The Berkeley Student Cooperative pays over $100,000 a year in payments relating to credit card payment facilitation, specifically in that the company that processes these transactions takes a percentage of the overall payment (which I believe is 1.5%). It’s been a serious issue that we’ve never really been able to resolve. A few years ago, we apparently even tried to ask if we could get one of those portable ATMs in our office (the answer was no).
One company – Dwolla – is looking to radically change the way in which merchants handle transactions. Basically, customers (our members) sign up with Dwolla by entering their account and routing numbers for a checking account. Once they’ve done that, they can pay merchants who’ve signed up on their computer or on a smart phone. Dwolla charges $.25 a transaction for any transaction over $10 – anything under $10 is free – and the maximum payment is $5000, though you can make as many $5000 payments you want. (Continued)
After Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, he founded NeXT. There’s a lot of really fascinating footage of Steve Jobs interacting with his team and talking about his business philosophy. There’s great footage of him trying to reconcile the realities of the market at the time with the needs and concerns of the NeXT programmers.
Infer what you will from him talking to his software developers. I think that he’s suggesting that successful start-ups need unique offerings, or they simply shouldn’t exist. Perhaps “shouldn’t” because someone else with more experience will do it, or a different company, or some wisdom about the way that VC firms allocate their financial resources.
We’re either going to make or break it on whether we can provide products to higher education, and services and relationships, that no one else provides… if we can’t, we ought to go broke.”
And this quote is Jobs’ epic meditation on the nature of his own instrumentality.
I felt it the first time when I visited a school, it had 3rd and 4th graders, a classroom, one time, they had a whole classroom full of Apple II’s and I spent a few hours and I saw these 3rd and 4th graders growing up completely different than I grew up because of this machine. And what hit me about it was that:
Here was a machine, that a very few people designed, and they gave it to people who didn’t know how to design it, but they knew how to make it, to manufacture it – they could make a whole bunch of them – then they gave it to some people who didn’t know how to design it or manufacture it, but they knew how to distribute it. Then they gave it to some people who didn’t know how to design, manufacture, or distribute it, but they knew how to write software for it.
Gradually, this sort of inverse pyramid grew and when it finally got into the hands of a lot of people, it blossomed, out of this tiny little seed. It seemed like an incredible amount of leverage. And it all started with just an idea. And here was this idea, taken through all of these stages, resulting in a classroom full of kids growing up with some insights and some fundamentally different experiences which I thought might be very beneficial to their lives. Because of this germ of an idea a couple years ago.
And that’s an incredible feeling. To know that A) you had something to do with it and B) to know that it can be done. You can plant something in the world, and it’ll grow, and change the world, ever so slightly.“
I didn’t have an Apple II in my 3rd or 4th grade classroom, but I was late to that specific era by only a few years. I agree with Jobs: having access to computers, in the classroom and at home, was radically beneficial to my childhood and current life.
Edit: Another thought, specifically about the “change the world, ever so slightly” quote, that I had while posting this video to a friend’s wall:
I don’t think it’s far-fetched to connect the Apple II anecdote and spontaneous events happening around the world today, like the November 9th Alameda County Sheriff’s raids of UC Berkeley’s OccupyCal protest, which went viral. A friend described what sounds like an intense, intense experience: one minute you’re standing around a tent and the next, you’re in a crowd of 1500 people are voting in consensus and the next, a video of a riot cop repeatedly jabbing you in the stomach has been seen by millions of people (even Fox aired it!).
And I chose an anecdote on the small scale, where I knew a number of people in the videos. If you consider how the Arab Spring is progressing, a similar phenomenon was obviously at play.
I think the internet age offers an aspect of modernity that societies are just starting to realize and use: radical individual instrumentality through networked communication systems. I’m utterly fascinated by it.
UC-Berkeley professor and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich addressed a crowd estimated at as many as 10,000 people on Tuesday, November 15th. He was speaking from the steps of Sproul Hall, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Reich was the featured speaker at this year’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Series; as UC-Berkeley students called a campus-wide strike in protest of skyrocketing student fees and police repression, the event was moved to the steps that Mario Savio made famous.
Neither the header text font nor the body text are standard. They’re actually from Google’s Web Fonts, which allows pretty easy integration of fonts with a website.
I am frustrated, though, that it costs money to buy OpenType versions of the fonts.
The fonts are Open Sans (sans serif) and Tinos (serif), both by Steve Matteson. Tinos is apparently “metrically compatible” with Times New Roman…
Tinos was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing serif design that is metrically compatible with Times New Roman™. Tinos offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
A lot of posts had associated pictures and music, but they do not now. Unfortunately, most of that information was lost in the aether, so I guess I’ll just either go back and delete them.
Maybe I’ll merge my livejournal from High School, but that sounds like a lot of work. :]
