Compared to some European countries, the UK is far behind. Many of the smaller retailers and pubs/bars still don't accept card or require minimum spends (£5 or £10) to be able to use cards.
In Finland it seems that absolutely everywhere accepts card and cash is very rare. I'd guess at least 95% of the in-person transactions that I see are made with card. Even for the smallest amounts.
This is very true. The merchant fees in the UK and therefore the minimum spend between merchants can vary enormously.
For instance, I can buy milk at £0.49 on an American Express card in Tesco, but in my local pub, anything under £10 (on any card other than AmEx - AmEx is still not accepted in that many places in the UK) requires me to pay a £1 transaction fee.
There is no reason behind this, other than Tesco are so huge, they can negotiate a much better rate than a small business, who clearly can't even consider the huge American Express merchant fees.
The sooner somebody disrupts this 'business', the better for everyone.
There is a reason behind this. Tesco deems it worthwhile to take a (smaller) hit to keep your business, whereas your local pub believes you aren't going to switch pubs, and just wants to encourage you to use cash so that they keep as much of the price of your drinks as possible (i say this because £1 in 10 is a 'penalty' more than covering costs.. which should be closer to 30p).
IE, your choice of supermarket is more elastic than your choice of pub.
Bitcoin seems to be the closest thing we have to disrupting this, but the chicken and egg problem isn't going anywhere.
Processing card transactions takes longer and reduces the serve rate of drinks. This is IMO probably a larger factor than the processing cost - cash has a processing cost too (staff time, security, fraud, bank charges) and it seems pretty close to the card processing cost.
I've heard several small shop owners say they prefer debit cards to cash since they claim it reduces the risk of robbery. The more people pay by card, the less cash there is in the till and thus the less reason to try to rob a place.
It's just that this is one of those situations where the "Europe" generalization doesn't work. In Sweden, where I'm from, everyone uses debit cards for everything. Right now I'm in Greece, and cash is king (in some supermarkets you even have to go to a separate desk to pay with a card - major hassle). Both are "Europe".
Yeah, I was really trying to sarcastically point that out more than seriously ask if things have become worse. Still, interesting stuff there, especially the bit about having to go to a separate desk in some places in Greece.
It's interesting to compare with the situation in China, where credit cards are very rarely used, but I've never had a problem paying with one in any kind of decently-sized store or restaurant. You almost get the impression that they knew you were coming and set aside a card machine just for you.
It's working for me from the UK. I can't imagine why Google would want to geolocate this. Perhaps they've only partially rolled it out to some of their datacenters?
I think that whatever comes out of this campaign (i.e. certain failure), the team of app.net should continue developing this service bc the need for it will emerge one day in the future. It's just that right now, this point hasn't been reached yet. But being able to move first when the time has come is a good thing.
Right now they should, instead of associating this project with failure, provide the service for free but be clear about the fact that they will start charging for it at some point in the future. Or maybe offer a free and a paid plan with the former being limited in possible API calls.
first of all, what is this extremetech site exactly? it suddenly appears everywhere and the articles i find there are usually of low journalistic quality.
this article is the best example. the author delivers no argument whatsoever to support his/her claim.
" If you imagine a smartphone-sized computer that automatically loads Firefox after boot-up, and the only apps you can run are web apps, then that’s a fairly good analogy of Firefox OS."
- no, this is not a good analogy. although the apps are indeed written in html/css/js they have access to low level apis, thus delivering the same capabilities as native apps currently do on ios/android.
"We weren’t at the meeting when Mozilla decided to make Boot 2 Gecko an actual smartphone OS, but I have a pretty good idea of how it probably went down"
- what follows is pure speculation and adds no value whatsoever to the whole undertaking of proving the article's claim.
"Today, if iOS falters, there are 10 other mobile operating systems that can step into breach"
- No, there wouldn't. Of all mobile operating systems today, there are only two that have a viable developer base, namely ios and android. No other platform has yet succeeded in attracting 3rd party developers to create useful and beautiful apps for its platform (maybe windows phone will step up it's game). So, obviously, the huge advantage of firefoxOS would be the simplicity to create apps for the thousands of talented and motivated web developers out there. How often to you encounter a headline on hacker news that reads "check out me weekend project x which i made because i was bored/wanted to learn some new technology/whatever"? This happens every day basically. Now imagine these people had the possibility to do "weekend projects" with the tools they already master but this time not for the web per sé but for a mobile platform? That is pretty damn exciting if you ask me.
"Firefox OS is a nice idea, but it’s predicated on open standards"
- but? BUT??? If anything, open standards is a good thing.
"Anyone can take Firefox OS’s additions to HTML5 and produce their own implementation [...] Google can simply implement the same specification in Chrome, Microsoft can implement it in IE10, and Apple can implement it in Safari"
- Yes, i can totally see it, Apple et all will give up their control over the app store and let people install apps from anywhere on the web with access to low level apis.
"Mozilla shouldn’t be disheartened, though"
- Certainly not. Especially after this kind of click bait crap.
i think you should add a moral support button. because right now i wouldn't pledge you $50 but i generally like the idea and i might join if this really takes off (and seems to offer me some unique value that i won't get elsewhere for free). i think showing the number of people that think like me somewhere on your page might encourage more developers to pledge something.
I agree! I can really imagine dalton's internal struggle now as he tries to validate the idea in the real world. But I'm more impressed at the way this experiment is set up.
@dalton: Maybe you should add the infamous "Kudos" button to the join.app.net site ;) !
the problem i see with this whole thing is that twitter (which is the company you are disappointed of) is a pain only to developers because they want to use their (more and more restrictive) api but not to the users. obviously they suffer too in the long run by not getting any innovative third party twitter clients or other useful stuff that's based on the twitter api. but this is (a) too far away in the future and (b) most of them won't know why that is or worse not even care.
the thing is: the reason why developers want access to the twitter api in the first place is because the users are there. you cannot just make a paradise for developers when there are no actual users feeding data into the system. one of the main reasons twitter got to where it is today is because celebrities started using it and their fans followed... you cannot reconstruct this phenomenon in the way you're trying to pull it off.
maybe, what you're trying to do is something completey else. maybe you want a service rather for machines to talk to, as a service purely for developers. than that's something completely else.
Also, keep in mind, a large portion of the growth of Twitter was driven by the technical innovation of 3rd-party developers (ie the first iOS app)
They built their service on the back of cool things developers built, and now seem intent on destroying the very same ecosystem which ensured their popularity now that they are succesful -> http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been
I think this sucks, and I am trying to do something about it, rather than just complain on the Internet.
if it is my final paragraph that is correct, then i don't understand why you are referring to twitter et al when announcing your service. you are obviously not in competition with them at all (with the exception of bot nets as a customer base maybe).
This is a catch-22. I have to refer to the comparable service and API to give some idea of what we are talking about, and where the inspiration came from.
Whether any startup founder likes it or not, their startups and projects will get put into buckets and will get called things like "the X of Y" or "like X a Y put together" or "X for dogs".
Don't take the t series. Lenovo basically transformed this to pure trash. The only thinkpad series that lives up to ibms quality is the x series. Truthfully I wouldn't by thinkpads anymore. The only notebook you can by nowadays is the MBA.
Counter-anecdote: I have a T520 and I'm perfectly happy with it. Get the full HD screen, it's worth it. I admit that I'd prefer the old 4:3 screen size, but that's just not the way of the world anymore.
I agree that quality has declined somewhat under Lenovo, but the old T43 was a goddamn tank. I've got one hooked up to my tv for streaming - it puts out full 1080 with DVI if you get the dock. I think it was also north of $2k when new.
So, no, the current t520 is not as well engineered as those old ones, but it's still better than the vast majority of its peers. And you get some great deals on refurbs and open boxes on outlet.lenovo.com.
Current MBA is only 4gb ram. That's a deal breaker for me.
