Hasta La Gadget!

Services like Seamless, Grub Hub, and Eat 24 are lifesavers when you’re hungry and don’t feel like cooking, but they only serve prepared fare. So what do you do when you want to make your own meal but can’t bother going to the supermarket yourself? Place your order with one of these helpful online grocers and get your goods delivered right to your door.

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Etsy, the online marketplace for DIYers, just announced several changes to its seller policies, giving store owners significantly more control over how they run their businesses. Going forward, sellers will be able to hire as many employees as necessary, as well as use outside companies to deliver their products and outsource manufacturing to third parties (provided they receive Etsy’s approval).

Most notably, these changes allow for a wider definition of “handmade” — now, the idea for an item simply must originate with the seller. This means 3D-printed items can carry the prized handmade distinction, for instance. And this change isn’t just about semantics; previously, Etsy customers could assume items that didn’t look handmade were breaking the site’s rules and consequently steer clear.

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Via: All Things D

Source: Etsy News Blog, Etsy’s New Guidelines

Go outside? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what goes on out there? You’re way better off staying in the safety and comfort of your own home. And thanks to the power of the Internet, you too can enjoy the best of what the outside world has offer without having to wade through all of its undesirable byproducts.

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Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

Back in the ’90s — before many of you were born — the internet was much better than it is today. I’m only halfway kidding, too. Let me explain.

At the time, we were sure anything was possible. We were also pretty stupid. We launched sites that just sold socks. Others sold balls. Social networking was just something we did — we didn’t need a site or a name for it. We were happy to go out at night and create real-life memes over drinks regarding the 2-minute video that took all afternoon to download.

Every site was new and fresh and daring. Two of the most shameless sites of the time introduced something that I am afraid we will never get back. Those sites were Kozmo.com and Urbanfetch.com. Some of you will remember them fondly. Others might recognize the names. Others, well, sit down and listen to a story of yesteryear when unicorns roamed the earth and virtually anything was available to your door within an hour at any hour.

Both Kozmo and Urbanfetch — we’re still not really sure which one came first — would deliver items to your place within an hour. If they didn’t get it to you within an hour, you got a discount or a gift certificate code. You could rent a DVD that was returnable to any mailbox-like receptacle on street corners. You could order a pint of ice cream that came sealed in its own freezer bag. You could order a stereo and make some poor soul carry it up five flights to your walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side. You could order a case of beer.

And we did.

Oh, how we did.

We ordered frozen pizzas in the afternoon, shampoo at midnight and boxes of fresh coffee in the morning. We were crazy addicts, sucking at the teat of ridiculous convenience. We were sure this was the future. We didn’t step inside real stores. Who needed real stores when it all came to you?

And then it all ended. Someone realized that selling stuff at a discount, warehousing it, paying couriers to carry it around major cities and doing it at little to no cost to the consumer wasn’t a very sustainable business plan.

The first few months without our citywide concierge services were rough. We were incredibly spoiled by the whole thing, and walking into regular drug stores to buy cold medicine felt foreign, ancient and wrong.

We didn’t know it then, but we had emerged from the magical era of the internet and into the rational, present one filled with marketers, social networking experts, advertising schemas that made money and business plans that placed a premium on profitability rather than straight-up awesome. The sorcerers were gone, replaced by search engines and cookies.

Some other reasons the internet was better:

1. Not everyone was on it. While there were plenty of trolls and not-so-smart people already, there was a certain headiness to it all. Maybe it was pretentious — who knows — but there was a lot more interesting experimentation going on. Sites like Word.com, Charged.com, Suck.com and Slate.com were changing the way we were entertained.
2. There was no social networking. Your high school friends weren’t online, weren’t posting pictures of their children and weren’t announcing their relationship status.
3. It was slow. As much as we love instant streaming video, the slowness of the internet forced people to return to the real world and find other forms of interaction.
4. Cool Site of the Day. The internet was so small that we looked to this one DJ-like site to tell us what was new and noteworthy. It was exciting, surprising and sometimes amazing.
5. It was innocent. The world was still super optimistic, the economy was irrationally on fire and criminals hadn’t yet realized that the internet was a great place to do all sorts of nasty things.

Yes, it was a silly era, and yes, it had to end. But we enjoyed it while we could, and someone out there like me still keeps a Kozmo bag in the back of a closet just for memories. And because it’s great for picnics.

Joshua Fruhlinger is the former Editorial Director for Engadget and current contributor to both Engadget and the Wall Street Journal. You can find him on Twitter at @fruhlinger.

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Mastercard is already a big fish in the still tiny NFC contactless payment pond, and now it wants to take that same technology to a veritable ocean — internet sales. The plastic purveyor is tag-teaming with ING in the Netherlands for PayPass-based smartphone internet payments that would have a “comparable level of security” to bricks and mortar purchases — by transmitting an EMV-compliant cryptogram or QR code to merchants. That would theoretically make online shopping less risky, and the system would also allow coupons and vouchers to be applied, giving a “similar user experience in both the physical and digital world.” The Dutch trial has already started and will continue until early 2013, but there’s no word if new users can still jump in — check the PR after the break to read the tea leaves for yourself.

Continue reading Mastercard previewing smartphone web payment system with in-person security strength

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Mobile

Mastercard previewing smartphone web payment system with in-person security strength originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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