sxa's Technical Musings

I'm not sure what to make of this week's announcement about AT&T and Verizon trying to push contactless technology in mobiles. They've teamed up with Discover (Fourth biggest behind Visa, Mastercard and Amex) with Barclays handling the accounts and are expected to begin trials in 3Q2011. T-Mobile is also involved. Now I don't know about you, but I'm not sure why I would want my telco provider involved in such a scheme. Admittedly I haven't seen what the involvement of them would actually be, but I don't particularly want another middleman (who would be taking a cut of sales - I believe the telcos probably went with Discover because of the percentages involved) getting in the way between me and my transactions, and potentially being bounced between more parties if there's a dispute. I'd rather deal more directly with the banks, and not have to risk a service which may potentially be dependent on my staying with a particular provider. For those of...

I'm sure that most people reading this will already have heard that recently Google have announced that wave will no longer be developed as-is and the expectation is that it will be removed as an offering by the end of the year. Now there are still a surprising number of people who never even saw wave, and who wouldn't recognise the name, and that's a shame because I genuinely believed in the potential that this tool had to offer. There were, however, a number of issues relating to it, and they were mainly related to marketing. Seeing how Google has done with GMail, Android, and probably GoogleTV in the future, it's a little surprising that it failed, but here's my take on why: Adoption - people weren't 'on it' Needing to have a google account got in the way, especially when it was restricted invite-only in the beginning (although given how buggy it was at the start, it's understandable). I used wave a number of times but many of the people I want...