Journal

The Distance averts a mini Cuban coffee crisis

It’s safe to say no one at York Coffee Emporium was expecting to come into work and find PayPal had shut down their account. No transactions could be made and customers were getting automatic messages informing them the account was frozen. But why would PayPal take such action?

Cuban Serrano Superior. That’s why. Despite the fact that York Coffee Emporium has sold this brand of coffee on a seasonal basis for years, PayPal suddenly took exception under the trade embargo imposed by JFK. In 1960. On products sold to American consumers.

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Does size matter? The 7 inch sweet spot…

What exactly has led to the plethora of 7 inch tablets now flooding the market?

First it was just the Nexus 7, but we’re now seeing a strong lean towards these smaller tablets as a target for clients. Is it the price? Is it the spec? What, in short, do they have over their larger brothers?
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Everyone’s a writer, right?

Well… no. The ease with which anyone can blog with impunity can lead to online content that is rather less than high quality. In fact, the internet is full of it. And we all know how vital it is to blog quality content that’s of actual, real interest to a community of people.

People can see straight through content that’s been optimised automatically or constructed badly to just show up in searches. It’s vital to not treat customers and potential customers like idiots, and writing to a certain intellectual level with intelligent content is key to this.

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PayPal’s new development features announced for mobile apps

PayPal have updated their developer options and introduced an SDK that will allow developers to integrate PayPal checkout and mobile credit card payment mechanisms directly into their apps.

At the moment, the current PayPal SDK allows users to make purchases within the app but only with an existing PayPal account. With the new SDK, there is support for credit card payments without the need for a PayPal account. Essentially, PayPal will act as a gateway service for the banks in the same way that similar services do on the web.

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Six seconds to change the world… an introduction to Vine

Vine was launched by Twitter at the end of January and has become the new hipster joy – a sort of Instagram for videos.

It’s basically an iPhone and iPod Touch app that lets you capture and share short (like six seconds short) looping videos. Six seconds is not a long time. But the idea is it’s so easy to use that it’ll unleash torrents of creativity among the great and the good of the interweb.

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