Hip to be Square

Photo by Chris Harrison - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdharrison/4992493250/

Got an email in late August that Square, the iPhone mobile card reader / payment acceptance application founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, had begun shipping readers again.

Mine came this week – 2 of them actually. I’m pretty certain I only ordered one, so I’m not sure where the other one came from – both had the same address and name on them.

Square’s going to have a huge impact on independent vendors: artists who sell at street fairs, bands selling merchandize at shows, stalls at farmer’s markets, etc. The mobile application is free, the reader is free, and Square takes only 2.75% plus $0.15 per transaction when the card is present and swiped. I can even see this approach getting used in more traditional settings (think high end retail stores) in order to free the staff from the old point of sale terminal. (Not sure if Square will offer better percent-of-transaction terms to enterprises who do a certain volume once the rush of free accounts settles down, but I would if I were them).

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Ajax and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications, 2nd Ed. (Review)

Photo by Mike Johnston - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikejsolutions/3078513728/

Just found this long overdue review of Ajax and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications – Second Edition sitting in a drafts folder – looks like I never published it. (Full disclosure – Packt sent me a review copy).

This is the successor to the wildly popular Ajax and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications, which came out back in 2005. The authors of this edition are Bogdan Brinzarea-Iamandi, Christian Darie, and Audra Hendrix. (Brinzarea-Iamandi was also one of the authors of the first edition).

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October Music Events in Cambridge

Music Hack Night photo by glacial23 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/glacial23/4326074965/

(Via Charles McEnerny of Well Rounded Radio)

Two events coming up in October in Cambridge dealing with music, social media, and hacking: Rockshop 8 and Music Hack Day.

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Retweeting the Right Way

Retweet Shirt Photo by Deb Hanson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/debspace/3766841512/

Just released an update to ReTweeter (1.1), which now uses the Twitter API for Retweeting. This means that instead of the traditional “RT: @username” syntax, the retweeted tweets will now show Twitter’s little retweet icon and the link to the original tweet (where it says “about 4 hrs ago”) preserved, and the retweeting user’s name at the bottom, like so:

Screencap by Jeronimo Palacios - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeronimo_palacios/4093181811/

Boston 140 Characters Conference succeeds despite coffee, wifi, power fail

The Fail Whale in Legos - Photo by Bjarne Panduro Tveskov - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tveskov/3387394098/

The 140 Characters Conference in Boston yesterday started off with three strikes against it, in my mind:

1. No coffee. I’ve greatly cut back on my own caffeine addiction, but who starts a conference at 9am on a Tuesday and doesn’t serve coffee?
2. No wifi. Well, there was Wifi, but I couldn’t ever get on any of the available networks.
3. No power. Well, there was power in the building, but the power cops facilities people from the venue would not allow attendees to plug in to the wall outlets, as the cords crossing the aisle represented some kind of hazard.

That’s a steep uphill climb for any conference to overcome, but it turned out to be well worth it. The saving grace was not just Boston’s always active, engaging, welcoming, and supportive social media community (as embodied in folks like @pistachio, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, CS Penn, and way too many more to name them all) but also excellent editorial curation and content pacing.

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