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- Square Goes Mainstream With Apple Store Availability
The Square credit card reader for iOS devices is now available online at the Apple Store, and will soon be available at brick-and-mortar Apple retail locations. The Square dongle is required to use Square’s mobile payment app, which allows individuals and small businesses to quickly and easily receive credit card payments on the go. Official Apple Store availability is a significant step in the ongoing rise of Square’s success.
Founded by Jack Dorsey (who also co-founded Twitter), Square began offering its hardware credit card reader, which plugs into the iPhone or iPad’s 3.5mm headphone jack, in May of 2010. It briefly stopped shipping the device between June and August of last year while it addressed a security vulnerability, and then continued shipping out free readers to any who signed up for the service and requested one. Square charges nothing for the hardware, or for the service, but it does take a 2.75 percent cut of each credit card transaction processed using its software.
Although the Square reader is available direct at no charge from Square, it will be selling for $9.95 in Apple Store. But Square is also including $10 credit in transactions with the version sold through Apple retail channels, so the price actually evens out. Square’s business model isn’t about selling hardware, after all, but about netting that 2.75 percent fee on every transactions for the life of the card reader. Securing Apple Store availability, even at a loss when it comes to hardware costs, will only ensure that it extends its reach well beyond its current audience and into the mainstream buying public.
Square isn’t the first mobile payment option to be made available direct from Apple. Intuit and Mophie partnered to bring the GoPayment app and Marketplace reader accessory to Apple Stores in August. Intuit’s solution requires a monthly fee, which features a tiered payment plan that offers two options depending on the volume of your monthly business. Square’s decision to stay away from plans and instead use a simple, clear, no-nonsense fee structure has made it appealing to small business and independent contractors alike.
Mobile payments has become a heated battlefront lately, as more users begin to look for quick and easy ways to pay for things on the go. Square recently crossed the $1,000,000 in transactions processed per day threshold, a remarkable achievement for such a relative newcomer to the payment processing industry. The service also recently came under fire from competitor VeriFone, which released a public statement and demo software reportedly exposing a key security weakness with the Square processing method. Many argued that the weakness was not really anything specific to Square’s method, and in fact represented a general danger when dealing with any credit card payments.
The mobile payment industry is already competitive, but growing consumer comfort and familiarity with connected mobile devices and the looming potential of NFC are poised to make it even more so. That Square has managed to secure a coveted spot in Apple retail is a strong sign that it’s about to gain significant ground in the ongoing battle.
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Переслать - Apple Revamps Community Support Site, Adds Incentives
Apple launched a brand new site offering tech support for its products on Saturday, called Apple Support Communities. The new site represents an evolution of its support discussion forums, where users offer helpful advice to one another regarding technical issues or other problems with Mac products they may be experiencing. It’s a small enough change, but it might be one that proves Apple can do social.
Apple Support Communities offers more than just a fairly standard discussion board. It centers on product-specific communities, which are themselves divided into sub-communities depending on the type of support you’re looking for. The site surfaces the most recent content, is based around more of a question-asking model like Quora, a popular social Q&A site, and provides status incentives to help encourage community members to assist their fellow users.
The redesign seems aimed at making support more accessible for new users, and at incorporating more social features to make it easier to give feedback and follow discussions. For example, users can now “Like” any post made in community threads, and you can follow individual communities using a bookmark feature, or by signing up to receive email notifications of new replies. Users can also customize which community feeds appear on their home page quickly and easily using links posted throughout the site.
There’s also a new incentive system that borrows from the recent popularity of gamification. Users can choose which are the most helpful answers, which awards five points to a user, and Apple will sometimes single out a “correct” answer, which grants an additional 10 points. Earning points increases your level, which tops out at level 10 (80,000 points). Apple hasn’t yet revealed what specific privileges are unlocked at each level.
Apple previewed the new site in August last year, but hadn’t made mention of any progress until the new version went live this weekend. My early impressions are that this might be Apple’s most successful foray into social networking yet, or at least the best-designed one. Anyone else agree?
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Переслать - Flickr Says Apple's Next Victim Is the Point-&-Shoot
The iPhone 4 is about to become the most popular camera used on Flickr, while traditional point-and-shoot cameras are experiencing a sure and steady decline, according to newly released data (via PCWorld). The numbers are a good indication that, even four years after its initial release, the iPhone is still disrupting markets.
Last week, Cisco made waves by announcing the closure of its recently-acquired Flip mobile video camera brand. The Flip brought cheap, portable, decent-quality, HD video recording to the masses and rode the wave of YouTube and online self-video publishing to become a popular portable device. But then smartphones, including the iPhone 4, gained similar-quality, HD video recording capabilities, and the Flip was no longer the hot commodity it once was.
The iPhone topped Flickr’s list of user cameras in 2009 following the release of the iPhone 3GS, and that was back when the best iPhone camera boasted only a 3.2-megapixel resolution. The iPhone 4 has a 5-megapixel sensor, but leaving aside tech specs, many agree that it performs better (on paper) than some of the more powerful cameras found on Android and other devices. The iPhone’s camera is another example of Apple’s philosophy that user experience trumps a hardware capabilities arms race every time.
This time, though, the data specifies the iPhone 4, not Apple’s entire line of iPhone devices, which speaks to the popularity of Apple’s latest smartphone. It’s also significant that this time around, Flickr-released data shows point-and-shoot cameras are steadily declining in popularity. The takeaway is that smartphones are nearing the tipping point in terms of camera quality when it comes to the needs of most average users (professional and prosumer DSLRs continue to do well), and the iPhone 4 is leading that charge. Phones provide a much more convenient on-hand camera experience than do dedicated devices, and the trade-offs in terms of quality and feature are becoming less significant all the time.
Android devices, despite the growing market share of Google’s OS, aren’t appearing in the top rankings for a couple of reasons. First, Android’s market share is far more spread out across a variety of devices, whereas new iPhone users have only a couple of choices when it comes to handsets. Second, Apple’s camera is still celebrated as being among the best available for mobile devices, despite its relatively low megapixel count.
Based on this data, and on general usage observations, I’d say the iPhone is about one or two updates away from rendering point-and-shoot cameras all but obsolete for most consumers. It’s true that really good analog zoom will likely remain out of reach for smartphones, but consumers who really want those features will increasingly gravitate towards the prosumer end of the DSLR spectrum, while everyone else will be well served with their mobiles. Expect a lot of disruption still to come from Apple in this area.
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Переслать - MacBook Air Gets a Better Solid-State Drive
The MacBook Air may or may not get a June spec bump, as per recent rumors, but at least one component appears to have been quietly updated already. Some newer MacBook Airs are shipping with what seems to be a Samsung-supplied, solid-state drive (SSD) with faster read/write speeds than the original Toshiba drive included at launch.
According to AnandTech, the faster drives carry the model name SM128C, which suggests Samsung is the supplier. Samsung has supplied Apple with SSDs for its other devices in the past, so it’s definitely not a stretch that the Mac-maker would use them in the Air, too.
Speed tests also show the SM128C drives are faster than the Toshiba drives, and those speeds are pretty close to the official specifications of Samsung’s 470 Series SSDs. The newer drives read at 261.1 MB/s according to AnandTech’s testing, and write at 209.6 MB/s. The Toshiba drives, by comparison, managed only 209.8 MB/s read and 175.6 MB/s write speeds in AnandTech’s tests.
It’s possible Apple’s decision to add Samsung as a supplier of SSDs for the MacBook Air stems more from necessity than from any performance gains, however. Japan-based Toshiba’s operations were affected by the earthquake and tsunami that struck the country, although Toshiba’s president said Friday that should have minimal effect on its profitability. Despite those assurances, Apple could be hedging its bets by enlisting another supply source (one that’s Korean based) for the special blade-style SSD, which is a key component of the popular MacBook Air.
For users, which manufacturers’ drive is included in their Airs may have a small but noticeable effect on performance when it comes to simple tasks like sequential read/write operations. Further performance testing is required before any conclusions can be drawn regarding more holistic, system-wide performance differences. In the end, it’s probably not enough of a difference to get too worked up about, but feel free to disagree in the comments if you’ve seen two machines with the two different SSDs in action.
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