After watching this video I know a few things.

1. It's going to be a while before anybody implements a smoother shopping experience
2. It's not going to look like this
3. PayPal won't be the ones to do it

The vision presented by PayPal of what payment solutions will look like creates more problems than it solves.

In their "PayPal Across the Purchase Process" graphic they show the key value proposition of each stage is a buzz word or gimmick.

• Geo-targeted mobile advertising 
• Barcode scanning 
• Real-time inventory availability 
• Mobile and point-of-sale payments 
• Virtual Wallet

It's absurd to think that the future of payments will involve consumers adopting five different new technologies and behaviours, none of which have even yet been proven in the market.

Remember also, that PayPal isn't relevant in the physical payment world at all. So the fact that their relevance is going to depend on those technologies isn't a good sign.

As I've written on the blog before quoting Steve Jobs, this reads like the case of engineers working backwards from the technology to the customer experience. Which is the wrong way of doing it.

What makes me more upset is that PayPal never describes a simple, consumer focused buying experience. The solution presented is more about how PayPal could fit into the process. The video presents the benefits to PayPal rather than what's best for the consumer.

PayPal promises 'one-stop shop' for merchants

It seems like we all know where computing is going.

Tablets, ultraportable laptops, NFC, smart phones, the Internet of Things...

We know it's coming. It's just a matter of when it'll be ready for consumers.

We also know the interfaces are getting more intuitive and simpler for
the average consumer to use on a day to day basis. So much of the
future seems obvious in fact that not much of it is exciting anymore.

But at the same time software is bigger than ever and is moving faster
than ever.

As the biggest software trend that's already four years old, social
media is still changing and is still disrupting. It's one of few
software trends ever to go mainstream, and new privacy concerns still
come up, most recently with the use of real identities and with social
sharing. Most surprisingly is that new start-ups come out with new
products and services every month.

There's still a lot of unresolved issues with software in general that
the world is dealing with. Software patent litigation, government
injunctions, IPOs, and more direct competition than ever between the
biggest companies in the world. Maybe the most profound change is the
rise of the app ecosystems, markets ruled by private corporations.

It's a volatile time as traditional industries that have been around
for centuries are being disrupted. Publishing of newspapers, magazines
and books, brick and mortar stores, television, movies and music.
Better experiences delivered through new hardware and software are
disrupting these industries.

These industries will always exist, and we already have an idea how
we'll experience them (Tablets, ultraportable laptops, NFC, Smart
phones, the Internet of Things). In the next few years we'll see some
try to save their businesses, and we'll see others use innovative
software to completely reimagine them.

Discovering over the next 10 years what that software will look and
how it will work is what really excites me.

Without getting down on the state of Toronto bike politics and where things seem to be going, Seeing Andrew Leinonen’s StayLocked Bicycle reminds me to just keep working and doing what you do.

What I can’t help imagining is how a different Toronto, one that valued making biking safer and that encouraged people to commute by bike might have helped Andrew’s with grants or rewarded him for his invention.

Toronto might not be the best place to be a bicyclist, but if people stopped building then things would never change.

The StayLocked Bicycle by Andrew Leinonen

This Papercut demo is interesting but I feel like having two things happening at once must be braking some sort of user interaction rules.

It also makes me wonder if the single running application benefit of the iPad, where users only have one open application to focus on is being broken also by this mechanism.

The only places I've seen animation and text work together in a really interactive way is in video games like Braid where narration happens between levels while you're still in control of the character.

To see Papercut replace pages with continuous text and to integrate it with visual and audible media could have big repercussions when it comes to the shape of poetry, short stories, and comics in the future.

So while this may not be the best way to read on the iPad, the combination of different mechanisms and the creation of a new experience is certainly exciting to watch.