garytouet

I wrote a short article when I bought Breaktime.app last January. My hope was to use it to organise small breaks while working on the computer.

A couple of months before I had been prescribed another pair of glasses with stronger correction. As much as I could, I wanted to limit further decline. I then researched and found the 20-20-20 advice: while working/reading something close to your eyes, take breaks each 20 minutes for 20 seconds and look at an object at least 20 meters away to relieve your eyes.

A year and a half of practice later, I had the pleasure to learn from my ophthalmologist this morning that my eyesight has stayed the same (even though the past months have been hard on my eyes: writing my thesis, preparing my finals).

I’m not sure if the stagnation is attributable solely to these breaks, but I am convinced it makes a difference. I’m happy with the result and I will continue.

Daniel Terdiman for CNET took Square Wallet for a test. If you’re not familiar with the service and the revolution it brings to payments, it is worth reading.

What struck me though was Daniel’s experience with a merchant that accepted to pay with Square even though he was still using the classic point of sale system. Daniel’s remark is pretty interesting:

In some ways, this was a more interesting scenario because it demonstrated how much merchants want to be part of the Square universe, even when they aren't ready to ditch their traditional registers. Being in the Square directory means people like me will find merchants like Cafe Venue, even if actually paying there means a slightly more cumbersome process for the cashiers.

This is telling and pretty cool for Square to know. Its expansion depends on both the customers’ and merchants’ adoption. If the laters find commercial benefits in accepting Square, they will and it will drive Square’s exposure to more customers.

I am yet to read such articles about Square competitors though.

I must say the Surface is the tablet I’ve read the most about after the iPad. I’m intrigued by the device and the OS. The tablet seems to be good in quality and I’d like to try Windows 8.

I started this article with the firm intention to highlight key points in the reviews I’ve read today of what’s to love and what’s to hate about the Surface. Unfortunately, I was left with an unbalanced list, not to the Surface’s advantage.

From what I’ve read the best thing the Surface seems to provide is good battery life, which lives up to the iPad’s, and a good-quality feeling once in your hands. Unfortunately, the rest does not. The 16:9 form factor seems awkward to use as a tablet (very large or too tall) and cumbersome to use as a laptop (unusable on your lap).

Windows RT has a lot of downsides. Microsoft made sure you could use the classic desktop environment but only for 5 apps (IE, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) and it’s impossible to install any other app. What’s the point apart from confusion? Of course, you can install apps from Microsoft’s store, but the selection is poor and many don’t run smoothly.

The type cover, which seems to be the main selling point (see the TV ad), is clumsy.

I won’t rehash everything, but I encourage you to read The Verge’s and Gizmodo’s reviews, even only to watch their videos. They are telling.

I’m not sure why I was expecting so much from the Surface, maybe I wanted Microsoft to come up with something exciting. Sure, I haven’t used one yet, but I don’t feel in a hurry anymore.

CBC:

Dorsey, the company's co-founder and CEO, says there were a number of reasons to make Canada Square's first foray outside the United States, including relationships with banking partners that made it easier to get up and running here quickly.

In light of this, it definitely makes more sense than to enter the UK (bad guess). I still think it would be the easiest market to enter in Europe though, but I don’t know how compliant the banks would be there.

Anyway, it’s pretty cool to see that the first language supported by Square other than English is French.

anatomyofahoax:

Let me reiterate: I, an individual with no previous worldwide recognition save for a frontpage Reddit post, managed to alter the behavior of people in Russia, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Italy within the course of 24 hours, all from the comfort of my home while exerting next to no effort.

This guy took several hours during his weekend to fake a leaked photo of a Sony smartphone. It got picked up by roughly 1,000 websites, some were suspicious, some were not.

He explains the hoax and his motivations in the linked article.

Utterly entertaining story for a quiet Saturday evening.

The Wall Street Journal:

“The iPhone 5 is the most difficult device that Foxconn has ever assembled.  To make it light and thin, the design is very complicated,” said an official at the company who declined to be named. “It takes time to learn how to make this new device. Practice makes perfect. Our productivity has been improving day by day.” […] He admitted that the conflict between assembly line workers and quality inspectors at its Zhengzhou site last month was partly due to the metal casing and other “quality issues,” but he didn’t elaborate.

It surely is disappointing to take your iPhone 5 out of the box and observe scratches and dents. It should never happen, especially for such an expensive device.

However, this article and others have hurt my sensitivity. It’s hard not to feel like a douche when complaining while Foxconn workers are hard at work in horrible conditions. I think I’ll be fine with a little dent.

Saturday Night Live nailed this point in their video.

NY Times:

“I’m ashamed of it,” said Ms. Crosby, a Los Angeles sales representative who said she had stopped pulling out her BlackBerry at cocktail parties and conferences. In meetings, she says she hides her BlackBerry beneath her iPad for fear clients will see it and judge her.

This paragraph is hilarious. It’s fascinating to see how a phone formerly used by business people and loved by aspiring business people is now old-fashioned.

On another level, it’s sad to see RIM doing poorly. As the NY Times reports:

The company’s future all depends on a much-delayed new phone coming next year; meanwhile RIM recorded a net loss of $753 million in the first half of the year compared with a profit of more than $1 billion a year earlier.

Around me it seems there isn’t many Blackberry fans left.

The NY Times:

Square, the popular mobile payments company, has proved just how important designers are by making a surprising acquisition. It announced Monday that it has bought a New York design firm, 80/20, which specializes in user interface design, or designing the parts of apps, Web sites and devices that people touch and maneuver.

It sounds quite bold to acquire a design studio. Obviously this is a talent acquisition and Square made what it had to to secure such talents.

Now, the other interesting part is that the studio will remain in its current office, which will become the New York headquarters for Square. It makes sense to be in New York with the number of potential customers and partners. I wonder though if this has anything to do with the rollout in New York cabs. Is the team going to work on improvements? A new project? Hopefully we’ll know soon.

The acquisition has certainly been made easier by the recent round of investments Square closed. Likely, part of the goal to raise more money was to make such a buy.

Farhad Manjoo, for Slate, about Square as a whole and this interesting bit about Dorsey’s vision and Square’s potential:

If you study Square’s products and its pricing, and if you talk to Dorsey about his plans, you’ll find that the company’s real mission is to alter the psychology of consumption. Dorsey is bent on creating frictionless commerce. His long-term goal is to make accepting payments a breeze for businesses, and he wants to make paying for stuff invisible—for everyone, across the entire economy, for all types of goods and services. If Square succeeds in that mission, it will become a persistent, ever-present part of our daily lives. You’ll use it every time you engage with businesses—which might mean you’ll interact with Square more often than Google, Facebook, Amazon, or even Apple.

Square is so interesting because it can definitely change a big part of our lives. Doing so it could become a giant. Of course, it will happen over a couple of years, but it’s exciting to watch.

It’s surprising to see Apple apologize, but the most surprising bit certainly is this one. Tim Cook:

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

It’s one thing to acknowledge shipping a deficient product, but it’s another to point at competitors and explain how to use them.

It’s honest and humble. It shows determination to offer the best experience whatsoever.

AllThingsD:

The launch follows a pilot program in the San Francisco area with more than 150 businesses. The service allows merchants to accept credit and debit cards by swiping them through a card reader attached to an iPhone or iPod touch.

Groupon’s testing period is over. The company tries to position the service as the cheapest option for merchants, but the rate structures it offers are confusing.

There’s a difference between swiped transactions and keyed-in transactions and there’s a third plan for non-Groupon members. The fees not only comprehend a percentage but also a fixed amount for each transaction. It’s a pain to run an estimate of your monthly fees if you’re a merchant. Square’s pricing options are much clearer : either a flat rate per month or a flat percentage on each transaction.

With so many competitors, it’s getting harder and harder for merchants to decide which to adopt, especially which one is the most relevant. User demand and an easy experience will be key selling points.

Bloomberg:

Fiserv, which has 16,000 clients, will announce today a black attachment called SpotPay that lets iPhones and iPads accept credit and debit cards, and deposit checks into bank accounts, Rahul Gupta, group president of digital channels at Fiserv, said in an interview.

The service will be pushed by banks to their customers running a business. It could be convincing for non-tech saavy business owners, who are more inclined to trust the bank rep for such operations.

Techcrunch:

It’s no secret that Amazon has been eying the in-store physical, retail world. The company is reportedly looking to launch a number of retail stores. A credit card processor and mobile payments device could power payments at these stores.

The competition could get even tougher with Amazon entering the mobile payments market. It is only a rumor though, nothing has been announced yet.

It seems Square’s choice to focus on design and user experience could make the difference.

Techcrunch :

Square has announced that it has finally closed its Series D round, totalling $200 million, with investors including Citi Ventures, Rizvi Traverse Management, and Starbucks Coffee Company. It values the mobile payments company started by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey at $3.25 billion, according to AllThingsD.

We already knew Starbucks had invested $25 million when the deal between the companies was announced.

Other interesting bit:

It also plans to announce its first non-U.S. services later this year, it says. A large part of its financing will be used to accelerate that expansion. A likely partner there will again be Starbucks, which has an extensive operation outside of the U.S., with 18,000 stores in 60 countries in total. Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz has already said that expanding Square’s relationship to those locations is up to Square to greenlight.

I’m guessing the UK (same language, good smartphone adoption, probably fewer regulations on payments unlike other European countries, presence of competitors), but I might be wrong. I’m secretly wishing it was France though.

The Starbucks deal is amazing to enter a new market.

This time, he explains how he recovered his data (especially how much it cost him…). He tells the problems he encountered trying to get hold of his Gmail and Twitter accounts, etc.

It is instructive and full of advice for anyone.

The excerpt that concerned me the most was about 1Password. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and have replaced many of my passwords by long strings of randomly generated characters. These passwords are so complicated that I can’t remember them and I have a different one for each service. As long as I am on my laptop everything is fine. However, when I switch to another computer, I can’t access anything.

I definitely understood Honan’s bigger problem:

I’m a heavy 1Password user. I use it for everything. That means most of my passwords are long, alphanumeric strings of gibberish with random symbols. It’s on my iPhone, iPad and Macbook. It syncs up across all those devices because I store the keychain in the cloud on Dropbox. Update a password on my phone, and the file is saved on Dropbox, where my computer will pull it down later, and vice versa. But I didn’t have it on any of our other systems. So now I couldn’t get to my keychain. And so I was stuck in a catch-22. My Dropbox password was itself a 1password-generated litany of nonsense. Without access to Dropbox, I couldn’t get my keychain. Without my keychain, I couldn’t get into Dropbox.

For most of the services I use (Last.fm, Twitter, Instapaper, etc.) I’ll continue to use 1Password and complicated passwords. I can wait to come back to my laptop to use them. However, I’ll need to find another solution for services I need to access anywhere (email and Skydrive mostly). I think I’ll change my current passwords, for a long memorable mash-up of meaningful-to-me information.

Passwords are a problem. They need a solution.

Square’s website:

Pay once a month to process all swiped transactions at 0% per swipe within the following limits: up to $400 per any single transaction and up to $250,000 in total transactions per year—or approximately $21,000 per month. Swiped transactions over these limits simply cost 2.75% per swipe.

Compelling argument to ditch the traditional plans with complicated fee structures and hidden costs.

I see this as a move to target better established small businesses, not the individual doing several jobs per month, but the bigger shop/cafe/restaurant with daily business. $250 per month is nothing for them.

Just sit back and realize that this is how Mars looks like. Mind-blowing.

The NY Times:

Starbucks is also investing $25 million in Square as part of its latest round of financing, which values the company at $3.25 billion, and Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’s chief executive, will join Square’s board. Starbucks has offered its own mobile payment app since last year and processes more than a million mobile payments a week. Customers will continue to be able to use it, but they will also be able to use Pay With Square, Square’s cellphone app, which eliminates even having to take the phone out of your pocket or sign a receipt.

Apple has released a new TV ad for the iPad.

That’s another good news for Square. Its Square Register app is in the ad.

Jack Dorsey, Square’s CEO, on the deal with Starbucks:

When Starbucks builds the Square Directory into their apps and in-store Digital Network, it gives Square new visibility, driving more customers to opt-in to Square. And with nearly 7,000 Starbucks stores soon accepting Square, these new payers will be able to find your business (including coffeehouses) and pay with their name, building community and creating value.

Starbucks is a big player and has a huge network. The deal will expose Square to a new audience, which will surely use Pay With Square in other stores too. It’s also a convincing argument to sign up new retailers. It’s a great deal for Square that puts him ahead of its competitors.

What an exciting company to work for.