Plastic Revolution: Square Makes it A Reality

Archive for the ‘Look What I Found’ Category

Plastic Revolution: Square Makes it A Reality

Feb
2011

Accepting credit card payments has traditionally been a difficult and expensive proposition for small business owners, requiring merchant accounts, lengthy contracts, crazy monthly fees, and specialized hardware. While it is certainly possible to circumvent the merchant account maze by using services like PayPal, lacking the ability to process plastic may be losing you potential customers, not to mention slowing down your receivables. Fortunately, a new service called “Square” has made it simple and cost effective to accept credit cards using your iPad, iPhone or Android smartphone.

Signing up for Square is free (and super easy), as is the card scanning widget they provide. And I won’t lie — it’s kind of cute. As soon as you insert the card reader into the audio-input jack of your device and download the free app, you are ready to start processing credit card payments. You will only incur fees when a card is charged. Square charges a flat 15¢ per transaction plus 2.75% for swiped (in-person) transactions or 3.5% for keyed-in (over the phone/fax/email transactions). Traditional card services typically charge about 30¢ plus 2.9%, so these rates are highly competitive, especially if the majority of your sales are processed in-person.

5 BlackBerry Storm Apps and Tricks You Should Know

Mar
2009

I’ll admit it, I loathed my BlackBerry Storm the first few days I had it. It appeared to be the biggest time sink and simple things I did before seemed way more complicated. This was supposed to make my life easier! But like any relationship worth having, I just needed to start finding out what made it tick.

Since then, I’ve fallen in love with my BlackBerry Storm, and it’s become a better friend to me, too. It keeps track of my day, alerts me to emails and text messages, plus has ample storage capacity for my every musical whim. The onboard camera makes Iphone users flush with envy and the touch screen and nifty buttons make it especially fun to tap out messages. Yes, we’re in love. And here are some free tips and apps to help you fall in love, too.

75 Bands…Can you find them?

Nov
2008

Can you find them? My sister sent this pic to me and while I found many right off the bat, I thought I’d share this fun and interesting waste of time with the community. Happy hunting! (You’ll likely have to click the image to make it bigger.) Here’s my list so far:

Led Zeppelin
White Zombie
Cowboy Junkies
U2
Smashing Pumpkins
Scissor Sisters
Guns and Roses
Queen
Matchbox 20
Phish
Presidents of United States of America
Styx
Gorillaz

WordPress Widgets

Oct
2008

As promised, I recently tested out a couple new (to me) WordPress Widgets and the results are in – I really love these two: Snap Shots and WP Cumulus Tag Cloud. Snap Shots is set up fairly straight forward, but take the instructions literally and it will be more of a piece of cake for you than it was me. Apparently the interface doesn’t have controls through WordPress, with the exception of “activation.” Instead, the controls are on the Snap Shot website and “feed” to your WP site based on the key code. Once configured, if properly coded in your page, links to other pages will pop up a little window, giving a tiny preview of the linked page. Pretty nifty and makes your own page seem a little less static. A guest can actually move the Snap Shot page wherever they like on the page while viewing.

My Fav WordPress Plugins

Oct
2008

Over the last couple months, I’ve become passionate about WordPress. I can thank Doug Wray, because having attended a class of his on the subject, he simplified a couple things that were vexing me, plus revealed how fun it was to build both blogs and websites using this great tool. Ever since, I’ve been singing the praises of WP, making some client sites and blogs, plus trying to help some adventurous people along the way. I’ve learned a couple key things I feel are worthy pieces to the puzzle; hopefully they will help lessen your learning curve.

First, This Important Message
This is just a nugget that helps me so I don’t blow up my own site: have a backup or test site in which you deploy and fiddle with things like plugins and changes to the css and php files. I use mine before using anything on my “real sites” and it’s saved me a lot of aggravation and embarrassment. I tweak it to death or I kick it to the curb, and my visitors are never the wiser because it all happened on a “pseudo” site.

Ingenuity At Play

Oct
2008

Does this beer make me look fat?

This morning I was reading an article about a couple of University of Colorado at Boulder graduates who invented a contraption called the, “Booze Belly.” At first glance, it seemed like a dorky toy for frat boys and tailgaters, but what occurred to me (and likely them) is what a cross-section of customers they could really reach. Imagine how many applications something this simple could have and not only that, what types of things could be developed from this idea? Kids with “Juice Bellies”, runners with “Water Bellies”, and so on. What has been made isn’t a revolutionary idea, but it’s one that has taken things a couple steps further than the ordinary “Camel Back” you see hikers running around with. It’s also less conspicuous and than the traditional flask or the not so traditional refillable binoculars. (google it, they exist.)

50 Milliseconds…What did you say?

Sep
2008

In reading an article in one of my fav mags, Dynamic Graphics about a study done this study done by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University, Ontario, Canada, and it reminded me of that skit on SNL, “Subliminal Man”, that Kevin Nealon used to do. The study shows that people will decide in 50 milliseconds whether or not to stay your website — that’s LESS than a blink of an eye. Sad, isn’t it? We labor and sweat all the details, only to have a such a short timeframe available and POOF, our visitor is gone…or are they? How can we convince a visitor that what we have will help them, that within the confines of our website, they will find an answer to their problem? The question is probably better answered by restating the question: What would a visitor need to see or read immediately to consider staying?

In a nutshell, your site must be compelling, guest-centered, fresh, relevant, and a host of other adjectives. The point is to study before you think you need to have flashing animations and 4 pages all about you. Customers want to see themselves in your site. If you are working with a designer, make sure they understand the things that make a marketing piece and that they are able to bring that together in a way that creates ease of use and evocative messaging and imagery. Also, is it clear from this study and others that people exit sites very quickly if they look like are past an expiration date. Keep things updated, current, and if something changes, revise right away.

Archive for the ‘Look What I Found’ Category