131–140 of 158 posts
This is an awesome idea... Why not just have it use the camera to OCR the front of the card?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i've heard this before but haven't been able to verify. do you have a source?
This American Life did a podcast (can't find it at the moment) where they followed two guys who decided to become homeless, and beg for money in NYC while trying to write poetry and stories. Each guy easily cleared 60k, as I recall. So it's definitely doable. In fact, another article I read told about a couple in Portland, Oregon that cleared 50k between the two of the begging.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i've heard this before but haven't been able to verify. do you have a source?
This American Life did a podcast (can't find it at the moment) where they followed two guys who decided to become homeless, and beg for money in NYC while trying to write poetry and stories. Each guy easily cleared 60k, as I recall. So it's definitely doable. In fact, another article I read told about a couple in Portland, Oregon that cleared 50k between the two of the begging.
"Gregory: I was making 60 grand a year, 60 grand, not working hard. If I wanted to push it I could push it to 70. They want you to do over time on Wall Street. Wall Street judges you by your overtime. So yeah, I was raking it in. And I was spending it just as fast on alcohol. I would get up at 8 at night, take a shower, have a pint of Jack Daniel?s on me when I got into my car and drove to work."
Poetry sample:
"A Few of My (cough) Favorite Things"
Waking up achy, And out in the open.
Guard dogs are barking. Before words are spoken.
Wrought iron benches, That causes suff-ring.
These are a few of my favorite things.
Taking a shower, With four dozen others. Moving around,
In a stench that can smother. Finding that you,
Are the source of the stink!
These are a few of my favorite things.
When the bottles dry, And the smokes are gone,
And I'm feeling low
http://www.verifone.com/countertop/vx510.aspx
The last thing I want to do is to hand my $699 iPhone over to a customer, especially with a usb attachment or delicate accessory in it's headphone jack....
CEO is Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i've heard this before but haven't been able to verify. do you have a source?
This American Life did a podcast (can't find it at the moment) where they followed two guys who decided to become homeless, and beg for money in NYC while trying to write poetry and stories. Each guy easily cleared 60k, as I recall. So it's definitely doable. In fact, another article I read told about a couple in Portland, Oregon that cleared 50k between the two of the begging.
I wonder what the overhead is per transaction (usually a small fixed fee as well as a percentage of the overall transaction). Having worked with some small retail shops, you usually trade off either a higher per transaction cost with smaller percentage fees for large ticket price items or the other way around for quick-serve restaurants for instance.
This sounds like a money grab business to me. They'll launch, make a couple hundred mil, then they'll get hit with fraud, a ton of people will lose money, and they'll be forced to shut down, since noone will want to use the service, in fear of getting defrauded. Since there is no barrier to entry, it'll be like 2 weeks before someone comes out with a black market version, that will look exactly the same, but instead…
If you haven't read the PayPal story, you probably should. A good version of it is to be found in Founders at Work , as told by Max Levchin (the nerd who mostly solved fraud for PayPal). Turns out the early story of PayPal is the story of solving the fraud problem...so it is extremely relevant to this discussion. PayPal also started as a company doing security and payments on portable devices, so it's doubly relevant…
This may come as a shock to some, but: Magnetic cards (and all existing RFID equivalents) are bad. Instead of encouraging their use, we should be creating the mostly fraud-proof obvious alternative: one in which a single transaction does not give the other party permanent access to your wallet. Picture a card with a key pad on it, for entering a dollar amount. The transaction (through RFID?) would be valid for only t…