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Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Verizon begins testing new mobile payment solution - 0 views

  • Vantiv, a provider of mobile payment solutions, announced a new point-of-sale product on Friday that it will be rolling out in partnership with Verizon Wireless. The product, which is currently in field testing, includes custom tailored applications and an Android-based point-of-sale solution for accepting payments. The applications will be available in Verizon’s Private Application Store for Business. “Merchants and consumers are seeking greater mobility, control and timely access to data,” said Bill Weingart, Chief Product Officer of Vantiv. “We’ve teamed with Verizon to combine our payment and security expertise with Verizon’s ability to tailor development of mobile technologies to address those needs.” Verizon Wireless is also a member of ISIS, an initiative in which it has partnered with AT&T and T-Mobile to provide customers with NFC-based mobile payment options. Vantiv’s full press release follows after the break.
  • Vantiv Introduces Next Generation Mobile Payment Solution Teams with Verizon to Develop and Deliver More Flexibility and Opportunity for Merchants to Grow Their Businesses CINCINNATI, Jan. 31, 2012  — Vantiv, LLC (formerly Fifth Third Processing Solutions, LLC), a leading integrated payment processor, today announced that its customers will be the first to use an innovative point-of-sale device and system that will help merchants more effectively conduct business.
  • Vantiv is conducting a field trial of a new mobile payment solution developed in collaboration with Verizon. The new solution is architected on the Android operating system and features end-to-end, secure point-of-sale payment capabilities and business applications using Verizon’s Private Application Store for Business. As a result, Vantiv customers can tailor point-of-sale applications to meet their needs while taking advantage of remote device management.
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  • Whether service professionals are meeting with customers at home or sales associates are interacting with visitors at a retail location, the new Vantiv solution is part of Vantiv’s overall strategy to address customers’ growing mobile payment needs.
  • “Merchants and consumers are seeking greater mobility, control and timely access to data,” said Bill Weingart, Chief Product Officer, Vantiv. “We’ve teamed with Verizon to combine our payment and security expertise with Verizon’s ability to tailor development of mobile technologies to address those needs.”
  • The Vantiv mobile payment solution serves merchants who require mobility, convenience and security and addresses many business needs through a value-added suite of applications including accounting, payroll, workforce management, loyalty, inventory and customer relationship management (CRM). Having complete business control in a packaged, intuitive and flexible platform is a significant differentiator in the realm of tablets, and allows merchants to conduct data enriched customer interactions and transactions, anytime and anywhere.
  • JKrete Supply in Mason, Ohio is among the first Vantiv customers to participate in the field trial.
  • “This technology gives me more flexibility and makes it easier to serve my customers,” said Jay Rhoden, Owner, JKrete Supply. “Having the option of being mobile takes my business to a whole different level. I have everything I need at my fingertips. I can sell my products anywhere I go at any time. Vantiv tailored this product to meet my needs; it is clear they listened to customer demand.”
  • “Verizon, through our Private Application Store for Business, is leading the charge to work with innovative companies to develop industry-specific mobile solutions,” said Chandan Sharma, Vice President and Global Managing Director of Verizon’s financial services practice. “The ability to customize enterprise tablets and applications has been characterized as a potential ‘game changer,’ and we look forward to working with Vantiv and its customers to advance the playing field for mobile commerce.”
  • The capabilities were featured in a Tab Times article “The 10 most important tablet trends, products, and stories at CES 2012.”
  • For more information on Vantiv and to view more information on the Vantiv mobile payment solution visit us at www.vantiv.com .
Dan R.D.

Do we need defined hours of work any more? [02Sep11] - 0 views

  • Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less?
  • Flexible work is something that seems increasingly popular with programmers and other online workers, for reasons that Zach Holman of the software repository GitHub described in a recent post on the GitHub blog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman said that for most of the staff who work on the service, there are no defined working hours whatsoever — everyone is on their own schedule and they work whenever they need to in order to solve the problems that need to be solved. As he puts it:
  • Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved. Code is a creative endeavor… We want employees to be in the zone as often as possible. Mandating specific times they need to be in the office hurts the chances of that.
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  • Unstructured work is not for everyone That kind of approach, which management consultants like to call a “results-oriented workplace,” might be fine for a creative endeavor like programming or design, or even for businesses (like GigaOM’s) that involve brain-powered work such as writing.
  • There’s another risk Holman’s description of the new unstructured workplace brings up, something we’ve written about a lot at GigaOM, and that is the impact that this can have on the “work-life balance” of employees. Says Holman:
  • By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.
  • Knowledge workers of all kinds find themselves answering emails or responding to text messages at all hours of the day and night, working on weekends, and so on. And the increasing globalization of many industries has just accelerated this phenomenon, since some staffers or contract workers may be in completely different time zones.
  • One thing is clear, however: This phenomenon isn’t going away; if anything, it is increasing, as more work becomes knowledge work, and as more companies try to adapt to a cloud-based and global world (flexible hours and an increase in freelance or contract work also has real benefits for companies in terms of lower costs, some of which are pushed down to the individual worker, such as the cost of health benefits).
  • Companies like VMWare are trying to help figure out how the nature of work changes when it occurs in “the cloud” and the workforce moves toward what CEO Paul Maritz calls the “post-document era.” Instead of sitting at desks moving paper around, more people are working in ways that are difficult to define, that involve streams of information that don’t start or stop at specific times.
  • Netflix has what it calls an “unlimited vacation” policy, which allows workers to take time whenever they need it, provided they arrange to have their work completed when necessary. Social Media Group, a Toronto-based consulting firm, is another that has taken this approach — one that CEO Maggie Fox described in a recent blog post.
Dan R.D.

Conductive nanocoatings for textiles could lead to thin, flexible electronics [08Jun11] - 0 views

  • Not long ago, we reported on a prototype thin, flexible smartphone known as the Paperphone. While it isn't actually made out of paper, the success of a research project at North Carolina State University indicates that phones in the future could be. Scientists there have been able to deposit conductive nanocoatings onto textiles, meaning that items such as pieces of paper or clothing could ultimately be used as electronic devices.
  • smart fabrics.
  • "Research like this has potential health and monitoring applications since we could potentially create a uniform with cloth sensors embedded in the actual material that could track heart rate, body temperature, movement and more in real time," said Dr. Jesse Jur, NCSU assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science, and lead author of a paper on the technology. "To do this now, you would need to stick a bunch of wires throughout the fabric - which would make it bulky and uncomfortable."
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Peer 1 launches Zunicore, a new cloud service. - Cloud Computing News [07Nov11] - 0 views

  • Peer 1, the hosting provider, has joined the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines the elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those many would consider more akin to a Platform-as-a-Service.
  • For example, instead of a virtual machine, a customer buys a “resource pool” that they can customize to fit their needs, as opposed to buying a small, medium or large virtual machine.
  • The company also offers auto scaling, a feature more common in Platforms-as-a-Service such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure or Heroku. However, the service is pay-as-you-go and deployed on demand. It includes a dashboard that functions as a fuel gauge for compute resources that shows IT pros when to spin up additional resources.
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  • Peer 1 will operate Zunicore across three data centers in Fremont, Calif.; Toronto; and Portsmouth, England. The company also offers a service level agreement aimed to luring businesses to the cloud. It appears that Peer 1′s cloud will not compete for hard-core developers that tend to like the ability to scale on Amazon, no matter the drawbacks, but it might appeal to those customers wanting a little more flexibility than a PaaS might offer but don’t want to sweat the uncertainties that might come with a true IaaS.
Dan R.D.

Forget wallets. What else is NFC good for? - Tech News and Analysis [16Dec11] - 0 views

  • Near-field communication (NFC) has been trashed by critics, who say it adds no value to consumers or is a technology in search of a need. But as we’ve pointed out, NFC is just a technology that can applied in a lot of different ways, apart from the digital wallet framework through which many people understand it.
  • Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more interesting projects and applications being built that show how NFC will be deployed outside of mobile payment situations. This not only indicates how flexible the technology is but also could help propel the overall technology in adoption, as consumers become aware of NFC and learn to use it for a variety of reasons.
  • Right now, NFC is still below the radar for most U.S. consumers, and the slow roll out of Google Wallet or the pending launch of Isis next year are, by themselves, only going to accelerate NFC adoption by so much. But having a host of uses for the technology could open people’s eyes and push them past any usability or safety concerns.
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  • San Francisco announced earlier this week it was partnering with PayByPhone to enable 30,000 parking meters with NFC support. 
  • Intel and MasterCard have teamed up to enable future Intel-powered laptops to work with PayPass enabled MasterCard credit cards.
  • Personal contact and content sharing has become one of the emerging uses for NFC.
  • Access card maker HID Global announced a trial with Arizona State University in September in which students were provided NFC-enabled phones, enabling them to gain physical access to buildings.
  • The Museum of London and its sister institution, the Museum of London Docklands launched a project in August that allows visitors to tap their NFC-enabled phone at exhibits and gain more information, buy tickets to future exhibits or check in, follow or “like” the museums on social services.
  • T-Mobile partnered with Meridian Health and iMPak Health in October on a new SleepTrak sleep monitoring system, a wearable device with an NFC-equipped card.
  • Many of these things can be done through QR codes, bumping, Bluetooth or other methods, but NFC provides a very simple and often elegant way to get through the process.
  • We’re still very early in the NFC game and the phones are just now trickling out in the U.S. But there’s going to be a much bigger flow of NFC-equipped phones starting next year. It’ll be these broader applications that might convince users that the technology has merit.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In the Next Several Years - 0 views

  • 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?
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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%.
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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."
  • 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.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

PayPal Will Be Expanding Mobile Payments Test To 51 Bay Area Home Depot Stores | TechCr... - 0 views

  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • Basically, via the pilot customers (for now, this only applies to PayPal employees) are able to pay for items via their PayPal account at Home Depot’s point of sale systems. They can either use a pin code via their mobile phone or a specialized PayPal credit card that can be swiped, the payment amount will be deducted from their PayPal account.
  • The bigger vision of brick and mortar partnerships are set to include location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device and offering more payments flexibility to customers after they’ve checked out. Users will also have the ability to access realtime store inventory, receive in-store offers, and real-time location-based advertising from stores. PayPal will also help retailers use location and transaction data to improve the experience for consumers.
  • As PayPal’s Anuj Nayar told us recently,  the Home Depot test program was individually established between PayPal and the big-box retailer, but in the future, PayPal is partnering with point-of-sale software companies to help expand the in-store program to other brick and mortar retailers.
  • The assumption is that the results of the smaller test at Home Depot, which only launched a few weeks ago, must have been positive, so Home Depot is expanding the pilot program. We’re told that PayPal will be partnering with at least 20 other known top-tier retailers for the in-store payments test, which will be unveiled later this year.
  • When asked about the impact of PayPal point of sale integrations will have this year, Donahoe says the last year was about the planning process, this year will be getting the in-store integrations rolled out and next year will be about sale. “The goal is to get a product that will be expanded to every vertical around the world so we can build a business around the point of sale product.”
  • Donahoe said he tried actually the in-store integration this morning at a Home Depot in San Jose (he says he left his wallet and mobile phone in the car), and just was able to enter his mobile number and pin and was able to pay. The receipt was emailed to him.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Your mobile wallet - 0 views

  • We've been promised a wallet in our phones for years, but 2012 will be the year that it breaks through. The advent of this technology will mean more than just the convenience of a 'Jedi wave' of your phone to pay for coffee. From tracking your carbon footprint to smart posters, mobile payments are another piece of the infrastructure of the 'Internet of Things'.
  • NFC, or Near Field Communication, is a type of chip built into mobile phones to allow contactless payments. Although the NFC technology has been around for years, a major barrier to progress has been the lack of payment terminals.
  • The Transport for London Oystercard is a form of contactless payment, and you've probably seen contactless payment terminals in popular sandwich chains like Pret and EAT. The same terminals can be used for NFC mobile payments as these phones become available. The difference is that NFC will allow the phone to interact with the terminal using an app, making it much more flexible than the debit card or Oystercard systems.
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  • The real promise of NFC goes beyond convenient payment for coffee, because every swipe of your phone becomes an opportunity to exchange data and trigger an application. You can use NFC to record your payments, and to exchange other information. Discounts, entry tickets and special offers could all be offered using this technology. Y Combinator start-up Tagstand makes NFC-enabled stickers and 'smart posters' to use in ads, trade-stands and other locations. These stickers allow you to tap your mobile phone on anything and do anything from sharing contact information, to sharing music, starting a multiplayer game or providing a discount coupon. MIT Media Lab produced a short 'day in the life' video to illustrate more possibilities, including a carbon footprint app that would use data from your purchases and transport choices.
  • There are already a few phone handsets that support NFC, but many more will be launched in 2012. The Nexus S is the first mainstream handset that already has NFC built in, but Nokia, Blackberry and Samsung are launching NFC phones soon and the Apple rumour mill suggests that next year's iPhone will have mobile payments. (NFC world has an exhaustive list of handsets).
  • Ultimately, NFC is another example of a technology that will connect together the 'Internet of Things'. Along with RFID and GPS, it provides another way for us to use our phones as a window into a world of data from connected devices and printed objects, making a seamless link between our data and the increasingly data-driven world around us.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Forget wallets. What else is NFC good for? [16Dec11] - 0 views

  • Near-field communication (NFC) has been trashed by critics, who say it adds no value to consumers or is a technology in search of a need. But as we’ve pointed out, NFC is just a technology that can applied in a lot of different ways, apart from the digital wallet framework through which many people understand it.
  • Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more interesting projects and applications being built that show how NFC will be deployed outside of mobile payment situations. This not only indicates how flexible the technology is but also could help propel the overall technology in adoption, as consumers become aware of NFC and learn to use it for a variety of reasons.
  • Right now, NFC is still below the radar for most U.S. consumers, and the slow roll out of Google Wallet or the pending launch of Isis next year are, by themselves, only going to accelerate NFC adoption by so much. But having a host of uses for the technology could open people’s eyes and push them past any usability or safety concerns.
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  • San Francisco announced earlier this week it was partnering with PayByPhone to enable 30,000 parking meters with NFC support. People can tap their phone against a parking meter and call up a parking application that identifies the parking location and allows the driver to enter his or her desired parking time and complete the transaction. The actual payment happens inside the app with a stored credit card, but the technology provides a short cut to the transaction.
  • Intel and MasterCard have teamed up to enable future Intel-powered laptops to work with PayPass enabled MasterCard credit cards. Users will be able to enter in their payment credentials for online purchases by tapping their card on their computer instead of storing the information on their machine or entering it manually.
  • Personal contact and content sharing has become one of the emerging uses for NFC. RIM in October introduced BlackBerry Tag, which will enable users of NFC phones to exchange contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other multimedia content with a tap of their phones. Google has enabled a similar a solution with Android Beam, which will work on NFC-enabled phones. This can serve as a Bump-like way to pass back and forth information quickly.
  • Access card maker HID Global announced a trial with Arizona State University in September in which students were provided NFC-enabled phones, enabling them to gain physical access to buildings. All the participants were able to enter residence halls with their phones, and some were also allowed to open individual room doors using unique digital key and PINs.
  • The Museum of London and its sister institution, the Museum of London Docklands launched a project in August that allows visitors to tap their NFC-enabled phone at exhibits and gain more information, buy tickets to future exhibits or check in, follow or “like” the museums on social services. It’s part of Nokia’s NFC Hub effort to help businesses set up NFC campaigns.
  • T-Mobile partnered with Meridian Health and iMPak Health in October on a new SleepTrak sleep monitoring system, a wearable device with an NFC-equipped card. Users can upload their sleep data to an NFC-enabled Nokia astound with a tap.
  • Nokia and NFC Danmark launched NFC-enabled smart poster campaign in Telia stores in Denmark, enabling Nokia N9 users to download mobile apps by tapping on a poster. The two companies also introduced what Danmark called the world’s first NFC-enabled vending machine.
  • The winning application of the WIMA NFC USA conference in San Francisco earlier this month was a project called Think&Go, which is being tested by French supermarket chain Groupe Casino. Think&Go allows visually impaired and elderly shoppers to call up large text information on products by tapping NFC tags on store shelves.
  • These are just a sample of the projects and real applications leveraging NFC. As you can see, none of them are actual mobile wallets. The biggest thing they provide is a real short cut to information and actions that can happen without much work. Many of these things can be done through QR codes, bumping, Bluetooth or other methods, but NFC provides a very simple and often elegant way to get through the process.
  • Also, in some of these cases, what’s also nice is that since they aren’t trying to conduct sensitive transactions, they don’t need to access the secure element inside a phone. That could be a limiting factor in the roll out of NFC, because the owners of the secure element, often the carriers, don’t seem to be in a hurry to enable a lot of other NFC payments systems. But with a host of other non payment uses emerging, users won’t have to wait to find out if their digital wallet is enabled on their particular phone. There might be other ways they can experience the power of NFC first. That will help in just teaching people the practice of tapping for information, transactions and access.
  • We’re still very early in the NFC game and the phones are just now trickling out in the U.S. But there’s going to be a much bigger flow of NFC-equipped phones starting next year. It’ll be these broader applications that might convince users that the technology has merit.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

OPENWAYS ANNOUNCING: Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ in Cooperation with Nord... - 0 views

  • The best of mobile technologies are now combined to offer hoteliers the most advanced front desk bypass solution that is 100% deployable today, 100% future proof, 100% compatible with the major electronic locks and 0% dependent on Mobile Phone Operators/Carriers
  • Modern travelers are expecting self-service options to make their journey easier. Who did not dream to one day be able to arrive at the hotel and go straight to the room without having to go through the burden of the check-in process? Thanks to Mobile Key by OpenWays, guests can already choose to proceed straight to their room upon arrival and securely open their door with their cell phone. They are no longer forced to wait in line at the front desk – unless they want to.
  • 100% Deployable Today / 100% Future Proof / Truly Ubiquitous "Mobile Key works TODAY with ALL cell phones worldwide. With NFC (Near Field Communication) enabled cell phones gradually hitting the market in larger volumes during 2012 and 2013, we are pleased to announce Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™," said Pascal Metivier, Founder and CEO of OpenWays. "Mobile Key DUAL© combines the established and highly ubiquitous CAC™ (Crypto Acoustic Credential) technology with both RFID and NFC technologies so we can offer the only 'fully deployable today' while 'fully future proof' solution to our customers. Thanks to Mobile Key DUAL©, hoteliers can offer today a mobile-based front desk bypass solution to all their guests while being sure that the investment they are making is made for the long run."
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  • In 2010, Nordic Choice Hotels was first to try mobile NFC key technology in hotels: It was an important learning experience that helped identifying needed improvements and changes
  • “When Nordic Choice Hotels conducted an NFC key pilot in 2010 at our Clarion Hotel Stockholm property we learned that mobile keys are the future for hospitality. We also learned of some limitations to the technology and it was decided not to expand the trial,” said Svein Krakk, Nordic Choice Hotels CIO. “Indeed the pilot we ran was very educative and helped us identify several areas that needed to be improved in order to make NFC viable within a hospitality environment.
  • “The No. 1 priority for Nordic Choice Hotels is to provide freedom of choice for our guests," Krakk said. "Freedom to choose the phone you prefer, to use any mobile operator, to use mobile keys or ordinary keys independently or in combination. We started looking for alternative technologies addressing some of the shortcomings of the pilot. First the user interface needed to be improved. With the latest generation of NFC phones it is not very easy for the end user to figure out how to position the phone vis à vis the lock reader. We also wanted a solution that bypassed the SWP protocol which is designed to make the solution mobile operator and mobile carrier dependant. The pilot was limited to one mobile operator. More than 1,500 mobile operators / carriers exist around the world and our guests could come from anywhere, so offering a solution that works only with one or a few carriers would be pointless.”
  • Hotelier’s independency and cost control are key "Equally important, the SWP standard drives the cost and complexity if implementation towards areas that hoteliers do not like," he said. "It implies a long list of fees to pay to the mobile phone carriers and it places our brands and hotels in a state of dependency that is not acceptable. In addition, we felt that using a solution that would make us dependant on one lock vendor only was not a good idea."
  • A good mobile front desk bypass solution must be guest centric, supported by a strong business case and must be deployable for real "In 2010, we also tested the Mobile Key solution by OpenWays with CAC™ technology," Krakk said. "We appreciated that it was compatible with all cell phones worldwide, that it was easy to use and that it was mobile carrier independent. Equally important, the pilots conducted were great successes both from a technology and a guest satisfaction stand point. As a result, we decided to deploy Mobile Key by OpenWays in several hotels and we are continuing as we speak. "We also decided to challenge OpenWays to think about the next steps and to include NFC as part of their strategy," he added. "Obviously, we wanted an NFC solution that would be free of the identified shortfalls but also would allow us to eventually offer more services to our guests in the years to come. We do realize that it will take years before NFC phones reach any form of critical mass, nevertheless we want to be sure to deploy and invest in the most future-proof platform while our dependency on both mobile carriers and lock vendors would be minimal. As a result, OpenWays proposed to us Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™. We were immediately seduced with the open architecture of the OpenWays solution. We were thrilled with the idea to offer a DUAL platform allowing us to leverage all mobiles today with the CAC™ technology while building an infrastructure for when NFC will be reaching critical mass. We are now looking forward to go live with several hotels this year."
  • Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ is very unique: The solution is protected by 26 patent filings and patents; It allows OpenWays' customers to deploy globally without having to ever worry about knowing if their guests have the right phone or the right carrier; And, it works with all phones and all carriers. "Pure NFC™ allows adding NFC features while still being fully carrier and lock provider independent," Metivier said. "It is highly secured and operates on trusted networks. It leverages modern cryptology combined with highly secured OTP (One Time Password) principles. Implementation costs are significantly lower than with the sole SWP protocol and significant engineering efforts were invested in making the user interface intuitive. This was achieved with the design of very specific RFID antennas designed to provide high reading performances with the next generation of NFC handsets. Other areas of focus were ergonomics and human factors. With NFC, what appears to be a good idea -- because you simply have to wave your phone to a lock to open it -- can sometime be a very bad idea when you truly analyse user behaviours and expectations."
  • A solution compatible for both new build and existing hotel locks Like Mobile Key by OpenWays, Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ can be applied to existing hotel locks and/or major renovations. New locks that are factory made with the OpenWays module built in can be provided by the major electronic lock vendors.
  • A solution that works with ALL cell phones and ALL Smartphones With Mobile Key by OpenWays, all smartphones can receive an app and leverage any data network (2G, 3G, 4G and even the hotel WiFi network) to use Mobile Key. The same is true for hotel staff who use our “Mobile key for Master Keys” that offers much more security (real time master key management) and flexibility than traditional plastic cards.
  • A “green” solution that contributes to reduced waste Mobile Key is green. The more guests use their mobile phones as room keys, the less plastic key cards will end up spoiling the environment. Today everyone is concerned about the planet, and hoteliers want to allow their guests to contribute to waste reduction programs. Because Mobile Key by OpenWays is only made with data, it is the cleanest room key a hotelier can offer. "With Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™, we are making a giant step forward and confirming our global leadership in key management via Mobile phone," Metivier said. "Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ is a solution that is going to be 'new for long time' and will be also applied to many other market segments outside the hospitality industry, such as residential, commercial buildings, university campuses, and more. "We would like to thank our partners Nordic Choice Hotels, Nokia, NXP, KABA SAFLOK and Ariane systems that are making these first 2012 deployments possible," he said.
  • About OpenWays | OpenWays is a global solution provider of mobile-based access-management and security solutions. With offices in Chicago, Las Vegas, Seoul and in Europe, OpenWays provides technology solutions allowing for the secure issuance and delivery of access rights and keys process via any cell phone operating on any network. The OpenWays solution is truly unique as it is built on the concept of credential dematerialization. The OpenWays mobile room key solution works on ALL the 6 billion cell phones in service in the world today. For more information, please contact Barb Worcester at +1 440 930-5770 or email barbw@prproconsulting.com. More information can be found by visiting www.OpenWays.com.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Daring Fireball: Apps Are the New Channels [28Oct11] - 0 views

  • Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.
  • Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.
  • Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.
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  • Collect them in a Newsstand-like folder on iPhones and iPads, and make them the “home screen” of a future Apple TV.
  • Better for advertisers, too. Apps allow for fairly exact viewership statistics. There’d be no need for Nielsen-style statistical polling if exact analytics are available.
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Spread Your Wings- Get More Retweet Action Today - 0 views

  • Twitter offers a great way to get your information spread far and wide: the retweet.
  • 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.
  • 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
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Don't have a Plan? Why Not Having a Plan Can Be the Best Plan of All [28Apr10] - 0 views

  • Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg’s strategy in 2004.And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn’t stop them from starting. It wasn’t until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company’s money-making platform. Last week, in Don’t Get Distracted by Your Plan, I wrote about the importance of staying flexible, about the dangers of sticking too closely to your plan. But what if you have no plan? Read more at blogs.hbr.org
  •  
    Add this to the strategy behind successful use of social media
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Badgeville & Janrain: Turning Serious Games Players Into Loyal Brand Advocates [29Apr11] - 0 views

  • “After carefully weighing our options for building a social rewards solution in-house versus integrating with a best in class technology provider, we selected Badgeville, a recognized leader in the space, for their comprehensive, lightweight and flexible platform,” said Larry Drebes, CEO, Janrain.
  • Badgeville jumped onto the scene when they won “Audience Choice” at TechCrunch last fall. Within two quarters they’ve captured 50 clients for their “white label” social rewards, loyalty and analytics platform.
  • Badgeville helps web publishers of all sizes increase audience engagement and unlock new monetization opportunities. The Palo Alto– based company provides platform that makes it easy for web publishers, to increase user loyalty and engagement. 
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  • Badgeville aspires to democratize the Foursquare experience beyond retail by enabling publishers and other segments to build their own game mechanics and incentives platforms.
  • Publishers who use Badgeville can set up an account, offer defined rewards and track visitor behavior with realtime analytics. Badgeville works for any company that has a community on its site: anyone from gaming to education, to retail and more can use the service to reward people for checking into a site, taking tests or simply browsing through products. Virtually anything can correspond to a badge reward.
  • “It’s not about pageviews anymore.” Publishers can award badges for the behavior of their choice, such as leaving a comment or becoming a fan of the site on Facebook. Readers can also compare their results to friends’ on social networks like Facebook.”
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Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality [10Mar11] - 0 views

  • In the tradition of much post-Modern theorizing, “augmented reality” offers a new conceptual paradigm, seeking to implode/queer/do category work on the real/virtual dichotomy and make room for a more flexible understanding of social media that allows for recursivity between these two concepts.  A person embedded in augmented reality is a cyborg in the Harawaysian sense.  For this reason, the editors of this blog have proposed – somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that our research is best understood as “cyborgology.”  In augmented reality, the culture is hyper-literally super-imposed on the material.  Our bodies and all other objects in the world become canvases for the digital and its rapid circulation of signs and symbols.  In Bauman’s term, everything becomes a conduit of Liquid (post-)Modernity.  However, the symbolic order expressed through the digital does not emerge out of nothing; it is a reproduction or extension of what has always existed.  The digital and material are always in circulation and neither can be abstracted from the new order of social relations.  That is to say, society is neither online or offline; it is augmented.  Thus, augmented reality and the cyborgs who populate it are now the proper objects of sociological inquiry.
  • three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.
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    Re-frames the inquiry into virtual,mediated, augmented reality (vs. "physical world" reality) ... a liquid post-modern view
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The top 10 reasons your mobile learning strategy will fail [13Apr11] - 0 views

  • While the focus of this post is not specifically Apple or the iPad, it’s almost impossible to talk about successful mobile strategies without recognizing that the iPad has created a transitional moment for the Learning & Development world. The reasons why have been the subject of countless blog posts, but I think DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, in this video from TechCrunch, says it best:
  • “[The iPad] it’s the first device that actually is a reflection of me – or us. It’s so revolutionary that it’s no longer about me adapting myself to somebody else’s set of programmings or the way in which a device is going to engage. It is the reverse. It is as though I’m looking in a mirror.”
  • While it took the iPad to make learner-controlled content a reality, this level of flexibility is now the gold standard for delivery to any device, be it tablets, smart phones or any number of performance support devices.
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  • For learning organizations, the clear challenge to meet this gold standard in their frenzied rush to mLearning will be to NOT repeat the mistakes that were made in the move from classroom to on-line training.
  • here are 10 repeat offenders
  • 1. Don’t assess how mobile fits in your blended learning strategy.
  • mobile workers are not committed to any one mobile device, leveraging notebooks as much as they do smartphones and more than tablets.
  • Keep mLearning content development tactical.
  • still early days for mobile learning
  • 9. Don’t write granular content.
  • For mobile learning it’s not about rapid authoring, it’s about rapid reuse
  • 4. Forget about your classroom materials
  • 5. Build your mobile content from scratch.
  • 6. Be proprietary:
  • 7. Believe that learners really want PowerPoint on their mobile.
  • 8. Forego XML – again. If you don’t believe that open, platform-neutral XML is critical for mobile learning, I’m not going to try to convince you. Instead, take a look at this TED Talk clip from Richard Baruaniuk, the founder of Connextions.
  • Use rapid authoring tools.
  • Richard Baruaniuk
  • Richard Baruaniuk
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Can Cloud Computing Save The American Economy? [11Jun11] - 0 views

  • picture a world where software platforms are available online and easily customizable. Picture a world where compute power is generated off site, available in quantities when and where you need it. And picture a world where information is safely stored, efficiently managed and accessible, when and where you need it. These are cloud infrastructures. The economies of scale, flexibility and efficiency they offer will not only save organizations massive amounts of capital and maintenance costs but emancipate them to apply and use information as never before. An unbelievable opportunity to raise productivity while creating unprecedented opportunities for businesses and workers.
  • Now picture a health-care system where a doctor has medical records at his fingertips, can see x-rays with the click of a mouse, is able to learn and apply the latest diagnostic and surgical technique from anywhere in the world. Think of the efficiencies in hospital supply chains, the delivery of prescription drugs, the processing of billing and insurance claims, reductions in fraud, and the application of best practices for cost controls. The capacity for improvement is endless.  As a matter of fact, these innovations are already being applied in isolated pockets. But for us to seize the opportunity before us it’s imperative that we move from isolated centers of excellence to connected systems of excellence. Pick any industry and systemic improvements like these are available.
  • A new age of innovation and technology advancement is within our grasp – an opportunity for job creation, greater productivity and economic growth. The time for cloud computing is now. We need government and industry to accelerate broad scale adoption of cloud infrastructures so we can reap the rewards of a true information based economy.
Paul Simbeck-Hampson

Home | THOUGHTStream | Fulcrum Management Solutions - 0 views

  • It is the only collaboration application that allows you to engage groups of people with the simplicity of email, the workflow of survey tools and the confidence, flexibility and documentation of a professionally facilitated process.
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