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This 28-Year-Old Is Making Sure Credit Cards Won’t Exist In The Next Few Years

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 23:33 by Desiato in category: awesome, News

[Quote]:

With Dwolla, payments are made directly from your bank account. No credit or debit cards are allowed. And because they don’t exist in the system, we don’t have to bring the fees into the system. You can spend any amount of money and when you do that, the person on the other end doesn’t have to pay 1, 2, 3 or 4%. They only pay $0.25 a transaction, which is especially helpful when it’s $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000 transactions. Obviously PayPal becomes very cost prohibitive with those larger transactions. The biggest difference between ideas like this and a PayPal — and PayPal is a phenomenal idea, Square is too — is that those are built on top of networks like Visa and Mastercard. We’re building our own.

You thought Square was cool? Square is kind of cool, but Square keeps the credit card companies in place, skimming fees off all your payments. These Dwolla guys are building a Paypal replacement that charges a flat $0.25 per transaction rather than the 2-3% that Paypal or credit card companies charge. They started with one bank and a handful of retail businesses in Iowa and are slowly trying to take it national.

It’s hard to believe that the big national banks will let an independent upstart replace the VISA and MasterCard networks. This should be interesting to watch.


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Comments:

  1. If they do $1,000,000 a day in throughput with an average transaction size of $500, that means they are doing 2,000 transactions a day. At a quarter a piece, they are making $500 a day in revenues.

    I assume they are hoping that it scales up well.

BBC drops Frozen Planet’s climate change episode to sell show better abroad

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 17:54 by John Sinteur in category: ¿ʞɔnɟ ǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʍ

[Quote]:

British viewers will see seven episodes, the last of which deals with global warming and the threat to the natural world posed by man.

However, viewers in other countries, including the United States, will only see six episodes.

The environmental programme has been relegated by the BBC to an “optional extra” alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary which foreign networks can ignore.

Let’s not educate people about global warming, because they’re uneducated about global warming.


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Comments:

  1. There are two kind of people.
    1) Already believe in climate change
    2) Will never believe in climate change.

  2. @Roland, by Rick Perry’s standards, wouldn’t that be three kinds of people?

  3. No, the third kind of people are…

    Er…

    Hang on…

    The EPA?

  4. @Mudak dang, true, my only excuse is that 1) I’m sick 2) At the moment more involved in Hungarian politics 3) EPA.

Don’t Censor Censorship Opponents: Let Us Testify!

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 16:15 by John Sinteur in category: Intellectual Property

[Quote]:

Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week — and it’s censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

But the bill’s opponents — tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users — won’t have a voice.


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Guernica 3D

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 13:48 by John Sinteur in category: News


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The Cains

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 8:21 by John Sinteur in category: Great Picture, Indecision 2012

And no one is asking for their birth certificates. We know they’re citizen Cains.


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Cracking Siri

Posted on November 15th, 2011 at 8:16 by John Sinteur in category: Apple

[Quote]:

Today, we managed to crack open Siri’s protocol. As a result, we are able to use Siri’s recognition engine from any device. Yes, that means anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad! And we’re goign to share this know-how with you.


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Comments:

  1. Ya, I’m sure that’ll stay open & accessible real long.