Hasta La Ideas

The tech sphere is abuzz with Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s announcement of a couple new features that are already hailed as a new model for digital payments. To hear Dorsey (one of Twitter’s co-founders) tell it:

We revolutionized the payment industry with the Square card reader which makes it possible for anyone to accept credit cards on their phone. Now, with Square Register, we’re reinventing point of sale with a beautiful, intuitive iPad app. Card Case goes beyond point of sale to transform the entire buyer-seller relationship… we’re transforming everyday transactions between buyers and sellers into something special

The Square app+card reader allows merchants to turn their iPads into a mobile point of sale, with customizable inventory, as well as “Google-style analytics”—i.e. full reports of daily transactions—and digital receipts. It’s a significant upgrade from the simple (yet innovative) credit card reader that launched over $1 billion in sales, in 1 million total transactions, for small businesses.

But Square’s major innovation, in terms of user experience, is the Card Case, which links customers to merchants through virtual business or customer loyalty cards without the physical cards or case. After the first transaction between a merchant and a Card Case-holding customer, Square stores the customer information such that he or she can simply provide his or her name—as in a running tab—to make a payment. (The Card Case also serves as a transaction history, which is handy when it comes to balancing your books.)

Geolocation rounds out the Card Case’s seamless integration into real life: the app features directories, menus, specials and even exclusive incentives from local businesses.

The 2.75% transaction fee will remain the same for all transactions.

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From Madonna to Al Gore, how one publisher reimagines books for the digital age

Charlie Melcher is, in his own words, a man of eclectic tastes. With a hand in some of pop culture’s most influential phenomena, from “South Park: A Sticky Forms Adventure” to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Melcher has been redefining the publishing industry since graduating from Yale University in 1988. Conceptualizing projects like Madonna’s controversial “Sex” book is practically old hat to Melcher, who spearheaded the tome when he was with Calloway Editions. The progressive publisher explains the choice was obvious, “Madonna was going to get naked in an amazing book of erotica. What was not to like?”

Melcher worked his way up the ranks after college, re-launching what he’d called Melcher Press as Melcher Media in ’94, where he patented the technology behind DuraBooks. Waterproof, synthetic paper made of nontoxic resins and inorganic materials instead of wood pulp, the infinitely recyclable pages make for ideal beach reads or field guides. The technology also came into play for William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s environmentalist design manifesto,
“Cradle to Cradle.” Like Melcher, the game-changing book preaches a new kind of industrial sustainability—one that incorporates eco-consciousness from the ground up.

From the ground up is exactly how Melcher Media approaches all of its projects,
shepherding a new publication from its inception through various print and digital
incarnations. Working on “An Inconvenient Truth,” Melcher took Al Gore’s next project one step further, developing iPhone and iPad apps called “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” The richly-colored pages, filled with interactive infographics, animations, maps and documentary footage, are all accessible with a swipe of a finger.

“For the last 20 years, I’ve labored to break out of the confines of the two-
dimensional Flatland of the printed page and redefine books as multi-sensory
interactive experiences,” Melcher said. The phrase that he uses, “deep
marketing,” is a type of marketing that creates a unique, immersive experience that
a reader will seek out on his own, which can range from reading a DuraBook in a
bubble bath to flipping through maps of Africa on the iPad while on the train to work.

If working on Gore’s books wasn’t enough of an indication, Melcher also exercises his strong interest in sustainability with his position on the advisory committee for Green Press Initiative and FSC certification for Melcher Media. Clients like HBO and MTV may seem off-brand, but Melcher insists, “The projects that we do are all things that I, or my staff, are personally passionate about. We love high culture and low culture. If it is [a book on] a serious subject, we try to find approaches that will make it as impactful and appealing to as large an audience as possible, and if it’s a pop culture project we try to find the angles that will make the most high-quality and innovative version available.”

As Melcher Media’s website points out, books have basically remained the same since the invention of the Gutenberg Press. If phones and other communication
devices have to keep updating themselves, there’s no reason why this venerable
technology should have to stay the same. “Pop-up books for adults, books with
sound chips and 3-D glasses and now interactive media-rich apps are all examples of an effort to reinvent the book in the digital age.”

The Audi Icons series, inspired by the all-new Audi A7, showcases 16 leading figures united by their dedication to innovation and design.

We’ve all seen “The Japanese Way of Folding T-Shirts,” or at least, according to YouTube, 2.8 million of you have. A lesser 1.2 million of you have watched “How an Engineer Folds a T-Shirt,” which I won’t embed here because it was apparently edited by an engineer (it’s over one minute in length for a ten-second payoff). Instead here’s an abbreviated version:

This guy upgraded the cardboard with K’NEX robotics:

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Competition-led innovation pushes positive social change

Like
Kickstarter for socially-minded projects, Yoxi (pronounced yo-see), an online platform to propose solutions to social issues, encourages activism by introducing a competitive element. After teams create pitch videos on Yoxi-identified problems—they launched with “Reinvent Fast Food“—the voting starts. Industry experts serve as judges, but their opinions only function to create dialog about the team ideas. Social game playing ultimately selects the winners, who can win up to $40,000 (with public donations matched by Yoxi) to make their ideas happen. You can literally help change the world just by voting; their latest competition “Trim The Waste of Fashion” takes on garment manufacturing.

One pair of jeans sold in the U.S. has often traversed seven countries in its making, with the cotton picked stateside then cleaned in China, buttons added in Taiwan, zippers in Hong Kong and so on. This extremely unsustainable practice affects everyone, so Yoxi’s tasking teams to generate a new system or program that will drastically reduce the carbon footprint fashion creates.

With the success of its first competition, Yoxi proves that these American Idol-inspired challenges can yield life-changing results that will better the world in a real way. To enter “Trim The Waste of Fashion,” assemble a three-person team, make a video about your idea and register before 1 July 2011.