A library of snippets
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Today, we’re adding PIX, the most used payment method in Brazil, as a payment method for Spotify Premium. Getting access to on-demand ad-free offline music streaming in Brazil has never been so easy. Now, users can pay once and recharge whenever they want—without automatic renewal.
From Spotify Brazil Expands Payment Methods With PIX — Spotify:
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The best scenario would be to end up with 10+ “too big to fail banks” instead of the current 4, complemented by several dozen “specialist banks” to serve specific niches.
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An honest chatbot at a retail bank would simply say, “Right now, we pay you 1.2% on your deposits, but you could get 4.85% at CIT Bank. You are paying 10.5% on your auto loan, but you could get an 8.75% rate at Lightstream. You paid $450 in fees in the last 12 months in fees, but with a Capital One 360 checking account you would have paid $0 in fees. RUN!”
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“They proceeded to the self-service checkouts and scanned multiple Clubcard vouchers on a smartphone, ultimately reducing the price of the goods to zero,” the prosecution counsel claimed.
From Tesco: Students accused of scamming NI stores with TikTok Clubcard – BBC News:
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The great paradox in financial services is that money is really really really important to us, yet we still choose to spend more time deciding what movie to go see, what restaurant to eat at, and what video game to play than we do managing our money.
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For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere – it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps.
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Indeed, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984, and most people didn’t know why they needed one.
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While working at the morgue, Lodge allegedly stole parts of cadavers donated to the school, often by the deceased’s kin, to sell them to collectors, and even let Maclean and Taylor into the morgue to peruse the bodies and parts and choose what they wanted to buy.
According to the indictment, from September 2018 to July 2021, Taylor transferred 39 electronic payments to a PayPal account operated by Lodge, totaling $37,355.56, in payment for human remains he’s stolen. One of the transactions, for $1,000, came with the memo “head number 7.” Another said, “braiiiiiins.”
From ‘Braiiiiiiiiins’: Alleged Harvard Human Remains Trafficker Left PayPal Notes.
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The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) publishes a register of all CDR participants and representatives at cdr.gov.au/find-a-provider. Almost three years on from the official launch, the data holders now sharing data include 113 bank and credit union brands representing 76 ADIs, who collectively account for approximately 99.8% of bank lending to Australian households and 99.7% of bank deposits by Australian households, based on APRA monthly banking statistics. In practical terms, the Consumer Data Right already makes near-ubiquitous banking data available to any accredited data recipient.
(A small number of ADIs not yet sharing data include those with ongoing exemptions granted by the ACCC, those with no relevant products – for example ADIs who focus on providing payment settlement services, and some very small ADIs whose exemptions have expired but are not yet compliant. Collectively their market share is negligible.)
Data sharing by Energy retailers was added in November 2022, with Australia’s three major energy retailers actively sharing data. Roll-out to the energy sector is continuing.
Data recipients must be accredited by the ACCC. There are 28 active accredited data recipients, and another 75 ‘CDR representatives’, which are organisations able to receive CDR data through another accredited data recipient. Another 11 organisations have been accredited but are not yet active. Between them the active accredited data recipients have 98 active ‘software products’ through which consumers can request that their data be shared.
From Australia’s Consumer Data Right is driving innovation and opening up benefits for consumers | Finsia.
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The Apple shocked many people with the launch price of its Vision Pro headset. At $3,499 they are not going to be an impulse buy at the airport. But they are, apparently, amazing. One journalist went so far as to say that using the Vision Pro was “the most mind-blowing moment” of a career covering Apple and technology, which suggests to me at least that something interesting is going. Perhaps $3,499 really isn’t a lot of money for an entirely new way to interact with both the mundane and virtual worlds?
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At least one Apple procurement employee has told a component supplier that they are optimistic about the headset’s success, suggesting it could follow the trajectory of the AirPods, whose shipments roughly doubled in size each year between 2017—their first full year on the market—and 2020, according to a person who spoke to the employee.
From Apple’s Learning Curve: How Headset’s Design Caused Production Challenges — The Information:
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As most observers have noted, the Metaverse will be made up from many different metaverses and there is no reason to think that a games metaverse accessed using a Meta headset will be the same as a (for example) engineering metaverse experienced through an Apple headset or a (for example) media metaverse seen through Google goggles. What they all are, however, is shared social spaces where people obtain experiences together.
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However, it might be that Apple is introducing a new binding process for digital identity with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. The extended-reality headset that was launched to a fairly receptive audience earlier this month, uses biometrics in such a way as to cement the relationship between the user, the platform, their identity and, presumably in time, their wallet.
From Apple Vision Pro Signals Another Move Into Digital Identity for Apple.
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However, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has now tweeted that many people will have to set extra money aside to buy the Vision Pro. That’s because there’s no room for wearing glasses under the headset, so those who wear specs have to find a different way to be able to see the microOLED displays in perfect clarity.
This is achieved by prescription lenses which sit in front of each eye. They attach magnetically to the Vision Pro, Apple has said, but it has not given any clue about pricing.
From Apple Vision Pro: Report Claims New Eye-Watering Price Shock.
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Finally, as a place holder in an important new category of technology, an Apple headset would be a statement of intent, rather than an end in itself. However impressive the technology behind the device, it will still suffer from the problem common to all VR and AR headsets: most people do not want to don a bulky headset or to cut themselves off from the world to enter a different digital realm.
Until the same experiences can be worked into lightweight glasses — or even, one day, contact lenses that make the technology completely invisible — VR and AR are unlikely to infiltrate everyday life in the way that smartphones did. But if Apple finally launches its headset next week, it will have taken the all-important first step.
From Apple’s mixed reality headset is a hedge against disruption | Financial Times:
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