Group items tagged

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.

Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.

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.

Zypr is everything you wanted from Siri without the Apple-flavored handcuffs.

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.

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.

Nokia City Scene is a prototype app from Nokia Beta Labs that combines street maps, 3D panoramic views with gesture navigation and social network integration to provide what appears to be a powerful map discovery tool.

A user can transition from a top-down conventional street view to a Google Maps Streetview-like panoramic view with simple gesture-based navigation. In this 3D panoramic view, the phone user can read information about the businesses in the area in a text overlay. Check-ins by friends on Facebook and Foursquare is also available. The following cities are currently supported within Nokia City Scenes: London, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Newark-Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

It is somewhat unfortunate that this powerful tool is only available for the Nokia N9 which is based on an orphaned mobile platform, the Linux-based MeeGo. Nokia has not said whether this app will be ported to Windows Phone (its current smartphone platform).

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.

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.

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

Tapit is a new mobile advertising startup, founded in March 2011, that enables content sharing and offer delivery simply by tapping an NFC-enabled phone anywhere the Tapit logo can be found.

The company has now raised a seed funding round from Sydney Angels in record time – just 22 days from the pitch until the round was subscribed for. This is the fastest investment to date for Sydney Angels, the not-for-profit membership organization for angels which typically invests in Sydney-based startups.

NFC (near field communication), a short-range wireless technology, is often associated with mobile payments and mobile wallets these days, as a new way to enable purchases at point-of-sale. But that’s only one of the many possible use cases for the technology, which can also support things like sharing files and media between devices, advertising, ticketless transactions and more. It can even be used to perform actions like those found in NTT DOCOMO’s nifty “tap to follow” offering that lets two Twitter users follow each other simply by tapping phones.

In September, Wikets, Inc., announced it had raised $1.5 million from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, to build a new iPhone application that allows users to rate products and share those recommendations with friends. Today, the app has gone live in iTunes.

The resulting product is deceptively simple. You make a recommendation, optionally share it with friends via Facebook or Twitter, and then get rewarded in the form of points that can be later turned in for gift cards at online merchants.

At launch, Wikets lets you recommend products from its featured partners and from 60 major retailers, including iTunes (music and apps), Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Best Buy, The Home Depot, Wine.com, and others, as well as any place you can pull up on Yelp or Foursquare. You can also scan a product’s barcode, if you choose.

China's leading location-based social service is distributing NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchants in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong

Jiepang is to distribute NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchant partners in six cities in Greater China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong.

Jiepang is China's leading location-based social service. Its users currently check in and earn rewards via a GPS-enabled smartphone app which comes preloaded on all new HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and other smartphone brands in China, including all three of the new Nokia NFC smartphones announced earlier this week.

Mobile payments company Boku is letting French consumers pay for virtual goods and services via their handsets.

The company is partnering with French carriers Bouygues Telecom and SFR. The deal will reach 32 million French consumers.

“France is a top priority for us in international markets, and we decided we wanted to tap into it in 2010,” said Ron Hirson, cofounder/president of Boku, San Francisco.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 22pc of businesses polled in the sector were investing in social media marketing. This figure fell to 8.5pc in the first quarter of 2012 and to 6pc by the second quarter. Pearlfinders, a major business research company, spoke to more than 5,000 marketeers around the world about their budgets. “This represents an interesting about-turn. We saw investment in social media increase steadily throughout 2011, to reach the highest levels ever by the end of the year. However, as financial services brands embraced new methods for communicating with customers, they opened themselves up to criticism and negative sentiment,” said Anthony Cooper, Pearlfinders managing director.

putting spending on hold until they have developed a clearer picture of how social media can be harnessed to improve their brands.”

conversations directly linking to brands near impossible to control

iTnews is reporting this morning that the Bank of New Zealand has begun a Near Field Communications (NFC) payments trial, in partnership with Vodafone NZ and Visa.

The news comes quickly after the Commonwealth Bank announced its ‘Kaching’ iPhone app. Kaching will use a case over the phone to enable contactless payments, as well as allowing users to pay to mobile, Facebook and email.

CBA’s Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will present in Australia’s only dedicated NFC conference. To find out more about NFC in Australia and New Zealand, click here.

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

Quotes on the importance of strategy with social media marketing from some of the top social media experts and brands online including: Chris Brogan, Peter Kim, Joseph Jaffe, Jason Falls, Katie Payne, Debbie Weil, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, David Meernan Scott, Valeria Maltoni, Scott Monty and about 40 others.

It’s a debate that’s more common than you might think. Strategy or Tactics first when it comes to social media? Many companies approach their participation on the social web tentatively, picking a popular tool like Twitter, Facebook or for the more adventuresome, a blog. The exercise of setting up and populating a profile, friending others and seeing what happens is akin to the proverbial “throw spaghetti against wall to see if it sticks” school of marketing. There’s a time and place for tactics, for strategy and for experimentation. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to test certain channels without a broad corporate wide commitment to being more social. However, that effort should be guided by smart analysis of audience, tools and with the aid of goals and measurement methodology. Without a plan, social media efforts often fail, waste time, money and detract from the brand experience.Read more at www.toprankblog.com

social analytics platform Viralheat, we have new data points in which to judge the fallout of SXSW.

the one getting the most attention on Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks is clearly Foursquare (), which earned more than 38,000 mentions on social channels at its peak. In comparison, Gowalla () garnered less than 25% of that amount, peaking at 8,296 mentions.

Social media could transform the NHS and other public services in the same way that file-sharing changed the music industry, a conference has heard.Growing use of tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, offered an opportunity to reinvent services, delegates heard. “It’s happened to the music and travel industries and it’s going to happen to public services,” said Dr Paul Hodgkin, founder of the Patient Opinion site that organised the MyPublicServices conference. He said that conversations about people’s experiences with public services were going on all over the web and needed to be taken into account.“This is about turning things upside down so the thing that looks like a deficit, your experience, becomes the gift you have to give to other people.” “I’m not sure that the government can re-engineer itself from the inside out,” he said. “It’s going to take the demands of people to force it into shape.” Read more at news.bbc.co.uk

y’d from www.business-strategy-innovation.com

The new dimension of innovation is about having customer as an integral part of the system. Firms can no longer afford to stay separate from customers and still come up with great innovations. The success of social media websites (like Facebook) is frequently attributed to engaging customers in the creation of new innovations - also referred to as crowdsourcing.The topic of innovation is multi-dimensional, which no firm in the globe can afford to ignore today. Being innovative is necessary to stay competitive in the business. The new age of innovation has a lot to do with making the customer an integral part of the innovation system by engaging and involving them with the product or service that the firm is working on.So, next time you are set out to innovate something, ask yourself: ‘Am I involving my customers in the process?’Read more at www.business-strategy-innovation.com

Of course by SCAM I mean: Specific, Complementary, Achievable, and Measurable. They are important factors to consider when you are preparing any social media marketing campaign.

Just because every Fortune 500 company has a fan page on Facebook doesn’t mean that you should run out and create one too.

When I go to your website (or blog, or twitter page, or facebook page), what do you want me to do? What do you REALLY want me to do? Don’t answer that right away or glibly. What do you want me to do on your site? How do you want me to feed into your systems?This is what I want to give you: a few questions to consider, from the same side of the fence as your prospective customer/visitor/reader/member whatever. Remember, these questions are not from your side of the fence. They’re from the other side, the important side. Answer These Questions for Your AudienceWho do you want me to be? How will I know that I belong? What do you want to show/tell me? What do you want me to do?How will we keep this relationship going? How shall I talk of you to my friends?Read more at www.chrisbrogan.com

Take a moment and imagine a future where every object you own has a presence on the internet. Your car would have a Facebook status (“just hit 3,000 miles, need an oil change”), your shoes would appear on Google Maps, even your toothpaste would tweet (@shoppinglist you’ll need more of me soon).