Day: 10 March 2011

Verifone throws its weight behind FUD

If you’ve not seen the video from Verifone about Jack Dorsey’s Square startup, its well worth watching if you can find it. There is a Parody which sums up everything we’re all thinking.

VeriFone’s business model has been side-swiped (pun intended), so they decided to use Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to counter this, and hope to drive their competition out of business. Remember, VeriFone is the one who makes, and gives away, the app to skim Credit Cards — and they’re talking about trust? VeriFone, go fuck yourself with a cactus. I’m sticking with Square, who won’t rip me off.

The weird part of this whole thing is Verifone creating a proof of concept application at sq-skim.com. Which raises the whole question about hacker ethics.

Verifone putting out a proof of concept app before telling square about the flaw… And making it available for anyone to download and mess with. This is bad form, and if they were not in the business of pushing there own solution (which is much bulker and no where near as elegant) they might have told Square about the flaw and pursued them to fix it.

Verifone are certainly running scared…

Kinect the fast growing, all down to the hackers

Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators

Microsoft announced today that it has sold 10 million Kinect sensors since the Xbox 360 accessory launched in November. In addition, Microsoft reported that over 10 million Kinect games have been sold. The global sales figures, according to a company spokeswoman, were tallied through the end of February.

Since its launch, Kinect–which allows gamers to control on-screen action with only the movement of their bodies rather than a controller–has surpassed expectations. Microsoft initially expected to sell 5 million Kinect units through 2010. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, however, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed that the company actually sold 8 million units through the end of the year.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20041213-17.html

Although I’m really happy the Microsoft Kinect has outsold even the Apple iPad, The Nintendo Wiimote, Halo, etc. One thing no one seems to be mentioning is the fact Microsoft made that massive U Turn on people hacking the Kinect.

There is no doubt in my mind that being hacker friendly made all the difference. In actual fact if there was a graph of sales, I bet after the first rush to get a kinect, things were steady before sales went a little crazy once someone hacked the kinect. After Microsoft did the whole U turn, sales must have gone through the roof.

I look forward to seeing the increase sales once the SDK comes out. Microsoft are on a roll, now if only Sony, Apple, etc would see the benefits of working with the hacker community.