David Marcus on the PayPal Blog:

So, you’re asking, how is this different from other small business mobile payment solutions? The key differentiator is that it comes from PayPal.

Excellent work. It’s not better. It’s not faster. It’s just triangular. And its key differentiator is that it’s from PayPal.

The Milk Team:

We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts.

This is awesome. The worst state for a startup is mediocrity. It kills creativity and, eventually, is the ultimate cause of company death. Being able to fail quickly, and to honestly acknowledge it openly, is an extremely admirable quality.

I’m making something that uses Markdown, and there’s currently no great universal symbol for identifying Markdown support. So I created one.

You should use this mark to identify user input areas which support Markdown-compiled HTML output or to identify general Markdown support. See the “Usage” section in the Markdown Mark documentation on Github.

You can find the specifications and a PSD with vector shapes on Github, at dcurtis/markdown-mark.

[M↓]

Alyson Shontell at Business Insider:

In just five weeks, the pictionary-like game has been downloaded 20 million times. […]

Users have produced more than 1 billion drawings. On March 11, 3,000 Draw Something pictures were being made per second.

Insanity.

Marco Arment on linking, sourcing, and curation.

Paul Graham:

One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I’m going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.

This is an extremely thought-provoking essay, and probably my favorite ever from PG. He explores seven markets that are in need of radical transformation, but where the transformation seems so ambitious that many people do not even think about the solutions in a holistic way.

I’ve had a weird feeling about Fitbit, Nike +, and the various other personal diagnostics devices that have come to market recently, and Graham seems to have figured out why; as I read item 7, called Ongoing...

Yesterday Apple launched iPhoto, its photo management app, for the iPad and iPhone… and we’re rather pleased to find they’re the latest to switch to OpenStreetMap. […]

The OSM data that Apple is using is rather old (start of April 2010) so don’t expect to see your latest and greatest updates on there. It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get that on there.

See also: Apple ditches Google Maps and Foursquare ditches Google Maps.

Stephen Wolfram:

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.

After showing a truly epic analysis, he concludes:

As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives. At first it all may seem quite nerdy (and certainly as I glance back at this blog post there’s a risk of that). But it won’t be long before it’s clear how incredibly useful it all is—and everyone will be doing it, and wondering how they could have ever gotten by before. And wishing they had started sooner, and hadn’t “lost” their earlier years.

There are no words...

I’ve heard from multiple sources that Path is currently trying to raise around $30 million on a $300 million valuation.

Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group is working on new technologies that improve touchscreen input response time:

One of the biggest problems with touch interfaces is simulating physics well enough to fool the brain’s perception systems. When a physical action you make with your finger does not lead to the response your brain has learned to expect in the physical world, something feels very wrong. It doesn’t feel genuine. Thankfully, Windows Phone does a much better job at this than Android; Microsoft is clearly thinking about this stuff.