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The U.S. is objectively behind countries like Australia in digital banking "by whatever metric you choose," according to Stripe cofounder John Collison, but that head start may not last forever. 

As president of a global payment company, in Sydney recently to launch the marketplace tool Stripe Connect, Collison was in a position to help me understand the digital divide between American and Australian banking.

Having lived in both countries, the difference feels striking. While I'd been paying landlords and sending friends dinner money online in Australia for years, suddenly in the U.S. in 2014, I found myself searching each month for a stamp and an envelope to mail off my housemates' rent cheques.

It's not all cheques and cash: America finally began rolling out chip cards and terminals widely in late 2015 — an innovation so traumatic it inspired a BuzzFeed post titled: "Credit Card Chips Are The Absolute Fucking Worst." In Australia, the world's largest user of contactless (tap-and-go) payments, many may be wondering what the fuss is about.

Collison suggested two main culprits for the digital banking discrepancy: First up, the curse of the early adopter. 

"The U.S. started modernising and computerising its banking much before most other countries," he explained. "Those [mainframe] computers worked pretty well and they're good enough, and so the result is, we're still running on those mainframes, which is ridiculous."

Other countries have been able to learn from and surpass the U.S., and even make Australia look like it's caught in the payment past. Cash transfers are being digitised mobile-first in countries like Kenya, which has the M-PESA network allowing money to be transferred via SMS. 

"Because they don't have these legacy systems to deal with, they can obviously design something for the new world," Collison said.

The other possible cause, pointedly in contrast to Australia's situation, is the highly fragmented banking market in the U.S. 

"Everyone banks with banks like the 'First State Bank of Omaha' ... and here you have the big four," he said, referring to the National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and Westpac, which together are said to account for an incredible 80 percent of the Australian market.

"Because they don't have these legacy systems to deal with, they can obviously design something for the new world."

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there are at least 6,016 banking institutions in the U.S. That's a lot of bodies to pull kicking and screaming into a digital network at once. 

This is not to downplay the mangled rollout of chip cards in the U.S., which has been widely acknowledged to be a mess. 

Unlike Australia, which uses contactless payments, or chip and pin typically for items over A$100, the U.S. opted for chip and signature despite it being less secure. As Ian Kar reported in Quartz, that may have been part of an attempt by the U.S. to save money, but lack of education has also plagued the transition.

"Payment experts have been openly complaining about the lack of education on how and when customers should use chip cards," Kar wrote. "The Aite Group notes in a report from June 2014 that banks and retailers in Australia ran full-page newspaper ads explaining the benefits of chip cards and how to use them when the country added EMV."

Falling behind on mobile payments

Despite its love of cheques and apparent hatred of chip cards, the U.S. may be set to leapfrog Australia and move straight to mobile payments. 

The growing demand for mobile payments is insatiable, suggested Ben Pfisterer, the Australian country manager of merchant payment provider Square. "They're actually in the process of leapfrogging contactless cards, or trying to ... straight from magstripe to chip cards and phones in the same leap."

And that's where Australia may be left behind. A report released by research firm RFi Consulting in mid-2016 found only 24 percent of Australians said they would try using mobile payments, compared to 77 percent in the U.S who said they were "extremely likely to use the technology," the ABC reported.

"It is probably because contactless credit and debit cards have been so successful and the incremental benefits are not enough — or been explained well enough — to make the jump," RFi managing director Alan Shields told the publication at the time. "You would be lucky if you get the right card from the right bank that connects with the right phone at the moment."

While Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay have launched locally, the major banks are not wholesale on board with each provider.

To further complicate the picture, a number of Australia's largest banks applied to Australia's competition watchdog in July to negotiate collectively with providers of third-party mobile wallets — enemy number one: Apple. They want to get their own banking apps on Apple's hardware, which Apple has strongly resisted.

That's a dangerous impasse, Pfisterer suggested. In his view, there's a lesson in how Australia moved smoothly to contactless cards over the past decade. It was the liability shift in 2014 that he thinks became the tipping point. From August 2014, only PINs and not signatures were accepted.

"My general philosophy on payment innovation is you can't go two steps of change in one leap."

"They put a liability shift in that if you didn't accept chip cards you'd be liable as a merchant," he explained. "The whole market was incentivised to move. It's a really easy next step to go 'we've got this technology, what should we do about it?' That's where contactless cards came in."

Now 59 percent of Australians have made a purchase with contactless cards, according to RFi Consulting, but only 10 percent said they had used a mobile wallet.

It was also a lucky confluence of events — Australia managed to find the right balance of cards and available terminals. "If you get too many cards and not enough terminals, people will stop using their cards," he said.

In contrast, too many mobile payment providers and not enough bank cards to use them with could prove enough of an inconvenience that consumers fail to see the appeal.

So could Australia leapfrog the U.S. again and move straight to wearable payment devices? Probably not, Pfisterer said.

"My general philosophy on payment innovation is you can't go two steps of change in one leap," he said. "I think wearables were identified years ago as the next generation a little too soon. That mass population device has not really come through."

Still, we're all just at the tip of the iceberg. "What's next is where it gets really exciting," he said.

First it was the smartphones, now it's the washing machines.

In the same month that Samsung admitted it knows of at least 35 instances of Note7 batteries exploding or catching fire amid a nationwide recall in the U.S., the company is also having to deal with reports that some of its top-loading washers are also exploding.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a warning Wednesday, CNN reports, saying that there were "safety issues" with certain models made between March 2011 and April 2016. It did not specify models.

A woman's washer "exploded with such ferocity that it penetrated the interior wall of her garage."

Customers from several states, including Texas, Georgia and Indiana, have all said their washing machines exploded during use. ABC News believes 21 people have reported to the CPSC that their machines have malfunctioned.

In Texas, a woman's washer "exploded with such ferocity that it penetrated the interior wall of her garage," according to court documents reportedly filed earlier this year.

"The dent left at the washing machine's point of impact was so deep that it pushed through into [her] living room, which shares a wall with her garage."

Another woman in Georgia said it "sounded like a bomb went off in [her] ear” when her machine exploded in April. “There were wires, nuts, the cover actually was laying on the floor,” Melissa Thaxton of Dallas said.

Samsung issued a statement Wednesday, saying it was in "active discussions with the CPSC to address potential safety issues related to certain top-load washing machines."

"In rare cases, affected units may experience abnormal vibrations that could pose a risk of personal injury or property damage when washing bedding, bulky or water-resistant items," the company added. "Samsung is recommending that consumers with affected models use the lower speed delicate cycle" when washing those items. 

"It is important to note that Samsung customers have completed hundreds of millions of loads without incident since 2011."

The name of one of the world's fastest growing messaging apps appeared pretty self-explanatory. "Slack" seemed like a simple nod to what you shouldn't be doing at work. 

Turns out it was actually an acronym. It stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. 

In response to a Twitter inquiry last night, the co-founder and CEO of Slack, Steward Butterfield, explained that Slack came about as a better alternative to linefeed, the original codename for the now multibillion-dollar company. 

To prove the story was true, Butterfield uploaded a screenshot of a conversation with someone named Eric, likely Eric Costello, another co-founder of Slack. 

Costello pointed out that the name could have negative connotations, but Butterfield thought the name could be funny. "Our users would be Slackers :)" he wrote. 

Things are getting back on track for YouTube in Pakistan. Months after the country lifted its three-year-old ban on the site, people have once again begun turning to Google’s video service for consuming and creating videos.

Pakistanis are now spending substantially more time on YouTube than they were in January, the company told Mashable India. Google says the watch-time of YouTube has more than doubled in eight months. Pakistan government had banned YouTube in late 2012 after it found an anti-Islam video circulating on the video portal. The ban was eventually lifted earlier this January.

Much like India, Pakistan is an important place for Google. Unsurprisingly, both neighboring countries share a similar challenge for the company - low Internet penetration. Earlier this week, Google outlined its plans on how it intends to improve its services for Indians. Today it made two important announcements for Pakistan.

Google says users in Pakistan too can now save certain videos for offline usage. This feature has been particularly popular in emerging countries where many face connectivity issues. Through this, a user can go to YouTube app (on Android as well as iOS), and save a video for later viewing. The video will be with them for 48 hours after downloading it. 

“We are delighted to launch this new offline experience on YouTube with some of the top Pakistani players in entertainment. By making these popular videos available for temporary offline viewing, our partners will help fans connect more easily with their favorite content, while also helping bring more viewers to their videos,” said Tania Aidrus, Head of Business Development, Next Billion Users team at Google Asia Pacific.

But more importantly, Google is also looking at YouTube creators for growth. To make the deal sweeter for them, it is bringing YouTube Partner Program to Pakistan. This will allow video creators in the country to make money for their original work.

Pakistani rapper says YouTube has been his only glimmer of hope.

This is particularly an exciting development for artists in Pakistan. The country's entertainment industry is fairly small, which makes YouTube the biggest platform for many artists to showcase their work. Popular Pakistani rapper and comedian Ali Gul Pir explains the matter to Mashable India: “YouTube for Pakistan before the ban was a glimmer of hope as we did not even have a single record label in the country. So musicians and artists only had YouTube and that's where I released my first song as well."

"It got over 3 million views. It made my career but then YouTube was banned and we were back to zero. I still made content but we would use Twitter and Facebook to show the work, and frankly that didn't work well because those platforms are not made for content creators," he added. 

Google says any Pakistani creator — even if they have only one original video — can become a “Partner” and start making money. These partners will be able to run ads against their videos. YouTube splits the revenue generated by those ads, and pays its partners.

There are three reasons why wireless headphones mostly suck and I've steered clear of dropping serious dough on a pair: poor sound quality, frustrating pairing and weak battery life.

Beats' new Solo 3 wireless on-ear headphones solve all three. And they do so while looking stylish and recognizable on top of your head for hours.

Announced with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the Solo 3 headphones improve on the Solo 2 in every possible way. 

They're still a little pricey at $300, but for the wireless pairing convenience and battery life alone, I think it's money well spent. Sure, you could get a pair of sleeker B&O BeoPlay H8 or noise-cancelling Bose QC35 for $100 and $50 more, respectively, but the Solo 3 hit the sweet spot.

From the outside, the Solo 3 look virtually indistinguishable from the wireless Solo 2. Beats could have went with some more upscale materials like metal, but that would have also made them heavier. Plastic will have to do.

As they are, the Solo 3 are super light, the ear pads soft and the adjustable headband comfortable to wear all day long. They also fold up and fit snuggly into an included case. 

They're available in six colors to match the newest iPhone palette: white, silver, gold, rose gold, matte black and gloss black.

A battery LED indicator on the bottom of the right ear cup shows you how much battery power is left and there are play/pause and volume buttons embedded into the left ear cup (these are real buttons, not touch-sensitive gesture controls).

Beats provided a gloss black pair that matches my jet black iPhone 7. I'm just a breathing mask, cape and boots short of being Darth Vader every single time I step out of my home. Do not buy this color if you hate seeing smudges and fingerprints. 

Pairing magic

Ask any person with a pair of Bluetooth headphones and they'll tell you pairing can be a real bitch. You never know how well the pairing process will go. There's always something that creates interference. Or your computer can't detect the headphones. Or the battery died and the next time you go to pair them, they don't.

The Solo 3 are one of four pairs of new headphones (the others are the BeatsX, Powerbeats 3 and AirPods) from Apple and Beats that contain a tiny chip called the W1. The headphones are still connecting to devices via Bluetooth, but the W1 chip essentially acts like an assistant, talking to Apple devices (iOS devices, Macs and Apple Watch) to make pairing dead simple. 

And I really mean dead simple ... if you're pairing them to an iPhone running iOS 10, which I am. To connect, just press the power button for a second and place them near your iPhone. A screen slides up asking to connect, and that's it. No listening for beeps. No jumping into Bluetooth settings. No waiting for your headphones to appear on a list of nearby Bluetooth headphones. It even shows you the battery percentage.

Better, the headphones can pair with your Apple Watch, iPad or Mac easily using your iCloud login.

It feels good to finally be able to say, "It just works" — which is Apple's unofficial tagline of making complicated processes idiot-proof.

Unfortunately, if you're pairing the Solo 3 to iOS devices running iOS 9 or earlier, you won't get the pairing magic. Nor will you get it if you pair the headphones to an Android phone or other standard Bluetooth-supported devices; it's back to "pairing mode" and all that junk for you.

Battery champ

Aside from the W1's awesome pairing sauce, the chip also provides another major advantage: long battery life.

With the W1 chip, Beats was able to improve the Solo 2's 12 hours of battery life up to 40 hours, an increase of over 3x.

The best wireless headphones, some of which cost more than the Solo 3, only get up to half the battery life of Beats' new headphones. The only one that I could find that matches the Solo 3 on battery life is Sony's DRBTN20, which seems to have middling sound.

Beats was able to improve the Solo 2's 12 hours of battery life up to 40 hours.

On a weekday, I average about two hours of music listening during my commute to and from work, about four hours during the work day and another two hours when I'm at home. That's up to eight hours per day. I went five days before I ran the battery down from 100 percent. 

The BeoPlay H8s I tested last year needed to be charged every two days. The QC35s needed to be charged every three days for my listening habits.

If you don't listen to music as much as I do, you could easily go a few weeks without needing to charge the Solo 3 headphones again. Say you only listen to music on a two-hour roundtrip commute; that's up to 20 days of usage.

On top of that, the headphones have a "Fast Fuel" charging feature, which is basically like the quick charging features on many smartphones. With five minutes of charging, the headphones can give you up to three hours of listening time. That's more than enough to juice up in the morning and get you through your commute to work, where you'll be able to plug the Solo 3 in and charge them proper.

If you prefer, there's also a cable that plugs into the left ear cup for wired listening. The only downside is you'll need to supply your own 3.5mm headphone jack-to-Lightning or USB-C dongle if your phone doesn't have a headphone port.

Any way you slice it, the Solo 3 come out on top in terms of battery life. 

Solid sound

By now, you're probably thinking, "Ray, it's great they pair easily and battery life is awesome, but how do they sound? Do you they still sound like Beats?"

The answer is yes. But not like the old Monster-era Beats when they were tuned mainly for heavy bass and sounded terrible for everything else.

The Solo 2 reworked the sound for a wider range of music and the Solo 3 offer more or less the same audio experience. Mainly, they sound great on the low-end with dubstep and EDM and today's heavily audio-tuned vocals. 

That's intentional. Beats headphones are tuned for today's music, not Bob Marley or The Beatles. If you want a pure listening experience for the classics instead of Eric Prydz or Frank Ocean or Kanye, you'd be better served looking elsewhere. Beats headphones are made for modern digital music and your average millennial could care less.

So yeah, the Solo 3 sound like Beats and you know what? I have no issues with that. They're better than EarPods, but not as clean as more expensive wired headphones. For wireless headphones, they sound great to my "regular" ears in bed, on the subway and at work. 

They don't have noise-cancellation like the Bose QC35s, but the noise-isolation from the ear cups are quite good in blocking out ambient sound.

It's a mistake to dismiss the Solo 3 for a modest update because it doesn't look any different from the Solo 2. What Beats has achieved with the W1 chip in terms of convenience and power efficiency is game-changing. 

Years from now, when wireless headphones won't need to be charged for months, we'll be laughing at charging headphones every week (like I am now at existing wireless headphones that need to be charged every two to three days).

Audiophiles will never like Beats, but the company couldn't care less. Who needs to please audiophiles when the majority of people are streaming their music on Apple Music or Spotify, anyway?

Google today announced a new version of its YouTube app called 'YouTube Go' for India to tackle slower network connections. The project is part of company’s 'Next Billion' program through which it aims to connect India’s next billion people to the internet. 

YouTube Go offers a range of features to make it easier for users to watch videos on slow networks. The chief among them is YouTube Go’s ability to share videos among friends. The "social" feature uses Wi-Fi Direct protocol to exchange the files, the company confirmed to Mashable India. 

With YouTube Go, Google is also trying to enhance YouTube’s offline-feature. On the new app, people get a "super low bandwidth" preview of the video they want to download. The company says it is also sharing more information on how much data a video consumes. 

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year.

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year. It will support several local Indian languages including Tamil and Marathi. Users can sign up for early access at YouTubeGo.com/signup. 

YouTube Go is faster, lighter, and has been built from ground up for the Indian market, Johanna Wright, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube said today at a press conference in New Delhi. The team spent time in rural India to understand the challenges people face with internet access. 

"We believe that no matter who you are, or where you come from, everyone should get an opportunity," Wright said. The company said it spent a lot of time in Indian rural areas to understand the challenges people face in accessing the internet. "You can’t solve these challenges by sitting in Silicon Valley," Wright added.

Xiaomi, the Chinese company that makes phones with specs that top Samsung and Apple flagships, and then sells them at half the price, is at it again. 

The company just launched two new phones in China: The Mi 5s and the Mi 5s Plus. The phones are an obvious answer to the iPhone — both are very, very powerful devices, but the 5s Plus is bigger and has a dual camera. 

As you might imagine, the specs on these things are top notch. The Xiaomi Mi 5s has a 5.15-inch, Full HD screen, a 2.15GHz Snapdragon 821 chip, 3/4GB of RAM and 64/128GB of storage. 

It also has a fingerprint scanner has a 12-megapixel rear camera, and a 4-megapixel selfie cam with an f/2.0 aperture and 2-micron pixels. 

The price is RMB 1,999 or $300 for the 3GB/64GB variant, while the 4GB/128GB version costs RMB 2,299 or $345. 

5s Plus currently the most powerful out there

As for the Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus, it is, on paper, currently the most powerful smartphone out there. It has a 5.7-inch, Full HD screen, a 2.35GHz Snapdragon 821 chip, 4/6GB of RAM, 64/128GB of storage, and a fingerprint scanner. 

It also has a Sony-made, dual, 13-megapixel camera on the back, the setup being similar to the dual-camera setup on the Huawei P9 — one camera takes color snaps and the other monochrome for increased sharpness. The selfie cam on the front is also a 4-megapixel one.  

The price for the 4GB/64GB variant is RMB 2299 ($345), while the 6GB/128GB version costs RMB 2,599 ($390). 

While the spec sheet for both devices reads great (especially considering the price), there's more technical wizardry going on there that's not immediately apparent. 

For example, the fingerprint sensor on both phones is ultrasonic and placed under glass, which should theoretically mean it will not wear out with use. And the dual camera on the Mi 5s Plus sits flush with the phone's back, unlike the one on the iPhone 7 Plus. 

Design-wide, the phones aren't far off their predecessor, the Mi 5. Both have an aluminium body and a curvy back, with a round fingerprint sensor nested below the rear camera. 

There's no jet black (or any sort of black) option, however — an odd omission from Xiaomi which takes pride in following in Apple's footsteps (and sometimes being a step ahead, as well). 

The phones will be available in four colors: gold, rose gold, silver and white, and will go on sale starting Sept. 29. There's no word on international availability.