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The Almighty Buck

Clinkle Wants To Become Your Wallet 121

vikingpower writes "Clinkle, a new mobile payments start-up, may or may not have succeeded where so many other efforts have fizzled by inventing a practical way to replace credit cards with smartphones. It's hard to say, though, since Clinkle won't say much about how its system works. Its website is, well ... slight. But a prominent group of Silicon Valley investors who do know what Clinkle is cooking up are acting as though it has achieved a breakthrough. On Thursday, Clinkle announced that it had raised $25 million in early financing from Accel Partners; Andreessen Horowitz; Intel; Intuit; Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com; Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal; and a long list of other investors with technology industry pedigrees. The Huffington Post has an article on Clinkle, or rather on Stanford students putting their degree on hold to go work at Clinkle. The Wall Street Journal [paywalled] mentions Clinkle having some 30-odd employees already."

Comment Bah. (Score 1) 480

They should be minimizing their javascript anyway. Tell that new credit-stealing dev how to use a minimizer. Then, he can feel all fancy when he brags about how his awesome stolen code loads more efficiently. He can also feel important because the obfuscation will make it harder to reuse, making it harder for other devs to take the credit for his awesome stolen code!

Comment This isn't because he is doing too MORE Science. (Score 4, Insightful) 204

The summary makes it look like he is being held back by bureaucracy, while he's really just using it. He entered ONE project in many fairs. Each of these fairs were lateral contests in a larger competition. Effectively he entered multiple times in the over-all road to the International Fair.

What he did would be like a NCAA team losing in March Madness multiple times, only to move position in the bracket, to try again on each defeat. Sorry, I couldn't think of a car analogy.

The kid was taking the same project to different fairs after failing to qualify. Nothing is stopping him from doing Science. He was more interested in being successful. He wasn't doing this so he could "do more science". He was doing it so he could basically enter more times, giving him an unfair advantage. Say I ran a science fair for a bunch of inner city kids. They worked really hard on their projects. When time for judging comes up, some AP, college-bound kid with a rich ( anything white-collar, to these inner city kids) dad comes in with his garage-built project. He didn't qualify in his home town, but blows these kids out of the water. I would be livid.

However, by seeing the way he plays ball, we know he will fit right in in Academia.

Comment It's tough to keep it simple (Score 2) 573

If everyone behaved the same as this guy, I'm sure that Verizon would not be able to offer the service at the consumer price.
70 Terabytes would certainly be the equivalent of "unlimited" to me. This isn't to defend Verizon, as I do agree that they could find a way to make the limits of their plan more clear.

I Suppose Verizon COULD, instead of using the term "unlimited" call the plan: the 50 Terabytes / month plan.

But, for typical consumers, this *IS* unlimited and those numbers just might make choosing an Internet provider more complicated. In fact, if my parents were asking for advice on an Internet service, I would indeed say: "oh, don't worry about those numbers, that pretty much means unlimited for you guys".

By adding these numbers to the plan, competitors could simply up the numbers, while adding no real value for the user. Even Verizon could even offer a 100 Terabyte plan for "only $20 more a month". The average consumer would see this as value, while in reality they would just be paying more.

Comment This will only CREATE jobs for people (Score 3, Funny) 393

Robots will be so good at complex tasks that they will find it overkill to use one for simple tasks. They'll simply say, why waste a robot on this task when we have all of these stupid humans who are willing to do it for basically nothing. Half the quality at an eighth the price. Can't beat that.

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