SquareUp is now processing $1M in transactions per day. They also just dropped the $0.15/transaction fee to the buyer, keeping the 3% fee (with minimum?) to the seller.

Robert Scoble considers the size of the AppStore to be the key determination of value in the Tablet wars - IPad-2 vs Motorola Xoom vs Rim Playbook vs Hp Touch Pad. No apps no sale. He doesn't count Android apps that haven't been redesigned for the bigger screen. I Commented that for the apps I use on my Archos70, they don't need big redesign as long as they take advantage of the bigger screen to show more text/page. But I'm sure some apps would need a bigger design change... (more)

process of building a ProtoType

Bryan Boyer ponders the city as ProtoTyping engine. You’ll have to excuse the brutishness of this line of reasoning, but suffice it to say there are places which tend to prototype new ideas and others which tend to adopt pre-tested ideas from other places. New York City: prototyping engine. Paso Robles, CA: consumption engine. (Urban) (more)

aka Global MicroBrand (more)

The OHS Project is developing open source tools for collaborative knowledge management, building on XML and other open standards as well as Douglas Engelbart's groundbreaking NLS/Augment system. (more)

from Nokia (more)

David Wiley posted his slides on the needs of Educational Technology to be Open Education (OpenAccess nodes, not Invisible Content, based on Open Source software).

Douglas Engelbart concept (more)

Framing of importance of using Educational Technology to increase the independence of students, not control them. (Power, Hacker Ethic, DIY...) (more)

Fred Wilson slags bad Marketing (paying Advertising agency, paying PR firm - I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).), and recommends some low-cost Customer Acquisition tactics for Start Up-s: Twitter, "social hooks", entry-point segment, live events to piggyback on, etc. (more)

Dave Winer is thinking about BootStrapping for (more)

Dave Winer makes a pitch for Twitter clients to support RssCloud. This would help move the Open Twitter model forward. Hmm, will Twitter clients become RssAggregator-s? Does the fact that the RssAggregator hasn't succeeded in Crossing The Chasm mean anything? (I still use Blog Lines as my RssAggregator. And I don't use a Twitter Microblogging Client at all.)

Some ideas for doing mashups of IRC and Wiki (esp Wiki For CollaborationWare) (more)

Matt Taibbi wonders why nobody from Wall St ever goes to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people. (more)

The latest UsCensus says that 1-in-4 counties are "dying", though it sounds like that just means experiencing more deaths than births in their communities, a phenomenon demographers call "natural decrease" which makes it sound like it ignores immigration/emigration, though maybe that's just mis-described. (Looking at the terms and data, the "natural" part does not include migration. The question is whether the 1-in-4 counties had a net loss in population, or just a "natural" decrease which might have been offset by migration. (more)

the movement of personnel between roles as legislators and regulators and the industries affected by the legislation and regulation and on within lobbying companies. In some cases the roles are performed in sequence but in certain circumstances may be performed at the same time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics) (more)

Fresh Credit Crisis 2008 news (more)

Tunis Ia has had a popular uprising. The demonstrations and riots were reported to have started over unemployment, food inflation, corruption,[8] freedom of speech[9] and poor living conditions. The protests led to the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who stepped down from the presidency and fled Tunisia on 14 January 2011 after 23 years in power. (more)

Dave Snowden says that Complex System-s are inherently unpredictable because they are non-causal. He finishes with the barb Scenario Planning as a method is a sure fire way of falling into all the traps listed above for managers, and PostModernism is a refuge for the confused academic who does not get point 1 above. (more)