Jay Lagare

Oculus, maker of the virtual reality device Oculus Rift has been acquired by Facebook. It doesn’t make sense to me. Although I wasn’t happy with it, it at least made some sense to me when they bought Instagram. There are some service and technology synergies there. But to me, Facebook buying Oculus is like Google buying Motorola Mobility (oh yeah they did, and promptly undid). Or like Microsoft buying the monitor division of Samsung. To me, Oculus is viewing hardware. It needs application (i.e. games for now) support to work. Now Facebook could be planning or working on some virtual reality system a la The Matrix. But other viewing hardware should be able to view it also. They could lock it into Oculus but that won’t help adoption. Maybe they really are just genuinely interested in pushing the state of the technology, provide Oculus the resources to make virtual reality a… reality. Or maybe they’re diversifying. Or maybe they could just as well have bought DropBox :P

Last Friday, my ATM card was captured by a BPI ATM through no fault of mine. I inserted the card, entered the PIN, and it was ready to dispense the cash (in fact, my account reflected a debit and a rollback credit) but the card wouldn’t come out. The same thing happened to the person who used the ATM before me (it didn’t occur to me yet that their card got captured) and after me (I did warn them that the ATM seems to be capturing cards). Now it’s already an inconvenience losing your ATM card, even if just temporarily, but it was aggravated today when I retrieved my card. Considering that there was definitely something wrong with the ATM they should have some sort of measure to at least set-up a temporary fast-track counter or something. But no. There were people before and after me retrieving their cards. People who had to go out of their way and schedule just to recover their cards. Waiting longer than should be. There’s not even an attempt at an apology for the inconvenience.