30 ms·
Square is now called Block
- blitzar 5y agoIs it April 1st again?
- nikolay 5y agoThis is stupid! I don't wanna be boosting crypto indirectly so our nonprofit is leaving Square now!
- randomhodler84 5y agoI am sorry to inform you that you may have trouble finding fintech outfits that are not playing with Bitcoin moving forward. Good luck with that fiat.
- nikolay 5y agoYou're wrong! We have both SumUp and Intuit! Both are cheaper and better than Square anyway!
- randomhodler84 5y agoIronically, intuit and SumUp did have BTC payments in 2014 but stopped it due to low demand. (Of course… what people don’t get is BTC is not for spending. It is for saving.) Maybe early to the pre party and late to the after party?
- snotrockets 5y agos/saving/speculating/ ftfy
- nikolay 5y agoSquare is hoarding Bitcoins; can't recall SumUp getting involved and popularizing Bitcoin the way Jack is! Yes, sometimes companies accept Bitcoin, but that's a totally different story, and are not directly involving themselves in this scam and eco disaster!
- rezistik 5y agoI'm not super bullish on crypto and frankly it terrifies me a bit, but Intuit charges rent to the US population by lobbying to maintain complicated tax forms and processes...is that what you'd rather support?
- nikolay 5y agoIntuit is a pretty big company with some old mentality, but they contribute back a lot, too. For example, the whole Argo ecosystem is pretty much maintained by them. If Clover was not requiring you to go thru a bank, they would have been much more successful, and we'd be a client of theirs already.
- yurishimo 5y agoI think that's fine, but why create so much chaos with a rebrand on a product that currently has very little to do with blockchain tech? Why not spin off a separate entity, "Block (powered by Square)" to prove the idea and slowly migrate? This name change is going to be extremely confusing to end users who are out of the loop given the current dominance of the Square brand.
- randomhodler84 5y agoThe key public brand cash app tidal etc is the same. Square was vendor facing mostly so the name isn’t that important as b2b names change frequently. I don’t think as big a deal as Meta name change, being a consumer brand, and that’s not really a problem with consumers so far.
- wmf 5y agoThe Square product is not being rebranded. Nothing is really changing here.
- snotrockets 5y agoBecause they need to offload their crypto assests on the unsuspecting masses before they loose all value. And the hope is that driving crypto front and center would help that
- nscalf 5y agoHave you tried using cryptocurrencies? What made you so polarized on this topic?
- nikolay 5y agoI used to mine Bitcoin before it was cool.
- randomhodler84 5y agoAnd you still have some today?
- nikolay 5y agoI tend to sell at peaks. I occasionally use it to make payments, but it's the most expensive is slowest method of payment in 2021!
- randomhodler84 5y agoCome now, most expensive! That’s ETH for sure, btc is never more than $1 at peak times of multiple MB of mempool and currently at 1sat/vB which is $0.08
- kccqzy 5y agoThe environmental impact.
- imwillofficial 5y agoPretty, but I’m clueless what this is for
- adreamingsoul 5y agoIs this real? This reads like spam or some other kind of nonsense...
- piinbinary 5y agoA block is a square in 3 dimensions
- htrp 5y agothis makes almost no sense unless Dorsey is going full time crypto .....
- wmf 5y agoHe is.
- randomhodler84 5y agoNot crypto, Bitcoin. Not blockchain, Bitcoin.
- xiphias2 5y agoSure, still a lot of things Jack does doesn't make sense. Michael Saylor did the pure Bitcoin play, he gets it much more: make the company buy as much Bitcoin in the treasury as possible, and get into low interest rate debt that is not marked to market value. While Jack Dorsey is just talking about helping poor countries, Jack Mallers went there to launch the product, and has a great vision about using the lightning network to compete with VISA / Mastercard.
- pazimzadeh 5y agoI predict a VR app from Block called Party where Tidal supplies the music
- piinbinary 5y agoOther threads: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409382 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409497
- KoftaBob 5y agoI wonder if their stock ticker will change. BLOCK doesn't seem to be taken.
- htrp 5y agoPress says no.... still SQ
- KoftaBob 5y agoYeah you're right: https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158918724472837?s=20 https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158918724472837?s=20
- arthurcolle 5y ago5 letter tickers are frowned upon generally unless its a different share class or if its in some kind of credit/corporate action I thought. Like .E means Ch11 (iirc)
- jonny_eh 5y agoWTF is @TBD54566975?
- wmf 5y agoIt's a crypto incubator.
- jonny_eh 5y agoThanks, it's weird though that their twitter bio doesn't say that. It's just a picture of a musician and #Bitcoin and a picture of a hat. https://twitter.com/TBD54566975 https://twitter.com/TBD54566975 Is anyone in this space serious?
- wmf 5y agoTwitter bios are pretty bad in general. I'll check someone's bio and it just says something like "optimist, player of games" which doesn't help my poor literal-minded brain decide whether to follow them or not.
- jonny_eh 5y agoYou'd think a Twitter bio created by the founder of Twitter would be better.
- me_me_mu_mu 5y ago"Twitter isn't real life"
- randomhodler84 5y agoTheir first product is a decentralized peer to peer Bitcoin exchange based on Decentralized Identity. They released their white paper recently.
- conroy 5y ago"If press releases are your thing, here’s ours: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/52543725/en https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/52543725/en" - @blocks (https://twitter.com/blocks/status/1466159597194907649 https://twitter.com/blocks/status/1466159597194907649)
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoSince when has twitter not allowed me viewing individual accounts on mobile browser without signing in? That's annoying.
- chockablock 5y agoYou can hit reload then dismiss the modal. (works on iOS)
- mediumdeviation 5y agohttps://nitter.42l.fr/blocks https://nitter.42l.fr/blocks (the main nitter.net is down, this just the first mirror instance from https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances)
- cwkoss 5y agoOMFG, they weren't even able to get @block username on twitter. This is so pitiful.
- a_crowbar 5y agoInteresting… thinly veiled play on blockchain? With Jack’s recent leave of twitter, I think it’s clear this is his new vision for the future. With Facebook’s recent re-org to Meta, is this spurring a new wave of companies re-branding to be seen as relevant by associating with future technologies?
- inerte 5y agoSomething interesting is happening in other industries, where large conglomerates are spinning off high-growth potential divisions, specially pharmaceuticals https://www.fiercepharma.com/topic/spinoff https://www.fiercepharma.com/topic/spinoff all for that sweet sweet stock growth
- peanut_worm 5y agoIs this a blank page for anyone else?
- mdoms 5y agoIt loads after a long, long time. It will transfer upwards of 10mb of who-knows-what before displaying a useless morphing cube and zero information.
- peanut_worm 5y agoAll I saw on mobile was a play button
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slownews45 5y agoGood lord. Pity the poor person out there trying to understand what is going on / what is block.xyz. At least we are told nothing will change with TBD54566975 (?). https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en The bitcoin world is crazy.
- rezistik 5y agoIt's only a 90 billion dollar company running a significant share of the POS market and peer to peer money market, why would they have a sensical, logical or straightforward parent site?
- slownews45 5y agoExactly - and they are talking / working with at least some boring accountants in all of this who don't care if things are curated by Jay-Z in their point of sale and merchant clearing systems.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoIt has been fascinating to watch the corporate cryptocurrency world try so hard to project the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place. All of these corporate cryptocurrency pushes have strong "How do you do, fellow children?" vibes. But the funny part is a lot of the crypto people are eating it right up, mostly because they have to accept any and all big business investment in the crypto space to further pump their own assets.
- babyshake 5y ago"How do you do, fellow children?" vibes. But it's curated by JAY-Z!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anonymouse008 5y ago
- newbie789 5y agoThis is a very stupid website.
- mh- 5y agoSome info here https://investors.block.xyz/overview/ https://investors.block.xyz/overview/
- rvz 5y agoA Block is a three dimensional Square. How is that confusing for most here? Name change makes sense, especially in cryptocurrency services.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Taurenking 5y ago>A Block is a three dimensional Square. How is that confusing for most here? I'd agree if all their services were financial related but don't think Tidal fits.
- imwillofficial 5y agoI had no idea it was affiliated with square. Now it makes more sense
- ___q 5y agoThat makes sense in a Brand pitch meeting, but there are so many things called Block in this space I think they could have been more unique. I thought this was about The Block (the news site) at first glance.
- acdha 5y agoIt looks like a turn of the century art project or album launch site at first: there's nothing on the page mentioning Square until you click on the arrow at the bottom which does some animation before showing the copyright notice and the pseudo-Python on their home page doesn't look like a $100 billion dollar company or a tech company (it'd be valid syntax).
- bee_rider 5y agoNo, we get it. It is just dumb.
- flgr 5y agoI really adore the demo scene vibes I'm getting from https://block.xyz/ https://block.xyz/. You can say what you want about megaholding corporate conglomerates, but this has so much more style than abc.xyz.
- afandian 5y agoOkay I'll bite. I just see a flexing cube (agree it looks like a 90s demo). But is this site meant to do anything else? I tried scrolling or tapping and it didn't do anything.
- MartinMcGirk 5y agoThere's an arrow button at the bottom right of the page, that if you click it reveals a navbar with some links to a careers page and so on. You can also click and drag to rotate the cube. But yeah, it doesn't do anything particular spectacular.
- mlindner 5y agoYou can click and drag the flexing cube and it moves the background in some way.
- roywiggins 5y ago
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago"Cube" would have been better: "Square" => "Cube" but "Square" => "Block" just seems mediocre by comparison. Certainly they want "Block" to invoke blockchain, but it seems more gimmicky with just "Block".
- cercatrova 5y agoBlock is a reference to blockchain, ie Square is looking to move towards cryptocurrency more and more, so cube wouldn't have worked in this case.
- fragmede 5y agoChain also has some weird connotations, but Coin might have worked.
- cercatrova 5y agoChainlink and Coinbase already exist so they might not have wanted to be too similar to them.
- keyle 5y agoMissed opportunity on cubechain right there!
- anonporridge 5y agoJack has been pretty explicit that they're looking toward bitcoin only, not cryptocurrency generally.
- newfonewhodis 5y agoSquare Blockchain Corp maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp
- LanceJones 5y agoIf anyone should've rebranded as Block, it's H&R Block. "It's cleaner."
- mivade 5y agoMakes me think of Fakeblock.
- paxys 5y agoTech company -> holding company rebrand/restructure is so hot right now
- evolve2k 5y agoIt’s interesting comparing Facebook to others; Facebook sought to leave their main brand behind while others generally seek to keep brand equity. Google => Alphabet Square => Block Facebook => Meta ?? For Facebook they were dealing with the opposite, trying to shift past a torrent of negative press, the move to an Abstract name has been highly effective in turning down the (short term) negative press heat. Yes they announced new things but arguably it was critical timing from a PR perspective.
- theduder99 5y agohas it been highly effective? do new articles about meta not mention facebook?
- lbotos 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29391726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29391726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395518 Two examples here -- When I read both titles and took a min to realize "OH FACEBOOK!"
- wmf 5y agoYou forgot We!
- rvz 5y agoand Snap Inc. which pre-IPO was Snapchat Inc before it was under the parent company.
- throw_away 5y agoFor others as confused as I was: Square bought Tidal earlier this year. Spiral was Square Crypto. TBD54566975 appears to be some sort of decentralized exchange Jack Dorsey tweeted about at one point. & they're all being put under this Block banner, apparently.
- rconti 5y agoThank you. Completely missed the Tidal acquisition, will never care about TBDXYZ, but was curious, and clicking on the twitter link did nothing useful.
- newfonewhodis 5y agoregular brain: company galaxy brain: blockchain holding company
- mindcrime 5y agoMaybe next year they can rebrand as Hypercube.
- purple_ferret 5y agoDon't understand this trend. Apple has done just fine diversifying as Apple, Inc. Square, as a name, is simple and well-known, and the logo is recognizable, inoffensive, and amenable for design updates. Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).
- tempestn 5y agoYep, a block is like a square, but brings to mind a blockchain. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday soon we're reading about Block's new product, Chain.
- adamnemecek 5y agoApple is more integrated.
- kelp 5y ago> Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now). I suspect this has something to do with it. I had a co-worker once describe Jack as a magpie. He's usually much more interested in the new shiny thing. That was Cash App for a while. Now the blockchain stuff I guess. I haven't worked there in many years so I don't know for sure. Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff. I had a big WTF with this move, and have a similar feeling about the blockchain efforts. But I also tend towards the new and shiny, so I have a harder time faulting that.
- tdeck 5y agoSquare had been trying to do Bitcoin stuff for years. When I left in 2016 they had built accepting Bitcoin into Square's Online Store product a few years ago, because it was shiny. I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. I guess the popularity of BTC speculation among retail investors brought the whole thing back.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y agoThis is what happens when you put the product designers in charge of the rebrand
- adamnemecek 5y agoGod Jack, I get that you and Jay-Z are besties but people don’t care about Jay-Z.
- Infinitesimus 5y agoJay Z is a billionaire and one of the most influential musicians in recent history tho... it's safe to say a lot of people care about him.
- rconti 5y agoI work in tech, I don't care about Jay-Z, and I still care about Jay-Z more than I care about Jack.
- adamnemecek 5y agoOut of curiosity, are you over 40?
- hnburnsy 5y agoCan someone explain the TBD54566975 moniker?
- dilyevsky 5y agoHurr durr memes
- guessmyname 5y ago> Can someone explain the TBD54566975 moniker? The answer is in the following links: > Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is Bitcoin. Its name is TBD. — https://twitter.com/jack/status/1415765941904941061 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1415765941904941061 > We’ve decided to make our official name TBD54566975 based solely on this numerology report [picture]. — https://twitter.com/TBD54566975/status/1424818221652324355 https://twitter.com/TBD54566975/status/1424818221652324355 tbDEX: A Liquidity Protocol [1][2][3][4] [1] https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf [2] https://twitter.com/tbd54566975 https://twitter.com/tbd54566975 [3] https://github.com/TBDev-54566975 https://github.com/TBDev-54566975 [4] https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/ https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/
- hnburnsy 5y agoThank you!
- jacobmischka 5y agoI find it interesting that they're copying Alphabet with their TLD choice. It was clever with abc.xyz, but in this case it doesn't really mean much.
- paulgb 5y agoAnd in turn, copying Hooli: http://hooli.xyz/ http://hooli.xyz/ (I was at google during the alphabet announcement and seem to remember a wink from management towards the connection being intentional, but I could be remembering speculation as fact.)
- ttepasse 5y agoThe announcement letter on https://abc.xyz/ https://abc.xyz/ (still) has a hidden link to Hooli, in one of the full stops.
- vermilingua 5y agoI suspect the “meaning” is 3D. Square -> XY, Block -> XYZ.
- jacobmischka 5y agoAh, could be.
- enos_feedler 5y agoWhy couldn't twitter be integrated into one of these blocks and have square run them all?
- simonsarris 5y agoAn explanation of the name choice from Square's tweets: > Not to get all meta on you… but we’re going to! Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes. https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158911413760004 https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158911413760004
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoJack Dorsey, November 29th 2021 ( https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720/photo/1 ): > There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being "founder-led." Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders. > I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction Ironic, given all his push toward making Square a Bitcoin company in line with his own Bitcoin whims.
- moron4hire 5y agoThat's funny. He's naming the company he left Twitter for after the action you have to perform against promoted accounts on Twitter to make it at all bearable.
- somewhereoutth 5y agoInteresting trend from specialized names with large amount of semantic content, towards more generalized names with very little semantic content: Google->Alphabet, Facebook->Meta, Square->Block (ok a little tenuous). What's next? Apple->Fruit? Windows->Opening? I guess it is so the owners can imagine the company to be whatever they want it to be, though typically they end up being nothing at all.
- cblconfederate 5y agoIn japan the owners just put their family name there. I guess some of these tech owners dont want their family ethics being confused with what their business does Jack should not have used Block, it should be either called "@jack" or the address of his bitcoin wallet
- pyuser583 5y agoAmazon -> Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
- TrispusAttucks 5y agoTranslation: "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoThe new names all sound minimalist and trendy.
- smt88 5y agoAs companies trend toward being conglomerates of unrelated businesses, it makes sense for them to rebrand this way. Google makes (a little) sense for just search, but it makes no sense as a self-driving taxi service.
- jacobolus 5y ago"Google" is a meaningless pair of semi-pronouncable nonsense syllables, inspired by the made up big number "googol" (which was named by a 9-year-old child whose uncle wrote a pop math book). It has no problem standing for self-driving taxis or whatever else. If you want your own similar company name, visit an elementary school and ask the 3rd grade students for advice. You can make "bleeblax" or "squibjub" or "tibflee" or "shubzoo" into the next unicorn company.
- webinvest 5y agoI wonder why their crypto arm is called Spiral?
- IAmGraydon 5y agoLikely of the downward variety.
- janandonly 5y agoBlock (previously Square) Bitcoin Revenue By Year: 2018: $166 million 2019: $516 million 2020: $4.5 billion 2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters $SQ $BTC
- comeonseriously 5y agoIs it a verb?
- ramesh31 5y agoI think it's awesome that Flash intros are back
- echelon 5y agoExcept now it's a layercake of JavaScript / HTML / CSS salad that doesn't work in all devices. Flash had a lot of faults, but they could have been fixed (and open sourced). The Flash editor was by far the best animation tool for the web and it got murdered by Apple to protect iOS from foreign runtimes.
- novok 5y agoWhat branding consultant has gotten into the ear of bigtech company CEO's in SF to do renames for their conglomerates that everyone will continue to ignore?
- dang 5y agoOngoing related thread: Block (aka Square, Tidal, CashApp etc) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409630 - Dec 2021 (29 comments)
- bitwize 5y agoIt's Square for the metaverse. (A block is a 3D square, you see...)
- chupchap 5y agoDoes any company want (to) block payments? Terrible name!
- d--b 5y ago> Block references the […] obstacles to overcome […] Surely that’s the most problematic thing here… Block sounds to me like something that gets in the way. Like a blood clot or something… I guess they’ll be fine… On a side note, the block.xyz website looks _amazing_
- vmception 5y agoTheir rationale is good, local merchants use square. they should use the party tld, for block.party
- snickerbockers 5y agoI always confuse them with Square Enix so I'm glad they're finally changing their name.
- pkrotich 5y agoLooks like corporate umbrellas [0] are making a come back. I get the need to productize endlessly on sea of ideas and perhaps incubate spin-offs but even GE and J&J are running away from its conglomerate ways… I mean umbrella corporation [1] ways. —- I think the current trend is coming about because of SAAS - in the olden days, startup feared big companies because they could make your product / company a feature in their product - but we’re seeing the reverse- they’re now seeing that millions of customers are willing to pay $X dollars a month for what amount to a feature as a separate product instead of licensing SAP type product. [0]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-umbrella.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-umbrella.asp [1]https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Umbrella_Corporation https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Umbrella_Corporation
- zht 5y agoJack has always done this. Even though the bulk of revenues has come from POS subscription and payments revenue, Jack has only cared about it to the extent it allows him to try consumer facing things like Square Wallet, Caviar, Square Pickup, Square Cash, and then all the crypto stuff. I just hope the sellers don’t suffer because of this
- gadnuk 5y agoWho thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea? https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.aspx https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as... My eyes! My eyes!
- tx9984 5y agoClearly a bunch of blockheads!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arcticbull 5y agoHorrible design aside, there's some interesting politics represented on there. 1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell. 2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened? 3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense. [1] https://twitter.com/TBD54566975 https://twitter.com/TBD54566975
- ryzvonusef 5y agotheir white paper is one of the most obtuse writing I've ever read: https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/ https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/ the best I can understand... you can use your identity as a token? or something?
- janandonly 5y agoBlock (previously Square) Bitcoin Revenue By Year: 2018: $166 million 2019: $516 million 2020: $4.5 billion 2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters $SQ $BTC
- dahak27 5y agoHow much of that is revenue from actual crypto-related business vs. just appreciation of crypto the company owns? Feels like the impressiveness of this trend really depends on that
- adam_arthur 5y agoTheir Bitcoin "revenue" is simply the face value of the Bitcoin they sell. It's like if Charles Schwab counted any stocks people bought as revenue. I suspect the difference is that SQ may hold the Bitcoin and sell directly to the user rather than as a broker. But calling it "revenue" is still highly misleading, as margins will be razor thin, by definition (the transaction fee)
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoWTF is with all the Twitter replies?
- sam0x17 5y agoThis is definitely a prelude to some kind of blockchain thing they will attempt to undertake.
- zwarag 5y agoI'm going to predict that at some point in time, this company will name itself Tesseract.
- auvi 5y agoBefore posting, I searched for "Tesseract" and here you go.
- crazy5sheep 5y agoA 2D to 3D migration?
- mudlus 5y agoLet the meme in, bad is good if it stays in people's head. Accepting the memeplex into a business is all here is really, that's marketing.
- holoduke 5y agoI somehow never understood what square/block is. Tried to understand it again, but still not able to find any grasp while browsing their site. What are they doing?
- webZero 5y agoPumping crypto!
- funcmasterc 5y agoThey are a payments processor, like Shopify. They make physical card readers, with a focus on small retailers, restaurants, nail salons, small time family businesses. Some up-market support. Also e-commerce products that compete more closely with Shopify. They also build cash app, a competitor to Venmo. They have investment and banking and tax products. They also have some crypto side projects and own tidal.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoBrand confusion is never a good plan. Block, Meta, alphabet, who cares? It's Square, Facebook, and Google that are the big brands these companies have and that they are known for with billions of people (well not Square probably). Only a fraction of those people would be able to name the parent companies. Facebook owns Whatsapp, and Instagram and a bunch of smaller stuff as well. But Meta is just not a great brand. It's a vague ambition at best. That's the problem with this rebranding. Google did it because they had a bunch of aimless acquisitions/spinoffs, none of which since managed to rival it's money maker Google, which continues to be the place that is associated with their successful stuff (Android, Youtube, ads, etc.). Facebook is doing it because their Facebook brand is imploding due to years of mismanagement. It's a dead zone at this pont. I check in once a month and then leave in disgust. Absolutely nothing going on there whatsoever. Square on the other hand is a successful product. Nice growth. Nice brand. Worth going all in on. The stuff they acquired pales in comparison. Why mess with that brand, create confusion and awkwardness, etc.?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 5y agoI agree. Branding changes "for nothing" help nothing. But the worse contender seems to be Transferwise who changed their name to Wise, losing the recognition and the brand specificity. Oblig. "Yeah that wasn't a very wise choice."
- lordnacho 5y agoIt's not just that it's confusing, it's misleading. Humans attach a lot of value to names of things. The whole history of a thing is keyed on its name, a fact that is especially pertinent in the internet era. If some brand has built up a bad rep, they shouldn't be allowed to change it just by renaming themselves. Likewise a firm that's built a good rep and wants to try something new in order to protect the brand shouldn't be allowed to either. I don't know whether the law could ever protect us from this, I suppose it's more the job of the media to keep remind us who Altria are, and where Lexus came from. A lot of brand shenanigans is basically abusing how humans associate history with names. Somehow it's never been an ethical issue to change brands, spawn a new brand, or buy another brand while hollowing out the product.
- krm01 5y agoSince I'm reading a lot of angry comments here, let me add a bit of thinking behind how these things happen without taking a side. Been designing for companies (probably just 10% branding, mostly UI/UX) for more than a decade. Rebrands always get a ton of negative press, but almost always the reason why companies try to do so is not what it seems from the outside. For example, when Dropbox did their big rebranding (sure they kept the name, but I can remember reading the same comments when it happened) I happen to know that their reasoning is not what many people would think of. Dropbox hit a growth plateau. The growth they had gotten from the engineering community where it started was slowing down. They decided to reposition and rebrand their company to a new more creative community. This seems to have had some help in continuing the growth curve. Many of these rebrands get a ton of negative comments, but you have to remember that the rebrand is not meant for you as an existing user/customer/fan/etc. it's meant to help reach a new audience. To push growth. Tap into new markets, please a board and show that you're moving forward to some exciting destination at the horizon. When looking at rebrands, try to think of the business decision behind the scenes as to why these might have happened.
- rgallagher27 5y agoWhat's the business/design decision behind this: https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.aspx https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
- duiker101 5y agoIt's interesting how their Block design is very similar to Gumroad's new design (which came out earlier this week), and yet they came out so close I doubt either copied or got inspiration by the other
- hellopeep5 5y agoLooks like a shitty crypto altcoin website.
- tinyhouse 5y agoWhen you think it's April fools day but it's actually December.
- coldtea 5y agoI've had payments blocked with PayPal, why do I need Block for that?
- resonious 5y agoI remember when Transferwise changed their name to Wise. I tried to humor them and use their new name when talking about the service to other people, but people had a hard time understanding what I was even saying. "I use this thing called Wise." "What?" - something about the word is actually hard to enunciate and people don't even comprehend the sentence. I think this is mainly a problem with using a pre-existing English word for your brand. In the case of Square, their original name was already pretty non-specific/unrelated and they just moved laterally. I guess if they're getting into blockchain then maybe it really is more related now...
- that_guy_iain 5y agoThat one is kinda different. They renamed everything. It's not like transferwise is a product of Wise. It's transferwise is now called wise. In 10 years or so people will look at you weird when you call it transferwise. Branding and naming takes a while to catch on. WWF to WWE - It tooks years for it to fully take hold. Sure some people will automatically think of WWE when you say WWF but not all will. And at one point it was called WWWF. Datsun to Nissan - Honestly, you say Datsun to anyone they'll have no idea what you're talking about. Marathon to Snickers - Very few people even remember this.
- auggierose 5y agoThat website looks like something Kendall Roy would have done.
- louissan 5y agoThe company has acquired (more?) depth .. :o)
- nothrowaways 5y agoChain
- nothrowaways 5y agoIt shows that they aim to focus on Blockchain ;)
- remorses 5y agoI always associated .xyz domains with cheap and unprofessional stuff, really weird to use that domain
- DrBazza 5y agoPWC tried to become 'Monday', the worst day of the week, back in the original dotcom boom. Didn't work out too well for them: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2163472.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2163472.stm
- tarkin2 5y agoSignal’s gone blockchain crazy. Now Square’s gone the same way. It makes me a little less confident in Square. Hopefully this won’t affect their core products. Did Jack jump from Twitter onto the end of the Blockchain train? So more money and employees are sacrificed onto the altar of blockchain hype. Else they’re successfully trying to gain attention by pretending to move into blockchain.