We’re starting a new mailbag feature called Inbox— and we need your letters.
The service first requires a bank customer to link their current account with their mobile number, this enables payments to be sent directly to that account with just a phone number for reference. To send funds, you can download the free Barclays Pingit app (available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry) or sign-up receive mobile transfers by registering online. Each transaction is protected by a five-digit passcode, which is set by you, and payments can be between £1 and £300 with a maximum of £5,000 per day. (via Barclays Launches Pingit: New Mobile Number Payments)
Rock Historian Ed Ward, on The Lost Promise Of Buddy Holly:
We’ll never know what he was looking for while his wife, Maria Elena, did the dishes, but I’m confident now that he’d probably have found it. If it gave him the strength to stand up to the suits who wanted him to be a teenager’s Sinatra and make recordings that built on his already-impressive past, American rock ‘n’ roll might have been very different.
I wrote a friend of mine with some of these speculations after I got the Memorial Collection and Rarities, and he wrote back, “Imagine what we’d think of John Lennon if the Beatles had all died in a plane crash after their first album.” Lennon and Holly would have been the same age, after all.
“Let’s see how the competition goes…”
Just to beat a dead horse, after seeing the post noting Apple’s iPhone business now brings in more revenue than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined, Jason Hiner reminded me of Steve Ballmer’s classic 2007 video laughing off the iPhone announcement (above).
To be fair to Ballmer, he does say that selling a $500 fully-subsidized phone is insane, and Apple did end up dropping the price, which has fueled sales. Still, the business argument sounds like something RIM would (and did) make. How’s that working out for them now?
As for “I like our strategy, I like it a lot” — there’s simply no excuse. Windows Mobile was quickly exposed for the turd it was, and Windows Phone, while good, was far too late. But 2007 wasn’t all bad for Ballmer…
The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again.
This might be a more important question for the future than we think. When children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later the number of people behaving in a way we used to ascribe to teenagers increase dramatically we are increasingly living in a world where those who shape it are behaving like teenagers… Can this effect have even more impact than e g an aging Western society will? Meaning more teenage logic??
