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The payment standards

Do you remember when you had to go to the bank before the weekend to get enough cash to make it until the next week? Do you remember when they stopped accepting cheques at your local grocery store? Do you remember when ATMs grounded underneath a shady stair of a club were the only method of getting money to pay for your evening?

I do remember those days and thankfully they are gone. The “Cash Only” sign has been placed across countless venues both downtown and uptown when banknotes were essential customers’ financial trading. Then the age of digital trading came through the internet and the gig was up and done.

In the last ten years paying the bills has drastically changed, we don’t carry staches of $100 bill in our pocket to make it through the day, and we don’t need to stand in line at our local teller to get some cash for our shopping needs.

Along came the age of online payments in different forms to free us from the necessity of having our wallet robbed while going back home from work during the evening. We now have the chance of making our finance dues only through the use of our smartphones.

Facebook Messenger has added a feature to split the bill when paying for the tab. This means social platforms have absorbed the need to improve their users’ experience by providing the necessary tools from their devices.

Smartphones technology will continue to host more and more alternative ways to promote digital payment systems, along with bill and purchasing offers in order to maximize the user’s experience.

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A new life awaits you

The year is 2020 just started in the worst possible manner. After leaving behind a grouchy 2019 wishing the next one to be better, we stumble into undiscovered space with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are learning things as we go in these months and it shouldn’t be like that. Despite our best effort in technology-making there are several fallacies we haven’t addressed yet; one of the many is the our own behavior we are exploring under particular stress.

In 2003 the SARS epidemic begun raising alarms of the ease at which such disease managed to spread. I remember those white, green, and blue masks, on the face of people in Toronto believing it would have been a much worse scenario, luckly it didn’t happen. Fast forward 2020 and the Corona Virus (similar to SARS) has placed the world on its knees becoming a direct threat to many healthcare systems and economies.

We are witnessing the weak and unprepared side of globalization where markets have no more boundaries, and so do people. Now, more than ever, western economies are depending more and more from the east and in particular from China. Our technology is made far away from the stores near our neighbors, yet all it took to send panic and supply shortages was a controllable disease that was left unchecked.

As quarantines have struck all major countries of the globe, we are slowly understanding how tomorrow will be different from yesterday. We acknowledge how frail our economies are, how easy it is to get sick, how fast we can lose our loved ones to an invisible enemy. What is propelling through this chaos is the digital component of our lives, we can still exchange data between each other, we can work from home, we can do school from our devices, but the next change in society is already here.

Hopefully the quarantine and extraordinary measures should fade through the spring, however there is still plenty of caution we have to excercise before we can resume yesterday’s pace. From today on we will be thinking twice about many things like how easy the panic was for the lack of hand-sanitizers, or the toilet paper rush. But most importantly we will rethink our political class and how they responded in time of crisis.

We are going to become more paranoid and more fake news will wash ashore of our social networks, and this will become our ever increasing Achilles’ heel; more than anything else: we have become such an iperconnected society to the point we cannot go back anymore. A new life awaits you…

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Jam Hacking Google Maps

Simon Weckert started carrying with him 99 smartphones on a handcart to fool Google a cluster of users were all in the same spot. The result is a virtual traffic jam that tricked Google Maps road conditions in the red, but it was just him alone walking the street of Berlin.

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20 years, every day.

Noah Kalina has kept going with his project of a picture of himself each day of his life, and now he has reached the 20th year of this amazing art project and human/social research.