President Barack Obama gave a high-profile speech this afternoon at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, to announce a massive new government plan designed to address climate change. But the plan, details of which were released by the White House on Tuesday morning ahead of the president's speech, won't do much to help fix the problems of pollution and global warming, and may actually make things worse overall, according to independent climate experts.
The Brogrammer is a mostly mythological figure, a nine-headed scapegoat. But there are, of course, programmers who also happen to be massive bros. For instance, the dudes who founded mega-valuable Snapchat. When you call yourself a "certified bro" in an email to the opposite sex, then yes, you probably are. Let's read their emails and texts.
The following court docs, exhumed by TechCrunch writer (and the Snapchat founders' fraternity brother!) Billy Gallagher, paint us a, very particular picture. It's a painting of a Solo cup. A red Solo cup filled with Keystone Light, patent wrangling, and three eager college boys who are somewhere between the kind of people who wear golf visors to class and the kind of people who stumble into an $800 million smartphone phenomenon.
Only two years ago, before they were embroiled in a lawsuit, Reginald "Reggie" Brown IV, Evan Spiegel, and Bobby Murphy were building Snapchat together. The app was young, blossoming, and full of potential, just like its finely coiffed makers, brothers of Stanford's Kappa Sigma chapter. They weren't sure what the app would be used for, or if it'd ever catch on, but they knew it wasn't really like anything else you could put on your phone at the time. They had a fucking great idea, really. So naturally, they were proud—on July 27th, 2011, Spiegel typed out an email to his friend, blogger, and current MTV writer Nicole James:
Subject: Yo gurl, here's an iPhone app I think you'd love...
The ephemeral messaging revolution was born. Swag. It. Out. Peep our kicked-off-campus frat steez.
James, preempting the entire tech writing community, thought it'd be a natural fit for sexting—though Spiegel suggested women could use it to ask their peers if their asses looked fat in dresses, without a permanent record of said asses:
Snapchat—or Picaboo, as it was called back then—was exciting not just because it might've become a mega-millions sensation, but because of the chicks. The team was over the moon about how many college girls were roaming around the house they were using as a makeshift software dev studio. Dawg: don't take my word for it.
So of course, the trio was chest-bumping itself via SMS with much gusto.
Bro love, hustling, rockets—it was an exciting summer, and things were just getting started. This app is going to fucking rock:
Evan said there was NO CHANCE they were going to celebrate without Reggie—who would soon be pushed out of the operation entirely—because a bro doesn't do another bro like that, even aboard a rocket.
But it wasn't meant to last. Like most frat houses, Snapchat was all fun and high fives on the outside, but inside, rotting wood and discord. By August, the trio was fighting about who deserved credit for what—a dispute that's still working its way through court today. In the meantime, Reggie has been completely booted from the company, erased from its annals, and cut out of multi-million dollar cash-out deals like his former partners.
The bro-talk slips away when the prospect of money (earned or lost) pops up. Suddenly, creating a business isn't about the girls or the frat cred, and suddenly, the guys who made the biggest craze in the recent history of smartphones look like the regular dudes you used to pass on the quad.
The court documents can be read in full below.
The average rent of an apartment in America is just over $1,000 per month. But do you know how much the average rent is in New York City. Do you? DO YOU? TOO MUCH.
"$3,017 a month, according to new market data."
That is more than a thousand dollars a month more than fucking San Francisco.
If it makes you feel any better, NYC developers are doing everything they can to increase the supply of "superluxury condos."
And don't even think about trying to buy.
More than one in five New Yorkers are below the poverty line. Every new impoverished citizen is one less competitor for that perfect apartment!
Until they rob you.
:(
[Photo: sakeeb/ Flickr]
Had to literally get up and walk away from my computer at the second Sarah Lacy quote. http://t.co/zFjLq9usLo
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) July 8, 2013
It was fun yesterday watching these quotes from Pando's Sarah Lacy spread across Twitter last night, each person discovering it afresh, so that every time I checked Twitter, there was always someone having a bad feeling.
Sarah Lacy, founder of tech news site Pando Daily, which is based in San Francisco, said “If I had more friends who were BART drivers, I would probably be very sympathetic to their cause, and if they had more friends who were building companies they would probably realize we’re not all millionaires, and we’re actually working pretty hard to build something.”She said the BART strike exacerbated what she sees as a philosophical divide in the Bay Area. “People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.”
GOOD STUFF. San Francisco used to be a great city, and now it is populated by Fountainhead enthusiasts who know how to run everything.
I also enjoyed the other guy who said his developers were joking about how they were like "wait I'll quit this stupid job computer-jockeying go for one of those amazing BART salaries." This is him:
39 CommentsBART strike, construction noise, excessive jury duty – How I love the challenge of trying to have a productive company in SF :\
— Richard White (@rrwhite) July 3, 2013
The post Stupid Striking BART Union Doesn't "Get" Silicon Valley Values appeared first on The Awl.
For the past two years, a tight-lipped and little talked about unit within the Metropolitan Police has been conducting blanket surveillance of British citizens' public social media conversations. Following an unintentional leak and a detailed investigation, we are finally able to see some of the capabilities of this 17-man team—some of which are truly alarming.
The PRISM scandal engulfing US and UK intelligence agencies has blown the debate wide open over what privacy means in the digital age and whether the Internet risks becoming a kind of Stasi 2.0. The extent of the UK's involvement in this type of mass surveillance—which already appears exhaustive—shows just what a potential intelligence goldmine social media data can be.
But the monitoring of our online trail goes beyond the eavesdroppers in GCHQ.
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On the morning of June 30 in 1908, a gigantic fireball devastated hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited Siberian forest around the Tunguska river. The first scientists to investigate the impact site expected to find a meteorite, but they found nothing. Because no traces of a meteorite were found, it many scientists concluded that the culprit was a comet. Comets, which are essentially muddy ice balls, could cause such a devastation and leave no trace.
But now, 105 years later, scientists have revealed that the Tunguska devastation was indeed caused by a meteorite. A group of Ukrainian, German, and American scientists have identified its microscopic remains. Why it took them so many years makes for a fascinating tale about the limits of science and how we are pushing them.
Eyewitness reports of the Tunguska event help paint a partial picture. As the fireball streaked across the sky, a blast of heat scorched everything in its wake, to be followed by a shock wave that threw people off their feet and stripped leaves and branches from trees, laying a large forest flat. Photos reveal the extent and force of the impact, showing trees that look like bare telegraph poles, all pointing away from the impact site.
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A researcher says he has uncovered a security weakness that can easily trick people into executing malicious code when they use the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Google Chrome browsers to visit booby-trapped websites.
The attack was recently presented at the Hack in the Box security conference by independent security researcher Rosario Valotta. It exploits weaknesses in the way browsers notify users when they execute operating-system-level commands, such as printing or saving. He said the attack works against Windows 7 and Windows 8 users running IE versions 9 and 10 when they enter either one or two characters while visiting a malicious website. Windows 8 machines running Chrome can be forced to execute malicious code when users click on a single HTML button on a malicious page, such as "Play" for a video or a Facebook "Like." Windows provides some protection against this social engineering attack, but Valotta said attackers can often bypass those defenses.
When a user visits the attack website, it opens a pop-under window that in most cases will remain invisible. The hidden window immediately begins downloading a malicious executable file without notifying the user or requiring any kind of permission. When the website is visited using IE, the file can be executed when English-speaking Windows 7 users type "r" and when Windows 8 users enter the tab key followed by the r key. The keystrokes, which can be invoked by asking the visitor to solve a CAPTCHA puzzle used to filter out bots, send a Windows command to the pop-under window instructing it to run the recently downloaded file. Clicking a booby-trapped HTML button while visiting the page in Chrome similarly executes the malicious file.
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At its BUILD developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft developer and C++ Committee chair Herb Sutter talked about what Visual Studio users can look forward to over the coming years.
Microsoft is transitioning to a new policy of rapid releases. The plans aren't as aggressive as the rapid releases of Firefox and Chrome, which see new versions released every six weeks or so, but a set of roughly annual releases is still a major change from Redmond's historic practice of making major releases every three years.
These rapid releases will allow the company's C++ team to deliver substantial functional updates to their compiler and libraries. In the past, there have been minor updates to these tools (shipping in service packs or feature updates), but these have been conservative to ensure that there are no breaking changes. Microsoft doesn't want a program that compiles and works correctly in, say, Visual Studio 2012 to stop working in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1.
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Filed under: Government/Legal
SCOTUS rebuffs automakers, refuses to block 15% ethanol sales originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 25 Jun 2013 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | CommentsFiled under: Ford, Earnings/Financials
Bill Ford augments his power by nearly doubling stake of supervoting shares originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 28 Jun 2013 08:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We just finished playing with Samsung's newly announced ATIV Q, a convertible tablet that runs both Windows 8 and Android 4.2.2. The display is the main attraction. The 13.3" panel features a 3200 x 1800 resolution (276 PPI). Although some of the screen shots from Samsung's presentation of the ATIV Q showed Windows 8.1 running, the demo units themselves ran vanilla Windows 8 and as a result had to rely on traditional Windows DPI scaling. I fully expect Windows 8.1 to make this 3200 x 1800 13.3" panel usable through new OS X-like DPI scaling upon its release.
Despite having to light 5.76 million pixels, the ATIV Q seemed bright indoors. The demo tablets were running at max brightness to begin with, which was comfortable (but not too bright at all). I'd be very curious to test outdoor brightness performance.
Internally the demo ATIV Q features a Core i5-4200U (Haswell ULT, dual-core + Hyper Threading, 2.6GHz max turbo, 3MB L3, Intel HD 4400). The demo systems featured 4GB of DDR3L. Powering the system is an integrated 47Wh battery.
The dual-OS functionality is what you'd expect: Android runs in a VM on top of Windows 8. Networking, storage and CPUs are all virtualized resources. Virtualization is the only way to enable Samsung's instant switching between Windows 8/Android on a single set of hardware. The switching process itself is pretty quick as Android is treated like another application running on Windows 8. Performance within Android seemed good enough, the UI wasn't butter smooth however. I'm not all that sure about the benefits of running Android on top of full blown Windows 8, but the option is there. There's even a dedicated key on the keyboard to switch between OSes.
Although the ATIV Q has a large surface area for a tablet, the overall design feels very light and portable. Lifting the display up to reveal the integrated keyboard is simple enough. The keyboard itself feels decent, although there's no room for a standard trackpad so you're left with a little nub that is reminiscent (but no where near as functional) as what you'd find on an old ThinkPad. You glide your finger over the nub to move the mouse, with slim physical buttons at the edge of the keyboard for left/right click. Touching the display is definitely the way to go, but the ATIV Q absolutely needs Windows 8.1 style DPI scaling in order to make UI widgets in desktop mode better for touch.
Hidden in the display hinge is a USB 3.0 port, micro HDMI and a micro SD card reader.
I'm a big believer in convertibles. I don't know that anyone has gotten it perfect with design yet, but it's very good to see everyone trying. Battery life is a big unknown, as is pricing - that display can't be cheap. Given its light weight construction, the ATIV Q seems like it could actually be a very compelling option.
A Nevada man is suing the city of Henderson and its police under the rarely-used Third Amendment, claiming that they unconstitutionally arrested him for obstruction of justice when he refused to let them commandeer his home.
Anthony Mitchell, a resident of a Las Vegas suburb, was arrested by Henderson Police in 2011 after he refused police requests to enter his home to "gain a tactical advantage" against the occupant of a neighboring house. The Third Amendment prohibits the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the homeowners' permission.
Mitchell says the violations began when police called him and told him they needed his home to respond to a nearby domestic violence call.
When Mitchell refused, police allegedly smashed open his front door with a metal ram, aimed guns at him, and shouted obscenities at him. According to his complaint, they forced him to lie down on his living room floor, and fired multiple "pepperball rounds" at him. Mitchell says that he was hit by at least of those three rounds. His dog Sam was also allegedly hit by the rounds and left outside in 100 degree weather with no food or shade for hours.
At this point, Mitchell, still lying on his own floor, was arrested for obstruction.
In the meantime, Mitchell alleges, as police searched his home and set up operational positions, they also went to his parents house (on the same street) and tricked his father, Michael into leaving that home. According to the complaint, police told Michael he was necessary for the negotiations nearby, and convinced him to leave and move to a police command center nearby. When it became apparent that the negotiations request was a ruse, Michael attempted to leave the police command center.
Police then arrested him for obstruction too, handcuffing him and placing him in the back of a marked police car. The suit alleges that approximately an hour later, police returned to the parents' house, where Mitchell's mother also refused police entry without a warrant. According to the suit, police forcibly pulled her out of the house and made her to walk to the command center with them. She does not appear to have been arrested.
Although Mitchell and his father were both charged with obstruction of justice and jailed, all criminal charges against them were dropped with prejudice.
In addition to Third Amendment violations, the Mitchells are suing for violations of the fourth and 14th Amendments, assault and battery, conspiracy, defamation, abuse of process, malicious prosecution, negligence and emotional distress.
[via, image via Shutterstock]
Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA, PRISM, and the US government's broad surveillance tactics were shocking to many people — but maybe they shouldn't have been. There's plenty of precedent, says David T. Z. Mindich for the New York Times, dating all the way back to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. In 1862, Lincoln authorized sweeping control over the American telegraph infrastructure for Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war. Telegraphs were re-routed through his office, and Stanton used his power to spy on Americans, arrest journalists, and even control what was or wasn't sent. It was a critical tool in wartime, but a massive invasion of privacy that surely angered citizens.
Mindich argues that despite the huge differences in...
When Google Reader announced it was shutting down a few months ago, most of us stamped our feet, panicked, and went running into the arms of another RSS reader. But Matt Jibson is different. Unlike most of us, he can crunch code. So he built a Google Reader of his very own own.
Jibson, 30, studied Electrical Engineering at Colorado State. By day, he works Stack Exchange, a New York start-up that's trying to figure out how to solve the difficult problem of peer-to-peer question and answer. But by night he's long been an active member of GitHub, the open source community of coders.
After Google announced that it was murderizing Reader, Jibson realized he wasn't really satisfied with the alternatives. Most of all, though he was just fascinated by the challenge: What if you could make a reader from scratch that's exactly how he wanted it? And so he went to it, from scratch, plugging away a few hours at a time after work 4 to 5 nights a week.
And he got the technical challenge he was looking for. As he tersely put it in the blog post describing his project, "Feed readers are difficult." It turns out that all of that gobbledygook that supposedly outlines a feed's information isn't really standardized. He started a Tumblr collecting some 60 different methods for expressing a timestamp—all of which his reader would need to parse.
And last week, the effort paid off. Last Thursday, just weeks before Google was set to pull the plug, Jibson flipped on the lights to Go Read, his open-source response to Google abandonment. He posted the project on Hacker News and his code on GitHub. Since then, 8000 people have signed up. He expects another big influx when the people outside tech communities wake up Monday morning and realize their feeds have no home. (If its running a little slow right now, you'll have to forgive the growing pains.)
But more than the thrill of the hunt alone, Jibson is big Google Reader fan, and by his own admission, the reader is supposed to be as close to a Google Reader clone as he could realistically accomplish within a few months. "It was good at presenting content in a usable, quick, simple way," he says. "I wanted the same experience," he says "Yes, I thought that the interface of reader was done right"
As with most of the other Google Reader alternatives out there, step one is importing your feeds. If you've got loads of them like I do, it takes just a few minutes to import. And then, just as you'd expect, there they all are. You won't see any frills, but you will notice how snappy feeds load. That is, when it's not suffering the early bugginess of a product rushed out the door. If you're trying to use it this morning, you've probably noticed it's slow, the result of overtaxed resources that Jibson is paying for out of pocket.
If you're one of the legions who are lamenting the loss of a familiar daily companion—I'm one of them—this might be where you want to go. Go Read (Get it, "Go Read" from "Google Reader"?), looks and feels very similar to Google's bare bones design. All the keyboard shortcuts still work, and the typography are similar. There are some obvious missing features like, ahem, search, but the basic feed reading experience is right there in tact.
Jibson says he can't take too much credit for the look because he was just riffing on building blocks that are openly available. He points out that Comma Feed, another coder-initiated adventure built over the last months, looks similar because it's built from the same foundations.
Which brings us to the all important question of why would a lone wolf dive into a a crowded pack. The more you look at the different configurations of the different readers, you start to realize that the core functionality of a reader is extraordinarily simple—the key is nailing the UI. And frankly, there are big teams with more resources to hammer out something revolutionary.
Both Go Read and Comma Feed are focused on staying out of your way, and that kind of makes you wonder if in reacting to Google's departure, the competition might be ignoring some of the product's original appeal.
Take, for example, the team at Digg that built a simple-looking RSS life raft. The principles on that project told me there's a lot more going on under the hood that isn't yet perceivable. The company has plans to expand the product into a reader that surfaces the good stuff using the same social data secret sauce as Digg proper. We can't evaluate the merits of those features until we see them. All of this filtering will appeal to some, but others might prefer to simply read their streams in the raw.
In the last 100 days another up start, Feedly, has done bootstrapping of a different kind. Before, Feedly was basically a fancy overlay for Google's cloud-based backend. With Mountain View's generosity gone, it had to figure out a cloud solution for its snazzy design.
Jibson says he doesn't have an opinion on the matter, but like a lot of us being left behind by Google, he's not trying to rebuild anything fancier than what Google gave us in the first place. And in a way, he's making a statement about what he wants from a reader simply by not developing it out. Jibson is building features he needs in as he needs them rather than building something complicated from the start. We'll have to wait and see how many people sign on to find out.
As for next steps, well, Jibson set out to make the reader he wants to make sure he's going to keep adding features. He's been adding them as quickly as he can code them. In the short-term, he'll be looking at some pretty basic stuff like feed and folder organization and fixing bugs—he's been racing down to the finish line adding features as he can. For all its ambition and impressiveness, it's not quite running up to the speed most people will probably want in the long run. He doesn't know how far he'll ultimately go with Go Read, except that he's not stopping now.
One thing that's clear is that the rate users are showing up, he won't be able to maintain without revenue for long. Right now, the plan is to cover the cost by offering people the choice of ads or a subscription fee. "There is no goal to make a profit, " he told me "although if it is doable without sacrificing user experience, I might consider it."
Hey! We remember you guys.
Just like death and taxes, one thing that’s always certain is Amy’s Baking Company making the headlines for something terribly entertaining (or just terrible). After a romp through the unbelievable this spring when the restaurant was thrust into the reality TV spotlight by Kitchen Nightmares, the Scottsdale, Ariz. eatery is back in the news: Apparently employees allegedly have to sign a — how shall we say this? — extremely thorough contract.
Radar Online (via Eater) says it has a document that comes from Amy’s Baking Company. The lengthy bit of wording has a plethora of terms that employees allegedly must agree to, and there are a few doozies in there that would make any worker sweat like a popsicle in hell upon reading.
There’s a non-compete clause that outlines how employees can’t work for anyone not only in a certain geographic radius (50 miles) of the restaurant as well as a minimum amount of one year after leaving ABC before you can work for anyone else.
Want to say meaningless things at work? Nope — the “mutual agreement” bans unnecessary talking. Want to comport yourself with a definable air, a certain je ne sai quoi? Better stop it — having “any type of attitude” is verboten.
We’ve picked a few of the 20 terms to highlight, and you’re probably gonna want to read the rest. The non-bolded parts are ours.
• No outside Food or Beverages may be brought inside ABC: This could be a problem if you’re like the former waitress who admitted to never having the urge to pay out of pocket to eat the grub there.
• Any type of attitude will result in immediate termination: Practice your robot faces.
• No purses or bags are allowed inside ABC, (exceptions may be made) however upon leaving a designated employee of ABC has the legal right and consent to inspect any and all packages that you may have brought with you: Good thing cardboard boxes are the new clutch!
• At no point is any food or any type of open beverage allowed in the kitchen. This is a direct Health Code Violation: So what is the staff cooking in there?
• No visiting or unnecessary talking is allowed during your work shift. This causes distractions and results in loss of product. Any may result in possible harm to you, or to others: Just assume your pal’s weekend was fine, no asking required.
• Holidays and Weekends are Mandatory, by signing this contract you are accepting that you will be required to work all Holidays, and Weekends. Due to the nature of our Industry this is a necessity and any No-Show will be monetarily penalized with a fee of $250.00: Adios, Grandma’s famous Thanksgiving turkey.
And the pièce de résistance, quite possibly the least surprising given the owners love of the “your tips are our tips” policy:
• The wait staff understands that any and all “tips” are property of the “house.” By signing this contract, you agree that you willingly accept a payment of $8.00 to $12.00 per hour to ensure that you will receive some type of payment. Due to the volatile nature of any retail business we are unable to predict when we will have buissness ([sic].By signing this contact you agree that you are willfully accepting a payment of $___ per hour instead of tips.
Eater points out quite observantly that the document isn’t dated, so it’s hard to know if the tips policy is from before the whole Kitchen Nightmares fiasco. If it’s current, that goes against what Amy and Sam had promised — that the owners would pay servers $5 and give them all their tips.
Kitchen Nightmares Restauranteurs Had Employees Sign Lengthy ‘Legally Binding Contract’ — See It Here! [Radar Online]
Amy’s Baking Co. Makes Employees Sign a Crazy Contract [Eater]
Relatively small cable and Internet company Charter Communications has earned a number of Worst Company In America brackets but often fails to progress beyond the first round because it’s just not big enough to be hated by a nationwide audience. That could change, as the company’s owner reportedly seeks to acquire Time Warner Cable and possibly Cablevision.
TWC being swallowed by Charter would be like a toddler eating an entire ham, but sources tell Bloomberg that Liberty Media, which recently purchased a 27% stake in Charter, is investigating ways to make a deal that would appease shareholders, even though Time Warner Cable appears to be resistant. Liberty already owns 1% of TWC.
Liberty Chairman John Malone has made no attempt to hide plans to expand Charter, recently telling Liberty shareholders that the cable company — currently the fourth-largest in the nation — would transform into “a horizontal acquisition machine.”
An acquisition that seems more sensible, at least in terms of size, is Charter’s reported attempt to take over Cablevision. The roadblock to that deal would be the Dolan family, who have had a steely grip on the company for decades. Of course, the Dolans have repeatedly failed to take Cablevision private, so there might be room for Charter to slip in there and take control.
Aside from simply increasing its subscription revenue by acquiring new customers, Charter needs to expand to compete. As most of you know, negotiations between broadcasters and cable companies have become increasingly nasty — and increasingly public — in recent years. Acquiring TWC would instantly make Charter the nation’s second-largest cable provider, giving it significantly more leverage to get better rates with broadcasters.
Not that any of those improved rates would be passed on to customers through discounts or improved service.
Josh Duplan, age 22, just banked $25 million for an app no one really knows much about. Well, a few do: his investors, and a tipster who leaked us some very interesting details about the clandestine wallet app. Does the world need a new way for Yale kids to buy things?
Our source says he, like Duplan, is a young Stanford grad who remembers Dunlap for a notorious class presentation in which he channeled Steve Jobs to a T—even capping off with a one more thing reveal. But the Stanford tipster says he's got Clinkle revelations of his own after downloading a pre-release copy of the app when it was temporarily available online—a download he says shows how Clinkle works and where it might be headed.
So what the hell does it do, besides something vaguely PayPally?
Based on what’s in the app, the following features seem to be a lock for Clinkle
"Wallet" feature - this looks approximately like a paypal balance (will let you pay your friends, etc)
"Credit Card" feature - scan a credit card with your phone (it uses card.io to do this)
A Scott Forstall-esque, completely useless bound leather wallet look to polish it off
Ability to pay stores (who they are partnering with)
Like I said last time, this sounds, at best, like a composite of Other Apps That Already Exist and Do Just Fine.
But what about that secret method of transferring money with high-frequency sound? The one TechCrunch willingly redacted from its post because Clinkle didn't want people to read about it? Maybe that's the $25 million feature?
Our tipster thinks he knows:
Clinkle lets you do phone to phone payments via ultrasound exchanged on the phone. This is branded as "Aerolink"
My additional suspicions:Clinkle may be partnering with Verifone to get the terminals to emit / receive the same audio signals that they're using for payment information. Looking up specs on Verifone terminals , it seems to indicate that they support audio output. Clinkle may be using this to localize the phone to the point of sale terminal. Then, they would send money to Verifone ... I'm basing this on Lucas's past discussions of working with Verifone on SMS based payments (this is before Clinkle was doing the whole ultrasound thing, they initially were a sms based payments system for dumb phones).
Translation: Clinkle would make your phone beep like a dog whistle that only special cash registers could hear—encoded in this whistle signal would be MONEY, so you could buy a bag of chips or textbook without ever touching a debit card. Partnering with VeriFone would make sense, as they're already in the business of outfitting stores with wireless purchase gear. Aerolink! At the very least that's a fun word to say. So is "Yale": more buried code in the app leak show a Facebook-esque plan to launch at top tier schools, and maybe expand to the proles from there:
Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Based on our understanding of their tech, they would probably outfit campus retailers with Clinkle and then drive student adoption through incentives...It seems pretty clear Clinkle is going to try to target itself as a pay-ahead-skip-the-line type operation.
Kids love digital exclusion. So an app premised on the appeal of Ivy League kids cutting the line to buy things ahead of everyone else—that might just be a $25 million hit.
