Category: Office Tech

I’ve blogged about many different disruptive consumer technologies.  I’ve blogged about VOIP telephone services (which is an over-the-top way of replacing a traditional landline).  I’ve blogged about streaming media sticks such as the Amazon Fire TV stick, the Roku stick, and the Chromecast stick.  I’ve blogged about the Tablo, a television receiver and digital video recorder that permits time-shifting and place-shifting your viewing of broadcast television programs.

What’s pretty interesting, I think, is what all of these technologies have in common.  Of course one thing they all have in common is that they rely on internet connectivity.  But the other thing they all have in common is their bland, featureless, nondescript boxes. Continue reading “Disruptive technologies in nondescript boxes”

I have been seeing a bit of a trend lately.  The trend is free wifi that is blazing fast, many tens of megabits per second both up and down.

At right is a speed test result for the free wifi in the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin.  And this did not even require me to accept some terms and conditions.

Some time ago a friend was in the new Whitney museum in Manhattan.  Again blazing fast, eighty megs down and fifty megs up.  And again no need to accept terms and conditions.

It’s nice when this happens.

What’s the fastest free wifi you have encountered?  Please post a comment.

The last time I tried to use the public wifi at the USPTO, which was a few months ago, the login process was so cumbersome that eventually I gave up and used my own wifi hotspot instead.  The last time I did successfully log in to the public wifi at the USPTO, which was a few months before that, it was embarrassingly slow, slower than 100K bits per second up or down.  Basically voice phone modem speeds.

Can someone who has recently made use of the public wifi at the USPTO share a comment about how fast the wifi was, and how easy or difficult the login process was?

Used to be that to accept credit cards, a business had no choice but to open a “merchant account” through a bank.  The merchant account had a monthly service fee of at least $30 and required purchase of a card reader costing $500 or more.

A couple of years ago, startup Square offered a new way that a business could process credit card payments.  An inexpensive card swipe reader would plug into the user’s smart phone.  With no monthly service fee and no signup fee, Square became very popular among small businesses.  Close on its heels, Paypal launched its own very similar service.  Then a year ago, Amazon decided to take over the market with its Amazon Local Register service.  Amazon promised a smaller commission (a mere 1.75% compared with 2.5 to 2.7% for Square and Paypal) and backed the system with its well-known brand name and market clout.

Then October of 2015 kept getting closer and closer, and this was important because in October of 2015, there was going to be a “liability shift” in which a merchant would have to absorb the losses from credit card fraud if the store failed to use the “chip” in a credit card.  Square sent out new card readers to its users, card readers that could read a chip as well as swipe a magnetic stripe.  And Paypal rolled out a super-sophisticated card reader that would read a chip, swipe a card, or even accept a contactless payment such as Android Pay or Apple Pay (and that cost $150).  Industry watchers watched Amazon to see what it would do for its users of Local Register.  Would Amazon mail out small and inexpensive chip card readers to its users as Square had done?  Would it invite its users to purchase super-sophisticated $150 readers as Paypal had done?  Or would it move to the head of the pack by rewarding its loyal customers with free-of-charge super-sophisticated card readers?

I was astonished to learn today that Amazon has given up.  It will not do anything to make it possible for its users to read chip cards.  Amazon stopped signing up new Local Register accounts today, and users with existing accounts will only be able to use them until February 1, 2016.  Amazon is abandoning the merchant credit card processing business.

What should existing users of Amazon Local Register do about this? Continue reading “Amazon scraps its Local Register service”

(Summary:  SIP telephone service is really neat and you should learn about it and use it if you want to be trendy, modern, and up-to-date.)

“Over-the-top” is a general term for the Schumpeterian sort of disruption that we see over and over again as various categories of commerce get disrupted by new distribution mechanisms (generally involving the Internet).  We see the traditional world of record labels, a world in which ten or twenty years ago a handful of companies had a stranglehold on the distribution of music.  A world in which I had no choice but to purchase a “record album” of maybe ten tracks to get the one or two tracks that I actually wanted to listen to.  That traditional world is now in the past, replaced by an over-the-top world in which the consumer can download the one or two tracks of interest by clicking around on the Internet at iTunes or Amazon.

We see the traditional world of video entertainment, a world in which ten years ago a handful of cable TV and satellite TV companies had a stranglehold on the distribution of things like HBO and sports event broadcasts as parts of bundles of dozens or hundreds of channels which the consumer was forced to buy to get the two or three or four channels that the consumer actually wanted to watch.  That world is likewise gradually receding into the past, with OTT mechanisms like HBO Now and Netflix and Hulu and CBS All Access.

I’ve recently encountered some aspects of modern telephone service that also count as over-the-top, new services called “SIP” that bypass the traditional landline telephone companies and that will likely be as disruptive in the telephone world as the OTT services have been for music and video.  I will tell you about some of the SIP services. Continue reading “Over-the-top as it relates to telephone services”

(Summary:  Install Android Pay on your smart phone and use it, because it is trendy and modern and up-to-date and greatly reduces the risk of someone misusing your credit card information.)

The last that you heard from me about digital wallets (blog article) was that Softcard, the non-Apple digital wallet, had bitten the dust, and that Google had rather carefully not actually purchased Softcard but instead merely purchased its IP (mostly, its pending patent applications).   This left Google Wallet as the successor app for Android phones.  Google Wallet was decidedly clunky in several ways.  Industry observers stood around waiting for Google’s next step, whatever it might turn out to be.  Now we can see Google’s next step.  It is Android Pay. Continue reading “Adopting a digital wallet – now Android Pay”

Every one of USPTO’s e-commerce systems — EFS-Web, TEAS, RAM, ETAS, and others — has a place where the system forces the user to answer this question.

Continue reading “USPTO should not require “credit card type””