is, actually.

The New York Times explains the split’s outcomes:

Google is proposing to have three classes of stock. Mr. Brin and Mr. Page will control the super-voting Class B stock, which have 10 votes per share and provide the two co-founders with voting control over Google. The Class B shares are convertible into the current publicly traded Class A shares, which have one vote per share and trade under the symbol Goog. Now, Google is planning to add a separate nonvoting stock called Class C shares, which will trade publicly under a separate ticker. According to Google, Class C will have all the same rights as Class A shares including the rights to dividends, if and when Google ever pays them.

As a result, if you currently own Google shares, after the stock split you will have twice the number of shares you had before, but your voting power won’t change at all as well as the value of all the shares you have.

It’s all about increasing Brin’s and Page’s power over Google’s management.

Funny enough. It looks like Square is actually advertising a bit more than K. Rabois said.

Techcrunch’s writer, Leena Rao, spotted a TVC on air on the Cooking Channel. The channel’s audience seems to be composed in majority by women from 18 to 54.

That’s an interesting choice. Square is probably experimenting with this first TVC, but choosing such a channel cannot be innocent.

My best guess to explain Square’s choice is to consider that this audience also contains a lot of small business owners. I think about flower shop owners, clothes boutiques, bakeries, cupcake shops, shoe shops, etc. Then it makes sense. They are very likely to adopt a much simpler and elegant way to take payments. They surely are annoyed by the complicated setup traditional payment systems require, fee management and upfront costs.

On the contrary, Square’s reader and apps are free, easy to setup and elegant. It surely is appealing for this audience.

Keith Rabois, Square’s COO, in an interview for Business Insider:

BI: Have you guys done any advertising? KR: We occasionally test advertising in different channels but the primary driver of the Square option is actually seeing Square in the real word. BI: So no sales force. KR: No sales force, none whatsoever. We have bought an online ad here and there but not in any serious sense.

As a reminder, Square has more than 1 million customers and is processing about $4 billion in payments per year. All of this mainly thanks to word-of-mouth. Crazy!

Mike Skinner is a producer now, I’m sure you know that. He is half of the D.O.T with Rob Harvey. Yesterday, the group has released their first single “Bad News” featuring Elro. You should at least give it a listen.

And if you want to know more about Elro, you should watch this: magistral.

Nicely recreated and animated. Comments by James Cameron.

A more accurate video of Google’s Project Glass. It does not take into account technological limitations, but Google’s business model this time.

You’ve probably seen Google’s Project glass concept video. It looks cool, but it does not take into account current technology limitations.

As experts told Wired:

Mistry does point out that the Project Glass demo is a concept video. But MacIntyre believes Google may have set the bar too high for itself. “In one simple fake video,” MacIntyre told Wired, “Google has created a level of over-hype and over-expectation that their hardware cannot possibly live up to.”

It’s a tough task for Google. Of course, they want to create excitement. A realistic video probably would have deceived. It’s not guaranteed that it would have been shared as much. But isn’t it more harmful to create expectations Google won’t be able to meet?

Ravi Udeshi on his blog:

I took the “Smoked by Windows Phone” Challenge yesterday. And won. Or so I thought. Instead, the store manager cited an employee mistake to deny me the prize, a $1000 laptop.

Looks like another Microsoft’s employee does not like to lose.

TorrentFreak:

For more than a decade the entertainment industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. So if piracy is down massively in France, one would expect that the revenues are soaring, right? But they’re not. If we look at the French music industry we see that overall revenues were down by 3.9 percent in 2011.

This is France centric, but there is no doubt this will reproduce in any other country.

The French government is using the taxpayers’ money to support a dying industry with unsuccessful laws.

Voilà.

A small photo gallery of Skinner through the ages.

Not sure yet which one I like the most.

The "One Sense" headphones not only cover the wearer's ears, but a bright red band of spikes wraps around their face to shut out the visual world and discourage outside interruptions.

Using spikes to repel distractors: interesting design idea.

Leena Rao from Techcrunch has a good article about Square’s update of their app now called ‘Pay with Square’. It is available on both iOS and Android.

As you may know, Square’s app allows you to walk into the store, just say your name and you’re done. This has been available in the iOS app for a year. It made its way to the Android app with this update. Wondering how that works?

On the backend, Square’s technology detects when you are near a merchant-enabled store, and the Merchant’s Square app will open a tab for the customer and show that customer’s account, name and photo as nearby. When the customer purchases an item, they say their name, and the cashier can verify that the photo matches the customer, and then press the transact button to send the charge through. The customer will get a push notification with the amount of the charge as well. The customer can also add a tip via Pay With Square after the transaction in case they forget.

Make you want to use it until broke, right?

The app also features ways to discover merchants and to share them with your friends. This is great for businesses. All of this drives more people into their store, reduces checkout time and combined with Square Register gives them very personal ways to stay in touch with their customers.

Square is onto something and it is exciting.

VentureBeat reports that Square added encryption to its little reader and most probably in response to competitors’ criticism.

Competitor VeriFone tried to drum up sentiment against Square last year because Square’s readers did not encrypt credit card numbers from the reader to the application. In the recent launch of PayPal’s competing product, PayPal Here, the company referenced popular unencrypted readers, while mentioning that its own dongle does encryption.

Even easier to trust Square’s reader.

The New York Times:

Facebook on Monday sought to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a man who claims to own half of the world’s largest social network. […] The case was filed by a man named Paul Ceglia in June 2010. He claimed he had a contract with Mr. Zuckerberg dating back to 2003. In that contract, he said, he was given a 50 percent stake in the company that Mr. Zuckerberg was working on as an undergraduate at Harvard, called TheFacebook.

On top of the contract, he also claims to have emails proving their agreement, but they’ve been dismissed.

Anyway, it reminded me of the Winklevoss brothers, who by the way are probably waiting for Facebook’s IPO with impatience, but this story is different. It gets funny pretty quickly. Let’s focus on the contract.

Further in the NY Times’ article, you can read:

Mr. LaPorte, who works for the Justice Department and is allowed to consult on private cases, tested the physical contract and concluded it had been “baked” in the sun to make it look older.

Also, in a previous article, the NY Times gave more information about this precise contract:

But Facebook said it had copies of the two-page contract examined by Frank Romano, a professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an expert in document authentication. Professor Romano found “significant inconsistencies” in type sizes, spacing, margins and other details between pages 1 and 2. He concluded that Page 1 and Page 2 were printed at different times on different printers and that Page 1, which includes references to The Facebook Book, is an “amateurish forgery,” according to the motion.

So this guy took the second half of its real contract with Zuckerberg and thought he could fabricate the first half. He opened his text editor but could not tell what the font and size were on this old piece of paper. Anyway, he went ahead, printed it and ‘baked’ it in the sun to make it look older.

This is hilarious.

Still form the same NY Times article, we learn a bit more about this Paul Ceglia:

Mr. Ceglia was previously known to have pleaded guilty to possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Texas in 1997, and to have been arrested and charged with defrauding customers of his wood-pellet business by Andrew Cuomo last year, when Mr. Cuomo was then the New York State attorney general. In the motion, Facebook said that in 2005, “Ceglia was arrested in Florida for trespass while trying to sell property in a private orange grove to an elderly couple.” Mr. Ceglia pleaded no contest and paid a fine, Facebook said. “That trespass incident appears to be part of a wide-ranging criminal land scam involving the fraudulent sale of land in New York and Florida,” Facebook said.

This guy is a legend.

This time it looks like it’s Skinner’s own publisher, Random House, who is teasing with a bit of book reading from the Story of the Streets.

It’s only teasing, but I thought it was worth sharing.