I signed up for PayPal when they first started. They started out as a service for beaming payments between Palm Pilots. You put money into your PayPal account from your credit card or bank account. Then you'd sync your Palm with your PayPal account and you could beam money (via IR) to/from other peoples' Palms. And, as a secondary feature, you could transfer money to other people's accounts on the web site too.
Well, it turned out that the the secondary feature was the one that took off and the one that was originally the whole point eventually got dropped. So this is really just a return to their original concept from 8 years ago rather than some suprising new idea.
LibraryThing costs money if you are cataloguing a collection of any meaningful size.
$10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. To me that costs a lot less than spending any of my time reinventing what LT already has. I have a barcode scanner (an old CueCat that I got for $2 on eBay) so I just scan the barcode on the book and LT pulls the data from Amazon and I'm on to the next book. I can do it from any computer with nothing to set up or maintain and export a CSV file (or get an RSS feed).
The OP can go to LibraryThing and start cataloging books 60 seconds from now (free for the first 200 books). If he gets to 200 books and doesn't think it's worth paying for, he hasn't wasted any effort because can export a CSV and put it into whatever other solution he ends up with.
Here's how it works: Customers sign up once, by registering a checking account or a credit card, and showing government identification such as a driver's license. The Pay by Touch technology records the lines and ridges of their fingerprints, and translates the data into a numerical algorithm that is stored in a secure database.
[ . . . ]
Pay By Touch is sharing the cost of each installation, and it gets a fee per transaction of between 12 and 14 cents, he said.
That is cheaper than what stores pay for alternative payment methods, he explained. A credit card transaction typically costs a store about 60 cents for an average $25 purchase of groceries. A debit card costs a store about 50 cents
But it is a credit card or debit/check card transaction. So how are the debit/credit card fees getting paid?
Isn't it a little hypocritical to have a trademark, a form of intellectual property, to open source?
Not at all (though it happens to be untrue that the term Open Source is a registered trademark). This is exactly what open source does -- use intellectual property law to ensure that the intellectual property is used in the (open/"free") manner that the other wants. If it were just about not claiming intellectual property, people would just make it public domain freeware.
With Google coming up with their own PayPal, they're halfway to coming up with a full eBay-killer auction site.
I'm not so sure about that. eBay became huge many years before PayPal came along (and it was years after that before eBay bought PayPal). eBay was the killer app even when everybody paid by sending cheques in the mail.
eBay took off because it was a new way to sell things. Whatever Google might come up with that might challenge eBay's supremacy, it's not going to be another auction site. To become the next killer app, they need to invent some completely new way of selling online -- not just a variation on what eBay does.
PayPal's fees are less than you'd pay if you signed up for your own merchant account to accept credit cards.
I don't think that an individual is going to find any way to accept credit cards that costs less than PayPal -- unless Visa/MasterCard/AmEx/etc. radically change the way they do business (or the payment service is willing to take a loss on the fees).
Well, if the stock is worth $300 a share and drops to $0.01 a share, his $2 billion would become $66,666 -- still not a bad return on a $10 investment.
From the article: "The way Searchlight transforms the computing experience is akin to Google's effect on the web"
And Google has made bookmarks obsolete, right? So Searchlight will make folders obsolete.
Better search is always very cool. But proper organization and categorization is better yet. The problem is not that the latter is a bad system but that people don't do it very well. I think a system that helps people organize their stuff will be even better than a better search. The "labels" which are used instead of folders in gmail seem like a step in that direction.
The basic idea behind writing anything right is to know your audience. You've used these documents before -- write out a list of all the information you, as a user of these documents, need to get out of them to do the work properly. The format, etc., should support the answering of these questions -- don't decide on a format/structure and then shoehorn the information into it.
Here is a very interesting article on the way Wal-Mart works with suppliers. They have done similar things in other industries to what they're doing here, and really transformed the way business is done in some fields.
From that post, I had absolutely no clue what book this was a review *of* (the blurb post, not the review). Could someone please run the posts by a eight year old child proficient in English? I'm sure he/she would catch the glitches. Thanks!
It's not a review, it's an excerpt from "Running Money" by Andy Kessler -- as stated in the first paragraph above and in the title of the article.
No. The most likely reason would be that the second launch doesn't happen on time. The trickiest part of the X-Prize requirements is to have the ship ready to go again within two weeks.
That's a bit of a let-down, actually. I was hoping a few more people would have a successful first launch before someone managed to do it twice in two weeks. It would have been a little more dramatic.
What do you think will happen to the other projects? I suppose they must have been funded well enough to not depend on receiving the prize.
1) Prepare a ten-minute talk (informed by other comments in this discussion) with an introductory bit that's two minutes or less. (No longer!) 2) Give the two-minute introduction and then ask if anyone has any questions. 3) Only use the rest of your prepared talk if the kids are too shy to ask any questions.
The thing that makes a talk interesting is that you're telling people things they want to know. The only people who can say for sure what these kids want to know are the kids themselves.
IMHO, the thing to compare when deciding new vs. refurbished is warranty.
For example, when I was last shopping for a laser printer (several years ago now), Panasonic was the only manufacturer who offered the same warranty for refurbished printers as for new printers (in my price range with my desired features) while the others had warranties between 30 and 90 days on refurbished printers.
While I normally wouldn't purchase extended warranty plans, the one case when they are worthwhile is if you can buy refurbished and get a warranty that matches (or beats) the new product and still have a significant savings.
If the warranty is the same, I see no reason not to buy refurbished (and no advantage to buying the new model). OTOH, even though I'm an extreme bargain-hunter, I wouldn't buy a refurbished printer with less than a one-year warranty.
Maybe someone at VA will give a crap if we gripe enough.
Gripe enough? You're losing it, Em. I thought you were a manager for a large company? You should know that businesses change when it's financially necessary. If there's no financial penalty for the current course of action, why would they change?
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The only members of the CRIA are the American record labels. The Canadian labels have all pulled out.
I think the idea is that you can use this to pay anyone (rather than just businesses who take credit cards).
I signed up for PayPal when they first started. They started out as a service for beaming payments between Palm Pilots. You put money into your PayPal account from your credit card or bank account. Then you'd sync your Palm with your PayPal account and you could beam money (via IR) to/from other peoples' Palms. And, as a secondary feature, you could transfer money to other people's accounts on the web site too.
Well, it turned out that the the secondary feature was the one that took off and the one that was originally the whole point eventually got dropped. So this is really just a return to their original concept from 8 years ago rather than some suprising new idea.
$10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. To me that costs a lot less than spending any of my time reinventing what LT already has. I have a barcode scanner (an old CueCat that I got for $2 on eBay) so I just scan the barcode on the book and LT pulls the data from Amazon and I'm on to the next book. I can do it from any computer with nothing to set up or maintain and export a CSV file (or get an RSS feed).
The OP can go to LibraryThing and start cataloging books 60 seconds from now (free for the first 200 books). If he gets to 200 books and doesn't think it's worth paying for, he hasn't wasted any effort because can export a CSV and put it into whatever other solution he ends up with.
I think you're missing the point -- even Googling is too hard. They want to just go to wikipedia and get all the information there.
It says you can register a credit card or a bank account.
Seriously, though, there are biometric devices that confirm whether the finger is the correct temperature.
oops. "other" should be "author"
Isn't it a little hypocritical to have a trademark, a form of intellectual property, to open source?
Not at all (though it happens to be untrue that the term Open Source is a registered trademark). This is exactly what open source does -- use intellectual property law to ensure that the intellectual property is used in the (open/"free") manner that the other wants. If it were just about not claiming intellectual property, people would just make it public domain freeware.
I was skimming the article and where it said "Morgan Stanley Small Cap Conference" I thought I saw "Stanley Cup"
With Google coming up with their own PayPal, they're halfway to coming up with a full eBay-killer auction site.
I'm not so sure about that. eBay became huge many years before PayPal came along (and it was years after that before eBay bought PayPal). eBay was the killer app even when everybody paid by sending cheques in the mail.
eBay took off because it was a new way to sell things. Whatever Google might come up with that might challenge eBay's supremacy, it's not going to be another auction site. To become the next killer app, they need to invent some completely new way of selling online -- not just a variation on what eBay does.
PayPal's fees are less than you'd pay if you signed up for your own merchant account to accept credit cards.
I don't think that an individual is going to find any way to accept credit cards that costs less than PayPal -- unless Visa/MasterCard/AmEx/etc. radically change the way they do business (or the payment service is willing to take a loss on the fees).
Well, if the stock is worth $300 a share and drops to $0.01 a share, his $2 billion would become $66,666 -- still not a bad return on a $10 investment.
They were going to call it the Monad shell. I think that the marketing department realized that "mshell" looks too much like "MS Hell"
From the article: "The way Searchlight transforms the computing experience is akin to Google's effect on the web"
And Google has made bookmarks obsolete, right? So Searchlight will make folders obsolete.
Better search is always very cool. But proper organization and categorization is better yet. The problem is not that the latter is a bad system but that people don't do it very well. I think a system that helps people organize their stuff will be even better than a better search. The "labels" which are used instead of folders in gmail seem like a step in that direction.
The basic idea behind writing anything right is to know your audience. You've used these documents before -- write out a list of all the information you, as a user of these documents, need to get out of them to do the work properly. The format, etc., should support the answering of these questions -- don't decide on a format/structure and then shoehorn the information into it.
Here is a very interesting article on the way Wal-Mart works with suppliers. They have done similar things in other industries to what they're doing here, and really transformed the way business is done in some fields.
It's not a review, it's an excerpt from "Running Money" by Andy Kessler -- as stated in the first paragraph above and in the title of the article.
No. The most likely reason would be that the second launch doesn't happen on time. The trickiest part of the X-Prize requirements is to have the ship ready to go again within two weeks.
That's a bit of a let-down, actually. I was hoping a few more people would have a successful first launch before someone managed to do it twice in two weeks. It would have been a little more dramatic.
What do you think will happen to the other projects? I suppose they must have been funded well enough to not depend on receiving the prize.
1) Prepare a ten-minute talk (informed by other comments in this discussion) with an introductory bit that's two minutes or less. (No longer!)
2) Give the two-minute introduction and then ask if anyone has any questions.
3) Only use the rest of your prepared talk if the kids are too shy to ask any questions.
The thing that makes a talk interesting is that you're telling people things they want to know. The only people who can say for sure what these kids want to know are the kids themselves.
IMHO, the thing to compare when deciding new vs. refurbished is warranty.
For example, when I was last shopping for a laser printer (several years ago now), Panasonic was the only manufacturer who offered the same warranty for refurbished printers as for new printers (in my price range with my desired features) while the others had warranties between 30 and 90 days on refurbished printers.
While I normally wouldn't purchase extended warranty plans, the one case when they are worthwhile is if you can buy refurbished and get a warranty that matches (or beats) the new product and still have a significant savings.
If the warranty is the same, I see no reason not to buy refurbished (and no advantage to buying the new model). OTOH, even though I'm an extreme bargain-hunter, I wouldn't buy a refurbished printer with less than a one-year warranty.
Okay. But if you're trying to have an effect on a business, "squeaking" means "having (potential?) financial consequences," not merely complaining.
Gripe enough? You're losing it, Em. I thought you were a manager for a large company? You should know that businesses change when it's financially necessary. If there's no financial penalty for the current course of action, why would they change?