Category: Pay

The Google Nest Hub offers the perfect sleep tracker for lazy people

Posted onAuthoradmin

Google’s newest Nest Hub is the tech giant’s best attempt yet to be all things to all people. The device so far has made a name for itself as a modern picture frame , the perfect kitchen assistant, and even a cool tool for makeup tutorials . Now, the Nest Hub can function as a sleep tracker, providing a better reason for you to let Google into your bedroom. Nest Hub’s sleep tracking is built for anyone who is on the fence about using technology to assess how well they’re sleeping. It’s a very stripped-down experience compared with popular sleep trackers like Oura Ring or even the Apple Watch, but it won’t make you feel judged for your bad habits. And, if you do feel ashamed of your sleep statistics, you can easily delete them at any time in the Google Fit app (oddly, you can only delete your data on the Nest Hub itself within two hours after you wake up). That makes the Nest Hub a great addition to the roster of available sleep trackers. In the week I spent trying it out, I found the Nest Hub to be extremely low maintenance. You don’t need to wear it, you don’t need to check it every day, and you don’t need to remember to charge it—it’s always plugged in. The tracker works in the background on its own. The sleep tracking is enabled by Google’s motion-sensing Soli technology, which also powers the device’s new gesture-control feature, a user favorite that was previously available only with the Nest Hub Max . With gesture control, users can pause music simply by air-high-fiving the screen or move to the next step in a recipe with a wave. (Soli, which uses radar to detect motion , first launched in the Pixel 4 smartphone.) [Photo: courtesy of Google] In order for the sleep-tracking feature to work, the Nest Hub has to sit on a night table that is the same height as the top of your mattress (my side table is a few inches higher, though I don’t think it affected my results). Read More …

PayPal now lets you spend cryptocurrency at millions of U.S. merchants

Posted onAuthoradmin

PayPal now allows payment for goods and services with cryptocurrency, with a twist: Merchants receive cold, hard, American cash, less PayPal’s standard merchant fee. Starting with U.S. customers and merchants, the global payment-processing firm’s new “Checkout with Crypto” provides the most mainstream conduit to convert value in bitcoins and three other digital currencies into government-backed dollars to complete purchases. “What I love about this for the consumer is that their crypto holdings are just like any other funding instrument inside the PayPal wallet, whether it be your credit card, your debit card, your balance that you may have. . . . You just select whatever funding source you want,” says PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Read More …

‘Roblox’ isn’t just a gaming company. It’s also the future of education

Posted onAuthoradmin

Roblox , which recently made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, has quickly become one of the most valuable video game companies in the world.  As I write this article, Roblox has effortlessly overtaken household video game names such as Take-Two (maker of Grand Theft Auto ) and Electronic Arts (EA) (maker of Battlefield and FIFA ) in terms of market cap, while only making a fraction of the incumbents’ revenues and none of their profits. And there is good reason for this change in pecking order. Unlike Take-Two and EA, Roblox is not just a gaming company. It is a virtual playground for nearly 200 million monthly users, with two-thirds of those users being of school-going age. Read More …

Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

Posted onAuthoradmin

Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …

Inside Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s alcohol- and snacks-saturated battle for Oscar buzz

Posted onAuthoradmin

A month out from the 2021 Academy Awards telecast—which airs on April 25—the battle to win the love of Hollywood has turned into the year of the crate. Over the past few weeks, everyone from the indie studio A24 to indie stalwart Fox Searchlight (now a division within Disney) to Universal have dispatched across town crates of artisanal food to woo their way into the hearts—and stomachs—of the Hollywood press corps, the influential body of scribes who feverishly chronicle every twist and turn in the jostle leading up to the Oscars. Netflix, which leads this year’s nominations haul with a whopping 35 nominations for films, including Mank , The Trial of the Chicago 7 , and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , has also been lavishing edible swag on reporters, but has become more known for gifting booze. To support Malcolm & Marie , a moody art film starring Zendaya and John David Washington—which looked like an early contender but ended up not nabbing any nominations—Netflix sent out bottles of top-drawer scotch. (I’m sure it didn’t go to waste.) Swag and Oscar campaigning have always gone hand in hand during awards season—the three (to six) month swirl of parties, dinners, brunches, and getaways sponsored by the studios and streamers to stir up buzz for their contenders. But in a season that has been turned on its head due to COVID-19—in-person screenings have been verboten , along with glad-handling galas—studios and screening companies have had to be more creative about how to get the word out about their films. Even the fall film festivals, such as Venice and Telluride, which are traditionally relied on to build early buzz and critical acclaim for films, went virtual in 2020, lessening their ability to fuel word of mouth and serve as showboating opportunities for stars and filmmakers. As a result, studios and streamers are coming up with new ways to transform their projects into events. Take Nomadland . The Best Picture frontrunner—it cemented this position by nabbing the top award at the Producers Guild Awards—stars Frances McDormand as a peripatetic Amazon worker who finds beauty and serenity amongst fellow RV dwellers in the American Southwest. The film premiered at festivals last fall, but when it launched on Hulu in late February and officially came out in theaters, Fox Searchlight announced a virtual global premiere. The tactic, in part, was to keep the film feeling fresh so far along in its run, and with the delayed Oscars still a ways off. (During campaign season, the fear of peaking too soon—what many believed killed A Star is Born ‘s Best Picture chances in 2019—haunts all awards publicists.) Invitees to the event were sent the aforementioned crate—stuffed with gourmet cheese, “humanly raised” salami, and trail mix—to enjoy while watching the film. This at-home viewing party atmosphere has become de rigeur this season in an attempt to replicate the feeling and fun of an Oscar screening/gala, and to elevate the living room viewing experience beyond turning on the tube in your pajamas (though you can still do that, of course). One publicist attributed the format to Netflix, which has been throwing “virtual premieres” ever since COVID-19 hit. Invitees who RSVP “yes” to a Netflix premiere see the film show up in their Netflix preview row, and are then sent popcorn or a DoorDash coupon to enjoy with the show Read More …