TechCrunch
Leaked YouTube Video & Tumblr Blog Reveal All About Stealthy Payments Startup Clinkle
Clinkle, a much-hyped mobile payments startup which raised $25 million in funding ahead of having a publicly available product, has been notoriously secretive about its user interface and the details of how it all works. TechCrunch has been able to grab some screenshots in the past that demonstrate how the app functions, and spoke with beta testers and former employees to get a sense of its differentiating elements. But nothing comes close to this tell-all video which appeared a few days ago giving away much of Clinkle’s secrets.
The video’s creator is currently unknown, but it appears to be someone with direct knowledge of Clinkle’s plans. There are a lot of people who worked for Clinkle for a short time, while strung along with promises of equity and then dropped, we’ve heard. That’s why it makes sense that there’s some potential for a leak of this nature to occur. However, tipster who send in the video claims they were able to bypass the Clinkle waitlist in the app, which is how they were able to see all this functionality.
For starters, the video shows off the Clinkle user interface in action. These images include a lot of shots where photos of America’s founding fathers are used in the place of “dummy” user accounts. This correlates up with the placeholder images we had previously pulled out of the app’s APK, again lending credence to the video being either a direct capture, or at least a very knowledgable re-creation.
The video demonstrates how Clinkle can manage cash, credit and debit cards, transfers and withdrawals, as well as other things, like peer-to-peer payments, and transaction histories. Toward the end of the video, it also shows a screen that says “Aeorlink enabled,” which refers to an ultrasound connection between a phone and an iPad acting as a register – basically the app sends encrypted sound waves that act as the payments. A Register app had earlier appeared in the iOS App Store before being pulled.
From the details on an accompanying tell-all Tumblr blog, a tipster explains that with Aerolink, the ultrasonic sounds encode a store, register, and transaction identifier but the process may be open to security vulnerabilities. It also may be technology sourced from a third-party, the post states. (The video and Tumblr blog were sent in by the same tipster, but we can’t be sure at this point that his or her claims to be the author of both are legitimate.)
This Tumblr blog reveals that Clinkle’s accounts are actually being held by Zions Bank, which is why the app asks for things like your driver’s license photo and Social Security Number. That allows Clinkle to transfer money to your real bank account with the app’s “ATM” functionality. Using a real bank behind the scenes is not altogether different from how other startups, like Simple and Dwolla, operate. It’s very difficult for a startup to actually be a bank itself, so it instead innovates on the front-end.
The phone number 1855CLI-NKLE, also featured in the Tumblr blog, when called, did respond “hello this is Clinkle,” when tested a few days ago. It appears to be an office number.
To be clear, most of the leaks confirm functionality we already knew about, but now it’s a case of being able to see how it works, rather than just hearing about the details from sources.
The potential for more leaks around Clinkle continues, as the company is not planning to have some grand launch event, but is rather quietly expanding its tester base while launching around college campuses.
We’re reaching out to Clinkle for comment on the leaks now and will update with their response.
Facebook Starts Rollout Of Graph Search For Posts, Comments, Check-Ins To Reveal The Past And Present
What’s everyone saying about Breaking Bad? What about just my friends? What do my old photo comments say about me? A trillion posts full of this info start getting unlocked today as Facebook begins rolling out Graph Search for posts to a small subset of US English users. It will allow us to see what the world thinks of anything, but could also dredge up the past, defeating ‘privacy by obscurity’.
When Facebook launched Graph Search in January, it started with indexing people, photos, places, and interests. It let you find people based on certain characteristics, browse specific sets of photos, find local businesses, and discover media and brands your friends enjoy. But there were three big things missing: International access, mobile access, and the ability to search posts.
Since then Facebook has expanded Graph Search from a limited beta to a product available to all US users that browse in English. Since Graph Search is a semantic search engine based on sentences, not keywords, it’s tricky and slow to internationalize.
There’s still no mobile support, which is facepalm-worthy consider Facebook is supposed to be a “mobile first” company, and much of Graph Search potential lies in helping people find things and friends while on the go.
Today, though, Facebook stars solving the second problem by making almost anything you post accessible via Graph Search. That includes status updates, comments on anything, photo captions, Notes, and check-ins. No Events yet, though. Only a small group of US-English users are getting post search today, and Facebook tells me it plans to to monitor usage and take feedback before refining post search and rolling it out to all Graph Search users.
The End Of Privacy By Obscurity
Looking to the past, Graph Search for posts will help Facebook and its users realize the ambitions of Timeline. Suddenly everything we’ve written on Facebook isn’t just clunkily navigable from our profiles. It can be searched by anyone with permission to see it. Your bitter posts from your college library, silly comments on friends’ wedding photos, and dispatches from distant vacation check-ins.
That could make for some fun nostalgia, or some embarrassing fiascos. Before Timeline, your old posts were essentially locked away behind hundreds of clicks of the “more posts” button at the bottom of your profile. This is known as ‘privacy by obscurity’. Technically your old content was still accessible, but it was really tough to find, essentially making the past a secret.
Timeline let you find content on the profiles of friends if you knew what you were looking for and when to look. Graph Search for people let you find a non-friend’s profile and comb through their public posts. But Graph Search for posts essentially eradicates ‘privacy by obscurity’. If you said it, and it’s technically visible to someone, they will be able to easily find it. That includes any time you’ve mentioned you’re “drunk”, “high”, “depressed”, “pissed”, or cursed like a sailor.
I don’t mean to scare you. There’s a lot of good fun and ‘connection’ that will come from Graph Search of old posts. But this is a good time to go to your Activity Log and make sure any sensitive content you have has the right privacy settings. I’d definitely recommend doing this when you get the feature yourself. That’s actually one problem with the slow rollout. Some people’s content will be searchable by others before they can search themselves.
The Global Townsquare, Indexed
Looking at the present, Graph Search for posts could do a lot to help Facebook win the war against Twitter to become the web’s premier water cooler. Perhaps more than Facebook adding hashtags, verified profiles, trending topics, and other features from Twitter’s Playbook.
Now when there’s a big live television event or world news, you can browse more than your News Feed or hashtags. You can search for “Post about Syria” to see every public post on Facebook mentioning the word. Want to just see what your friends are saying about the latest teen pop drama? Search “Posts about Miley Cyrus from my friends”.
These searches could become popular places for Facebook to advertise. Right now there’s no way to target ads to appear on post Graph Search results, but Facebook could unlock that soon. If Facebook can convince users there’s more going on than what’s immediately visible in their News Feeds, it could get them spending more time on the site in front of brands who know what they’re thinking about. That could let Facebook accomplish its goals of connecting the world while finding a way to pay for all the servers that host our digital lives.
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