Video-Sharing iPhone App Limits Users to 1-Minute Clips [22Sep11] - 0 views
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If mobile video sharing is to follow in the footsteps of its more desirable mobile photo-sharing cousin, which application will users want to use to shoot, share and discover video clips? It’s too soon to tell, but startup Klip joins the fray and is now vying for your video attention. The startup released its application for iPhone on Monday with a focus on letting users share super-short 1-minute video clips — on Klip or with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube — and helping users discover clips from friends or other users based on topics of interests. “Klip re-invents the way consumers experience the world by organizing mobile videos in real time and by connecting consumers with the people and the topics that interest them,” the company says.
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Square Expands Retail Partnerships; Now Sold At OfficeMax And UPS Store Locations | Tec... - 0 views
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For disruptive mobile payments startup Square, 2011 was a year of massive growth on many levels. The startup ended the year with over 1 million merchants using the mobile payments platform to accept credit cards (there are only 8 million merchants who accept credit cards in the US). In November, Square announced it was processing $11 million in payments per day (up from $4 million a day in July). Sir Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins, Visa, and other investors poured over $100 million over the course of the year into Square, with the company’s latest valuation pegged at $1 billion. And Square announced a number of new product innovations, including Card Case, a new iPad app and more. Not to mention the unveiling of retail deals with Apple, Wal-mart, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Target. It’s hard to imagine how Square could top such an eventful year. But according to COO Keith Rabois, 2012 will prove to be even more monumental for the mobile payments company.
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Square is kicking of 2012 with two new retail deals, OfficeMax and select UPS Store locations. With these new retailer partnerships, Square is now being sold at 10,000 retail locations, up from 9,000 at the end of last year. Square’s credit card readers sell for $9.99 in stores but each purchaser can redeem a $10 credit to their bank account. According to Rabois, retail sales of Square has been a large driver of adoption. In fact, currently 80 percent of U.S. population is within 15 minutes of a Square device sold at a retail location.
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Beyond expanding retail deals (there are more to come, he says); Square will also be looking to upgrade the experience of running a business, end-to-end, on the iPad. Last May, the company debuted new iPad app Square Register, a high-powered point of sale replacement for cash registers and point of sale terminals. This year, the startup will add to the capabilities of this software, enabling small businesses to grow and manage their operations off of the device.
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For example, Square will be adding in-depth merchant analytics to its iPad experience, allowing merchants to access information about which inventory is selling well, and what they can do to help make more money. Rabois tells me it’s about providing data insights from transactions and interactions, and giving these small businesses the tools that big businesses and retailers can afford. As for focusing just on the iPad, he says that if there is an Android tablet that has traction, Square will invest in a comparable Android tablet offering.
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Another product area where Square will be continuing to focus its efforts is on Card Case, which is a virtual card case (via a mobile app) that consumers fill with ‘cards’ of all the merchants they visit and buy from who accept Square. These mobile cards include locations, merchant contact info, coupons, order and purchase history and more. Users can also use Card Case to ‘pay with their name’ and even enable hands-free payments.
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Rabois explains that Card Case has seen major traction amongst consumers, and is on the same growth trajectory (in terms of usage and engagement) as Square was when it first launched to the public in 2009. One area where the startup will be innovating is personalization, and helping merchants to provide a more individual, personalized experience based on interactions to each customer.
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As for transaction volumes, Rabois declined to give us any exact numbers but did say that transactions have hit way north of $11 million per day on a number of days in the past few months.
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Armed with over $100 million in new funding, Square is also preparing for international expansion within the year, which was revealed at the time of Branson’s investment.
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With the major product innovations set to take place this year, Rabois tells me that Square is also looking to triple its employee count in 2012. Currently, Square has a staff of 200 employees, up from around 40 at the same time in 2011. Most of the hiring will be of engineers, specializing in a variety of areas including iOS, Android, Ruby, back-end infrastructure and more.
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In the end, Square’s 2012 goals are still aligned to the startup’s core principle: to help small businesses everywhere accept credit cards. Rabois says that there are still 26 million businesses in the U.S. that don’t accept credit cards, and he expects to convert a “huge fraction of them” this year. Stay tuned.
21MorePayPal tests NFC payments app - 0 views
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PayPal is testing an NFC mobile payments application at two stores in Sweden while it continues to look for ways to expand access to its payments services.
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PayPal has been experimenting with NFC for a while and recently incorporated NFC into the latest version of its Android app to enable peer-to-peer payments with two mobile phone users tapping their phones together to transfer money between them. The NFC payments app test is running in conjunction with two Swedish retailers and the Swedish developer Accumulate over a five day period.
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“There has been some confusion out there,” said Anuj Nayar, director of communications for PayPal, San Jose, CA. “We are not anti NFC.
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Offline payments The test is running for five days, during which time anyone who downloads the app from the Android store or Apple store in Sweden and enters their PayPal credentials can receive an NFC sticker when they arrive at one of the two stores so they can tap to pay for items in the store.
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“Our wallet lives in the cloud and not on devices. There are plenty of ways to access your wallet in the cloud and NFC could be a great way to do that.”
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“We think it is a very interesting technology and we are looking at ways to use it,” he said. “It is one of the technologies that we are looking at – we are not betting the bank on NFC.
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PayPal parent company eBay has not been a big supporter of NFC – or near-field communications – technology. However, as a leader in the alternative payments space, it makes sense that PayPal would want to investigate NFC.
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“While eBay maybe hasn’t been a big proponent, PayPal has been quite vocal about the opportunity,” said Drew Sievers, CEO of mFoundry, Larkspur, CA. “PayPal is the biggest jewel in the eBay empire, so their vision is, in my opinion, the most interesting driver for eBay corporate.
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“PayPal’s publicly stated goal is to become as important a payment option offline as it is online,” he said. “NFC is a potentially disruptive technology that could offer fertile ground for PayPal’s offline payments endeavors.”
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NFC has been embraced by numerous companies such as Google, Isis – which is a partnership of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile – and others. However, there are significant challenges facing these companies’ efforts to expand NFC as there are still a limited number of mobile phones available that support NFC.
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However, PayPal – as an alternative payment solution – also faces the challenge of getting retailers to accept PayPal payments if it were to try for a broader NFC roll out.
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“PayPal faces the same challenges with NFC as everyone else in the ecosystem: NFC-enabled phone penetration combined with merchant acceptance penetration,” Mr. Sievers said.
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“In fact, they face an additional challenge since nearly every existing NFC-enabled merchant takes Visa, MC, Amex, and Discover, but those same points of sale don’t take PayPal yet,” he said.
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Long-term strategy While the NFC test is limited, it is another example of how PayPal is trying to bring its technology to bricks-and-mortar retailers. PayPal wants to get merchants to use PayPal and is looking for ways to embed PayPal in the shopping experience via applications, deals and a variety of other merchant services.
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“EBay is recognizing that NFC is one of those things that would enable them to grow more in a physical retail environment rather than providing online or electronic transactions,” said John Devlin, London-based group director of AutoID and Smart Cards at ABI Research.
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However, it is likely to be some time before PayPal would be able to deploy an NFC solution on any kind of scale. “This is something that they are thinking about on a medium to long-term basis,” Mr. Devlin said.
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“In the next couple of years, NFC is really going to be used at the local or national market level rather than an international basis,” he said. “Once it becomes more widely available, that is when PayPal would be more actively interested in pushing ahead.
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The sticker model of NFC – where an NFC sticker is placed on a mobile device to make it compatible with an NFC reader – is more of a limited solution.
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“It is not able to plug into the handset and take advantage of all of the different smartphone functionality,” Mr. Devlin said. “It has advantages in that you can upgrade existing handsets quickly and easily but I don’t think anyone is really pushing ahead with stickers for a long-term consumer solution on a mass market level. This indicates that this is a trial rather than a precursor to a wider deployment.”
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Proximity payments PayPal expects to do $3.5 billion in mobile payments this year using its existing payments solutions. The NFC mobile app test is another way that it is experimenting with new payments solutions as proximity payments grow “This is what we’ve always done – experiment and test and be open to partnerships to drive innovation,” Mr. Nayar said. “What we are going to start to see soon is the growth in proximity payments where you need to be in contact with a reader of some sort,” he said. “This can be done with Bluetooth, RFID and NFC is another way to do it.”
8MoreThe Consumerization of Business Software | VentureFizz [08Nov11] - 0 views
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One of the themes that we've been most interested in at NextView over the last 12+ months has been the impact of consumer web trends on business software.
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But I've seen an acceleration of the impact consumer web trends are having on business software, and believe strongly that it will provide a thread of innovation for SaaS companies for the next 5+ years.
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The classic delineations of web products for business and consumer ("enterprise" direct selling, on premise vs cloud, etc) are only getting blurrier.
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At present the consumer web is the tail wagging the enterprise dog, in that you see business software companies copying consumer companies' marketing strategies, product features, etc. I think this will continue for a few years at least. But hopefully B2B software companies will innovate in some interesting ways that will bleed into consumer-facing products.
15MoreMobile banking trends to watch out for in 2012 - Mobile Commerce Daily - Banking - 0 views
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Mobile banking will continue to grow next year across a multiple fronts. Not only will more banks jump into mobile with optimized sites and application, but financial institutions will also build their existing mobile programs with a variety of new services.
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Much of the interest in mobile banking is being driven by consumers, who tend to interact more with a mobile banking solution than they do Internet banking. On average, customers use a mobile banking app three times per week and only use traditional Internet banking two times per week, according Malauzai Software.
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“We see a demand for mobile via the application and text messaging,” said Jim Simpson, vice president of information technology at City Bank Texas, Lubbock, TX, which has over 30 locations across Texas.
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“We are looking to provide innovative services to our customers,” he said. “We have to be competitive and to be competitive you have to offer these services.
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Banks that feature a rewards program will increasingly look to mobile to drive interactivity for the program and drive customers back into mobile banking apps.
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For example, City Bank Texas will introduce a new service early next year that enables customers to quickly and easily temporarily turn off their debit card via the mobile app if they have lost it and then turn it back on just as easily. Currently, customers have to find and call the bank’s 800 number to accomplish this.
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Mobile check capture Many of the big banks currently give customers the ability to deposit checks into their bank accounts using their mobile phones. However, next year more banks are likely to jump onboard and offer this service to meet consumer demand. Malauzai Software’s research shows that a lot of bank customers are investigating remote capture on their mobile phones even if they have not made a deposit yet. For those customers who are using the service, they typically deposit one to two items per month. “We see mobile check capture becoming really big in 2012 – we expect over half of our clients to adopt it next year,” said Robb Gaynor, chief product officer and co-founder of Malauzai Software Inc., Austin, TX.
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“If we can move certain things to mobile so customers can do them on their own time via mobile, it’s a big advantage. It is a stickiness that gets them to stay with us.”
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For example, City Bank Texas offers a rewards account that enables customers to earn higher interest rates and ATM fee refunds based on how much they use the bank’s various services. However, because there was no way for customers to keep track of how many transactions they made or how close they are to earning a reward, customers were frequently calling the call center for this information.
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To address this, City Bank Texas put a real-time reward monitoring service in its mobile app. Now customers can use the app to find out how many more transactions they need to reach the next level of rewards.
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Person-to-person payments Person-to-person payments have been around for several years but use has been limited because the transactions did not take place in real time. However, with Visa recently changing certain rules to enable two consumers to exchange debit card information in a secure way, person-to-person payments will now be able to show up in someone’s checking account within seconds. Visa is expected to roll out a solution for person-to-person payments in the first quarter of 2012. “With real time settlements, you will see a lot more customers use person-to-person payments,” Mr. Gaynor said. “We see this as the beginning of real mobile banking.”
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Some banks may try to ease customers into mobile payments to get them comfortable with the idea. For example, City Bank Texas will give mobile customers next year a way to manage their prepaid, loyalty and gifts card via the mobile app.
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“This is the first step to moving customers to mobile payments concepts,” City Bank Texas’ Mr. Simpson said. “New companies are sprouting up weekly to do mobile payments but the problem is that the debit card is not broken yet – it is still relatively easy to swipe that card.
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Mobile marketing Mobile offers and deals from retailers and third-party services such as Groupon and others were a big phenomenon in 2011. Next year, banks will be looking to cash in on the opportunity here by providing local offers via their mobile banking apps. Bank customers will be able to opt-in to the service so they can receive offers via the mobile banking app when they walk past a local business making an offer and redeem the offer via the app as well. In the past, banks have been reluctant to allow other business to market to their customers but because of the personal nature of a mobile phone and the ability to serve offers based on a customer’s location, this is starting to change. “We see this as a huge opportunity for banks to start making money through the mobile channel as offers are redeemed,” Malauzai’s Mr. Gaynor said “We feel it can be pulled off in an unobtrusive, value-added way.”
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Customized apps Currently, a lot of banks have one mobile app for all of their customers. However, next year there will be a growing number of customized banking apps that are tailored to the needs of a specific customer group. For example, regional banks could customize apps based on which local market a customer belongs to. Or, an app could be customized to the needs of college students, who often have a different set of services available to them. “The first generation of mobile apps lost some of the customization found in Internet banking but now we are seeing more customized mobile experiences,” Mr. Gaynor said. “This is an example of how mobile banking is getting smarter and banks are trying to deliver a better mobile experience,” he said.
5MoreThe End of Social Media 1.0 Brian Solis [29Aug11] - 0 views
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I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.
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The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing. eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.
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Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity: - Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide. - Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide. - Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world. Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.
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Consumers want to be heard. Social media will have to break free form the grips of marketing in order to truly socialize the enterprise to listen, engage, learn, and adapt.
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Social media becomes an extension of active listening and engagement. Strategies, programs, and content are derivative of insights, catalysts for innovation, and messengers of value.
5More30% fee - How Facebook plans to fuel the app economy with Facebook Credits [21Apr10] - 0 views
openintelligence.amplify.com/...-with-facebook-credits-21apr10 1-innovation 1-technology 2-opportunities 2-risks 3-reportedshared by Jan Wyllie on 26 Apr 10 - Cached-
Taking 30 per cent of every transaction off the top is plain greedy — very much not part of the ethos of a community / social currency.
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New details emerged today on Facebook Credits, a long-awaited virtual currency on the social network that will likely have a lot of impact on how much money is made by Facebook’s ecosystem partners.
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the goal of Facebook Credits is to make it “friction-less” for users to adopt virtual currency and to start spending it across a bunch of Facebook apps.
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2MoreL2: A Think Tank for Digital Innovation » 5 Web Trends for 2012 - 0 views
4MoreWikitude Augmented Reality Browser Now Supports BlackBerry 6 Devices | N4BB - News for ... - 0 views
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As part of BlackBerry Dev Con Asia taking place in Singapore right now, Wikitude has announced additional support for smartphones running on the BlackBerry 6. Bringing Wikitude to devices running BlackBerry 6 will help answer considerable demand expressed by users who want to experience Wikitude’s extensive content offering including more than 2,000 content Worlds consisting of approx. 150 million places around the globe. Users of the BlackBerry Bold 9700, 9780,9788 and BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphones can download Wikitude on BlackBerry App World starting today.
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After being crowned “The Most Addictive Social App Using the BBM Social Platform” at BlackBerry DevCon Americas in October, Wikitude most recently won the BlackBerry® EMEA Innovation Award for “Best BBM Connected App”, awarded in Alicante 1stDecember. “Extending the Wikitude platform to millions of BlackBerry 6 smartphone users will make the BBM experience richer than ever before. We are extremely happy to finally bring this version of Wikitude to even more BlackBerry smartphone users,” says Martin Herdina, Wikitude’s CEO.
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Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations, Research In Motion, said: “We’re delighted that Wikitude has integrated BBM support within their app. Integration with BBM can allow much greater viral discovery for apps, as well as enrich and transform the user experience with important social elements.”
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About Wikitude Wikitude GmbH are the creators of the world’s first mobile augmented reality (AR) platform and the company behind the internationally renowned Wikitude World Browser for iOS, Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry devices. The browser has been voted “Best Augmented Reality Browser” by the readers of Augmented Planet for both 2009 and 2010. Wikitude is leading the international AR technology standardization as part of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG). More information on Wikitude here:www.wikitude.com
4MoreTop 7 Mobile Commerce Trends in 2011 - 0 views
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1. Just Gimme My Mobile Wallet, Man There are a lot of deviations of a mobile wallet, and everyone does it differently. Essentially, the mobile wallet is exactly what it sounds like: A service that stores everything you would normally put in a physical wallet, including debit and credit cards, coupons and loyalty cards, in a mobile wallet. Not all wallets store data on the phone itself; SCVNGR's LevelUp and PayPal, for example, store data in the cloud. Your mobile wallet arrives empty, just like an wallet. You decide what goes in it. Google's mobile wallet works off of an NFC chip called the Secure Element, which acts like a secure wallet and differentiates this product from being just an app. It's also separate from the phone's main operating system and hardware.
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Google launched its Wallet program in late May. The official launch (yes, a beta) happened in September. Google chose MasterCard as its official partner in the realm of mobile payments using near-field communications (NFC). At the time of launch, Nexus S 4G on Sprint with Citibank and payment network MasterCard was the only phone compatible with Google Wallet. The industry is preparing for Wallet, but the consumer side isn't quite there yet. In September, however, Visa also signed a licensing deal to include credit and debit cards in Google's Wallet program. MasterCard's has begun its shift toward technology innovator thanks to its new partnership and investment with mFoundry. This solidifies MasterCard's commitment to the field of mobile payments. PayPal has a slightly different vision for its mobile wallet. With a wallet in the cloud, consumers can select a payment instrument (credit card, debit card, bank account) and then use any Internet-connected device to enable that purchase. Really, PayPal wants to be technology agnostic, meaning that its mobile wallet should work on any device regardless of the operating system. In mid-November, PayPal unleashed its mobile wallet that features a card and a smartphone app that lets consumers store credit cards, gift cards, frequent flier miles and more. Speaking of mobile wallets, whatever happened to Apple's iWallet? NFC never did come to the iPhone4S.
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2. Where NFCs Will Go, Few Do Know NFC (near field communication) enables the exchange of data between devices (typically, mobile devices) that are in close proximity to each other. NFC devices are used for more than just payments, though - they can be the link between real world actions and consumer-facing or back office systems. While card issuers love NFC options, they would force payment processors to radically redesign. Are consumers ready to trade in the swipe of a credit card for the tap of an NFC-enabled device? NFC may never be widely used as a form of payments, writes RWW mobile expert Dan Rowinski. While the technology around NFC is ready and being widely adapted within the industry, the actual infrastructure is not there yet. But the NFC hype is here. Since Google's Beta Wallet launch in September, it has partnered with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (NFC partner), Hypercom, Igenico and NXP (NFC partner). On the opposing end, NFC mobile payment solution ISIS is poised to attack Google's Wallet; it recently partnered with Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T.
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In 2012, there will be more NFC-enabled Android devices. For now, only the Samsung Nexus S and a few others have mobile wallet capabilities. Lest we forget PayPal, it is important to note that it recently launched an Android app that allows for money transfer via NFC. 3. Carrier Billing Is Alive And Kicking Carrier billing allows users to pay for apps on their mobile phone bill instead of using a credit card or a third-party mobile payments service to pay at the time of purchase. This payments system is moving right along. In April, Spring joined T-Mobile and AT&T to support carrier billing in the Android Market. Mobile payments company BOKU went live for Android app developers in June. It began offering carrier billing on 230 operators in 56 countries worldwide. eBay purchased mobile payments company Zong in July, and integrated it into PayPal. Zong allows users to make mobile purchases through carrier billing. PaymentOne, another leader in carrier billing, lets users pay with their phone numbers, and validates transactions via text.
2MoreEye Tracking Could be the Next Natural User Interface - 0 views
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That's what a Danish startup called Senseye claims to be doing; they say they've got software for Android that uses the front-facing camera to track a user's eye movement and then uses that to control what happens on the phone's screen. They're not alone in working on doing that kind of work, either. Eye tracking could be a big new way that users interact with their devices.
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If the company can really pull this off, Senseye could join the ranks of Microsoft's Kinect, Surface and the touchscreen mobile devices in what people are calling the Natural User Interface (NUI). A Swedish company called Tobii announced in-car eye tracking technology this week as well and these aren't isolated innovations.
7MoreThe Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
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there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
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solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.
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Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process
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Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.
10MoreIntuit's GoPayment Cuts Transaction Fees, Pricing Now More In Line With Square | TechCr... - 0 views
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Inuit’s GoPayment reader, which competes directly with Square, is about to become more attractive to small businesses. The company has made the decision dropped the transaction fee ($0.15 per transaction) for both new and existing customers for Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards, both swiped and key-entered as well as qualified and non-qualified transactions. The move will go into effect on Monday.
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Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones. So now, businesses using the mobile payments reader will only pay a flat 2.7 percent fee of a transaction for any swiped cards. Intuit will charge 3.7 percent for both key entered and non-qualified transactions.
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This is surely a competitive move against Square, which also dropped its transaction fee (which was $0.15) recently in favor of a flat 2.75 percent fee for all transactions. One important fact to note—Intuit will still charge the transaction fee for transactions using American Express but this is something the company is working on negotiating. Square does not charge a fees for transactions on Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.
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For higher credit card processing volume (recommended for more than a $1,000 per month), Intuit is continuing to charge a $12.95 monthly fee but has dropped the set transaction charge of $0.30. The per transaction percentage remains at 1.7 percent for cards swiped; and 2.7 percent for key entered.
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Mobile payments is a competitive space and it’s hard not to notice some of the attention Square has been getting from both Visa and Apple. Because of this, companies like Intuit have to up the ante to remain competitive and attract businesses. For example, Intuit recently extended the offer of a free version of its GoPayment reader indefinitely. Square’s readers have been free for some time now.
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Chris Hylen, VP and general manager of Intuit Payment Solutions said this explaining this change in pricing: We started simplifying GoPayment pricing back in January when we eliminated the monthly fee. Now we’re removing transaction fees. As we continue to evaluate the market and talk with customers, we believe that making our pricing even more affordable is the best way to give more people an easy way to process credit cards on their mobile devices.
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While Square is growing fast, as more and more businesses are looking for innovative, inexpensive and painless ways to accept credit cards, Intuit’s reader does offer a compelling product. The company reports that it has seen a nearly 700% increase in the number of people signing up for GoPayment each week compared to the beginning of the year (driven in large part its free swiper offering). Intuit declined to reveal exactly how many users are signing up per day vs. a year ago.
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And GoPayment users are processing in excess of $15 million a week using GoPayment and related services. These services also include payments from the Web and through QuickBooks using a GoPayment merchant account, so it’s unclear how much of that $15 million is coming through the readers themselves. Intuit says GoPayment users have processed more than $3 million in a single day over the past month as well.
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For basis of comparison, Square just revealed that it is processing $2 million in transactions per day and $66 million for the first quarter, but COO Keith Rabois says forecasts that this number will triple in Q2.
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The other competitor in the space, VeriFone, has yet to eliminate the set transaction fees ($0.17) associated with its payment product. But with pressure from both Square and Intuit, that may change soon.
6MoreCommerce Weekly: Chasing down abandoned shopping carts - O'Reilly Radar [10Nov11] - 0 views
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Only three out of every 10 online shopping carts actually make it to checkout, according to email marketing vendor Listrak. That's 70% of carts lying abandoned in the virtual corridors of ecommerce. Listrak wants to improve those numbers. It's one of several vendors offering "shopping cart abandonment solutions" — essentially, programs to follow up with shoppers who've left the store and ask them, "Haven't you forgotten something?"
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Retailers would love to close more of those sales: Listrak estimates $18 billion lost in sales to U.S. retailers every year. A Forrester study last May found that 89% of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Forrester's authors attributed that high rate to growing user sophistication: as shoppers become more experienced online, they are more likely to comparison shop even as they move toward checkout. Other industry observers offer a simpler explanation: shoppers are shocked at high shipping costs. A 2006 study by Goecart blamed comparison shopping, high shipping costs, and plain old running out of time as the leading causes of abandonment.
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Listrak sampled Internet Retailer's Top 1000 online retailers, loading up carts and then abandoning them ("Hey you kids! Knock it off!") to see who would follow up. Only 14.6% sent a follow-up email, and fewer still sent a second or third email which, Listrak's CEO Ross Kramer told Internet Retailer, is where about half of the revenue comes from. Among Listrak's suggestions to retailers: get the shopper's email address first.
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Intuit cuts payment rate for AT&T subscribers Intuit announced a partnership with AT&T for its GoPayment mobile payment solution, which competes with Square. Like Square, Intuit offers a free card-swiping attachment that plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry device, allowing anyone to collect credit card payments. Intuit's basic rate of 2.7% slightly undercuts Square's 2.75%, but AT&T customers will pay even less (1.7%). Intuit originally charged customers $175 for the swiper dongle, but last January, in a bid to compete with Square, it began offering the dongle for free. Still, Intuit has struggled to gain the visibility that Square founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois and high-profile investors like Richard Branson have brought to Square. This week's deal with AT&T is a reminder that Intuit is serious about GoPayment, which may actually offer more to merchants since it integrates with QuickBooks, its bookkeeping package that also targets small businesses.
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PayPal embraces NFC (just a little) PayPal has made something of a point of not jumping on the NFC bandwagon, emphasizing the technology-agnostic nature of its mobile payments platform. Demonstrations at PayPal's recent Innovate conference emphasized payment options like PayPal's Empty Hand system, which lets you buy things with only your mobile number and a PIN. Still, NFC seems an inevitable part of the payments picture in the years ahead, and this week, PayPal delivered the peer-to-peer NFC payment technology that it promised last July. Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile Applications, wrote on the PayPal blog that the technology for NFC P2P is included in version 3.0 of PayPal's Android app. No need for it in the iOS app yet, obviously, since the most recent iPhone upgrade disappointingly didn't include support for NFC. As we noted back in July, in practice, the transfer of funds through PayPal's NFC system isn't substantially different from what was already possible using Bump, which sends the transfer through servers in the cloud rather than wirelessly between the mobiles. But the NFC system will let PayPal developers acquire experience with NFC wireless transfers, which should serve them well as NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals begin to show up next year and beyond.
5MoreQualcomm Talks Future of Mobile, AR, 3D, Sensors & More at Uplinq 2011 [01Jun11] - 0 views
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People Don't Care about PCs...the Buzz is All About Mobile To paint an image of the very large scale of the mobile ecosystem, Jacobs talked numbers: There are 1.3 billion 3G connections worldwide, and there will be 2 billion more connections by 2015. Mobile data use will increase 10 to 12 times over the next four years. There are over 120 HSPA+ mobile networks and 180 commercial EVDO networks offering mobile broadband. There are 200 LTE networks planned, 20 of which have launched now.
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Mobile Unleashing the "Greatest Wave of Creativity in History" And what is that? Only that mobile is going to unleash the "greatest wave of creativity in history." Dr. Jacobs said he knew that sounded like a "heady" proposition, especially because many mobile developers are just trying to build an app people like, he says. "But your app could reach hundreds of millions of users!" Now is the time to "think and act globally," Jacobs said. "Mobile is now the dominant computing platform, and it's never going back."
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Augmented Reality Demoed as Marketing Tool AR, or augmented reality, was also at the forefront of today's keynote, with a sobering presentation from John Batter, Co-President of Production, Dreamworks Animation SKG. He produced data showing the decline of DVD sales over the years.
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He showed an example of this with the studio's new hit, Kung Fu Panda 2, which will be marketed using in-store signage at major retailers like Walmart and Target. The signs feature QR codes that, when scanned, make an AR-enabled app available to end users
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Mobile is "Digital 6th Sense" Dr. Jacobs concluded the keynote by looking forward into the future of mobile, calling mobile our "digital 6th sense" which will become the primary way we interact with the world around us. Your phone will listen and see everything using the sensors connected to your body, sensors out in the environment, the people around you and more - and it will adjust itself accordingly. Imagine a phone that adjusts to your mood, or your vital signs, he said. "You are the creators of this experience," Jacobs said, speaking to the developers in the audience. Qualcomm just wants to "free you up to do what you do best: innovating."
10MoreWhat is Coming? - The Future of Geolocation [21Apr11] - 1 views
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Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.
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Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.
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developers continue to chase after our elusive social graph to make geolocation as indispensable as microblogging and photo sharing.
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RFID (radio-frequency identification) and NFC (near field communication) technologies are going to become much more popular as geolocation apps continue to evolve and developers look for ways to make sending and receiving location-based data easier.
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Foursquare has already begun testing NFC check-ins and Coca-Cola used RFID at last year’s Coca-Cola Village teen camp to enable Facebook Likes and status updates to be sent with wristbands.
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What Else Can We Expect? There are some exciting innovations emerging in geolocation already, but there’s surely much more value to be had from this technology. Some of the developments I’m most interested to see are: A collection of user-generated information about a place, like a location-based Wikipedia Mobile check-in for flights, bypassing the long check-in counter queues Mobile check-in at doctors’ offices, sending the secretary an automatic notification of your arrival Mobile identification, providing entry to adult-only venues like nightclubs (our phones are already replacing cash, so why not our photo IDs?) Digital, geotagged nightclub stamps to prove you’ve paid to get in Bookmarking for places with push notifications, so you’ll finally remember to check out that café your friend keeps recommending Interactive maps attached to promotional material (with QR codes?) so you can easily find the new pizza place that sent you coupons in the mail
2MoreApple triggers 'religious' reaction in fans' brains, report says [20May11] - 0 views
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For Apple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike that of religious devotees, according to a BBC documentary series that cites neurological research. The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says. The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London. Observers and Apple critics have long accused fans of the tech company of taking their infatuation to an extreme. People have gone to great lengths to prove their love of Apple with tattoos, bumper stickers and home shrines to outmoded Mac computers. Apple's cult-like following was highlighted in a 2009 documentary called "Macheads." A blog, aptly titled Cult of Mac, wrote on Thursday about Oakland, California, resident Gary Allen's cross-country pilgrimage to Apple's first store in Virginia to celebrate the retail chain's 10th anniversary this week.
3MoreCan Kaggle Predict the Future? | #1 Site for Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, & Open In... - 0 views
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Kaggle is an Australian company that crowdsources predictive models. How does Kaggle do this? By hosting competitions of prediction models. Clients post their problem and correlating data promising a prize money for the most reliable prediction model provided by the community.
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Kaggle’s community consists of data analysts from all over the world and from a wide array of fields, with the majority of users coming from computer science (15.6%), statistics (11.6%) and economics (10%) but also from physics, engineering and even social sciences. According to a recent blog entry, Kaggle’s community is reaching 13,000 data scientists.
8MoreFujitsu develops technology enabling speech-based information retrieval from ... - 0 views
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Fujitsu Laboratories has developed speech interface technology that enables users to retrieve a variety of information by simply speaking into a smartphone, without having to look at the smartphone’s display.
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After listening to a synthesized speech read the latest news and other information, users can articulate the information that they would like to learn more about. The software will then read details about the topic and other related information
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In recent years, by employing devices to remotely access data centers, where an abundance of computing resources can be utilized, it has become possible to develop speech recognition and synthesis technologies that handle a larger lexicon than has previously been possible on stand-alone devices. This has led to high expectations for the delivery of new and innovative services.
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1. Speech dialogue knowledge building technology supports the latest modern lingo and newly coined terms
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Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new eyes-free and hands-free speech interface in which, by simply speaking about what the user is interested in, the system pulls up relevant information and reads it out loud. For instance, when the user speaks a particular phrase from a news headline that the system has read, the system will read more detailed articles related to the topic at hand.
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In addition, for audio tour systems employed in museums, the technology can provide more detailed information. For example, additional information could be offered just by saying a word that comes up in an audio tour or in a description of an exhibit.
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