As Mobile-Payment Giants Bicker, Startups Step Up

The mobile payments industry is stuck in neutral. The ability to pay for your goods and services at brick-and-mortar locations from your smartphone is a dream of technologist and financial companies, but the realities of a complicated industry with billions of dollars at stake and too many moving parts has stymied progress. 

Well, almost.

No Momentum For Big Mobile Payments Players

The companies with the biggest vested interests in mobile payments are all multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded behemoths. This group includes the payment processors like Visa, MasterCard and American Express as well as giant technology companies like Apple, Google and PayPal. The banks of the world do not want to be left out in the cold to become the 'dumb pipes' of the payment industry (places where money is merely stored and transferred). And the mobile carriers - Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile - want their slice of the mobile payments pie. Every one of those companies has some derivation of a mobile payments system that could be seen as ill-conceived (PayPal), immature and un-deployed (Isis from the carriers), stuck in the maelstrom of competing interests (Isis as well as Google Wallet) or illogical (various mobile payments systems from the payment processors). When it comes to the top of the so-called mobile payments market, there are too many moving parts, too many squabbles and not enough infrastructure or actual solutions. 

But the very mess being created by the big boys in mobile payments is opening opportunities for fast- moving startups that understand that the best way to make mobile payments work is to place their services inside as many physical retail spaces as possible. Right now. Not preparing for some theoretical future where everything is all of a sudden ripe for success.

The leaders in the mobile payments space are not MasterCard or Google. The real leaders are little startups like Square, ShopKeep, Dwolla and LevelUp. These companies see an opportunity and are rushing to fill it, leaving behind the big bureaucracy and striking real partnerships with real business.

LevelUp's Small-Time Approach

LevelUp is a good example of a small mobile payments provider creating traction at the bottom of the market. The Boston-based startup (which is a derivative of social location app SCVNGR) provides QR-code-based payments for local merchants by providing businesses with Android-smartphones to act as scanners that process payments from the LevelUp smartphone app. It now has 500,000 users and just completed its first 2 million transactions. Those numbers are small potatoes compared to the big payment processors, but in many ways LevelUp is the bellwether for the progress of the mobile payments industry in the United States. 

LevelUp thinks outside the box, thinks big thoughts, makes significant partnerships, and perhaps most importantly, actually finds its way into actual businesses. LevelUp has expanded to several cities in the U.S. and its growth is accelerating. It took LevelUp 424 days to reach its first million transactions and about 100 days to reach the next million. Unlike the big payment processors (or even startups like Square), LevelUp does not charge an interchange fee (taking a percentage of each transaction) for every payment it makes. LevelUp makes money by offering deals to consumers within the app. For instance, the app will take $3 off your burger the first time you visit a restaurant and pay with LevelUp. You come back enough times and pay with the app and you get better rewards. Fundamentally, it is an advertising and data business model that LevelUp believes will be central to the future of mobile payments.  

LevelUp has gone from an app that makes payments to a platform that provides payment capabilities. In addition to its apps on iOS, Android and the mobile Web, it also partners with companies that wish to have a mobile payments presence themselves. These custom-branded mobile payments apps can be used by merchants to provide deals to its customers as well as process the transactions themselves. LevelUp says that it has sold many of these custom-branded mobile payments apps but so far it has announced only one, with Washington, DC-based eatery Sweetgreen. 

The startup is now looking to expand, announcing on Wednesday a partnership with a mid-tier bank ' First Trade Union Bank ' to create a mobile payments app for its customers. The app will integrate First Trade Union banking features with LevelUp's payment and loyalty functions to provide an app that will likely be able to check your balance and make a payment at the same time.

At first blush, this may seem like a shrug-worthy event for both LevelUp and First Trade Union. A middling startup and a middling bank just made an app. Great. So what?

Tackling Mobile Payments Without The Innovators Dilemma

The fact of the matter is that LevelUp and its kin (Square, ShopKeep etc.) are going after a key segment of the American retail market ' small businesses and small banks that make up a giant swath of the American economy. One bank or one eatery chain may seem small compared to Visa or MasterCard's footprint, but when you put all of those pieces together they can become a powerful force. And one that the biggest so-called players are not penetrating while they argue amongst themselves and wait for inertia to begin moving in their direction.

'In my opinion it's not just that they're big and thus slow, it's that they have the mother of all innovator's dilemma's. They all make money in the wrong ways (and huge sums of it) so taking advantage of this new market is really tricky. My belief is that mobile payments and the next-gen of [point-of-sale systems] are all driven by data and advertising,' said SCVNGR and LevelUp founder Seth Priebatsch. 

The innovator's dilemma, as far as the payment processors go, is a big one. American Express, Visa and MasterCard want to move aggressively into the emerging mobile payments industry - but cannot do so without significantly disrupting their existing business models. That's why they seem to drag their feet - and force the rest of the payments industry get down on their knees and crawl with them. Companies like Google are blocked because they are forced to deal other companies' innovators dilemma and do not have the resources or motivation to attack the bottom of the retail industry piecemeal the way Square or LevelUp do. 

'It's easy for me, ShopKeep, CloverOS to go after that because we don't make any money off of anything else and so forgoing those other rev streams is easy. But for [American Express], giving up $10 billion in interchange is too tough a pill to swallow on a gamble that data/advertising is a bigger market. For Isis, their parents make money off of data and wireless plans, so it's just not a key priority or easy thing to shift the model to be competitive in the new mobile payments space,' Priebatsch said. 

Eventually, the large companies will get their act together and make a concerted push towards actual, ubiquitous mobile-payment solutions on the ground level. But that process is taking longer than many pundits and consumers hoped it would. In the meantime, the startups of the mobile payments world are taking advantage. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Gaming Legend Peter Molyneux: What Makes A Great Game Great?

How do you make a truly great game? Peter Molyneux has been asked that question countless times. For the 53-year-old British gaming luminary known for both his veteran status in the industry and his polarizing ambition to surpass expectations, the words 'mobile' and 'social' are his next steps toward an answer.

'The way we develop games is changing very fast and it's changing forever,' he says.

Molyneux, known best for launching titles from the ground floor of the PC era in the late '80s and going on to create the Fable game series, is probably the last person one would expect to staunchly reject the Xbox-and-Playstation-dominated console generation. In the age of slingshotting birds, farming crops and more Facebook word puzzles than you can spell, mobile and social games are thought of less for their greatness and more for the mindless actions they lure players to perform for unfulfilling rewards.

But Molyneux is turning that notion on its head. With a new studio, 22Cans, he is putting all his professional weight behind turning these simple games into full-blown social experiments, with the dream that he can get an unprecedented number of smartphone owners playing - and thinking - in his world all at the same time.

From Floppy Disks To Fable

Following a career selling floppy disks with Atari and Commodore 64 games on them, Molyneux almost left the industry after a rocky start developing his own titles, including a text-based business simulator that sold just two copies.

Bouncing back with a lucrative stint creating database networking software, Molyneux co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987. His first hit, Populous, a PC "God-game" that let players play the role of a deity, came two years later. Populous went on to sell 5 million copies and establish Molyneux's career.

In 1997 Molyneux co-founded Lionhead Studios, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Lionhead's big hit was Fable, a game that continued to explore the good and evil tendencies that drive player motivations. As one of the first big studio titles to focus heavily on player morality, Fable was notable for weaving player choice and story, altering everything from your character's appearance to the way the world reacted to you, all within a good-versus-evil framework.

A number of sequels eventually led to the stagnancy of the series, and Molyneux announced his departure from Microsoft last March. He now has co-founded 22Cans, an independent game studio based in Guilford, United Kingdom, with former Lionhead Studios CTO Tim Rance.

What's Inside The Cube?

His first title since leaving Microsoft is called Curiosity - What's Inside the Cube. It is also Molyneux's first foray into mobile gaming, and it's so veiled in secrecy that it conjures up memories of debating what Jack Shephard and John Locke will find inside the infamous hatch on Lost.

Marketed as half social experiment and half competition, Curiosity is a free iOS and Android game released last month that has many users and critics skeptical, and not because it's even more mind numbingly simple than clicking a cow. Rather, it's because the game allegedly has the power to change lives. Well, for one of us at least.

In Curiosity, you do but one thing: tap the screen and see a cubelet shatter away to the satisfying flutter of disintegrating glass. That block is one of 68 billion pieces of an enigmatic floating cube. But only one person - the one who taps away the final cubelet - will get to see what's inside.

The secret contents of the cube have been described as 'life changing' in the game's brief intro and by Molyneux himself. Aiding the mystique is alternating cube art for every other new layer, ranging from real-life photos and still-life art to cryptic literature references.

This monumental tease has prompted a fresh round of accusations that Molyneux is once again overhyping the gravity of his creation, resulting in disappointment when the finished product doesn't live up to expectations. It's a tendency of his that peaked with the Fable series and has dogged him throughout his career, even generating a satirical Twitter account dedicated to his grandiose ideas.

But Molyneux has been steadfast on his promises, leaving players with an insatiable interest in 22Cans' creations, of which there will be 21 more following Curiosity.

Molyneux has announced that Curiosity 2.0 is on the way, to be submitted to Apple this week and released soon after approval. He hopes to release it for Android a little earlier to get it in the hands of players as soon as possible.

As for the updates, 'It's a mixture of things we learned, new ways of interacting and making the cube smaller, there's a real sense of new timeness,' Molyneux says.

So while the visibility of real-time changes and new destruction tools (including the most expensive downloadable content ever) will be nice, the more important addition with the release of Curiosity 2.0 will be the insight 22Cans has gained from the past three weeks.

'There's some really fascinating things about player motivation we've learned. We're going to go into a lot of detail' about how Curiosity has altered our perception of what a game is,' Molyneux says.

Currently, the app has been downloaded 'a few million times,' Molyneux says, and players have blasted away more than 5 billion of the cube's 68 billion cubelets, giving 22Cans a trove of data to sift through and analyze.

A number cruncher and Wikipedia editor has figured out a potential time scale for the cube, using some complex summation formulas. Because the first layer had 100 million cubelets and each layer is slightly smaller than the last, 68 billion in total equates to a little more than 2,000 layers. That puts the end date somewhere in the ballpark of late next summer at the current rate.

But Molyneux doesn't want numbers like that to convince anybody that the game will drag on for a year and kill its namesake quality, especially considering the fact that we're only on layer 70. 'There's a limit, but we can always bring that forward,' he says, meaning that at any point 22Cans could make the next layer the center of the cube and accelerate the entire experiment.

Meanwhile 22Cans has extracted a number of important lessons from Curiosity. For one, the studio learned the hard way what happens when an independent game company's creation yields hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first few days, and had to formally apologize for the app's early bugs.

Crowdfunding And Project Godus

Molyneux and his studio have been transparent from the beginning about their games acting as both social experiments and educational tools to be absorbed for future titles. While Curiosity still attracts new users every day, Molyneux is already gearing up for his next big thing ' 'Project Godus.'

Announced on Kickstarter on November 21, Godus is Molyneux's vehicle for reviving the God-game genre he popularized decades ago. Slated as a reboot of Populous, Godus will aim to take that experience further on iOS and Android alongside a more graphically rich PC version.

The crux will be this ability to shift platforms, from desktops and laptops to smartphones. Molyneux hopes this will capitalize on how game playing is changing from long-duration console experiences to multiple-screen, on-the-go gaming. He says his studio can offer a truly balanced experience. 'Most people are not overly attached to a particular platform anymore. The platform is just a window.' In three to ten years, 'releasing something on a single device will be unthinkable,' Molyneux says.

'This is some of the tech that we tested on Curiosity,' he adds. 'Can you link people together on many different platforms, over 200 with Android for instance? Can they all be fair? And if you looked at Curiosity, there were completely different engines powering that.'

Of the nearly £500,000 needed, the Kickstarter campaign has already amassed upwards of £192,000 with some unique prizes for generous backers, like a chisel-engraved titanium necklace with the game's logo on it or the opportunity to co-design a character named after you.

While 22Cans isn't the first group of indie developers to utilize Kickstarter to rekindle a popular franchise, the studio certainly jump-started the crowdfunding with the enormous interest generated through Curiosity. And while backers of the project may get some wearable swag, it's a two-way street. The studio can develop Godus with unprecedented feedback.

Building An Audience Through Beta Testing

In Molyneux's eyes, the common thread between great games is the amount of time spent playing, learning from and refining the game. 'If that theory is sound, then how do you find a group of people that really care about it? That's where Kickstarter comes in,' he says. 'We can find a group of people that not only actually care to play the game, but they also want to pay to test it.'

With Godus, even lower-tier rewards for donations offer beta and even alpha testing of the game as it is being developed. That's better than than waiting and testing the finished product select focus groups, Molyneux says, which was a tendency that kept big studios like Microsoft from doing anything but minor tweaking to projects like Fable II.

Molyneux won't offer any fresh hints about the secret inside Curiosity. 'It's not cash, a car or Half-Life 3,' is all he'll say, though it does seem to pain him to fall back on his PR-approved one-liner.

Though the life-changing aspects of 22Cans' creations may be Molyneux's biggest overpromise to date, with the success of Curiosity, there's been no shortage of people willing to listen and cross their fingers right alongside him. It seems that many people would rather waste their time in pursuit of something grand, even if the chances of winning are infinitesimal, than follow companies like Zynga into a profit-hungry maze with no exit?

Want Microsoft's Imagine Cup Grant? Combine Devices, Sensors And The Cloud

Microsoft's Imagine Cup rewards student innovators with thousands of dollars worth of prizes, the chance to network with other entrepreneurs and valuable experience. But to develop those skills into a viable business can require additional funding, and Microsoft's Imagine Cup Grant winners, announced Tuesday, now have that.

Team Graphmasters of Germany walked away with $100,000 in cash, which the company will use to develop a navigation system using Windows Phone and Microsoft's cloud technology, Windows Azure. Team Stethocloud placed second, walking away with a $50,000 prize for its mobile-hybrid stethoscope that can be used to detect childhood pneumonia via the cloud.

See the similarities? The company is funding startups that combine a client sensor, like a phone, with the combined knowledge of the cloud. In fact, every team that Microsoft funded combined a Windows Phone with Windows Azure.

According to a Microsoft representative, each team was judged based on four criteria:

1. Project impact and viability (40%), including whether or not the solution would be technically and economically viable.
2. Team quality and motivation (30%), concerning how the team is structured, and how capable it appears to be to overcome obstacles.
3. Solution design (20%), or how novel the solutuion is.
4. Defining the problem (10%), or how broad the problem that the team is solving actually is.

Imagine Cup Grants are a three-year, $3 million competitive grants program that provides opportunity for young people by helping them realize their vision of bringing their technology enabled projects to life, according to Microsoft. Grant recipients receive funding, access to resources and support to help them create a business or nonprofit organization. The Imagine Cup Grants are part of Microsoft YouthSpark, a global initiative that aims to create opportunities for 300 million youth in more than 100 countries during the next three years.

Graphmasters: Solving Traffic Problems, Collaboratively

According to Christian Brueggemann, who is involved in the technical development of the algorithms behind Team Graphmasters, the company began life as an academic project, natch, which competed in the Imagine Cup about four years ago.

The company's first product - originally dubbed "Greenway" and now known as "Nunav," uses a combination of cloud services and devices not to route drivers to their destination via the shortest, most optimized route, but to send them along a variety of paths to minimize total congestion. That, in turn, can cut the amount of time all drivers spend idling in traffic, reducing congestion and the corresponding increase in greenhouse gases from wasted gas. In a hypothetical example, one car can produce 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year - enough that a forest of 200 trees would be needed to consume it all. In total, the CO2 output from the world's cars would require a forest the size of Australia.

Rival navigation systems, according to Brueggemann, are reactive: a driver's GPS device encounters a traffic jam, reports it, is rerouted, possibly encounters another traffic jam, and the process repeats itself. What Nunav attempts to do, he said, was to proactively assign drivers to side streets, so that every driver wasn't trying to fit through the same high-speed bottlenecks. (It's worth noting that Graphmasters' examples focused on cities, where a number of relatively equal alternative routes present themselves.)

"A reactive system routes drivers around traffic jams that already exist, and when the traffic jam exists, you already have the problem," Bruggemann said.

All Nunav needs is about 1% of the cars on the road to communicate and respond to create a detailed traffic overview, and about 10% of the GPS infrastructure. "The strategy we're making is to get our service into the navigation systems alrady in the market, because once we do that it will be very easy to get 10% of users," Bruggemann said. That doesn't necessarily mean only Windows Phones, but all GPS devices.

And what's the business model? It's a new one: Nunav charges for the accelerated route. Yes, it's only $.10 or so, which Graphmasters promises will be made up for by reduced stress.

Stethocloud And Winsenga

The same strategy - the cloud plus a device - drove the introduction of Stethocloud, a nifty app developed by four students from Australia. The team created a digital stethoscope that could be plugged into the audio jack of a smartphone. The goal is to help diagnose and treat pneumonia. 

After a user enters some basic information about the child, such as the date of birth, the app asks the parent or doctor to hold the stethoscope up to eight points on the child's chest, "listening" and then uploading the sound file to the cloud. An algorithm then determines whether or notthe child has pneumonia, and advises a course of treatment.

That same approach was used to develop Winsenga, which combines a high-performance microphone placed within a Pinard horn, rural Africa's answer to the stethoscope. Without access to ultrasound machines, doctors and nurses have to rely on their own ears to determine if a fetus is alive, and what problems there might be. The app listens to the heartbeat, diagnoses any problems and issues an alert if needed.

Team Vivid from Egypt and Team QuadSquad from Ukraine each won $50,000 to form companies that can access healthcare records from mobile devices, as well as help disabled individuals speak more effectively.

The message here is clear: Microsoft is looking for developers focused on using devices as a local sensor and tapping into the cloud for specialized intelligence and additional computing horsepower. Whether it's Microsoft technology talking to Microsoft services, or something like Symbian talking to an Amazon Web Services hosted application running within Amazon's cloud, the company sees the combination of local sensors and back-end intelligence as a powerful trend it wants to encourage.

'Dental Surgery' Is The Most Bizarre iPad App I've Ever Seen

Things started to go downhill while I was trying to administer novocaine to a dog. I'm still not entirely sure what happened. I was trying to inject his gums with anesthesia when a message popped up, telling me I had failed. Game over. 

I had been doing pretty well, I think. Fixed a few cracked teeth. Filled up the novocaine syringes. The truth is, even on my fifth round of Dental Surgery, a medical simulation game for the iPad, I still wasn't sure what I was doing. I just tapped at the screen, guessing my way through surgery to what sounded like the soundtrack of a '90s pay-per-view porn movie. 

This Is Really Weird 

This game is completely bizarre. Upon launching it, that music is the first thing you notice: a single synthesized measure that blares and loops forever. A splash screen gives you a pretty clear idea of what the game is all about. "DENTAL SURGERY" rests above a graphical caricature of of a wide-jawed, blue-eyed man (presumably the dentist) flanked by trays of surgical implements.

"Would you like to have a look at some other Excellent Games?" asks a pop-up notification. It's unusual timing for such an inquiry -- before I've even had a chance to play the first one.   

In Dental Surgery, you operate on a randomly selected member of the Martins, a family plagued by horrendous dental problems. Even Canine, the dog has an awful maw.  

The entire time, there's a Google-served banner ad in the upper left corner, where it can awkwardly cover key elements of the interface and make it hard to see what you're doing. Like the porn music, the banner ad never goes away. 

Once the game begins, it's not obvious exactly what you're supposed to do. Tapping the surgical tools on the right causes each one to light up and a related icon to appear nearby, I guess to clarify -- using iconography that isn't any clearer than the low-res graphics themselves -- what each tool does. That's it. You can't pick up the utensils or use them. 

When I moved my finger over the patient's teeth -- surely, that's how you make things happen in this game about dentistry! -- nothing happened. A disproportionately small dental mirror, which appears to have no purpose, floats around on the screen as I moved my finger around the patient's mouth.

After I'd tapped just about everything else on the screen and wondered how this app ever got approved I realized that my first move is to prepare the anesthesia by filling gas tanks or novocaine syringes, a sort of mini-game in and of itself.

That's when the game started to make sense, but it's still a pretty odd experience. After poking around some more, I was able to can get down to fixing and cleaning teeth, filling cavities, repairing chipped teeth and so forth. Presumably, once you complete each procedure, you win the game. I don't know, because I'm apparently an atrocious dentist who might have killed a few patients.

How Did This Get So Highly Ranked?  

Dental Surgery is weird for the feeling it engenders that you may have stumbled upon a Russian spam app that is opening a backdoor to all of your private information. It's weird for the generally strange and unintuitive interface. 

But what's most mind-blowingly bizarre about this thing is that a few days ago, it was the third-most-popular free iPad app on iTunes. Today, it's still in the top five, sitting above Etsy and sharing the top 10 with Skype and a YouTube substitute. 

When I first opened Dental Surgery -- which I discovered only thanks to its high rank in the App Store -- I thought, okay, clearly Gawker or some tech blog wrote about how this app is incredibly, comically weird. That wasn't the case. A Google search revealed virtually no media coverage of any kind. Somehow, this app had climbed the charts on its own, despite being poorly designed, hard to use and completely outlandish. Out of nearly 6,000 reviews, the majority gave the app one star, complaining about its poor quality and confusing interface. 

How this app rocketed to the top of the App Store charts is a mystery, and the name of its developer doesn't yield any meaningful Google results. It makes you wonder about Apple's quality control and, specifically, if the updates to the App Store in iOS 6, which were supposed to make it harder to game the system and easier to discover quality apps, are working.

These are interesting things to ponder. But alas, Conor Martin needs some cavities filled. 

Urban Airship Acquires Tello, Banking On Digital Wallets

In a move that enhances its mobile management toolkit, push notification service Urban Airship has acquired Tello, a Palo Alto-based company that helps businesses and app-makers create passes for Apple's Passbook.

The move comes on the heels of Urban Airship's purchase last year of mobile location service SimpleGeo. Urban Airship's acquisition of Tello could potentially double its market given that it can now help businesses without apps create digital coupons, tickets and loyalty cards through Passbook.

Since its founding in 2009, Urban Airship, based in Portland, Ore., has specialized in offering high-quality push notifications and a slew of other services that come bundled with tiered plans. The company has raised more $20 million after three rounds of funding'including an injection from TrueVentures, which also invested in Tello'and earned it a list of impressive clients like Airbnb and ESPN.

With the acquisition of Tello and its PassTools product, Urban Airship is banking on the rise of the digital wallet and opening itself up to everyone from mom-and-pop shops wanting to offer local deals to big-name companies currently seeing poor results from age-old paper coupons.

Will Passbook Succeed?

Passbook debuted on Apple's iOS6 in September but so far hasn't made a big splash, generating comparisons to the now-defunct Ping. But some wonder if it is just a matter of time before companies catch on to the inevitability of 'the iWallet.'

'The combination of push messaging, passes and location-targeting offer an easy yet sophisticated solution for businesses to drive more successful pass programs,' Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton said in a press release.

Neither company released numbers on the acquisition, though it was stressed that it was an all-stock deal, with Urban Airship taking over Tello's Palo Alto office and Tello CEO Joe Beninato gaining the title of General Manager of Digital Wallet.

Kveton says Tello's PassTools will be integrated into Urban Airship's product bundles sometime next year.

Evernote For Business Is Here: Is It Right For Your Team?

At Le Web in Paris Tuesday, Evernote CEO announced the launch of Evernote Business, and it has a few extra features since its preview at the Evernote Trunk conference this summer. Evernote has found success as a personal life-organizer and workspace, but the new Business features make team management and collaboration possible, too.

Great Features For Business Users

The major feature is the Business Library, which is a standalone destination for notebooks throughout the company. Evernote CEO Phil Libin likes to liken Evernote to an external brain or memory, and the Business Library is like a company's institutional memory. As a company does more and more work in Evernote, the Business Library should improve as a resource for new and existing employees alike.

Individual employees also get Business Notebooks, which are like regular Evernote notebooks for documents, projects, and so forth, but they're easier to share within the organization. They're also visually distinct from individual Evernote notebooks, so there shouldn't be any accidental sharing or confusion.

Business Notes stay within the organization, even when an employee leaves. Personal (regular) Evernote notes go with employees who leave once their Evernote account is removed from the organization.

Sharing for Business users has easy permissions. In addition to sharing with individuals, which is possible using regular Evernote sharing, you can share within a team, a department, the entire company, or with people outside the company.

Evernote is pretty good at figuring out which notes in your account are related to the one you're viewing, and Evernote Business expands that functionality across the whole company while still searching your own notes as well.

Evernote Business costs $10 per user per month, and it leverages the existing, free Evernote desktop applications for Mac, iOS, Android, and Windows (desktop only). For the money, you get a 2GB monthly upload allowance, which is twice what individual premium users get, and the company as a whole gets a separate 2GB bucket for shared notebooks.

It's easy to deploy and manage, too, since there's a centralized console for IT people to add and remove employees and manage permissions.

But just because it's easy to manage the big picture doesn't mean it'll be easy to manage the details. I have some doubts about the viability of Evernote Business.

The Dangers Of Evernote Business

Let's be clear about this, I am betting on Evernote with my digital life. But as a heavy Evernote user, I know one thing for sure: It takes a lot of fiddling to make the service work for you. I'm subtly adjusting my tags and notebooks all the time as I figure out new ways I need to organize all this stuff. I'm not sure that kind of micromanagement is going to scale well.

For companies that can keep things simple, Evernote Business will work. If you make sure that the company has clear and rigid rules about formatting and tagging, and you fix it whenever someone doesn't follow them, it'll be fine. But how realistic does that sound? Think about company email and all the annoying protocol mistakes that crop up there. Now imagine those kinds of communication breakdowns in an application that's for writing, editing, collaborating and organizing, not just for sending messages.

That sounds like it could get pretty hairy. On small teams of technologically savvy people with very clear objectives, Evernote Business could be an awesome way to work together. But in your typical company, it's likely to be a logistical nightmare.

To be fair, enterprise IT is always a logistical nightmare. It's not like Google Docs would be any better for organizing. But the advantage of Evernote is that it's stored locally on your device, no matter what kind of device you use. That makes it a little more rugged and ready-for-anything as a working environment.

Here's how I'd advise someone deciding whether to deploy Evernote Business: If you don't know Evernote, try the free version and see if its basic structure makes sense for your work. Once you're comfortable with the way Evernote works, imagine your whole team sharing that tool and the synced workspace to which it connects. If that sounds awesome, go for it. Evernote is solid, and it's in it for the long haul. If the process seems too complex to manage, though, listen to that instinct.

Life Online: The Biology Is Different

[Editor's note: In a world where tags like 'visionary' and 'big thinker' get tossed around too frequently, J.P. Rangaswami is the real deal. He's a fantastic storyteller and has lived an incredibly adventurous life. Trained as an economist, J.P. has been CIO of an investment bank in London and has won acclaim as one of the most forward-thinking and influential people in tech. He lives in London and is now the chief scientist at Salesforce.com. His blog, Confused of Calcutta, should be on every techie's reading list, along with his feed on Twitter, where he is @jobsworth. I'm thrilled that J.P. has agreed to write articles for ReadWrite. This piece, his first for us, leaps from a description of buying tickets online to a meditation about the billions of previously disenfranchised people who soon will come online. J.P. promises to explore these ideas in future articles. I cannot wait. - Dan Lyons]

I woke up early this morning; I tend to wake up early most mornings, but today was special. I knew I had to get ready to do something important, something very important. Something many people would find hard to understand.

Cricket. I planned to go and queue for tickets for the Saturday and Sunday of the fifth and final 'Ashes' Test between England and Australia, to be played at the Oval on August 24th and 25th 2013. Because that's the kind of person I am.

Not just the kind of person who looks forward to spending a couple of days watching 22 men in white (or 'flannelled fools,' as George Bernard Shaw called them) amble around, the occasional sound of willow on leather rudely disturbing the reverie of moustachioed majors as they snored gently into their tea and crumpets. But the kind of person who enjoys actually going to see stuff 'live': plays, concerts, musicals, opera, and sport. In all shapes and sizes.

So I woke up, got ready, made sure I had my membership details and credit card with me, and went along to buy my ticket. Queued patiently as they started serving bang on time. Waited my turn. Bought the tickets I wanted.

It was altogether a thoroughly satisfying experience. I was warm and dry throughout; there was plenty of decent food and drink on offer; the environment was peaceful and comfortable, the company friendly and worthwhile, no noise, no crowds. They even had a notice telling me how the queue was progressing.

I was at home.

While I queued, I was greeted with a notice that the website was experiencing high demand, and that I'd been placed in a queue where "the flow of members accessing the site is monitored and adjusted accordingly depending on the number looking to purchase at any one time." There was an estimate of how long I would have to wait before entering the site.

Speeding Up Evolution

Even though I've bought tickets online many times, I felt a real sense of wonder at how technology had improved the whole process. I was particularly taken with how the size of the 'waiting room' could be adjusted to reflect the number of people 'queueing' in the room. Kevin Kelly, in What Technology Wants, suggests that we should look at technology as a means of speeding up evolution. In similar fashion, whenever I look at a digital process, I am particularly interested in how it improves on the analog. (And that is why I detest 'region coding' on DVDs and games, where technology was used to pave cowpaths rather than build roads.)

The 'physics' of the digital world is different from that of the physical world. I remember Richard Bartle making this point very elegantly in October 2005, in a comment on Terra Nova:

'Virtual space is not like real space, and the users of both have different criteria by which they judge it a success. People want to feel they're in the world, and that means the architecture has to be faithful to genre. Exciting new architecture is possible, but if it intrudes then it must do so for a reason. I expect it will be a long while before the architecture award goes to a building in a contextualised (ie. game-like) world, rather than a less themeful one such as SL.

'Also, because each virtual world is physically different, architecture that is successful in one may not be successful in another. Does the virtual world need staircases? Does it require structures to self-support under gravity? Are there materials that you can see through from one side but not the other? How about materials that change what they look like depending on who's looking at them? What's possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another - unlike the real world, they don't all use the same physics.'

When The Constraints Of The Physical World Are Removed

What Bartle spoke about is what excited me about digital infrastructure in general and virtual worlds in particular. The idea that people who were otherwise constrained from movement or speech or action could have those constraints removed made my heart sing. The possibility that ubiquitous affordable access to connectivity, computing power and storage could soon become a reality fascinated me. The implication that billions of disenfranchised people could have their lives transformed, particularly when it came to health, education, welfare, filled me with glee.

So I was very taken with this 'physics is different' idea ever since I came across it. This, despite the fact that digital landscapes and virtual worlds tended to attract a lot of criticism, particularly of the 'people who are in Second Life don't have a First Life' class.

That was over seven years ago. Since then, I've spent considerable time observing, and participating in, social networks of one form or another, in business as well as in society in general. Over time, some themes became more important to me than others. One particular theme, that of how trust could scale, not just scale but scale at speed, has intrigued me deeply.

When it comes to the physical world, biology plays a key role in how we trust, both in nature as well as speed. The 'biology' of the digital world is different; over the next few posts, I plan to look at how this affects us, in our personal lives as well as in our professional ones. I am particularly interested in identifying, understanding and sharing with you the class of person who was disenfranchised in the physical world, and who is now empowered to trust and to be trusted, reliably and at speed, in the digital world.

And I'm looking forward to learning from the dialogues that ensue.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.