Apple is positioned to put PayPal in the ground

I stumbled upon this great WIRED article that points out something we should have realized long ago: Apple has all of our credit card information.

Through the release of their recent earnings call and the slew of data that came with, it was suddenly apparent that there are 800 million Apple IDs for iTunes purchases, and most of those have credit card info to go with. That's 800 million users who may, very soon, radically change the way they pay for things.

Apple is in a very unique position. Over the course of a decade, they have inadvertently created a huge market for a valuable digital service. That position is unique for two reasons: first, the number, and second, the trusted Apple brand.

Wireless payment methods already exist, but even established services like PayPal don't have the kinds of numbers that iTunes commands. WIRED writer Marcus Wohlsen reveals that existing services and other eCommerce sites - PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon.com, Bitcoin - don't have even half of Apple's 800 million users. This means that, were Apple to offer a secure wireless payment service using Apple ID confirmation online and quick fingerprint scan authorization on the iPhone, they would already have a huge audience for that service. No customer acquisition required - just a brief stint of user education to encourage people to start implementing their new Apple iPay (I just came up with that name, but it's pretty good).

Apple's second strength is the fact that, well, that it is Apple. One of Apple's strengths is product and service integration. Their cloud service functions seamlessly across its varied products. The existing Apple ID set-up and iTunes purchase methods are intuitive and functional. If Apple were to implement a large-scale wireless transfer service using those same devices and the Apple IDs that users have already grown accustomed to, we can expect the same flawless cross-platform functionality.

It would be a natural step on the path towards the digitization of currency. Outside of the states, mobile and digital payments are the norm. Instead of using an Apple ID, in Europe, near-field communication is the norm - simply swipe your smartphone over a sensor at the register and your credit card information is gobbled up. In Africa, where carrying cold, hard cash can be a dangerous practice, SMS transfers are the preferred method of payment. In the same way that you might text CROSS to 55555 to donate to the Red Cross, cell phone users can text to their creditors mobile banking number to pay their bills or to purchase a product.

Whether for security's sake or efficiency's, mobile credit is the way of the future. Americans have just proven to be slow adopters. Perhaps they just need the right shepherd to show them the way. And Apple has got a mighty large flock.

FiLIP: solving parent paranoia in the digital age

It just makes you shake your head in disappointment. You see a family of four out to eat. The children - a daughter, looks to be about nine, a son, seven - both clutching cellphones. And they're iPhones no less. Look across the restaurant and see another two parents; their babysitter quit on them before their weekly night out to dinner. Their two-year-old starts to wail at the table, so mommy hands him an iPad like some sort of digital pacifier. Maddening.

Personally, I didn't own a cellphone until age 13. I was always trusted to get to and from school on the bus without incident. If ever I went to a friend's place, they knew that I could call them on a house phone to check in, so they resisted the cellphone "fad" for a long time. My parents only gave in when, in high school, after-school marching band rehearsals had varied and unpredictable end times. I was constantly borrowing my friends' cell phones in order to make calls at a time when unlimited minutes were a luxury. They cracked and I had a Sony Ericsson flip phone for two years.

I'm not saying my parents did it perfect, nor am I saying that parents who give their children cellphones too soon are bad people. They're trying to adapt to the digital age, and the digital age is scary. We believe that kidnappers, pedophiles, and predators lurk in windowless vans in every neighborhood, and fear for the safety of our children in perpetuity. With so many dangers, technology will surely provide an answer. So we thrust fragile, hundred dollar communicators into the grubby little hands of elementary school students and feel relief. Now you can call your son or daughter at all times, even track them using Find My iPhone. That is, of course, if they haven't dropped it in the toilet, shattered it on the playground, or had it taken up in class because they were caught playing apps.

Y'see, kids don't need cellphones. They're already growing up in an age of technology that spreads focus so thin that studies are finding suffering attention spans and levels of intercommunication in children. They certainly don't need a gateway to those influences in their hip pocket. But parents still want (note: 'want', not 'need') a way of contacting their child and knowing they are safe. In comes the FiLIP.

project ara: will I ever give up my iPhone?

We're taking a break from the music reviews this week, but I did listen to the free single (and didn't like it very much). Instead we're talking about smartphones.

The iPhone continues to dominate the smartphone market. Though phones playing host to the Android OS are spreading like wildfire, the cheapened iPhone 5C dampened that surge. Apple led the charge and Microsoft and Google scrambled to play catch-up, but Apple's first-adopter advantage carries on seven years after the release of the first gen iPhone.

I love my iPhone 5S, specifically how well-integrated it is with all things "Apple". It syncs all my contacts, messages, email, music, photos, etc. to and from my laptop like a champion, and creates a bond between them that Apple aficionados are accustomed to. It's a clever function, because it creates a dependency on the iPhone's natural connectivity. To switch to another phone - no matter how fantastic it may be or what features it offers - would be a mistake if it doesn't have the interconnectivity of my iPhone.

I once had a professor ask me what it would take to give up my iPhone. After really considering it, I told him there wasn't any other product that could get me to give it up. But I think that I may have finally found something to derail my Apple allegiance. Watch the first minute of this CNET video to get acquainted with Project Ara.

FiveThirtyEight, a data-driven journalism organization: making data journalism cool

Nate Silver is a name that I learned and then forgot. He earned a lot of repute after predicting the results of the 2012 election with near perfection. Many praised it as miraculous, an accomplishment against all odds, but Silver says it was all just data.

"Certainly we had a good night. But [the prediction] was and remains a tremendously overrated accomplishment... It wasn't all that hard to figure out that President Obama, ahead in the overwhelming majority of nonpartisan polls in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Iowa and Wisconsin, was the favorite to win them, and was therefore the favorite to win the Electoral College.

Instead our forecasts stood out in comparison to others in the mainstream media."

And it is because of Silver's discontent with some of the practices of the mainstream media that he is striking out with a venture in the field of data journalism.

FiveThirtyEight is the relaunch of Nate Silver's data-driven coverage with the backing of ESPN. The new site launched today (March 17) and, for a WordPress site, looks fantastic. Silver promises a broad coverage of topics in their subsections: politics, economics, science, life and sports.

FiveThirtyEight is now working with a team of 20 journalists. Silver says that though they're big on data, not all of their reporting will be driven by gritty statistics.

"By no means do we think that everything can be broken down into a formula or equation. On the contrary, one of our roles will be to critique incautious uses of statistics when they arise elsewhere in news coverage. At other times, we'll explore ways the consumers can use data to their advantage to level the playing field against corporations and governments."

why we need to send the rabbits back where they came from.

Airports are a natural place to be wary of these days. It seems that another terrorist scare is always just around the corner, and so we allow TSA to cop a squeeze in the name of liberty. But in a surprising turn of events, I tell you immigration is what you should be worried about at the Denver International Airport. In what is perhaps the first sign that Mother Nature is reclaiming her human-infested territory, rabbits are hopping the border to Denver airport parking lots.

Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trial, right to your parked car, and he’s taking a break from his hippity hopping to grab a bite to eat. This unexpected pest species is adorably munching away at critical cables and wiring beneath parked cars at Denver International. You might hope that something so cute wouldn’t dare eat anything important, but you’d be wrong – the critters are causing hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars in damage.

why I wrote a memorial about my first car

Your first car: a rite of passage. You turn sixteen and get behind the wheel with your license for the first time and so many doors are flung wide open. The options seem endless when you’ve got a full tank of gas, a high school student’s ambition and four wheels beneath you.

My car’s name was Chuck, before my family sold him and traded up. His full name: Chuck the Astounding Adventure-mobile. Yes, I know, men are supposed to name their cars and boats – all manner of vehicle, really – female names in the tradition of our seafaring ancestors. But I was not a man when I named that car. I was still a boy, and regardless, that goofy, cherry red Mercury Sable was definitely a male in character: sturdy and loyal, but not above playing the occasional prank. I went without air conditioning one sweltering Texas summer while we saved money for that fix, and I discovered the hard way that the 1999 model doesn’t come with anti-lock brakes.

why we need to change how we teach poor students

Students that come from impoverished families do not learn in the same way as students from middle class or wealthy families. Notions of value and importance are different when seen through the eyes of an underprivileged child, and we can’t expect them to adapt their worldview in order to succeed in the American education system. Our schools need to adapt in order to teach all students effectively, by using programs that will help them understand the worth of a grade school education in the real world.

When we attempt to understand obstacles to impoverished students in the classroom, it’s important to put ourselves in their shoes. When someone of the well-to-do class takes a glance at a poor, urban high school student they see the obvious. Financial limitations, likely poor parenting, and maybe a part-time job after school make it difficult for poor students to keep the importance of schooling in frame. But let’s say that the good people of the world were to give that student enough money to go to college - we’ll say $100,000. Would this fix all of his or her problems?

why my mailbox should be empty on saturdays.

The United States Postal Service is threatened. They are defaulting on payments and have reached their borrowing limit from the United States Treasury. If they don’t cut costs and start balancing their budget, it will mean big trouble for their agency. Their solution: no more mail on Saturdays. And I think that’s great.

The USPS plans to cut mail delivery services to solely weekdays, saving an estimated $2 billion annually. Sounds like an awful lot of dough, and a pretty slick solution for their budget problem. And it’s not the first time that they’ve attempted this change. For years the USPS has lobbied to end the six-day delivery, struck down by Congress each time. This time, with financial crisis looming, they may very well get their way.

And to this, I say, “good.” I am all for letting the delivery service take a day off. It’s just one more step leading us away from hardcopy delivery and publications – one more instance of the digital age steamrolling along and leaving expedited data transfer in its path. If the USPS can’t afford to deliver on Saturdays, then they shouldn’t.

Now, this change isn’t victimless. There’s been an outcry from small, weekly newspapers and magazines that regularly deliver on Saturdays. These publications fear a loss of readership from those who relish the routine of their Saturday morning read. If the USPS is no longer available for that Saturday morning delivery, these publications will just have to adapt. Perhaps this is a signal of a greater reliance on electronic publications, and a chance to put traditional readers online. Or maybe they’ll just deliver on Mondays.

Regardless, far be it from me to force the USPS into a budgetary crisis, and newspapers shouldn’t have the gall to do so either. Publications will be flexible as they have been for the past decade, and I suspect they’ll carry on just fine. If our mailboxes are empty and our doorsteps bare on Saturdays, we will just have to soldier on.

simple math

I attended a presentation this week by Julie Stackhouse, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Stackhouse presented to the Cornell School of Business on the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of the Federal Reserve. Till now, the financial crisis has been some great monetary enigma, unknowable to the high school senior that I was when it began. Subprime mortgages aren't exactly interesting, but the complex interplay of citizens abusing rising housing prices, banks issuing loans to folks that could never pay them back, and mortgage brokers leading buyers to variable rate mortgages made for a really interesting presentation.

All of the jargon aside, Stackhouse was able to boil down the past half decade in to a solution; one quote from chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, who said that to fix the debt crisis incurred, the federal government needs to either cut spending, or increase revenue. And until this country learns to spend within its means, our standing as the financial superpower of the world is unsound.

And I breathed a great sigh of relief to know that someone in this country understands how money works, even if it's not the folks that set our budgets and taxes. The national debt is the biggest offense to common sense in the modern era. You can try to chalk it up to financial crises and a need for government programs, what have you, but it can be simplified to an analogy.

Let's imagine a man named Sam, and Sam buys a used car using a high limit credit card for, say, $16,500 (that's taking nine zeroes off the actual debt). Now, Sam makes about $2,500 a month, so he figures he'll be able to pay off his credit card bill within the year. But Sam, not the sharpest spender, continues to spend $3,500 every month on music, booze, and Xbox Live arcade games. Or, y'know, fiscally responsible Sam-programs like food, clothing and gasoline. Either way, the Average Joe American can discern that Sam's irresponsible spending is going to cause his debt to increase. And let's not even think about interest.

This means trouble for Sam, and it means trouble for the United States. If our government continues to spend beyond its means, we'll cease to be trusted as a site for investment and safe capitalism. If you thought that our economy has been bad since 2008, try to imagine if the rest of the world were to cease economic activity with the US. The world economy would belong to the nations we borrow from now, namely the Chinese, and the US will be stuck as second fiddle (or worse).

The moral of the story is that it's time Congress began realizing the limitations of our economy. We have two options: decrease spending, or increase taxes. Neither option is apt to make many people happy, but it's a long-term game that needs to be played at this point. And if we don't trust the head of our national banking system, who will we trust?