Several years ago, most people in the UK were issued with new bank cards featuring the now familiar chip-and-pin system (formally specified by the EMV group). The goal was to provide greater protection to transactions by removing easily forged signatures and greatly increasing the state of card cryptography, at least compared to the old magnetic stripes. While the system has its flaws, it has been a success and is now an every day part of life here in Great Britain, as well as most of the Western world.

One problem it doesn’t solve is timeliness for small transactions. If you’re buying a cup of coffee, a sandwich or a similarly low-value set of items, using a card still takes a great deal longer than a cash transaction. If you have a queue of people all paying by card, the time taken really adds up, both for shops and consumers.

There is a solution that has been trialled in various ways over the last few years, called EMV contactless. By embedding a small radio transmitter (tiny, tiny range) into modern credit cards, we can now make use of chip-and-pin free technology. Rather than inserting your card, typing your pin, and awaiting authorisation, you swipe your card over a reader (less than a second) and that’s it. It gets enough of your details to charge you the right amount (which it tends to do in the background) and you get on with your day. You basically have a system that’s much faster than cash.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar if you live in or have visited London in the last 6 years or so: this is exactly how Oyster cards work on London Transport. You swipe, you walk through, and that’s it. It may also be familiar to American readers who are part of the Chase bank. It’s been deployed by them under the name Chase Blink. (I should say I was once employed by another part of Chase’s parent company, but obviously had nothing to do with any of this – I just read about it there first. My opinion is not their opinion, yadda yadda).

Now, obviously, an instant debit card that finishes transactions after you leave is open to fraud: you could charge up a number of small transactions that total a huge amount. They’ve thought of that. There are both per-transaction and daily limits before you have to revert to chip-and-pin. It’ll vary from bank to bank, but I’ve seen sensible limits of £10 per transaction and £50 a day. That should cover the use-cases here i.e. replacing cash and low-value card transactions.

A far more interesting problem is proliferation. I have one of these cards (it got sent out within the last week) but, as far as I know, there are absolutely no places in Glasgow that I can actually use it. I imagine big name, high-volume chains will get it quickly (coffee chains, fast food, etc), but I can’t imagine a quick change for most other vendors. Given the cost in upgrading aging equipment to be chip-and-pin compatible, a real concern for this system is how smaller companies who would really benefit from contactless transactions are actually going to be able to afford it. Sure, the convenience and time-saving probably make it worthwhile in the long term but I imagine the equipment involved is prohibitively costly for many operations.

If this had been incorporated into cards at the same time as chip-and-pin, then I’m sure it would be huge and have a bright future. As it stands, I doubt its going anywhere fast. I would like to be wrong on this one.

Another month, another bunch of films…

The Hurt Locker is fairly well in keeping with the cinematic vision of modern warfare. Unlike World War II films and their heroic stands against evil, films set in modern conflicts need to have troubled characters who do the things that they do for less idealistic reasons. In The Hurt Locker, we get the men of an explosive ordinance disposal team in Iraq doing their work in difficult conditions. The characters are broadly stereotyped (the risk-taker, the strategist etc), but it’s interesting to see their perspectives. While there are some fairly tense scenes, the film moves too slowly and doesn’t provide enough genuine insight into their work to justify it. It’s slow but decent, and just decent.  (See my The Hurt Locker Twitter review).

Neil Blomkampf has followed up his interesting sci-fi short, Alive in Johannesburg, with a full-length, studio-backed effort, District 9. It’s an interesting take on racial divide, with the arrival of an alien craft full of under-nourished aliens causing the South Africans to segregate them into camps and treat them pretty poorly. Despite the sci-fi elements, the film is shot in a largely natural style, lending an air of authenticity to both the aliens and their technology. With some striking visuals, great action sequences, and an interesting take on the theme, District 9 stands head and shoulders above typical sci-fi fare. It’s very well-done. (See my District 9 Twitter review).

Finally, Adventureland looks to be a teen comedy about working at a theme park, but is actually much more of a teen romance. Following a newcomer to the park and his pursuit of one girl, the story doesn’t really take us on a ride that surpasses our expectations. A relatively average movie, that really isn’t my thing. If you like teen romance, then maybe it’s for you, but it’s not for me. (See my Adventureland Twitter review).

The winner is District 9, for it’s fantastic pace, visuals and story. Well done.

When new music comes out, we tend to see it on Spotify on release day. That’s not universally true, but for the labels that have signed up for the service already it tends to be the case (purely observationally). I do wonder what the best approach is:

• Releasing on Spotify early to build hype for the album and getting income for a (slightly) longer period, but risking casual fans being done with the album come release day.
• Putting it on Spotify on release date so that everyone gets it at the same time, both casual and hardcore fan.
• Putting it on Spotify a period of time after release date so that the majority of buyers will have it already (assuming a typical album release and not a “classic” that will sell for a long time) and Spotify is an additional revenue stream. The risk here is that people who want to preview before buying will simply download illegally and never buy the album.

I genuinely don’t know which option is best, but I suspect it’s not the middle-one.

August was a particularly good month for cinema, with three films that all brought something different to their audiences…

Antichrist is, too put it mildly, a difficult film. It’s beautifully shot, with some incredible looking scenes and imagery, and the artistry throughout is of the highest quality. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg both live their parts near flawlessly, even when the film becomes surreal around them. All of that said, this is not a film for the faint-hearted. The themes at its core are adult (dealing with the death of a child and the guilt around that, self-mutilation, original sin), and the exploration is extremely graphic. It’s not what you might consider “entertainment”, which is obviously not the only purpose of cinema, it is a hard-hitting work of art and worthy of its critical acclaim. (See my Antichrist Twitter review).

Jacques Mesrine, we learn very early on in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, is a self-involved but charismatic risk-taker. Vincent Cassel is well cast as the brutal gangster in this biopic (the first of two parts), showing his incredibly ugly side as a womanising, evil criminal as well as his enthralling take-on-the-world attitude. The pacing is good, moving relatively quickly, and the film as a whole, from the acting to the directing, is well-observed. A good film. (See my Mesrine: Killer Instinct Twitter review).

Finally, Inglourious Basterds is probably the best movie Tarantino has made since Pulp Fiction. Set in an alternate World War II, you’d be forgiven for presuming that the movie follows the titular Basterds as they perform their special brand of guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines in Nazi-controlled France. Instead it splits the time evenly between their exploits, a Parisian-cinema owner (the sole survivor of a family wiped out by the Germans a few years earlier) and the absolutely fantastic Hans Landa (played by Christopher Waltz), an SS officer whose actions guide the course of the movie. It’s a great mix of over-the-top styling, excessive comic book violence and extremely tense moments. Often you know that something is going to go wrong in a scene, but Tarantino expertly draws the scene out more and more so that you’re never quite sure of the when. Absolutely top notch. (See my Inglourious Basterds Twitter review).

They’re all good movies in their own right, but I think it has to be Inglourious Basterds for it’s incredible dialogue and performances.

I’ve been thinking a lot about digital marketplaces, and how they can widely differ from physical marketplaces. In particular, I’ve been looking at the world of games. First, a digression into music…

Until recent years, I had been a firmly in the physical music camp. Although I’ve had digital copies of most of my music in MP3 format for the best part of 8-9 years, I always liked having an actual CD. There was something about having the artwork, the lyrics, and nice little touches by the band that made it special. There is also the collective urge: the need to gather up more of what I already had. I’ve got every Idlewild single so far? Great, I’ll get all the new ones on CD too. I’ve not counted in a while but I’m certainly over the 400 CD mark.

Two things changed my mind about how CDs (as a physical medium for music) can be so great. Firstly, I have moved a number of times in the last 5 years, more than I’d have liked. This has the very obvious consequence of packing, moving and unpacking 400+ CDs. While one CD is certainly not heavy, when you start scaling up you’ve got a very obvious physical problem. It’s not fun.

Secondly, I started thinking about the amount of time that I’d spent admiring the artwork and liner notes on most CDs. For the vast majority, it’s under a minute. Very few actually contain much beyond the cover art and the credits. There are a few outlying exceptions to that which I’m glad I own (such as NOFX’s “45 or 46 songs that weren’t good enough to go on our other records”, Bad Religion’s “Tested” and the Refused compilations), but they are very few and far between.

The pain of moving and storing these products just isn’t worth the benefits any more.

For the most part, I buy all my music digitally these days. Either on iTunes (not it is DRM free), Play.com, 7Digital (my favourite for a long time) or Amazon (best price-wise for most of my more recent purchases). I can pick between them based on price, any extras, exclusive tracks, longevity (some may not go the distance), copy protection (market forces have all but killed DRM in audio) etc. That’s a VERY good thing.

Now, games. I am a gamer, and have been for as long as I can remember. While I don’t tend to keep consoles for more than a generation or two, it’s still fairly easy to build up a decent number of games. Given that games face the same physical issues as music when the numbers get large enough, and they can be represented digitally, it makes sense to start building digital marketplaces.

It was no surprise to anyone, then, when Microsoft announced their Games On Demand service at E3 this year. It has now launched and features older games for cheaper prices. In and of itself, a digital service like that is probably a good thing, but there are some serious causes for concern.

As the platform holders, Microsoft are fully in control of the digital marketplace for their console. That means that they are the only people selling anything and they’re the ones setting the prices. We have a situation where, effectively, Microsoft have a monopoly. History has taught us, time and again, that marketplaces are good for consumers only whilst their is genuine competition.

If you pick any game on the Games on Demand, you can buy a copy much cheaper elsewhere in physical form. Whether the premium is worth the lack of box to store is entirely up to you, but I think that doubling the price probably isn’t worth it. That’s also ignoring the fact that digital products are cheaper to produce that physical products and that fact should be reflected in their prices.

It’s unfair to just pick on Microsoft. Sony have the same situation with their offering. (I’m leaving indie games, XBLA and Steam out of this discussion for the moment and may revisit it later).

What we need are alternatives. We need Microsoft to open up the platform from a sales-perspective at the very least. Different distributors could fairly well compete in the digital games marketplace for consoles. Pricing is an obvious differentiator, but with products like games there are a number of ways to build a competitive service: in-game extras, download speed, limited remote access (play from a friend’s console), limits around re-downloading, exclusive multiplayer servers (less of a concern with the 360), avatar awards, etc.

For now we’ve got a fairly weak offering in terms of its competitiveness. The worry is that the next generation of consoles move further from the retail and into digital (see the most recent PSP iteration) without these concerns being addressed.