Business Insider: Interview with Square COO Kieth Rabois

BI: Will payments evolve to the point where a card reader is no longer necessary? Is that one of your goals?

KR: I don’t know. Every American of almost any age and certainly any demographic knows exactly how to use one of these pieces of plastic. Doesn’t have to be trained. You show them a card and they know what to do with it, they know what it can be used for, they know how to swipe. So I think physical cards like that are gonna be used by Americans for a very long period of time and we’re gonna embrace that.

Now we have started to shift a lot of users to pay with their name, pay with their real world identity. All a credit card is, in some ways, is just 16 digits uniquely identified with you.

Spot on. Credit cards are already easy. It’s not about easier.

peacoat & CHR15 HARR15

Hi, it’s Chris. Internet announcement.

I miss Google Reader’s sharing feature, the happy sharing medium between emailing friends and posting here. In it’s absence, I’ve launched a second “off-topic” site:

  • peacoat: Apps, projects, and more “serious blogging” about topics of interest: consumer technology, mobile computing, mobile commerce, payments, Apple, and things I’m working on here at peacoat.
  • CHR15HARR15.COM: Links and random things. This is me, on the internet, sharing good things with you. Tumblr qua tumblr.

Google Project Glass: 6 Train Magic


So, Google Maps can’t give you directions on the weekend that incorporate weekend service changes. But in the future, they’ll be able to tell you that the subway isn’t running in your face. Google, walk before you run.

Philip Bowden: Two Kinds of Gestures

“Some gestures are more intuitive than others.”

I’m a products guy; I gotta tell you, it’s just weird we’ve been talking about that three-letter acronym for such a long time, and it’s a technology. It’s not a product,” he said. “It’s as if we’re getting all excited about gyroscopes before the iPhone launched, and no one was talking about the great iPhone experience, but were talking about gyroscopes.
David Marcus, VP, PayPal Mobile, on NFC
(NFC Times)

Interview with Nicholas Felton (The Verge)

Good interview with the Nicholas Felton, designer and personal statistics pioneer. See his fascinating Felton Annual Reports. He also worked on Daytum and is currently at Facebook. (Daytum is clearly a precursor to the work he did as part of the new Facebook Timeline.)

Wired: We don't have a mobile payment problem; we have a mobile shopping problem

A fair point. The tap of a phone isn’t really faster or more convenient than swiping a card. Coupons, offers, and ads aren’t very compelling either. Apple’s EasyPay is rethinking the retail checkout experience in a way that Google Wallet, Isis, and others currently aren’t.

Contact-free and tap-and-go payments powered by NFC (near-field communication) give great demo. They’re all the rage at this year’s Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, where Spanish bank La Caixa just rolled out an ambitious citywide payment system. But even at a Google Wallet-friendly Starbucks, waiting in a 10-minute line only to pull a phone out of our pocket and fumble with it rather than a credit card barely feels like the future.

“Consumers don’t really have a mobile payment problem,” says Jack Stephenson, director of mobile, e-commerce and payments at JP Morgan Chase. “Ninety-five percent of the time, paying with cash and credit cards actually works pretty well. Consumers have a mobile shopping problem. There’s a difference,” he said in an interview with Wired.

Really? Even after all of these apps offering reviews, check-ins, coupons and social discovery for retail? “If you ask the average customer, they don’t care about 50 cents off a cup of coffee,” says Gopago CEO and founder Leo Rocco. “They’d say, ‘I want to skip the line!’”

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs, 2003. From “The Guts of a New Machine” in the New York Times about the creation of the iPod. (via Daring Fireball)
Simplicity is a point of arrival, not a point of departure
Gualtiero Marchesi, three-Michelin-starred chef and and McDonalds collaborator
The computer is like a bicycle for our minds
Steve Jobs, 1991 (paraphrased on this lovely print at Kickstarter, via MG Siegler