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How In The World Does Venmo Make Money?

Every year, billions of dollars change hands in needlessly clumsy ways. Parents realize they’re short on cash and go out of their way to stop at an ATM so they can pay their babysitter; grandparents mail checks as birthday gifts, which take days to arrive and days to clear. Even as more and more of life is lived through a screen, paper is still how the vast majority of Americans give each other money.

In the past few years, a handful of tech companies have recognized these inefficiencies, introducing apps — such as Circle Pay, Square Cash, and Venmo — that let users transfer money to one another’s bank accounts using their phones, relatively frictionlessly. Among other things, they let users enter their bank-account information and then transfer money to others who have done the same. With Venmo, one of the more popular of these services, there is an additional wrinkle: Once money is transferred, the exchange shows up in the app’s social feed, a running record of who went out for drinks with whom, or whose roommate pays the electricity bill each month. (Users can elect to make a transfer private, but most don’t.) The app has among many — mostly young, city-dwelling people—attained a level of linguistic uptake reserved for the likes of Google and Uber: “Just Venmo me,” they say, after picking up a dinner bill.

The feature that sets Venmo apart is the social feed, which brings transparency to a class of transactions that used to be entirely private. The feed — an emoji-laden stream of often-indecipherable payment descriptions and inside jokes — seems frivolous; it is not a social-media destination in the way that Facebook or Twitter is. But as a public record, it is quite revealing of social dynamics — who’s hanging out with whom, and perhaps where. A friend of mine told me that Venmo proved invaluable in trying to determine if her ex and his new girlfriend were still dating.

RELATED: Why the Venmo Newsfeed Is the Best Social Network Nobody’s Talking About

The feature that sets Venmo apart is the social feed, which brings transparency to a class of transactions that used to be entirely private.
In other words, pointless and goofy as it seems, people do pay attention to what they see in Venmo’s feed. And there’s actually a way this parade of public transactions might give the app a significant advantage over its many competitors.

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The Coolest Job You Probably Didn’t Even Know Existed

We spend a lot of time each day looking at, tweeting, and texting emoji, but few of us get paid to do so. Keith Broni, on the other hand, makes his living doing just that.

Last December, London-based translation company Today Translations put out a call for an “emoji translator.” The job listing made news, partly because of its novelty — it’s believed to be the first role of its kind — and partly because it just sounds like so much fun. Who doesn’t want to spend their day looking at emoji?

Today Translations received over 500 applications, and the interview process took five months, but Broni emerged as the winning candidate. You can’t major in emoji translation (at least, not yet), but Broni’s educational background does complement the role. The Irishman graduated from University College London with a Master’s degree in business psychology. His dissertation, which was entitled using only emoji, looked at the ways that consumer behavior can influence how we perceive emoji in combination with various brand names.

Broni’s passion for emoji — a job requirement, obviously — is so strong that he organized Europe’s first Emoji Spelling Bee, in which contestants were given a limited amount of time to convert a phrase into emoji. When Today Translations posted the job, multiple friends sent Broni the listing, recognizing that it was a natural fit for a man whose days were already defined by hearts, smileys, and thumbs-up icons.

The interview process began with a short emoji test, asking applicants to decipher the meanings of some emoji combinations, as well as write a few sentences exclusively in emoji. The test was followed by a phone interview and then a presentation on what a handbook for using emoji might look like.

The job, as fun as it might seem, is far more complicated than it sounds. “The hardest things I’ve had to translate are ones where the intention is for it to be highly universal,” Broni explains during a phone interview with Refinery29. Even though emoji are often referred to as the new universal language, meanings can vary widely from one culture to the next. Take the thumbs up emoji.

“It’s very popular in the West, and is the ubiquitous Facebook icon, but in the Middle East it’s equivalent to an offense, like giving someone the middle finger,” Broni says.

The same goes for the A-Okay hand gesture, which Broni says can be very offensive in Latin America. Even the basic happy face isn’t so basic. In China, Broni says it’s often used to convey that you’re finished, or done with a conversation.

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A ‘Master’ Fingerprint That Could Unlock Your Phone

Fingerprint readers, like the TouchID on an iPhone, exist to make your device extra secure while keeping the process of unlocking it easy. Computer scientists at New York University and Michigan State are poised to turn that security benefit on its head. Like a master key that can open any lock, these researchers developed digital “master prints” that could emulate a variety of partial fingerprints enough to hypothetically hack into a device.

The researchers wondered if there was a fingerprint equivalent to a common four-digit security code, like “1234.” Using analysis from a digital database, they discovered that, indeed, a master print could successfully mimic a random fingerprint 26 to 65 percent of the time, according to the study. Why such a huge range? It depends on the scale of the fingerprint database; the more partial fingerprints enrolled in a fingerprint sensor system, the greater the chances are that a master print could unlock it.

There are several security issues at play. One, fingerprint sensors on smartphones are usually small, and two, a user can enroll multiple fingers. What’s more, a phone usually gives you several attempts to unlock it with your print.

“The sensors are small and they don’t capture the full fingerprint,” says Nasir Memon, a computer scientist at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and one of the authors of the study.

And since a smartphone fingerprint sensor can be taught to recognize several different fingers, the system learns a lot of partial prints. When you place a finger on the sensor, the system doesn’t actually know which finger it is, or how you’re positioning it.

“So if any one of them match,” he says, “it will say ‘okay, that’s you.’”

Memon and his colleagues analyzed a digital database of 800 fingerprints, then extracted thousands of partial prints from that same database.They wondered: Are there any partial prints that match the others with a high probability? “We were surprised,” he says, “there were some that match like 15 percent of the time.”

It’s worthwhile to note that the experiment was computer-based, so the researchers did not try to actually trick phones using a master print. The findings are theoretical, and one prominent biometrics researcher is skeptical.