Running errands with Google Wallet in San Diego’s Carmel Valley / Rancho Bernardo area (92128 / 92129 / 92130)

Tap & Go a.k.a PayPass, is a new simple way of paying. PayPass is a payment method that lets you make purchases without having to swipe your card or provide your signature. A simple tap with a card, key fob, or mobile phone is all it takes to pay at checkout.

So this Saturday morning, I took paying with a mobile phone to the test – the only method of payment available to me was the Google Wallet application on a Samsung Nexus S Android Phone running on Sprint’s 4G Network.

Google Wallet can be linked to a Citi MasterCard, or like I did, used as a prepaid card, funded with any of my existing credit cards.

“The C Programming Language” originally published in 1977. My German copy was printed in 1983.

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Apple Store NYC, iDay -3

July 2007 in NYC – 3 days before the iPhone launch

Growing up in Germany means being exposed to different foods than kids here in America. I still remember the jelly, my grandmother used to make from homegrown raspberries, we helped her pick in the garden.
Kids in Europe usually don’t know much about peanut butter and grow up on hazelnut spread instead. There are different brands, all with subtle flavor differences, featuring either a more nutty or more chocolaty taste. Ferrero’s Nutella is the leading brand, with the term Nutella being synonymously used for Hazelnut Spreads all over Europe. Not surprisingly, it’s also among the more expensive hazelnut chocolate spreads.

The Nutella success story began in northwestern Italy, shortly after World War II, when master confectioner Pietro Ferrero used hazelnuts, which are plentiful in the Piedmont region of Italy, to extend the chocolate supply. 23 years later, in 1969, Ferrero U.S.A., Inc. was founded and Nutella was introduced to the US market. Today, the Nutella supply for the US is produced in Canada and somehow finds its way to my breakfast table quite regularly.
Lately, Nutella became more popular here in the US, (e.g. My Nutella – Rihanna Umbrella Parody, and was featured in the Los Angeles Times’ Food Section this February: Nutty for Nutella: spreadable joy however during a recent visit to Germany http://twitter.com/tompaulus and I made a disturbing discovery. The Nutella in Germany tastes differently than the Nutella here in the US and what’s even worse, the German stuff tastes much better.

The Nutella Experiment

Back in the US we almost forgot about the taste difference, until one morning when we once again enjoyed the creamy goodness. But we weren’t sure anymore, if the German Nutella really tasted better and therefore decided to find out and do the ultimate taste-test.

Acquisition

Like abovementioned, the Nutella here in the US is actually a product of Canada, and available in many grocery store chains like VONS, Ralphs, or Albertsons; the Store Locator may show some additional stores locations near you.
The North American Nutella sample for out test was purchased at the World Market in Oceanside, which offers the 13 OZ (370 g) plastic jar for US$ 3.99

Finding Nutella, produced in Europe, or to be more precise in Germany, can be a real challenge. Fortunately, Big John, founder and owner of Tip Top Meats – European Delicatessen, Inc. calls Carlsbad his home and his store offers many German and European specialties, among them extraordinary German beers (topic for another blog post, maybe) and Nutella. Slightly more expensive, the 29.1 OZ (825 g) glass jar was to be had for US$ 10.49

Classification

For the untrained shopper it can be quite challenging to see the subtle differences in the packaging. Here are some hints:

• Glass vs. Plastic – a glass jar is a strong hint that you may have found Nutella, originating in Europe.
• Texture on the embossed text on the lid – all lids seem to be white with the Nutella name embossed. However, the German version has a dotted texture on the characters.
• Golden Foil – removing the lid reveals a golden foil, sealing the content. The North American version is blank, the German Nutella has the product name and additional information printed on the foil.

Look, Smell, and Taste

To create fair and equal test conditions, we kept the two jars for one week in a dark location at room temperature. Opening the lids and removing the golden foil was already an eye-opening experience. The German Nutella is a little darker and the surface appear to be less shiny.

The smell is even more telling that there must be a difference. The North-American product doesn’t seem to be releasing much scent at all. The German Nutella on the other hand has a noticeable nutty scent.
The widely-known Spoon Test showed that the consistency of the North-American Nutella is a little creamier and softer.

Obviously, taste is subjective, and opinions differ even stronger, when it comes to food. However, all participating Nutella Testers (that would be http://twitter.com/tompaulus and http://twitter.com/wolfpaulus) agreed unanimously that the German Nutella tastes much more intensive, more nutty and chocolaty, when compared with the North-American product. One tester got blind folded and was still able to identified the Nutella’s origin in four consecutive tests.
The German Nutella tasted better and not surprisingly, was strongly preferred during the meal following the Taste Test.

Better Then Nothing But Still A Bad Copy

If a European or German version is unavailable or simply too hard to get then we will certainly continue to buy the Canadian version of the Nutella product. However, I feel sorry for the typical American consumer, who doesn’t even know what the real stuff tastes like.
There are many more examples like that. Take for instance the famous Harp Lager, an Irish beer (cousin of Guinness Stout) and widely available here in the US. The label clearly states Imported, a closer look however reveals that imported in this case means imported from Canada, where the beer is brewed and bottled. Again, the taste is different when compared to the real Irish Harp, which can be sampled in some fine Irish pubs here in Southern California.
Seems like food corporations could do a much better job when introducing foreign specialties but instead are sacrificing quality for profit or maybe act just carelessly.
On the other hand, if given a choice, we as consumers shouldn’t be rewarding those companies by buying their “tainted” products. Coke for example puts High Fructose Corn Syrup in the Coca-Cola it’s selling here in the US. The Coca-Cola bottled in Tijuana, Mexico however, is made with cane sugar.Cron.com had an interesting piece about this here: Have a taste of the real thing – sugar, that is
Just like my grandmother did way back when, we should be spending our money more consciously, going the extra mile, buying products from companies that do the same.

This weekend an era came to an end, at least in my house. The last PC, dedicated to run a Microsoft OS got dismantled and put to rest for good.

The year was 1982 or 1983, when I brought my first computer home, a Triumph-Adler Intel 8085A based Alphatronic with two disk-drives and 48KB RAM. The Alphatronic was not CP/M compatible but used the MOS operating system instead and came with BASIC, Fortran and Pascal compilers. Just like the original IBM PC, I replaced it with about 2 years later, the computer was rented from a local computer store. Still in high-school, I was contracted to write a laboratory billing system for a clinical laboratory and could not afford to buy the machines. It must have been 1984 or 1985 when I finally had the money to buy my first computer, a PC-Clone from Zenith Data Systems, with no harddrive but a 8MHz fast NEC V20 processor. Ever since that time, I had at least one PC in my home that was dedicated to run a Microsoft operating system. There was the 80386 based Gateway PC, several more beige boxes followed, and the last one of its kind was a small tower style PC with an ATX motherboard and a 2GHz Pentium-4 processor, with most components purchased from the local PC-Club store, which also closed its doors just a few months back. Since 2002 I have gradually replaced PCs with Macs and at home the computer landscape now only features Mac minis, Macbooks, and an Apple TV.
The occasional need to run a Windows application can easily be satisfied by quickly warming-up a VM in VM-Ware Fusion, which I have conveniently stored on an external harddrive, and can therefore be used on any Mac.

A sad farewell? Not really!

I was in NYC, seeing the long lines going around the block the 5th Ave. Apple store, when the iPhone was launched in June 2007. People couldn’t wait, getting their hands on the beautiful mobile phone, the one with the best user interface, and the only one with a useable Web browser. This year I was in San Fran. at Apple’s worldwide developers conference, WWDC 2008, when the iPhone 3G was announced.
In 2007 Apple launched a new product-line. In 2008, a new platform was born, already used by several hundreds of companies, with the help of several thousands of software developers, all creating custom applications running on that new platform.
The first computer I ever came in contact with was a Commodore PET. Later on, I still had to deal with terminals, hosts, and even punchcards, but since my 1st experience was on a PET, I never really appreciated the paradigm shift that had happened back then. I can only imaging that the guys that were programming those huge mainframes must have felt like the .net and Java EJB guys feel today, rejecting the new mobile platform as a toy, or a small niche market at best – they will probably never know what hit them.
Everyone at this year’s WWDC felt it: a new age has begun – this will be the moment we will be looking back to, the moment the new platform was born, once again changing the information technology landscape forever.
Admittedly, attempts were made before. There was the Palm OS, Pocket PC, then came Qualcomm’s Brew, and also Sun’s Java MIDlets looked promising for a little while. All this has totally been overshadowed by the iPhone SDK and its capabilities, allowing developers to write iPhone native applications and putting them over the air on the device. The iPhone’s hardware capabilities combined with the software SDK and the App-Store is putting the iPhone-platform years ahead of anything we have seen so far, including Google’s Android initiative.

Unfortunately, there were also those rumors again, concerning Steve Jobs’ heath, driving the AAPL stock significantly down. He did look thinner, more skinny, compared to the last couple of appearances and I have to admit that when seeing him on stage during Monday’s keynote speech, I was concerned about his well being as well. On the other hand, even if he had to resign the CEO position tomorrow, the mobile revolution led by the iPhone seems very much unstoppable now. Over the last couple of years, all the pieces have carefully been put into play, and with Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of marketing, Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, and of course Scott Forstall, formally the vice president of platform experience, who was very recently promoted to Senior Vice President of iPhone Software, very capable people have been established to built-on and continue the legacy.
I have once experienced this myself, working for a company whose CEO I highly regarded and who was killed in a tragic airplane accident. His legacy and values however lived on even stronger in the people he had influenced and put into the right positions and who were leading the company for several years to come. For as long as those guys who have worked with Jobs for the last couple of years stay at Apple, I wouldn’t worry – only after that core team vanishes, will the company lose its focus, importance, and value.