Group items tagged

The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, has renewed concerns about how digital life has led children off the playground and into the computer room… permanently. The study concludes that the average 10-year-old today is far weaker physically than his counterpart just a decade ago. His arm strength has fallen by 26%, he can do 27% less sit-ups, and he is less likely to be able to hold his weight hanging from a bar.

For adults, the negative health effects associated with an increasingly digital-based lifestyle have been well documented. Inactivity, a bent or bowed posture, and perpetual screen-staring are taking a toll on desk-bound employees, ranging from short-term memory problems (and possible links to early dementia) to increased heart-health and muscular complications. And just when you thought your office space was the epitome of a modern sanitary workhouse, consider that microbiologists have tended to find more harmful bacteria on a typical computer keyboard than on a toilet seat.

Once the customer has selected an account to both receive and make payments from, Commbank Kaching will enable them to pay anyone via MasterCard PayPass, an email address, phone number or Facebook friendship.

Depending on the format selected for payment, the transaction will either take place instantly, or generate a unique code for delivery to the recipient, allowing them to access their payment online at a convenient time.

Users wishing to activate the NFC functionality will need to use an iCarte cover - billed as an interim technology by the bank - which is available for purchase during the app installation process.

"Mobile and online social payment is the next step in transaction technology," says Lindberg.

Now, for the first time, Australian consumers will no longer have to rely on cash or cards to make payments to family, friends or even businesses.

“The point system has dramatically improved engagement + contribution on Moz. We’ve grown community content 200%+ in the past 24 months.”

Step 1: You need points.

But points are meaningless without a leader board.

Step 2: You need a leaderboard to get people’s competitive spirit out and allow them to compare and be compared against others.

Salesforce does the same with Nitro by gamifying real life. Sales guys get stats to see what they’re doing well, awards them with points and badges but it also lets them compare to others.

We can also use game mechanics to help people learn how to use our products – Richard mentions Ribbon Hero 2 where clippy teaches you how to use Microsoft Office products. Rather than having him jump up when it thinks you need help (as was the case back in the day) you have challenges to help clippy fix his CV, etc. Your userbase is having fun and you’re helping them learn about your product.

Encourage users to hand over data - it makes us smarter marketers.

Who does this? LinkedIn with the goals and “profile completeness” – SEOmoz does the same thing.

Badges?

Rich doesn’t know that Foursquare should work but the beauty of it is that does. Rich thinks this has to do with velocity and the fact that it makes quite boring stuff exciting and PR worthy – not knowing when a reward is coming and the fact that they come almost at random is what Rich feels makes this work.

If you have a crappy product it really doesn’t matter.

Virtual Currency/Goods

What could we do/take away from this?

Gamification for Good – IMOK, a checkin platform for kids. Connected just from one phone to the other and checking in lets the parent know they’re ok.

Reward with Status- top contributors in Webmaster forums will get flown out to Google and learn all sorts of things.

Create signups/sales with loss aversion

Help people drive their business

Generate Reviews- badge and point system for heavy users?

Increase signups

Reward for Gifting

Reward for Uplaoding Content

Generate links

Increase social shares

Motivate internally to do the same - get your inhouse team to answer FAQ type questions and reward them for their interaction and points.

Within the Sensei architecture, each sensor and actuator network is conceived as an 'island' that, through an interface middleware, can be connected to the overall system and can publish data independently of the technologies they are using or the type of information involved. An island could be a home, a bus station, a car or your own personal network of smart clothing and mobile devices. From a privacy and security perspective, each user is able to control which type of information they wish to share and with whom. 

'If we are going to deploy billions of wirelessly interconnected sensors and actuators, the impact in terms of energy consumption and carbon footprint could become very significant. It is thus very important to develop sensors and actuators able to scavenge energy from their environment and communicate with ultra-low power energy consumption,' Dr Hérault says. 

Efficient sensors, operating within the Sensei architecture and coupled with technology developed in a parallel EU-funded project 'Wireless sensor network testbeds' (Wisebed), are already in the process of making their real world debut. As part of the 'SmartSantander' initiative, a follow-up project to Sensei, 12,000 devices are being deployed in the northern Spanish city of Santander over the coming year. In a first implementation they will be used to monitor available parking places and inform drivers about where there is space available, helping to smooth the flow of traffic in the city and reduce pollution. 

In this project, sensor and actuator networks will be set up in Santander to provide smart street lighting, dimming the lights to save energy when there is no one on the street, for example, and turning them up if some kind of incident or increased activity is detected. In Aarhus, the main focus will be to collect data about the water and sewage infrastructure, shape the information and use it in an intelligent and autonomous way. In Berlin, partners are working on the development of 'intelligent waste baskets' in order to optimise waste management. The Trento partners, meanwhile, are focusing on the development of intelligent water management in order to improve the utilisation of water for both drinking and energy generation in mountain areas. In Birmingham, transport infrastructure and services, including trams, buses, roads, cycle paths and walkways, will be optimised leading to streamlined transitions between modes, time saving and greater efficiency across the board. 

"This is one of the largest deployments of NFC technology in the United States and shows the practical benefits this technology can deliver in terms of ease of use and convenience. There has been a lot of hype around NFC recently and PayByPhone is pleased to now put the technology in the field for real world applications," said Neil Podmore, VP of Business Development at PayByPhone. "We expect this to help kick start the more widespread adoption and understanding of the practical benefits of NFC in 2012."

The installation of mobile electronic payment systems is already catching the imagination of cities and towns around the world. With a proven role of providing parking authorities with efficient, easier-to-manage and cost effective solutions also comes real-time data to fine tune parking policies and provide parking guidance systems.

Analyst firm Juniper Research predicted that consumers around the world could generate as much as $50 billion in sales through NFC-based mobile payments by 2014. The potential for this nascent technology is huge, according to Jupiter.

PayByPhone, the largest provider of payment systems for parking across North America, has ongoing contracts in more than 60 cities, towns and universities including Miami; Dallas; Vancouver, BC; London, Paris and now San Francisco, the largest installation in the United States. Worldwide, the company handles more than 55,000 transactions per day. The company experienced rapid growth in FY 2011, logging an estimated 8 million transactions over the first six month period.

Prior to joining Citi, Chu spent six years at PayPal, where he directed the group's mobile product strategy and development.

At LivingSocial he will serve as SVP for the company's Merchant Solutions division.

Tim O'Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial, says: "Dickson brings a deep background in developing vital business services for merchants, and we believe he is the ideal leader for a new division within LivingSocial dedicated to the creation of the next generation of local merchant solutions."

Finextra verdict After witnessing Chu's robust performance at a BAI Banking Strategies panel in October - Citi rounds on Isis, urges other banks to join Google Wallet - it was clear that he wasn't cut out for a long-time job in banking. While the other career bankers on the panel hemmed and hawed over the more difficult issues, Chu was unafraid to speak out, often prefacing his comments with lines like "As a banker I shouldn't be saying this, but..." or "I'm still learning what we can and cannot say as a bank".

His departures is not only a loss for Citi, but for the industry as a whole, which needs more people who are prepared to stick their necks out and think the unthinkable as the financial services business is refashioned by new digital technologies and increasingly challenged by new entrants and more nimble start ups.

Auras can even be created for periodicals, meaning you can possibly see an animated weather forecast for your local paper, if someone creates such an Aura (or, you can just create it yourself).

The Aurasma App is free off the iTunes App Store, and is also available for iPhone and Android devices. It’s about the closest you’ll come to living in a Harry Potter-like world of animated newspapers and pictures moving in their frames, so give it a spin.

When asked why mobile payments seem to have caught on at Starbucks, Brotman said he thought convenience was a major factor. “It’s a faster, easier way to pay,” he said. “We not only developed the feature, but we also rolled out scanners in our locations.”

Add to that the fact that more than 6 million of those mobile transactions occurred during the past nine weeks — which is more than double the 3 million transactions the company saw in the first nine weeks post release — and the data shows a growing number of consumers are going wallet-free and opting instead to pay for their daily coffee runs with the Starbucks mobile app.

Starbucks mobile pay, a prominent feature of the company’s iPhone and Android applications, was released in the U.S. in January. Consumers can use the mobile app to load money on to a digital Starbucks Card and present a 2D barcode to pay-by-scan at the register at more than 9,000 locations. The program launched in Canada in November and will land in the U.K. in January 2012.

Of the $2.4 billion loaded on to Starbucks Cards in fiscal year 2011, $110 million was loaded onto cards via Starbucks mobile apps. The mobile figure equates to just under 5 percent of all reloads, but does highlight a shift in how customers engage with Starbucks cards. “Customers love the ease of [Starbucks card] reload and autoload on their apps,” Brotman said.

Mobile app users are also tapping the company’s e-gifting feature to send the electronic gift of Starbucks from their phones. E-gifting was added to the apps in June — it was previously available as a web-only feature — and now accounts for 10 percent of total e-gifting volume.

The company’s early successes on mobile have allowed it to experiment with apps like Starbucks Cup Magic, a one-off holiday application released in mid November that adds a layer of augmented reality to the in-store experience. An app user can point his device’s camera lens at a holiday character on Starbucks cups, coffee bags or in-store signage, and watch the character come to life. The app has been used in this capacity more than 450,000 times to date, Brotman said.

Starbucks also now has 3.6 million customers in its My Starbucks Rewards loyalty program, and 2 million members have reached the highest Gold level.

Altogether, the stats show that the company’s Starbucks Card, loyalty, payment, e-gifting and drink builder modules and programs are converging into a single, mobile experience that customers truly love, Brotman said.

Some highlights of the report include: Details on who’s using gamification across the enterprise The three pillars of enterprise gamification The six elements of sustainable engagement Sustainable behaviors to drive desired business outcomes The Seven Deadly Sins to Optimize Gamification Design The top gamified business processes for the enterprise (see Figure 1)

Designing your gamification models?  What enterprise business processes will you gamify first? next?   Ready to turbo charge your next generation customer experience?  Have you tested out iActionable, CrowdTwist or the 3B’s (i.e. Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball?  Ready to here how you can apply the white arts of the 7 Virtues to work?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Almost half of all mobile users purchase something via the device every three months, the study suggested, and more devices will be in circulation over the coming years.

Increasing numbers of online retailers are offering PayPal alongside credit cards, and eBay is to open a shop which encourages visitors to pay for goods with their mobile phones rather than at a conventional till.

Carl Scheible, Managing Director of PayPal UK, claimed, “We’ll see a huge change over the next few years in the way we shop and pay for things. By 2016, you’ll be able to leave your wallet at home and use your mobile as the 21st century digital wallet. 2016 will mark the real start of money’s digital switchover in the UK. We’re not saying cash will disappear entirely, but we’ll increasingly use our phones and other devices rather than our wallets to pay in-store as well as online.”

Scheible added that the “The lines between the online world and high street will soon disappear altogether. Children born today will become the UK’s first ‘cashless generation’. It will be completely natural for them to pay by mobile.”

PayPal said it expects to process more than $3.5 billion in mobile payment volume in 2011 – five times the volume it processed in 2010. By 2016, UK mobile retail sales will hit £2.5 billion, PayPal claims, as just over 14 million adults will regularly shop via their mobiles.

“We are looking to provide innovative services to our customers,” he said. “We have to be competitive and to be competitive you have to offer these services.

Banks that feature a rewards program will increasingly look to mobile to drive interactivity for the program and drive customers back into mobile banking apps.

For example, City Bank Texas will introduce a new service early next year that enables customers to quickly and easily temporarily turn off their debit card via the mobile app if they have lost it and then turn it back on just as easily. Currently, customers have to find and call the bank’s 800 number to accomplish this.

Mobile check capture Many of the big banks currently give customers the ability to deposit checks into their bank accounts using their mobile phones. However, next year more banks are likely to jump onboard and offer this service to meet consumer demand. Malauzai Software’s research shows that a lot of bank customers are investigating remote capture on their mobile phones even if they have not made a deposit yet. For those customers who are using the service, they typically deposit one to two items per month. “We see mobile check capture becoming really big in 2012 – we expect over half of our clients to adopt it next year,” said Robb Gaynor, chief product officer and co-founder of Malauzai Software Inc., Austin, TX.

“If we can move certain things to mobile so customers can do them on their own time via mobile, it’s a big advantage. It is a stickiness that gets them to stay with us.”

For example, City Bank Texas offers a rewards account that enables customers to earn higher interest rates and ATM fee refunds based on how much they use the bank’s various services. However, because there was no way for customers to keep track of how many transactions they made or how close they are to earning a reward, customers were frequently calling the call center for this information.

To address this, City Bank Texas put a real-time reward monitoring service in its mobile app. Now customers can use the app to find out how many more transactions they need to reach the next level of rewards.

Person-to-person payments Person-to-person payments have been around for several years but use has been limited because the transactions did not take place in real time. However, with Visa recently changing certain rules to enable two consumers to exchange debit card information in a secure way, person-to-person payments will now be able to show up in someone’s checking account within seconds. Visa is expected to roll out a solution for person-to-person payments in the first quarter of 2012. “With real time settlements, you will see a lot more customers use person-to-person payments,” Mr. Gaynor said. “We see this as the beginning of real mobile banking.”

Some banks may try to ease customers into mobile payments to get them comfortable with the idea. For example, City Bank Texas will give mobile customers next year a way to manage their prepaid, loyalty and gifts card via the mobile app.

“This is the first step to moving customers to mobile payments concepts,” City Bank Texas’ Mr. Simpson said. “New companies are sprouting up weekly to do mobile payments but the problem is that the debit card is not broken yet – it is still relatively easy to swipe that card.

Mobile marketing Mobile offers and deals from retailers and third-party services such as Groupon and others were a big phenomenon in 2011. Next year, banks will be looking to cash in on the opportunity here by providing local offers via their mobile banking apps. Bank customers will be able to opt-in to the service so they can receive offers via the mobile banking app when they walk past a local business making an offer and redeem the offer via the app as well. In the past, banks have been reluctant to allow other business to market to their customers but because of the personal nature of a mobile phone and the ability to serve offers based on a customer’s location, this is starting to change. “We see this as a huge opportunity for banks to start making money through the mobile channel as offers are redeemed,” Malauzai’s Mr. Gaynor said “We feel it can be pulled off in an unobtrusive, value-added way.”

Customized apps Currently, a lot of banks have one mobile app for all of their customers. However, next year there will be a growing number of customized banking apps that are tailored to the needs of a specific customer group. For example, regional banks could customize apps based on which local market a customer belongs to. Or, an app could be customized to the needs of college students, who often have a different set of services available to them. “The first generation of mobile apps lost some of the customization found in Internet banking but now we are seeing more customized mobile experiences,” Mr. Gaynor said. “This is an example of how mobile banking is getting smarter and banks are trying to deliver a better mobile experience,” he said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.