| Per Visa's Orders, Square to Issue Encrypted Dongles After All In the startup world, with new money comes new obligations. The leaders at mobile payment startup Square, being well-establish entrepreneurs, know this well. Yet, they cannot be excited about requirements coming from Visa after the credit card giant made a strategic investment in the company earlier this week. Visa released a new "best practices" for mobile payments April 27 and a stipulation of those practices are that credit card information be encrypted from the source of the transaction. Square does not currently encrypt credit card information coming from the dongle it uses to make transactions through smartphones. Yet, when billion-dollar behemoths that have just invested in your company strongly suggest that you do something, it is probably best that you do it. Hence, Square will issue new dongles later this year with the ability to encrypt data transmissions from the source.
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What Can an App Do With Your Twitter Account? New Login Screen Will (Sort of) Tell You
Twitter has taken to redesigning the OAuth screen - the screen you see whenever you decide to login to an application using your Twitter account - in an attempt to better show what you are agreeing to when you hit the "Allow," err, "Authorize app" button. Twitter developer advocate Matt Harris announced on the developer Google group this afternoon that they were working on refreshing the screen to offer "better clarity about what an application can see and do with an account." Though it might be better than before, it's still missing one key thing - the fact that the app can access your DMs.
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PayPal Buys Fig Card: A Stepping Stool to Mobile Payments for Merchants? It looks like PayPal has mobile on the mind. Last week, parent company eBay bought the location-based media company Where and today, PayPal announced that it has acquired Fig Card. PayPal has been working on a number of ways to enable mobile payments, from bumping iPhone together to using NFC chips, but this acquisition could focus on giving merchants the ability to accept mobile payments quickly, easily and cheaply.
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How Netflix Stole my Eyepatch & I Stopped Stealing Movies I think it was about a decade ago now when I downloaded my first camcorder movie off the Internet and a love affair was born. Why bother going out and renting something from Blockbuster or forfeiting your first born for a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn when you could nearly replicate the entire experience, for free, on your couch with Orville Redenbacher at your side? As time went on and peer-to-peer file sharing grew - and the movies went from shaky, "down in front!" home movies to near-DVD quality replicas - it only got worse. And then, suddenly, it all came to an end. "Cold turkey," as they say. But why?
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Create Your Own iPad App in Minutes with New Bizness Apps Tool You may have seen the new web services that make it easy for anyone to create a lightweight iPhone or Android app, just using drag and drop, text entry and feed URLs. The apps are then hosted for a monthly fee. Those are cool but how about an iPad version? If that's of interest to you, check out a new service just launched today by a company called Bizness Apps. Bizness has an iPhone app creation system similar to Widgetbox or Genwi's iSites (my favorite) but now it lets you create a dynamic and native (not web) iPad app and host it for $39 per month. I tested it out and the Content Management System is easy to use, relatively powerful and rich with features. It's particularly well suited to restaurants and other small local businesses. Bizness also positions itself well for designer resellers.
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iPad Users Scroll More Google Search Results Than PC Users In the still nascent tablet market, research is ongoing about how consumers interact with this new computing medium. Whether it is how users interact with tablet magazines or how much time they spend using various apps, there is still a lot to learn. Advertising network Chitika released a study today showing that when perusing Google search results, users are more likely to scroll past the first couple of results than they are from a PC. The study showed that 20% of iPad users click the top search result in Google, a decline from the 34% who do so from a personal computer.
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India's New Laws Silence Online Speech: This Week in Online Tyranny India's New Laws Silence Online Speech. An innocuous-sounding set of rules called the "Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011" [pdf] went quietly into effect last month in India. These rules, possessing the force of law, practically guarantee that no user of electronic communications in one of the world's largest countries will ever be completely safe from persecution again. Under the new rules, anyone who objects to content online will be able to effect that content's immediate removal. The justifications for removal are so extensive and so vague that virtually anything will qualify for removal.
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Android Joins the Mobile Video Chat Party but We're Still in the Dark Ages Android phone owners will soon be able to video chat with each other using Google Talk over WiFi, 3G or 4G networks, Google announced in a blog post this afternoon. The feature will roll out first to Nexus S phone owners over the coming weeks and to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and newer devices "in the future." It's a start! The offering, when it ships, sounds like it will be more compelling than Apple's Facetime but less useful than independent mobile video chat apps like Tango that offer iPhone to Android video chat. A number of mobile video chat apps have been launched in just the past few weeks from Skype, Qik, Fring (now with group video calling on iPhone!) and others. But how long will we have to wait until Android users can video call iPhone owners without any more thought than voice calls require today?
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Celebrating Open Government: Sunlight Foundation Turns Five The Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization that uses the Internet to promote government transparency and openness, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. The foundation uses data analysis to report on government activity and trains journalists in the use of data to tell the story about what the federal government is actually up to. We often cover the Sunlight Foundation and what they are doing. For the anniversary they sent a note to all their kindred spirits in the cause of open government. "We've grown from a small organization with big ideas to a connected community whose call for greater government openness and transparency is heard throughout the country," wrote Nicko Margolies, communications coordinator at the Sunlight Foundation.
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YouTube With the Astronauts Tomorrow, Friday, April 29, the penultimate space shuttle mission launches and a 30 year shuttle program draws to a close. Mark Kelley, NASA Commander of Space Shuttle Endeavor's final flight, aka mission STS-134, will take questions live on May 2. Kelley and his crew will take questions via YouTube and Twitter and their responses will be broadcast live over the PBS News Hour's YouTube channel. Miles O'Brien, a space reporter with decades of experience in broadcasting, will moderate.
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