Business Insider speaks to Keith Rabois from Square, who provide a neat little dongle you can plug into your iPhone and use to process credit cards. The interview’s not that interesting if you’ve been following any kind of Silicon Valley/Square stuff, but a feature of Square’s payment app jumped out at me:
KR: [With the Pay With Square app], when you have favorited a merchant, there is a geographic trigger — there are actually two. Within a certain proximity it alerts them on the register that so and so has walked into your store. Then when you’re within 10 meters, you’re ready to check out, so you authenticate the face, name, click, checkout. If you want more information about that person, it will show you their last visit and their visit frequency, as well as in the future what the most likely orders are.
If a £50,000 annual donation buys you a seat near David Cameron at “dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions, election result events and important campaign launches”, I’m not clear how this isn’t buying influence vs. you and me who cannot afford the PM’s ear in such a way.
I couldn’t see a set of such overly influence-buying “clubs” on either Labour or the Lib Dem websites, though the Lib Dems have a special £25,000 rate for the “Leaders forum”. It would also be interested to see the access Trade Union leaders, and other large sources of funding, have to the Labour leadership.
Pentagram have designed the Windows 8 logo. I like the logo itself, reflecting as it does the fantastic-looking Metro UI.
What I dislike, and what makes me sad, is the obviously hindsight reasoning exemplified in this empty, soulless, self-justifying quote:
The perspective analogy is apt because the whole point of Microsoft products is that they are tools for someone to achieve their goals from their own perspective. The window here is a neutral tool for a user to achieve whatever they can, based on their own initiative.
I still find the amount Zynga copy game concepts mind-boggling. Related to this, it looks like Zynga employees love the game they shamelessly ripped off:
When Zynga came knocking and wanted to buy up NimbleBits, developers of Tiny Tower (which Apple recently named one of their games of the year), it didn’t take a genius to figure out that if the deal didn’t go through, Zynga would rip-off NimbleBit’s games anyway. And — shocker — it turns out that’s just what happened.
Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, on the future of the web.
I worry about the independent web. I worry about the content creators, and I worry that if 100 percent of the distribution of everything starts to go through just a few websites, that kills the vibrancy.