ste!!a gassaway: unpredictable thoughts

Simply, Square is a company that will let you make credit or debit card transactions from a smartphone. Square is a new company who has a founder from another interesting company, twitter.

Credit and debit card transactions take all kinds of devices physical and technical including merchant accounts that cost you a bundle each month whether you make a transaction or not. This is difficult for small businesses, sole proprietors, craftspeople, and artists.

The story is that “In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as payment” and the next day Square was born.

The whole process seems terribly slow for a small transaction but the advantages of marketing offers to frequent customers, an identity verification system, text and e-mail receipts, and transactions to the cloud make it a player in this service space.

I know that I’m ready to try it out.

video from TechCrunch:

Having done this kind of work for more years than I’m actually interested in admitting to – this video stripped away the intellectual and considered part of the process for me.

It’s sorta depressing actually.

All this work for that cover. Hmmm.

This was a great site that I found about actions taken around the world to support the election protesters in Iran. An easy to navigate site that incorporated map locations. It used your IP to present you with an appropriate map view. You could drag and position the map to see other areas.

At the height of the protests the map was filled with green. The sea of green was information made visable.

Sorry I didn’t get it up sooner. The site is still live although it has changed.

Ok, I don’t have an iPhone yet. Basically because I wasn’t willing to be an early adopter this time. Now I’m more interested. Video capabilities and the addition of interfacing with third party devices is very compelling. My almost dead Razr is another.

I have a love/hate relationship with my Razr. I love that it is a flip phone. I hate that my contacts have a different entry for each number rather than grouped by person. I love that my phone is small and sturdy. I hate that I can’t read the keys in the bright sun. I love that my phone can take being dropped. I hate that I have to listen to a whole message before I can delete it. I hate that texting is impossible.

I love that it has the Motorolla logo – the bat signal on it. And most of all I love that Jack the Cingular logo is still on my phone. I hate ATT.

So, I’m sure I will have the same relationship with my iPhone. I’ll love my iPhone but I will still hate ATT.

But, I’ll have lots of apps that I can’t wait to get my hands on.
Koi Pond, Bloom, Spore, Level, Compass, Pandora, iTunes, Tweetie, Bloom, Shazamm …

That’s a start.

Anything I’m missing?

Great new website! Follow the Apollo 11 mission to the moon with real-time experience. Follow the current point in mission. Listen to conversations, watch video that had been transmitted live. I’m just wondering around the site now and listening to the audio transmission.

Sales visulization of app store sales. Sometimes we all know that data can be quite beautiful. This is one of those moments. I would love to have a wall of these monitors for displaying information spaces.
Each time one of more than 50,000 apps is sold the icon pulses.

Mesmerizing.

youtube vid below.

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

What if every object could tell its own story? Haven’t you wished that you could just google anything? Well if you use RFID you can get information from any object that has an electronic tag. Each object in a way is a smart object.

If you have a reader attached to a device like a smart device, in this case an iPhone. You can come in proximity of the object and tell you the object’s story. It’s pretty interesting technology that can be used say for touring museums. You step up to a painting or sculpture and put your iphone next to the label. It recognizes the painting and allows you to see content about the work. Add links to sources on the net and an expantion of information based on your interests.

This is a nifty video showing the possibilities of using RFID. If you want to know more Check out this post: http://www.nearfield.org/2009/04/iphone-rfid-nfc

What kind of drawing and painting tools are available for artists in a digital space? I don’t know. Because sometimes I actually am under a rock. Why didn’t I know about this cool app so I could vote for it in the Webby’s? Sometimes you just miss cool stuff until most people think it’s old and tired. Well, It’s new to me. Here is a cool app where you can get your inner Pollock out.

I spent hours playing with this software toy. You probably will too.

wikipedia:
Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement.
see the article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

How about making the paintings on your iPhone? Here’s a little movie of the application in action.

Try it or download the iPhone app here : http://jacksonpollock.org/

Do you usually pay to be a beta tester? Not me. I usually get something free for debugging somone’s product.

Well today Amazon released the bigger dog of their reader and will charge you about $500 bucks for a device that looks like a cardboard prototype of a technology product from the 80’s.

Expectations for electronic devices are considerably more sophisticated than what the Kindle offers. Now of course Amazon is just warming up the market for a smart innovative company like Apple or a smart startup to take over much like Apple did with the iPod. I actually think that Amazon doesn’t care. Amazon is all about the distribution chain. They want to sell you the content not the device. They just created the device to create more interest in reading. Certainly the publishing industry doesn’t understand how to do that. But will this actually reinvigorate the reading market? That remains to be seen.

Rumor has it an app is coming to the iPhone that Hulu junkies will be thrilled about. I watch a little hulu here and there. I’m usually unimpressed. I don’t watch tv and don’t really appreciate the story format. But, hulu has a terrific interaction model and with limited titles to view; the selection interface remains simple.

I watch much more video than I thought I would on the iPhone. I’m always checking out what’s on YouTube and it’s great to have a video format that isn’t an immersion at times. Can’t wait to test the iPhone and hulu. Let’s see if the app can be as approachable as hulu in the browser.

The iPhone platform continues to grow with each new distribution method that develops.

Tags: hulu, iphone, tv, movies, media, on demand

I knew it, someone would notice this amazing project by Exquisite Letterpress, the shop of my longtime co-conspirator Peter Fraterdeus. Peter and I have known each other since the beginning of time. From his Micetype newsletters in the early days of laser printing Postscript™ technologies, first third party type house to create multiple master fonts, the first online community for designers designonline, first AIGA community online, and his Alphabets foundry — we have experimented with offline and online technologies together.

Ya need to go over and BUY a pack of these cards or better yet print a set of your own design. These are luscious. Amazing amounts of ink coverage on cotton paper. Pleeze! Show some love for letterpress.

Big kudos to Peter! Now he can get ready for our Spring Fling an all-out sprint to print a set of my ink drawings, egyptian waters as a fullsize limited edition and a set of blank notecards. I think he can handle it.

We’re planning an open house event around the printing of these drawings. Details to come.

Please note trademarks on Micetype, Postscript, designonline, Alphabets and any others we may have forgotten to mention.

Tags: letterpress, exquisite letterpress, nytimes, lettra, Igor Kopelnitsky, AIGA, crane paper

I’ve been looking at some cool new themes for Wordpress that use Sandbox. It’s a great environment to get in and use css to control the look and feel.

Problem is that most of the really cool skins that create thumbnails and size images can’t cope with photos from flickr. I almost never upload images twice. I refer to their location usually at flickr. These cool magazine and creative layout require that I upload the image I want to use. This means that blogging about an image located elsewhere requires a download and then an upload. I want to be able to linkback to the original instance for several reasons including giving proper credit for the image.

I don’t want to ask someone to write a plug-in or sript for this. Anyone have any ideas?

Tags: wordpress, flickr, images, feeds, plugin

Hey… this is fun! This is my first attempt at using Skitch. I found out about it from a Flickr friend Colin Devroe. Go over and sign up for the public beta.

I use SnapZPro for my screen captures and now I have Skitch. I’m using Skitch for fun right now but I imagine many other practical uses. But heck, let’s just stick with fun first.

More on this cool app as I experiment.

Tags: skitch, images, captures, draw, software