Within the first 24 hours after jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder) launched his new product called Square, he is already getting a lot of mixed press.
What is Square?
Square is a magnetic card reader that plugins into the headphone jack of an iPhone. Gigaom explains it as:
A credit card (or a debit card) is swiped through the reader, it reads the data and converts it into an audio signal. The microphone picks up the audio, sends it through the processors and then is routed to Square’s software application on the iPhone. From there the encrypted data is transmitted using either Wi-Fi (for iPod touch) or a 3G Internet connection to back-end severs, which in turn communicate with the payment networks to complete the transactions.
No information is stores on the iPhone or ont he device, plus Square is able to work on any device: Android, Blackberry, Symbian and even computers. “As long as we have software on that device, our reader works,” said Dorsey. Square basically makes any iPhone the equivalent to a $900 wireless credit card terminal.
Our thoughts so far!
Other press sources are reporting that Square is already worth $40 million on the day of launch. However, I think this number is very low! I can see this product has a lot of potential and can be adopted very easily. However, it has a huge amount of limitations. If Square gets mass adoption then the card companies like Visa and Mastercard could easily just develop their own similar product, and maybe even work out a way to block Square from accepting their cards. Additionally, established customers will already be tied into long term contracts with other merchants
Whats your thoughts on Square?
Other reports
Gigaom – Jack Dorsey on Square, How It Works & Why It Disrupts
Switched – Twitter Co-Founder Launches Square, the iPod-Ready Payment System
The Inquistr – Am I The Only Person Not Excited About Square?
Techcrunch – Square Worth $40 Million Before Launch
I have been reading Gigaom a lot lately, which is one of the worlds best technology news companies. Gigaom announced back in November that they will be leaving Federated Media for advertising revenues and move over to IDG. Since this time I have noticed a few key changes at Gigaom and was wondering if the site was being affected by the lack of quality advertising on the part of IDG?
Below is a screenshot of the Gigaom site as seem by a UK ip address.
As you can see from the screenshot Gigaom has been showing a huge amount of advertising from Chitika. These ads seem to just make Gigaom look a lot cheaper and more amateurish. Do you think the look of these ads has been affecting visitors to Gigaom?
I think it must have some affect. I have noticed these ads and from being on Gigaom several times in the last few days they have no put me off from visiting the site and actually just reading the full RSS feed instead.
Today Om Malik has talked about CPM advertising rates and how Pubmatic have release their own analysis of over 1 billion ad impression from over 3,000 publishers.
- eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped dramatically by 52% from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April 2008.
- Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April.
- Small Web sites managed to improve their monetization, increasing from $1.17 in March to $1.29 in April.
“The overall trends you pick up from report are not that surprising. For instance, the improved monetization of small websites because they have more focused content presents more targeted advertising opportunity. Again no surprise that Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47% from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Too much damn inventory. You can get the full report here.” Om Malik.
After launching Adphilia we have noticed that a lot of smaller publisher are getting very high CPM rates, thus this price index seems to be in order. However, I find it quite interesting to hear that these smaller publishers think that as they grow their CPM rates will remain the same, when this doesnt really seem to be the case. Therefore, hopefully from these findings most smaller publishers will realise as their sites grow their CPMs will drop.
Conference Season has begun. After the great success of TechCrunch40 (their first event); DEMOfall is next week, followed in October by the Web 2.0 Summit and CTIA.
On Nov. 14, 2007, GigaOM will host a conference of their own, NewTeeVee Live. This day-long event, organized by NewTeeVee editor Liz Gannes and Om Malik, will bring together content creators, distributors, carriers, hardware vendors and more to decide what the future of online video will be in a post YouTube-Google world.
The event will be a live incarnation of NewTeeVee.com, combining discussion of the creative, business, and technology elements of online video. GigaOM are co-producing the event with Federated Media, who are helping them with both organizational and sales support.
The lineup so far includes Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive; Mike Afergan, chief technology officer at Akamai; Henrik Werdelin, chief creative officer for Joost; Dina Kaplan, COO and co-founder of Blip.tv; Garrett Camp, founder of StumbleUpon; David Carson, co-CEO of Heavy; and Matt Wasserlauf, CEO of Broadband Enterprises, amongst many others. They are in the process of adding more speakers to the event, so stay tuned!
In addition to the speakers and panelists, they will also be having a small launchpad event where new shows, products, services and startups can get on stage and show off their latest, greatest thing.
