Zypr is everything you wanted from Siri without the Apple-flavored handcuffs.
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Pioneer unveils Zypr, a free Siri-like platform that can tell your web apps what to do ... - 0 views
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This voice-control API gives developers a free platform for writing voice-activated commands for web applications, including navigation, social media, maps, calendars and more.
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One of the most interesting and valuable aspects of the Zypr API is that it aggregates third-party APIs from services like Facebook and Amazon, categorizes their functions (for example, social, mapping or shopping) and presents those functions through a single, normalized API, creating a stable access point for devices and apps. If a third-party API changes, the developer using Zypr doesn’t need to make any changes to his or her code. Pioneer says that Zypr can replace around 80 percent of the functionality of the APIs it supports.
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But perhaps most interestingly today, Zypr gives developers natural-language voice control for all services, regardless of provider or category.
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Zypr is an ad-supported service and offers developers revenue-sharing opportunities.
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How Twitter + iOS 5 Will Change Mobile Apps [06June11] - 0 views
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A deep integration of Twitter and iOS 5 was among the many things announced by Apple today but it's not just that you'll be able to post to Twitter from inside official Apple apps like photos and maps. Any 3rd party iOS developer will be able to leverage a number of Twitter Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make their apps better and more social. After email, SMS and iOS messaging, Twitter will now become a key social layer over the top of many of the apps on iOS devices.
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"There is single sign-on, which allows you to retrieve a user's identity, avatar, and other profile data." That sounds like Facebook Connect, but I'm going to guess that Twitter will not prohibit developers from caching that data for time-shifted, aggregate, offline or other interesting types of analysis. Letting users skip having to create an account with every new app they download and instead click to log-in with their Twitter accounts is going to make many users very happy and encourage every iOS owner to get a Twitter account if they don't have one already. App developers will get more and better populated user accounts, faster.
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"There's also a frictionless core signing service, allowing you to make and sign any call to the Twitter API." To be honest, I'm not really sure what this means. Perhaps it means that parts of the Twitter API that require user authentication will be accessible via the same single sign-on feature discussed above.
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"There is follow graph synchronization, which enables you to bootstrap a user's social graph for your app." In other words, apps will be able to offer users to find their Twitter friends who are also using a new app they've installed, and connect with them there too. That's the kind of solution to the user-level "cold start problem" that Facebook Connect has been so helpful with for web apps.
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"Furthermore, there is the tweet sheet feature, giving your app distribution and reach across Twitter
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In other words, this looks a lot like Facebook Connect, but powered by Twitter:
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Twitter permission change hurts third-party mobile apps [21May11] - 0 views
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Twitter is updating its authentication system to give users more control over how third-party applications can access their accounts. Applications will now have to explicitly request additional permission from the user during the authentication process in order to send and receive direct messages on behalf of the user. At first glance, the change seems like a welcome improvement to the Twitter APIs. Support for granular permission tiers is one of the technical advantages of authority delegation systems like OAuth
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Twitter's approach to implementing the feature comes with some serious problems for third-party client implementors
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The OAuth standard was originally intended to enable server-to-server authentication for limited third-party access to non-public APIs. It is poorly suited for open APIs with an arbitrary number of independent third-party applications. More significantly, it doesn't address the needs of desktop and mobile authentication at all. Despite the significant limitations of the standard, it is being adopted and mandated by a number of social networking services, including Twitter.
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OAuth authentication process must be carried out in a Web browser and involves a series of redirects: a third-party site sends the user to the Twitter website to log in and approve access and then Twitter redirects the user back to the initiating third-party site and appends a token that the third-party site can extract and use to identify the user to Twitter. The advantage of this system is that the third-party site never gets the user's actual password, just a revokeble token
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The obvious problem with this system is that the redirect dance doesn't work for native non-web applications.
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American Express To Release An API For Digital Wallet Platform Serve; Focuses On Data A... - 0 views
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Over the past year, American Express has been making several key payments partnerships with technology companies and launched its take on the digital wallet, Serve. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card. The company has also landed a number of lucrative carrier partner deals for Serve. Separate from Serve, American Express’ recent partnerships in the payments space include Foursquare, Facebook and even Zynga for personalized deals. We sat down recently with Harshul Sanghi, American Express’ new VP of Enterprise Growth Group to chat about Serve, the digital wallet and how the company plans to dominate the payments space.
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Sanghi, who was formerly the Managing Director of North American venture activities for Motorola, joined AmEx in September. His focus is on further developing the Serve brand and forming these partnerships that help expand the card member base into new segments.
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Sanghi explains that while every payments company (including even Google) and credit card company is releasing their own version of the digital wallet, it’s whats in the wallet that’s truly important. “The wallet that has the most brand partnerships is what customers are going to gravitate too,” he says. And this wallet needs to tie in seamlessly with loyalty programs, and virtual currencies, which is why AmEx bought virtual currency monetization platform Sometrics a few weeks ago. And the wallet needs to store offers and deals as well so that consumers don’t have to carry around coupons or discounts to a store.
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While commercial partnerships are definitely key to the broad appeal of Serve, part of Sanghi’s master plan in furthering Serve’s presence is a connection with developers. “It is difficult for mobile payments startups to scale without partnerships with some of the major financial partners,” he explains. “There are a lot of regulation in terms of moving money, and fraud management and we want to be the partner mobile payments startups think of in this space.” Sanghi says that in first half of next year, American Express will open up the Serve platform to developer community.
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Another area where American Express is focusing its efforts when it comes to Serve is on data. “Data is going to be a differentiating factor in the payments space,” Sanghi explains. A personalized experience is going to be key in providing the digital wallet that consumers flock to, he says. And it’s not just purchasing data that American Express is looking to mine.
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Intent data, structured data and unstructured data will all play a part of delivering a personalized payments experience. That means analyzing things such as Tweets, Twitter sentiment, your social graph, Facebook updates and more to deliver targeted offers. “The magic is going to be in marrying structured data and unstructured data for results in real-time,” Sanghi says.
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With 100 million card members, American Express’ data opportunities are massive. But privacy is a key concern in this data mining, says Sanghi, and the company has to be sure they aren’t abusing these issues, especially as it relates to financial information. For example, the company’s Facebook partnership, in which AmEx cardholders can link their cards to their Facebook accounts to receive deals, is an opt-in experience.
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Across the board, American Express is going to be announcing many more commercial partnerships including those with gaming and telecommunications companies. Serve will also soon enter new geographies, says Sanghi, which will also be a key part of the platform’s growth in the next year.
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Of course, American Express has competition in the digital wallets space, and companies like PayPal and even Google are also looking to compete. And fellow credit card companies such as Visa have major ambitions to dominate the digital wallet. Regardless, all of these companies need to fine-tune their offerings so that the benefit to consumers is clear. The battle to become the de facto digital wallet is just starting, and which payments provider that will create the technology that keeps consumers engaged has yet to be determined.
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shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 09 Nov 11
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Clover breaks stealth with a powerhouse team to shake up peer-to-peer payments - The Ne... - 0 views
thenextweb.com/...shake-up-peer-to-peer-payments
payments p2p opportunities market apps API qr-codes platform trending
shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 09 Nov 11
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The space for mobile payments has heated up really fast over the past couple of years. One thing that we’ve started to see more of lately are applications that focus more on peer-to-peer payments versus something that you’d use to see a business. With PayPal implementing NFC, Dwolla providing software solutions to hardware problems and Venmo firmly in between all of it, the space is getting crowded quite fast.
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Funds can be added to Clover via any credit card, but not directly from your bank or PayPal.
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If you want to Pay, there are 2 ways to go about it. You can either pay a contact directly, or you can create a QR code that is then scanned by another Clover user to accept funds from you. This makes it easy to split a bill at a restaurant, for instance, but it also leaves the door open to long-distance transactions. In time, according to some grayed-out options in the UI, you’ll also be able to pay via SMS or email.
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Requests for money work the same way. You can choose to ask in person, which creates a QR code, or you can send a request to one of your contacts. Again, SMS and email-based requests appear to be coming at a later time.
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To withdraw, you can do immediate transfers to your PayPal, or a bank transfer in 2-3 days. Obviously, if you’re using PayPal, you’re going to get a fee tacked onto transactions. Bank transfers might have them as well, depending on your particular bank’s methods.
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We do know that there’s an API in the works, which will bring payment options to more apps and websites.
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“…it’s not about what you can’t do with PayPal but rather what you don’t do with PayPal. Over the past decade, PayPal has done a great job transforming how people think about payments, but most PayPal users don’t routinely use the service to pay each other for lunch, drinks, etc. from their mobile phone.”
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Presently Clover is sitting on a $5.5 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz, Sutter Hill Ventures and Morado Venture Partners.
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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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How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In the Next Several Years - 0 views
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Mobile payment has become a mainstream tech topic in the last couple of years, mirroring the rise of smartphones and application stores. E-commerce is becoming m-commerce. The focus point of the buzz has been the evolution of near-field communications as related to smartphones. The thing is, nobody in the payments industry expects NFC to be a player in mobile payments for years, if ever. In that case, what does the mobile payments ecosystem look like in the short term?
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The current mobile payments market centers around several cores: direct carrier billing, mobile wallets, online and offline sales, mobile credit card readers and application stores. During meetings with various mobile payments experts and executives at CTIA last week, the most uttered phrase was: "This is not something I would use to buy a fridge." Where are mobile payments going?
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The Non-Promise of NFC OK, let us get one thing straight: NFC may never be a widely used form of payments. There are so many reasons why it will not be. Foremost, the logistics of NFC are a nightmare. The actual technology is probably ready. The infrastructure around the technology is not. There are too many competing interests coming from above the retail market that creating a universal NFC reader between smartphones and financial services is not going to happen anytime soon. The closest thing to a widely used system would be Mastercard's PayPass, but even as widespread as that is, it is no where near the type of market penetration that would create an inflection point for NFC to take off. Second, PayPass needs a software upgrade to offer any type of deals, something that will be important in the mobile payments world.
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The second half of the NFC conundrum is that there are a lot of hands reaching for the supposed pile of money that NFC payments will enable. Look at Google's announcement of the Wallet product. Or the ISIS partnership between Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Google is partnering with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (the NFC partner), Hypercom, Ingenico and NXP (another NFC partner). All of these large companies are going to want a slice of the pie. Where does that leave the retailers? You know, the ones that are actually trying to make money with good and services? Sadly, on the outside of the circle. The carriers are the biggest culprits, wanting to take as much as 50% of transaction revenue because it is "going over their pipes." The financial services companies will be happy taking their normal rates in the 1.75% to 3% range as long as there is a promise that more people will pay electronically (read: sans cash). Between retailers, partners and infrastructure, NFC has years to go before it will be viable for all parties involved.
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What will happen in this time frame? Think about the so-called "4G" technology WiMax. The technology is already becoming antiquated with LTE and all the major carriers are working on the next version after that. Sprint is keeping a hybrid of WiMax and LTE going forward but overall it is a tech that died before it even matured. NFC may be the same. What if there are massive leaps in quantum teleportation in the next several years? Does NFC become the WiMax of the payment world?
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Maturation Of Direct Carrier Billing The "I do not see myself buying a fridge with this" line comes mostly from the direct carrier folks. Direct carrier billing is the perfect area for micro-payments and payments that stem from ease of use. Think of parking. If you could pay for your parking on the street with your phone, would that convenience be worth an extra couple of cents on the dollar to you? The direct to carrier ecosystem has evolved to the point where it actually makes sense for offline and online use. Zong (acquired by eBay for PayPal integration), PaymentOne and Boku are the leaders in this space. PaymentOne has processed $5 billion in mobile payments and lets users pay with their phone numbers, validating transactions via text. Zong allows that capability as well. Payment One's "One Care" features, announced last week at CTIA, makes direct to carrier billing safe and secure. Transparency is important in mobile commerce because consumers do not really trust their phones to handle their money quite yet. The most important aspect of direct to carrier billing now is that the revenue mechanism has been flipped. It used to be that merchants only got some 40% or less of payments while the carriers and partners took the rest. Even with high margin transactions, that is unacceptable. Today, direct to carrier billing provides the merchants with more than 80% of the revenue, sometimes nearly 95%.
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The Dongle World: Smartphones As Credit Card Readers Square, VeriSign and Intuit are pushing hard into the dongle department. Jumio is doing the same thing, just without the dongle. There is not much to be said about the dongle world that we have not already touched on at ReadWriteWeb outside of the notion that it is bringing easy credit card readers to the mobile masses.
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The dongle competitors are not worried about what is happening in the ecosytem because it does not really touch their core business. For instance, PayPal does not see NFC or dongles infringing on its business in any way, shape or form. As Laura Chambers, PayPal's head of mobile, said in a recent interview, "we are not worried about much in the ways of competition. There is a lot of white space in the industry for horizontal movement."
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What Is PayPal Really Doing? In the interview with Chambers, the first question I asked was, "Why does it seem like PayPal has become a "me too" operator in mobile payments?" It is a fair question, even if Chambers balked to acknowledge that PayPal has been in "me too" mode for the last year or so. PayPal has ignored the dongle movement and NFC is not on its radar as a technology it feels it needs to integrate. "What is the difference between a tap versus a swipe?" Chambers asked. "We are working with what works in the current infrastructure ... We have sat down with consumers and merchants to work with them on what they want." PayPal is growing sideways because there is not a ton of room right now to grow vertically. PayPal will get into NFC solutions when the time is appropriate. Its strategy now is to create as much flexibility for consumers as possible through its mobile wallet program. PayPal's stance is data driven - the company can track when and what consumers buy from mobile phones and tablets. Hence, PayPal is focusing on the shopping end of the spectrum, as opposed to a pure payments play. "60% of people buy more and spend more on mobile," Chambers said. "But, we see that people are not really buying different things on mobile ... the No. 1 driver of growth in mobile payments is boredom." That fits in well with what PayPal sees as "couch commerce." They released a study recently saying that mobile shopping is going to boom this holiday season. As such, PayPal is ready to deploy an end-to-end solution for merchants and consumers to reward loyalty and provide deals and offers along with digital receipts. PayPal believes that it has a lot of room to grow in mobile through these types of horizontal movements. We are also seeing this on a non-mobile front with eBay partnering with Facebook and the Open Graph API and the new X.Commerce initiative that consolidates the PayPal, Zong, Magento, RedLaser and Milo technologies. The company is calling it an "open commerce ecosystem."
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Future Of Mobile Payments This article is the first in a series of the trends in mobile payments that ReadWriteWeb will be working on in the next several months. There are a lot of questions and the answers are just beginning to emerge. Who are the winners in the space? Are retail shops in danger of "becoming expensive fronts for online shopping," as Chambers said in the interview? Does NFC really have potential to disrupt offline payments or is it just cool technology? These questions and more are what we will be tackling in the months to come.
10MoreAmEx Puts $125M In And Partners With Chinese Mobile Payments Company Lianlian To Licens... - 0 views
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American Express is making a significant move in the expansion of its digital wallet, Serve to international markets today. The credit card company is announcing the first global partnership for Serve with Lianlian Group, of of China’s leading mobile payments providers. Additionally, AmEx has also made an equity investment of $125 million in LianLian Pay.
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Group President for Enterprise Growth for American Express Dan Schulman tells us in an interview that American Express has come to realize that in a lot of fast growing economies internationally, people move money in different ways and in order to enter these markets, the company has to think beyond just plastic cards and checks, and consider moving straight to mobile platforms.
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AmEx is generally predicting China to be a huge market for its mobile and digital payments products and is planning to open a new American Express’ Enterprise Growth Group office in Hangzhou, China. The China-based team will provide technical and consulting support to Lianlian Group on the Serve partnership, and the new outpost will be headed by Matthew Lee, President, Enterprise Growth, American Express, China.
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With the Lianlian Group, AmEx gets access to a company that has partnered with 3 of the largest carriers in China, and served one-third of all Chinese mobile users through payments network infrastructure, he explains. So a Chinese consumer who was paying cash to get minutes can now load the Serve-powered Lianlian digital wallet and have the choice of digital commerce, paying bills via their mobile wallet, send peer-to-peer payments, buying more minutes and ringtones and more, says Schulman.
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Another area where we’ll see Serve expand is on data. As Harshul Sanghi, American Express’ VP of Enterprise Growth Group, told us recently, the personalized experience is going to be key in providing the digital wallet that consumers flock to. Intent data, structured data and unstructured data will all play a part of delivering a personalized payments experience for Serve.
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For background, Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card. AmEx has landed a number of lucrative carrier partner deals for Serve in the U.S. but this is the first step towards expanding Serve’s technology into one of the fastest growing consumer markets in the world.
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Amex has entered into an operating agreement with Lianlian Group which will allow Lianlian to license and use Serve in products and services it develops for its consumer and business customers in China. The Serve platform will help power a new Lianlian Group digital wallet that consumers can use to top up mobile phone minutes, pay bills and purchase products or services online.
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Founded in 2004, Lianlian Group has served approximately 300 million mobile phone accounts. It operates a network of over 300,000 small business agents across China where customers can buy additional top up minutes on their mobile phones. A portion of that network also allows customers to purchase airline tickets, video gaming credits and utility bills.
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With the mobile penetration in China, it’s no surprise that AmEx chose the market as its first global opportunity to expand Serve. AliPay is also playing in the space.
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In terms of financial companies, American Express has been at the forefront of trying to expand their mobile and digital offerings beyond the credit card business. Besides carrier partnerships for Serve, AmEx has announced a number of recent partnerships in the payments space include Foursquare, Facebook and even Zynga for personalized deals. The company has also been acquiring payments technologies and will be doing more investing in the space with a new $100 million fund.
8MoreBeyond The Internet Of Things Towards A Sensor Commons | Techdirt - 0 views
www.techdirt.com/...s-towards-sensor-commons.shtml Sensors Commons IoT 5RFID_IOT Data Trust Openness Opportunities
shared by Dan R.D. on 04 Jan 12
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Just what might be possible is hinted at in this fascinating post by Andrew Fisher, entitled "Towards a sensor commons": For me the Sensor Commons is a future state whereby we have data available to us, in real time, from a multitude of sensors that are relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition and that data is freely available whether as a data set or by API to use in whatever fashion they like. My definition is not just about “lots of data from lots of sensors” – there is a subtlety to it implied by the “relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition” statement. In order to be useful, we need to ensure we can compare data relatively faithfully across multiple sensors. This doesn’t need to be perfect, nor do they all need to be calibrated together, we simply need to ensure that they are “more or less” recording the same thing with similar levels of precision and consistency. Ultimately in a lot of instances we care about trended data rather than individual points so this isn’t a big problem so long as an individual sensor is relatively consistent and there isn’t ridiculous variation between sensors if they were put in the same conditions.
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What this boils down to, then, is trends in freely-available real-time data from multiple sensors: it's about being able to watch the world change across some geographical area of interest -- even a small one -- and drawing conclusions from those changes. That's clearly a huge step up from checking what's in your fridge, and potentially has major political ramifications (unlike the contents of your fridge).
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Become dispersible
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Gain trust
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The bulk of the post explores what Fisher sees as the key requirements for a sensor commons, which must:
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Be highly visible
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Be entirely open
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Be upgradeable
8MoreFinextra: PayPal aims to become your digital ID; unveils new bank, vendor, currency par... - 0 views
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PayPal has taken the wraps off its single sign-on digital identity service for online shopping, PayPal Access. The move comes as the San Jose-based payments operator unveils a series of new partnerships with a host of banking technology suppliers at the BAI Retail delivery show in Chicago.
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PayPal Access is designed to simplify the checkout process by enabling the company's 100 million account holders to sign in at participating retailers' sites with just their PayPal user name and password.
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The initiative is a key element of X.Commerce, a new division of PayPal parent company eBay, that aims to provide a common set of APIs for building consumer-facing online merchant services.
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Commenting on PayPal Access, Damon Hougland, general manager of identity & informatics, X.commerce, says: "Results from early adopters show that consumers are more willing to engage with merchants because they can use their PayPal account to check out instead of having to deal with the hassle of entering name, address and payment information. This has huge implications for mobile commerce and merchant sales among new and existing customers."
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Separately, PayPal is introducing a series of new relationships with banking technology suppliers as it bids to make it easier for banks to incorporate its services into their offerings. This morning it announced a partnership with NCR and S1 that enables people to make real-time person-to-person payments from cash machines.
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Other vendors lined up for the PayPal treatment include mobile outfit mFoundry, account opening specialist MeridienLink, community banking vendor BanVue, and airmiles operator ezRezSoftware. The latter partnership envisages the creation of an application that would enable consumers to convert their airmiles points into cash for spending on the Web.
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Dan Schatt, general manager of financial innovations at PayPal, explains: "With this partnership, airline and other reward programme members will have access to the entire 'catalogue' of merchandise the Internet offers by using their rewards anywhere PayPal is accepted."
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Set for take-off in 2012, United Airlines' frequent flyer programme, will be the first rewards scheme to allow PayPal account holders to use miles as a currency.
17MoreUpdate: Facebook Has A Mobile Card Up Its Sleeve In Addition To Advertising | paidContent - 0 views
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For as long as Facebook has been running its Facebook Credits program—the virtual currency that users can redeem on games and other content peddled through Facebook’s network—it has been letting users top up those Credits using their mobile phones. It does this in partnership with companies like (reportedly) Boku and (definitely) Zong, the payments company bought by eBay’s PayPal last year. Users can also top up their Credits via PayPal and credit cards.
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It’s not known how much, exactly, is purchased via the mobile channel today, but it is an example of how mobile is actually already driving significant revenue for Facebook. “Facebook Credits make a lot of money through mobile phones,” enough that Zong was “growing very fast last year” because of Facebook purchases, according to Frederic Court, a partner with Advent Venture Parnters, one of the VCs that backed Zong before the eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) buy.
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This is because while sometimes the mobile payments were actually more expensive than a PayPal or credit card transaction, they are often a lot quicker to do, especially if you are in the middle of a game. And, as with other mobile-based payment options, they appeal to those who don’t have or want to enter card details.
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Commissions on those Credits netted Facebook $557 million in revenues in 2011. (Facebook writes in the S-1 that the “other fees” that it designates on the same line as Payments was “immaterial.”)
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At this point, Facebook doesn’t take any commission on Credits that are purchased via mobile: that service—which uses the premium SMS channel to send a code to a user to redeem Credits on the main site, and then charges the amount directly to the user’s mobile bill—already has some other parties taking a cut, including the provider (eg Zong or Boku), the mobile carrier and even another processing middleman. Rather, Facebook’s cut comes in the form of a commission on the payments, similar to what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) takes for transactions on its App Store. That fee is 30 percent.
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Could Facebook eventually take more control of its payments, and potentially cut out some of those middle people? Probably not soon, in Court’s opinion. “Zong brought something to Facebook that it didn’t know how to do, and it became very deeply integrated,” he said. “I don’t see them starting to do what Zong does, which is connecting hundreds of operators.” Then again, he added, “When they have a worth of $100 billion with $10 billion on the balance sheet they can do pretty much anything they want.”
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What’s interesting is that as Facebook starts to expand some of the other functionality on its mobile platform, that will also open up a lot more opportunities in terms of mobile transactions as well.
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As Facebook enables and opens APIs to get publishers to build apps for its mobile platforms (via the web and apps), “Facebook will make sure those are monetized,” he said. “I have no doubt Facebook will be making money on mobile games and other content given the engagement and scale on mobile. There is an amazing opening there.” Paying for Credits that will actually get used on the device itself, he said, will be “even more natural.”
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Facebook in the S-1 said it had 425 million monthly active users accessing the social network via mobile devices, with that number outpacing the growth of overall subscribers.
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“Credits is a wallet that you can top up in all kinds of ways,” he said. “Facebook has created its own currency and has imposed that on anyone offering digital goods on Facebook.” If anything, that currency might have a life outside the platform, to to buy things outside of Facebook.
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But even with the opportunity for Credits, Court doesn’t see this eventually overtaking revenues from whatever advertising Facebook plans to put on its mobile services “for a very simple reason,” which is down to how those games are played today. “If you look at Zynga, only between two and three percent of people who play actually pay. The rest play for free. Tt will be the same for Facebook on mobile, with only a fraction spending money,” he predicted. “With advertising, 100 percent of the population is exposed.”
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Even though Facebook has listed “no mobile ads” as one of its risks on the S-1, it could be playing its cards very close to its chest: the last few days has been a lot of speculation already about how soon Facebook will launch those mobile ads.
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Razorfish (via Digiday) says that it is already working on a pilot for rich-media ads for the social network.
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The blog Inside Facebook, meanwhile, has put its money down on sponsored stories to be the “most likely” first stab at mobile advertising on the site, with running a mobile ad network the second-most likely option. (That’s one that we explored a bit yesterday as well.)
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Update: Razorfish’s VP of mobile, Paul Gelb, has made a correction on how his comments were portrayed in the Digiday story (via Twitter): his agency is not working on any mobile ad buying with Facebook. “In the interview I was referring to rich media featured stories, not paid ads,” he said.
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A Facebook spokesperson, via email, added the following: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform.”
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Much has been made of the mobile risks that Facebook laid out in its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week. Essentially, it’s seeing/pushing massive growth in mobile, but it still hasn’t tried out advertising, its most effective route to revenues, on this platform. That’s not to say it won’t. But meanwhile, there is another area where Facebook is already making money through mobile.
13MoreSquare Now Being Used For Mobile Payments At Political Fundraisers | TechCrunch - 0 views
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Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.
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Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.
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A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.
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Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.
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And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.
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Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday.
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Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.
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Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.
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With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations.
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For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.
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Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months.
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Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.
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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.
6More'Web Clipping 2.0′ Startup Clipboard Backed By Andreessen Horowitz, Index, Cr... - 0 views
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Clipboard aims to become the go-to service for saving and sharing the relevant parts of any page or service available on the Web, including much of its core functionality, or put differently taking care of everything in between simply bookmarking a URL and having to save an entire Web page.
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Using a bookmarklet, Clipboard users can ‘clip’ things like search query results, stock quotes, tweets or Facebook status updates, video clips, images with captions, a Google Maps map, a forum answer, an Amazon book review, an eBay product summary, a digital coupon, and the likes.
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Select part of a Web page or service, and use your mouse (simply by hovering over something or, preferably, by using the scroll wheel) to increase or decrease the number of ‘zones’ you would like to clip. Your selection – including links and images etc. – will be saved to your Clipboard profile instantly, and you can jump straight to it to visit your clip collection
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Clips can be annotated, saved, shared publicly and with specific users, tagged and all that jazz. But you can also just bookmark simple services you use, games you play, or parts of Web pages you often visit, and interact with your clips by visiting just one website instead of all them separately.
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Not all of a site’s functionality can be simply clipped to Clipboard, as you will notice, but that’s of course not necessarily their fault. Inevitably, some services that reside on other websites or rely on third-party API calls or whatever, will be tougher to clip in full.
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TechCrunch has learned that Clipboard has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from the following, impressive list of investors: - Andreessen Horowitz - Index Ventures - CrunchFund (note: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a founding partner) - DFJ - SV Angel / Ron Conway - Betaworks - First Round Capital - CODE Advisors - Founder’s Co-Op - Acequia Capital - Vast Ventures - Ted Meisel (former CEO of Overture and now at Elevation Partners) - Blake Krikorian (former CEO of Sling and now an Amazon board member) - the elusive Vivi Nevo
4MoreEnStratus raises $3.5M for hybrid cloud management - Cloud Computing News [07Nov11] - 0 views
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Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.
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The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.
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The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.
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EnStratus has been on something of a hiring binge lately, including bringing on popular cloud blogger (now GigaOM contributor) and former Cisco cloud strategist James Urquhart as VP of product strategy.
10More45 mobile operators announce support for SIM-based NFC [24Nov11] - 0 views
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45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).
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The large existing user-base of low-cost, mid-tier, NFC-less feature phones popular in emerging markets is a prime target for this technology. However, technical difficulties have prevented the adoption of SIM-based NFC. As the SIM card slot is located behind the battery, radio signals to and from the NFC module are effectively blocked in many phones.
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Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.
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The GSMA has published interoperability standards for SIM-based NFC application programming interfaces (APIs) and protocols based on the Pay-Buy-Mobile specification for secure NFC mobile payments. Such standards pave the way for the development of contactless services across a variety of devices irrespective of their operating system (OS) while providing more detailed implementation protocols for the Java and Android platforms.
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IHS Screen Digest research indicates that the 45 operators involved in the announcement serve 50.7 per cent of the world's mobile subscriptions. Since the NFC module is embedded in the SIM card, the operators expect users to be able to use existing handsets for contactless services without the need to switch to a high-end smartphone. Users of smartphones currently lacking NFC capabilities will also benefit from this technology.
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The 45 operators involved account for nearly 3 billion subscriptions worldwide, and include China Mobile, Vodafone Group, América Móvil, Telefónica Group, China Unicom, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T.
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There is also the issue of cost. IHS Screen Digest estimates current SIM-based NFC modules to be a hundred times more expensive than traditional SIM cards. This would deter most operators from venturing into offering SIM-based NFC as an option to customers in emerging economies until economies of scale bring the associated costs down.
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It is unlikely that operators will allow third-party "over-the-top" services outside of their value chain. As the implementation of some contactless services (e.g. mobile payments, public transit) depends on a close collaboration between operators and local third-parties, it is expectable that contactless services deployments and uptake will vary greatly across markets.
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IHS Screen Digest does not foresee rapid adoption of SIM-based NFC mobile payments. Users will likely become acquainted with the contactless technology by way of other use-cases, as NFC experiences in Asia and Europe suggest--most notably the Octopus transit and stored-value card in Hong Kong, and the London Oyster transit card.
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If NFC payment and transit cards schemes prove successful in more locations, the likelihood that such services will be increasingly incorporated into mobile devices will also increase.
3MoreSpread Your Wings- Get More Retweet Action Today - 0 views
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Twitter offers a great way to get your information spread far and wide: the retweet.
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Making Re-Tweet Ready Posts Make sure your post info has room for your original info plus a retweet. If your original post is close to 140 characters, the person retweeting has to edit your post to send it back out. Smells like work? People won’t make extra effort to retweet you if they have to edit your posts. Make sure you use URL shorteners like bit.ly or is.gd or ow.ly (there are dozens) to get back more of your real estate. If you’re going to tweet a URL, give folks a sense of what they’re clicking into. For instance, I use (video) or (youtube) when pointing to a YouTube video. And make sure you use (NSFW) on things that are Not Safe For Work. The more helpful or entertaining your tweet, the more likely people will take an action. The more jumbled with @ names and multiple urls and hashtags your tweet is, the less likely it will be retweeted. People will gladly retweet causes (unless you fatigue us). Starting a tweet with an @ means that a good chunk of folks won’t see it.
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Retweet other people and promote other people 15x to every 1 time of your effort. Don’t tweet every damned thing you write about or do. Folks will fatigue quickly. Befriend and add value to the best retweeters. It’s a live network, a human network, a give-and-take relationship. That’s it. That’s how I do it. What about you? How are you getting it done? Photo credit Mike Baird ShareThis Tags: communication, howto, socialmedia, twitter ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks. With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before. Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme! Seriously, you’ll love it. Check out the Thesis demo site See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase
1More10/04/22 Money Maker - Twitter and the rise of data platforms - 0 views
openintelligence.amplify.com/...and-the-rise-of-data-platforms success risks money capitalization data platforms
shared by D'coda Dcoda on 25 Apr 10
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The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com
2MoreFacebook's Hidden Hate Button - - 0 views
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Perhaps the saddest thing about Facebook (note: I do think there are good things) is that most users seem utterly unware of the way Facebook is changing things; unaware of FB’s ever-changing Privacy settings; little idea about how expansive the recent f8 announcements could be (in fact I’d say a huge percentage of users don’t even know what the heck f8 is or what its impact may have); and perhaps wholly uprepared when their profiles and their data are streaming out in the open publicly. Most users are using FB strictly to post pictures and update their status in the literal way in which FB was designed - no sense of re-purposing the software in broader ways. On one hand, it’s great that we can all share our experiences with each other; on the other hand it’s worrying that more users aren’t educated enough about the fundamental nature of these media to make smart connections back to their own lives.
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Furthermore, if Facebook becomes the primary place where people congregate, purchase, publish and share, it will become imensely important that users are proficient and savvy and creative in using it *for* their interests as citizens and not against them. The smallest tweaks in any software can have major implications in their use. Imagine if Facebook had a Hate button. I agree with Scoble: I hope we never see something like that. …But I have a feeling, there’s a Hate button hidden deep within our collective social experience and dynamics just waiting to surface its ugly head in the not-too-distant future. Recommend on Amplify
1MoreFacebook Death App Hunts Down Live People With Location Services [16May11] - 0 views
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Agencies Mizbala and twentythree created an eerie location-based campaign for If I Die, a Facebook application that lets people record a message that will only be published after they die. Of course, no one think they're going to die anytime soon so people needed a bit of prompting. Mizbala used th APIs of popular location services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Twitter and Google Latest to track checkins all over the world. Once they located a person, they'd place a call to the location the person had checked into and asked to have the establishment to put the person on the line. Once they had the person on the line, they'd leave a creepy message and tell the person to go to the If I Die Facebook app. You can check out the demo call to Mashable's Adam Ostrow in this video to see what it's all about. Did the campaign work? Oh yes it did. Without any advertising, the campaign received lots of press in newspapers, blogs, radio and TV coverage which resulted in an 800 percent increase in recorded messages being left on "If I Die". But ask yourself. Do you really wants to be found this easily?
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