Tag: Tech

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Amazon Prime Now, 8:31 A.M. Delivery

Amazon Prime Now 8am

On New Year’s Eve, my friends and I were talking about the need to buy new hard drives. In the conversation, someone mentioned about a great deal for a 4 TB hard Drive at Amazon Prime Now. I checked it out and it was indeed a great deal. The most incredible part is that the hard drive was available for delivery on New Years Eve from 10:00 P.M. to 12:00 A.M.; unbelievable it seemed. I opted to have the order delivered the next morning, between 08:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. on New Year’s Day.

By 08:00 A.M. I received a text that my order is being delivered. At 08:31 A.M., the courier arrived my doorstep and handed me a paper bag with a hard drive in it.

Using the Amazon Prime Now App, I set a $12.00 tip for the courier.

All in all, it was a great experience.

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Amazon Register to be Discontinued

Amazon Local Register Card Reader

Amazon:

Effective October 30, 2015, we are no longer accepting new customers. Existing customers can continue to use Amazon Register until February 1, 2016, when we will discontinue to service.

Amazon Register (formerly Amazon Local Register) was launched back in August, 2014 with promotional offer of 1.75% on swiped transactions until 12/31/2015. Amazon promised to deliver EMV Card Reader later in 2015. Alas, that day will never come.

Amazon-Local-Register-Discontinued

Payment processing business has been proven to be challenging even for Square, which reported of $131.5 million loss on $892.2 million in sales in the first nine month of 2015.

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Notes:

37prime uses both Square and Amazon Register. The later is the currently preferred payment processor thanks to its promotional offer of 1.75% transaction fee.

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Seems Legit: App Store Support Spam

Yet another round of spam purporting from “App Store Support” or “App Store Team”, complete with graphics directly linked from Apple’s own server.

Based on a few reports, this type of spam started making the round on Thursday, October 8, 2015. Anecdotally, all the reports come from users with mac.com emails.

Should you be getting this type of spam in your iCloud email, please forward the email as attachment to spam@icloud.com

App Store Support Spam

App Store Team Spam

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iOS 9: Ad-pocalypse Now

iOS 9 is coming

Apple is set to release iOS 9 on Wednesday, September 16, 2015. One of iOS 9 features that gained a lot of attention is what many calls as “Ad-Blocking”.

Apple calls it Content Blocking Safari Extensions.

Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.

This would be the beginning of “Ad-Pocalypse”. Publishers should have realized that there are ways to display ads without alienating the readers. Irrelevant and annoying ads would only drive readers away. Extended page-loading time paired with clickbait-ads are disservice to the readers. Promise of of targeted-advertising are nothing but privacy-invading tracking system. One would wonder why a site would have the need for 16 different trackers and analytics.

Take a look at one of The Macalope’s columns at Macworld. There’s the “Promoted Links by Taboola” which is one of the most irrelevant ad-networks on the Internet. Then there’s a “Dell Latitude 11 3000 Series Laptop” ad. A Dell advertisement on an Apple/Mac-oriented site! Don’t forget the Amazon Affiliate link on the top of the screenshot. Three different monetization scheme in 2048-pixel span. There are a lot more in the post. Shame on you, Macworld!

Macworld Ad-infested

Daring Fireball and The Loop are much smaller operations compared to others. What these two sites have done are good examples in presenting ads the right way. Remember that readers could easily walk away whenever they find sites being unfriendly.

Content-Blocking/Ad-Blocking will be the new gold rush in the Apple App Store. Watch for apps such as Crystal and Purify on the App Store,

The Ad-pocalypse is coming, at least to the iOS platform.