Hasta La Gadget!

A lot of things can go wrong while you’re withdrawing cash from an ATM machine. For one, you could press a wrong key while you’re entering your PIN, which means you have to start over. And while many machines have changed their card readers, your card could get stuck in some machines, which means you’ll have to call a hotline so you can get your card back. It’s also easy for thieves to skim and steal your magnetic stripe. And the list goes on.

Eliminating all these is the Cardless Cash Access (CCS) app that people with accounts at Wintrust (IL), BMO (Chicago), or City National (Los Angeles) can take advantage of.

Using technology developed by FIS, CCS eliminated the need to have your card with you while you get your cash. It also cuts down the withdrawal process from 30 to 40 seconds to about nine seconds. Now that’s fast cash.

Here’s how it works: clients can put in a request for a withdrawal up to 24 hours before they go and pick up the cash. A QR code is then generated by the app, which should then be scanned at the ATM machine before the cash is released. You’ll need a good Internet connection to access your code when you make the withdrawal though, so that’s one drawback if your carrier doesn’t have the best 3G or 4G service.

[via CNN via Dvice]

What happens when it’s easier to call tech support than to Google your problem? Amazon might discover the costly answer to that question depending on how much the owners of its new Kindle Fire HDX tablets use its Mayday on-demand video customer support feature. And whether they behave themselves.

Mayday is available at the tap of a button in the Kindle HDX’s Quick Settings menu. 24 hours a day, year round, it pops up a little video window on-screen showing a support agent. They can’t see you but can hear you, talk to you, draw on your screen to guide you, and even take control of your screen to help you out.

As Farhad Manjoo notes, Mayday might not be able to solve one of the most common types of tech problems: broken Internet. That won’t stop it from answering plenty of other queries from the old, young, and frequently confused. You can watch videos of Mayday in action here.

If Amazon can scale Mayday it would be amazing. Both in the sense that it would make many people’s lives with technology easier, and it would be a remarkable logistics feat. It could become an industry benchmark for premier service. I’d love to see this succeed.

No Barrier To Berating Support

Today, most companies put lots of support info online, but if you want handholding from a human, you have to work for it.

Look at Apple’s Genius Bars. You have to make an appointment, trek out to a retail store, and show up on time. That erects a barrier to use while giving people an option when they really need assistance.

With phone based customer support, you have to look up the number, wade through phone menus, wait on hold, and then explain what you’re looking at to a support agent that is essentially flying blind.

All this friction sucks. So why does it exist? It’s cost-effective.

Having tons of support people available on-demand straight from your device would be awesome…and could be very expensive for Amazon. Mayday could become a big selling point for the device and save the company from losing money to returns, thereby paying for itself. But it’s a gamble on whether people will bash that button too often.

The question is how much Amazon will have to compromise on its vision. The company has told reporters it wants Mayday to let you get support within 15 seconds at any time, even on a busy Christmas morning, and have no limit on how often you can call for help. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went to bat for Mayday, telling TechCrunch that it functions similar to the company’s other call centers. He seemed confident Amazon could pull it off. After all, it’s managed quite a few miracles in ecommerce scaling.

Still, it may need to include fine print that it can suspend Mayday service for abuse. If you Mayday because you’re lonely, or want to show someone your cat photos, it might need to cut you off. If you try to show the representative porn through the screenshare or verbally terrorize them, it might need to ban you for life. But what if you’re just really lazy and call in every day with semi-legitimate questions? Amazon will need to determine where to draw the line.

Maybe the fundamental challenges of scaling Mayday signals Amazon doesn’t have a massive amount of active Kindle users today, as Benedict Evans wonders. Amazon is notoriously secretive about Kindle sales and engagement numbers, so we don’t know what level of HDX devices it might sell and have to support.

But if anyone can figure out how to make this all work and save us from support call menu hell, it’s probably Bezos. Turning cost-prohibitive fantasies into margin-less realities is his specialty. And if the problem isn’t the volume of Mayday requests per customer but the total thanks to high Kindle HDX sales, things could be worse. Just ask the Microsoft Surface.

[Image Credit]

German newspaper Spiegel Online reports that the NSA has its own financial database to track money flows through a "tailored access operations" division.

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Bitcoin startup Lamassu Bitcoin Ventures, the makers of a Bitcoin ATM which promises to eat your paper (fiat) money and spit Bitcoins into your digital wallet in return, have funded their initial production run of 15 units a few hours after kicking off pre-orders (via their website) — taking the bulk of payments in Bitcoin, fittingly.

Presumably that means they’ve booked $60,000-$75,000 in sales revenue for the initial production run — based on the $4,000-$5,000 per machine price-tag they talked about at the Bitcoin London conference last month. Lamassu is not, however, confirming how much revenue they’ve generated at this point.

What’s the point of a Bitcoin ATM? The aim is to lower the barrier of entry to the digital cryptocurrency — which still very much ‘reeks of geeks’ (and investors) at this still early stage in its development – by letting people swap banknotes for Bitcoin in person. Of course there are myriad ways to do fiat-to-Bitcoin currency exchanges online but the Bitcoin ATM doesn’t require the user to sign up to an online exchange service in order to get some Bitcoin. (Albeit, users of the ATM do need to have their own Bitcoin wallet to store their exchanged BTCs).

The Bitcoin ATM accepts paper currency only but there’s no minimum limit (yes, you can exchange $1 to get around 0.009 Bitcoin, at current exchange rates, if you really want). It only accepts cash, so no debit/credit card payments — a deliberate choice by its creators to keep their costs and complexity capped by not having to deal with banks.

They argue it also makes things simpler for purchasers of the ATM itself, being as they don’t have to gain bank approval to get the machine up and running. However they do warn that buyers still need to make sure they comply with any pertinent financial regulations in their own country (Bitcoin regulations can’t even charitably be called ‘a work in progress’ yet, and the Bitcoin policy confusion varies from country to country).

The startup says it has had more than 150 inquires about the machine ahead of production. Some of the countries that have put in pre-orders are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, U.S., Slovakia, Finland and Denmark, according to co-founder Zach Harvey.

While it’s funding the initial run from pre-orders and its own investment, Harvey said Lamassu may look to raise external funding in future. ”Investment is something we’re considering seriously for the next step of mass adoption,” he tells TechCrunch.

Lamassu expects to ship the first 15 units to buyers next month.

Here’s the pitch Harvey gave about the ATM at the Bitcoin London conference last month:

Today in an SEC filing, Microsoft revealed a very interesting fact: Its Surface tablet hybrid line brought in revenue of $853 million in the company’s fiscal 2013. However, the Surface line didn’t become available for sale until October 26, giving it 247 days in the market during the financial period.

That places Surface revenue on a per-day basis at $3.45 million. Extrapolated for a one-year period, that financial rate puts the Surface line on a $1.26 billion per-year run rate. However, I would wager that revenues for Surface were highest at launch of the Surface RT and Pro, and lower in between, so the per-day and per-year estimates could vary.

Reviews of the figure have been decidedly negative. The Next Web’s Josh Ong flatly stated that the revenue figure confirmed that the tablet line is a “financial failure.” Tom Warren over at The Verge noted that the total revenue for the devices is less than the $900 million writedown that Microsoft took during its last quarter. And Todd Bishop of GeekWire underlined that the $853 million in revenue is again less than the $898 million in new costs that Microsoft called “primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.”

If Surface were a standalone business, it would be dead. However, as a Microsoft division, it is anything but.

Microsoft as a company has tectonic financial wealth in the form of past profits stored as cash. It has decided to enter the OEM world, and has, to my knowledge, continued with the Surface project, slow initial sales be damned.

There is a firm, recent precedent for the company to continue to invest in this way: Windows Phone. It took two full years of hard scrabble work to get Windows Phone to a point in which it was healthy enough to walk a bit on its own. Put another way, until Windows Phone 8 and the recent Nokia handsets, the smartphone line was sucking air.

Perhaps not as much as Surface, given that the line of tablets has caused material damage to Microsoft’s short-term profits — the $900 million charge was $0.07 in lost EPS for the company in the last quarter.

However, Microsoft has the money, and if it wants to can continue to pour it into Surface, as it did with Windows Phone, and Bing, and other properties that it finds to be strategically important. Does Microsoft want to cede complete hardware primacy to its OEM partners that have failed for so long to demonstrate innovation and forward-looking thought?

I don’t think so, no. Naturally, Microsoft would prefer if Surface lost less money, but I don’t think that Microsoft is done with this project yet. A decent test: If the rollout of the next-generation Surface line is muted, we could be watching the door close.

Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan