Worth The While: Evening with the Dove 2012
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Cool Gadget: Introducing…. PAYPAL HERE
The reader itself, like Square, plugs into a phone or tablet’s headphone jack. Created by the industrial-design gods at Fuseproject, it’s a triangle with a fold-down wing that’s designed to brace the reader so it doesn’t tumble off. It encrypts the card data before transmitting it to the mobile device;Square’s original reader was notoriously unencrypted, but the company started shipping an encrypted version last month.
Compared to Square, PayPal Here has a bunch more features. If you don’t have your reader, you can snap a photo of a card to accept it. It tracks cash and check payments as well as cards, and has a feature for issuing invoices. PayPal charges a slightly lower transaction fee — a flat 2.7% vs. Square’s 2.75% — and plays up its debit card, with a 1% cashback feature that reduces the effective fee to 1.7%.
Cool Gadget: Belkin WeMo
Belkin’s new WeMo system is home automation made easy. It’s completely modular, so you can control as much or as little of your home as you like. Turn on a light in another room, or turn it off from across town. Put your house on a schedule—living room lights go on in the evening, kids’ TV goes off at bedtime. You can check to make sure you turned the iron off, after you’ve already left the house. Have a fan go on before you get home. WeMo can even guard the front door.
