Knaresborough's Tech Support Café fields tech questions of all kinds
The Tech Support Café, which is run by Gracious Street Methodist Church in the village, welcomed village residents and those from further afield for one of its recurring sessions on Monday, July 28.
The café opens its doors every fourth Monday of the month.
Attendees can bring questions about any kind of device, or online-related issue - with mobile phone help, questions about artificial intelligence, and tablet/iPad issues all relevant.
Devices can be brought from home, or borrowed at the café.
Refreshments and sweet treats are also offered.
Gracious Street Methodist Church delivers the cafés alongside partners Right at Home Harrogate; Radfield Home Care; Knaresborough Connectors; and Boroughbridge Manor Care Home.
Following a summer break for August, the next session will take place on Monday, September 22.
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The Verge
an hour ago
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Buying Digital Foundry wasn't much of an uphill battle, to hear editor and founder Richard Leadbetter tell it, partly because he only had to buy 25 percent. Leadbetter had been holding onto 50 percent of its shares since 2015, when he originally sold his other half to Eurogamer to help fund DF's popular YouTube channel. Eurogamer's parent company Gamer Network obtained that half, which then got acquired by ReedPop, before making its way to IGN when parent company Ziff Davis purchased Gamer Network in turn, each time postponing Leadbetter's own attempts to buy the rest of his company. Then, this year, IGN suddenly offered to sell its half back: 25 percent to Leadbetter and 25 percent to investor Rupert Loman, who originally founded Eurogamer in 1999 with his brother Nick. Even 25 percent of the company wasn't cheap: 'I think this is pretty much easily the biggest thing I've ever bought, more than my house,' Leadbetter says. 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The dream is to take nearly two decades of archived Digital Foundry content and turn it into something new, something that'll additionally make DF's findings more accessible to a wider audience like many news sites (shameless plug) try to do. The team would also like to launch a retro games podcast, something DF's John Linneman says would have been difficult under corporate owners; do more game developer interviews; and try to hire an additional editor to beef up PC coverage if funds allow. Leadbetter, Linneman, and colleague Alex Battaglia don't sound like they're planning to change the formula much, though. DF plans to stick to PC gaming, retro gaming, and console performance analysis as its 'three pillars' and doesn't plan to chase SEO. Much of this is just about controlling DF's own destiny, taking control of everything from hiring to sponsorships, ad sales, and merch. Nor should you expect to see Digital Foundry move to a subscription-only model. Leadbetter plans to keep the vast majority of content free, the same as it is now, and you shouldn't even notice a difference on its YouTube channel, where DF plans to deliver the same number of videos without interruption. 'If we do a website, it'll be a public-facing website without any sort of pay-gating,' Leadbetter says. 'There's always been smaller subscriber bonuses, but ultimately the pitch we're making is to support us. If you love what we do, please support the team, it really does make a huge amount of difference.' Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Sean Hollister Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All PC Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. 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The bar for changing consumer behavior in payments is incredibly high, and Visa, MasterCard and contactless wallets still meet or exceed that bar. The Critical Role Of POS Evolution The future of payments is about fully integrated POS systems. That's why Fiserv acquired Clover, and Square bundled payment processing with its POS offering. Controlling both sides lowers costs and deepens merchant relationships. But scaling from small businesses to enterprises is tough. Large retailers can't afford one minute of POS downtime—it would mean a massive loss of revenue. Enterprise businesses demand industrial-grade reliability, uptime and performance, making it difficult for some providers to move upmarket. They need to be able to guarantee operational scale. How Customer Expectations Are Driving Change Customer expectations are now the biggest force reshaping payments. Consumers want the fastest, best and cheapest experience. That's why buy now, pay later (BNPL) models like Klarna took off. 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Wallets will soon integrate payment, financing, loyalty and even identity into one seamless platform. We're also starting to see true frictionless commerce with biometric payments. On Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, visitors link their Face ID to a wallet and pay for rides, food and shopping without pulling out a card or phone. It's faster, smarter and better for both consumers and merchants. The payments industry is moving faster than ever, but the challenges of legacy systems, customer expectations and operational scale aren't going away. Success will come to those who can blend the best of both worlds, delivering smarter, more affordable solutions without sacrificing the seamless experiences that consumers and businesses demand. Payments infrastructure may look sleek today, but the foundations were built decades ago, and many legacy dynamics still shape the industry. 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The incumbents are still bundling payments with business-critical services, making it hard for new entrants to compete. The Rise Of The Disruptors For decades, the payments world moved slowly, tied to banking relationships, old tech and complicated onboarding. Disruptors broke that model. New providers decoupled payments from banks, focusing on speed, simplicity and APIs. Onboarding could be completed in hours. Businesses could integrate through a modern API and instantly access new payment methods. Better experiences and faster deployments allowed these companies to charge premium margins—something legacy providers couldn't match. This model gained traction first in the U.K. and Europe, then rippled into the U.S. As more acquiring licenses opened up, barriers fell, and agility, innovation and customer experience began to matter more than legacy ties. Why New Payment Methods Struggle To Break Through When people ask why new payment methods like open banking haven't exploded in markets like the U.K. or U.S, the answer comes down to a few key points: entrenched networks, superior user experiences and the lack of a true 'sign-up moment.' Strong companies like Visa and MasterCard want to keep their structures firmly in place. They're deeply embedded across merchants, banks and consumer habits due to the sheer entrenchment of their systems globally. When open banking launched, it wasn't offering a dramatically better experience for consumers in the U.K. and U.S., because we already have systems such as Apple Pay. And looking at it from a user experience perspective, Apple Pay and open banking are the same. You tap, you authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID, and you're done. There was no compelling reason for the average consumer to switch to something new. Compare that to markets like India or China, where open banking services like WeChat Pay, PayTM and UPI emerged because services like Apple Pay or Google Pay weren't established. Those ecosystems were wide open for disruption because the baseline experience was still more manual. Beyond that, there's the 'sign-up moment.' In London, for example, when the London Metro enabled direct TAP access with your bank card during the Olympics, it created a huge inflection point. Millions of people were given a reason to use contactless payments seamlessly and necessarily. Open banking never had a moment like that in Westernwestern markets, a large-scale, practical reason for consumers to try something new. Without a better experience and a catalyst moment, new payment methods have struggled to break through. The bar for changing consumer behavior in payments is incredibly high, and Visa, MasterCard and contactless wallets still meet or exceed that bar. The Critical Role Of POS Evolution The future of payments is about fully integrated POS systems. That's why Fiserv acquired Clover, and Square bundled payment processing with its POS offering. Controlling both sides lowers costs and deepens merchant relationships. But scaling from small businesses to enterprises is tough. Large retailers can't afford one minute of POS downtime—it would mean a massive loss of revenue. Enterprise businesses demand industrial-grade reliability, uptime and performance, making it difficult for some providers to move upmarket. They need to be able to guarantee operational scale. How Customer Expectations Are Driving Change Customer expectations are now the biggest force reshaping payments. Consumers want the fastest, best and cheapest experience. That's why buy now, pay later (BNPL) models like Klarna took off. They made it easy: users were already signed up and could split payments instantly. 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We're also starting to see true frictionless commerce with biometric payments. On Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, visitors link their Face ID to a wallet and pay for rides, food and shopping without pulling out a card or phone. It's faster, smarter and better for both consumers and merchants. The payments industry is moving faster than ever, but the challenges of legacy systems, customer expectations and operational scale aren't going away. Success will come to those who can blend the best of both worlds, delivering smarter, more affordable solutions without sacrificing the seamless experiences that consumers and businesses demand. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Fast Company
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From back office to big picture: IT's autonomous era begins
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This approach shifts IT professionals from reactive problem-solvers to strategic architects who design intelligent systems and govern digital workforces. Imagine IT transforming from a help desk repair shop to a high-altitude mission control, designing systems so intelligent they render traditional troubleshooting obsolete. This isn't about making existing workflows more efficient; it's about making them completely irrelevant. At the core of this paradigm are AI agents: not just tools, but autonomous digital operatives capable of executing complex IT tasks with minimal technician interference. As IT journalist Rich Freeman explained in a recent article, to earn the 'agentic' badge, these systems must clear a high-bar performance test: Recall their digital footprints with surgical precision Plan future actions like strategic chess masters Interface directly with systems, speaking the native language of technology Collaborate across digital ecosystems seamlessly Learn and evolve with each interaction Execute assignments entirely autonomously, from inception to resolution, unless explicitly commanded otherwise The result? 24/7 availability, zero first-response time, and improved efficiency across the organization, alongside reduced costs, minimized downtime, and more productive employees. It's IT that's not just efficient, but truly intelligent. Autonomous IT emerges as the most tangible manifestation of this transformation. Employees no longer queue for basic support as AI agents intercept and resolve issues in real time. Password resets, software requests, device reconfiguration, and reboots: all handled instantaneously by intelligent systems that understand context, policy, and process. But tier-1 ticket resolution is just the beginning. Free from the burden of mundane/repetitive tasks, IT teams can redirect their efforts toward designing scalable infrastructure, optimizing digital experience, and driving long-term innovation. With autonomous IT frameworks, IT teams become the stewards of operations, the engineers of reliability, and the champions of ethical AI use. It will chart the course for how technology supports and empowers the entire organization. The evolution we're witnessing isn't about replacing IT professionals, it's about elevating them. Tomorrow's IT leaders won't be defined by their ability to troubleshoot hardware or deploy software packages but by their capacity to align technology with business strategy, orchestrate complex ecosystems, and harness AI capabilities to drive organizational transformation. The IT crowd is moving up from the basement to the boardroom, with AI handling the tickets while humans handle the strategy. The only question is: Will your organization lead this revolution, or be surpassed by those who do? After all, in the age of AI-powered IT, the most dangerous phrase isn't 'system failure.' It's 'but we've always done it this way.' The early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, September 5, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
