Group items tagged

Whenever people think of near field communications, they think of mobile payments. Your phone becomes your wallet and spending money becomes as easy as tap, tap, tapping all day. Well, the era of your tap-able digital wallet is not here yet. It may never come. But that does not mean there are not some very interesting uses of NFC coming down the pipeline.

For instance, there was a Coca-Cola vending machine at ad:tech this week that was tied to Google Wallet. Tap, tap, tap away and take a Diet Coke Break. At Nokia World there as a gate that could be opened with a tap from your phone. A developer is working on NFC solutions to help his father who has Alzheimer's. NFC could be great as a monetary transfer solution, but there is so much more.

Groundswell To An NFC Enabled World

Location-based social game mechanics are not inherently transactional. That is where the company's newest product, LevelUp comes into play. Take merchant offers, location, game mechanics and make then transactional and you have an idea what LevelUp is trying to do in the mobile payments space.

LevelUp is the path and it dives deep into the fundamental nature of payments, merchants and how people interact with money.

How Does LevelUp Work?

American Express is going all in on the daily deals business, striking a deal with Facebook that is similar to the one it already has with Foursquare. Through a new Facebook app called “Link, Like, Love,” AmEx cardholders can link their cards to their Facebook accounts just like they can already link their cards to their Foursquare accounts. Once they do so they will get a dashboard of deals from brands such as Whole Foods, Dunkin’ Donuts, Virgin America, and Sports Authority. (These offers are different than Facebook Deals, which Facebook sources itself)

Unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, these AmEx deals don’t require anyone to pre-purchase anything or present any coupons to merchants. One of the biggest challenges for the daily deals industry is how to measure how many offers are actually redeemed at thousands of different participating businesses. But AmEx has an advantage here in that it is already a payment network that is set up and accepted in businesses large and small around the world. All people have to do is buy the deal item with their AmEx card and they will be credited the deal amount. The Facebook twist is that the deals you see are influenced by what you and your friends “like” on the Web using the Facebook like button.

Although many of the deals at launch are with national brands, AmEx is also leveraging its relationships with smaller local merchants. It is a launching a program aimed at them called Go Social which allows merchants to manage deals across both Facebook and Foursquare, with other social networks to be added in the future. Business owners will be able to create their own coupon-less deals in a self-serve manner that are triggered whenever someone with a linked account buys a deal item. Self-serve has been a challenge so far with local merchants, but AmEx can market to them through its existing channels.

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

i have a few complaints about the use of “augmented reality.” the first is primarily semantic. it seems (to me at least) like the term it implies some kind of (pre-digital?) “non-augmented” reality. this is more or less explicit when we refer to things like “augmented revolution” or “augmented conference.” it seems like the idea of augmented reality was introduced to make a point against a false binary (“digital dualism”) and i agree that this is important, both academically and in real life (see what i did there?). but i think the way we talk about augmented reality is sneaking a version of that binary back in. not the naive real v virtual but maybe something like real v “real+” and i think that is a mistake. and it is a strange mistake to read here, on a blog called “cyborgology” that proclaims (rightly i’m sure) that we have always been cyborgs. our friends from sst especially, i think, are sensitive to how reality has always been “augmented” if we are paying attention. so quoting sst hero latour:

If we wanted to project on a standard geographical map the connections established between a lecture hall and all the places that are acting in it at the same time, we would have to draw bushy arrows in order to include, for instance, the forest out of which the desk is coming, the management office in charge of classroom planning, the workshop that printed the schedule that has helped us find the room, the janitor that tends the place, and so on. And this would not be some idle exercise, since each of these faraway sites has, in some indispensable way, anticipated and preformatted this hall by transporting, through many different sorts of media, the mass of templates that have made it a suitable local—and that are still propping it up.* and he goes on for literally pages. he starts on p 200 (where the quote is from) and ends somewhere on p 203. then he picks it up again on p 206 with more. by 207 he is talking about the “plug-ins”, “patches” and “applets” that actors in a lecture need to make sense of what is happening. and cyborgs:

As we have witnessed so many times throughout this book, information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a way that was impossible before. Not because they subvert the old concrete ‘humane’ society, turning us into formal cyborgs or ‘post human’ ghosts, but for exactly the opposite reason: they make visible what was before only present virtually. In earlier times, competence was a rather mysterious affair that remained hard to trace; for this reason, you had to order it, so to speak, in bulk. As soon as competence can be counted in bauds and bytes along modems and routers, as soon as it can be peeled back layer after layer, it opens itself to fieldwork.

PayPal has been a powerhouse in online payments but it hasn’t really cracked the much bigger market for payments for goods in the real world. Now, the company is starting to show off how it can put all of its components and recent acquisitions together to form a broad tool for mobile payments.

PayPal hosted a partner event for retailers yesterday and began explaining how they’ll be able to implement its tools for in-store payments. The big reveal will happen next month at PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco, but the company showed a glimpse of how it’s marshaling its resources. It’s important for PayPal to step up with a compelling offering because the mobile payments market is getting crowded with options like Square, Google Wallet and upcoming services like Isis from the cellular carriers and digital wallets from credit card companies.

Scott Thompson, president of PayPal, said in a blog post the company is looking to be a one-stop shop for merchants to help them address every part of the shopping lifecycle. OK, that’s a bit of jargon, but it means PayPal is going to help push out targeted advertising, help with in-store discovery and improve transactions with a handful of options.

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.

people want work and have to act like they’ve got work to get it. And more often than not, people won’t settle for work that’s matched to their experience. They want the big names because what do we honour in our social media circles? Names. The reality is that if these scores of people spent as much time projecting as they did actually humbling themselves to take work at their level and do it, they wouldn’t have to project having work in order to get the work they so desperately need. Right now I know of dozens of people who need work, some famous, some not, who if they would just stretch their hand out and ask, without searching for the big brands, the

I had a friend who told me the truth when he couldn’t tell others. His name was Trey Pennington, and when we lost him this month (and there was more to his loss than most know), we became determined to help others who felt equally unable to get the help that they needed

I know that most self employed and company owners within our Like Minds community are on the edge of their finances. They are startups in tough times, and the consultants especially are struggling to get work. I venture that together we could help a whole lot of people get the work they need if they told the truth and could be open with one another.

As with all things Internet, the future of mobile payments is going to be fragmented, making the promise of a digital wallet on your phone a lot less exciting. Having a phone act as a credit card makes things faster, more convenient and might even lead to more bargains. But the way things are panning out, only people who meet very specific cell phone, bank, and credit card company criteria can join in on the fun. Just today, Verizon blocked Google Wallet from its phones, reports The Wall Street Journal's Amir Efrati and Anton Troianovski. So for those with multiple credit cards, or without a Citi Master Card, Google Wallet can't replace a wallet, giving it a major utility handicap.

As of right now, Google's mobile payment tech only works on Sprint phones with Citi Bank Master Cards. That applies to a very specific set of people. Of course, Google doesn't have the only digital wallet replacement out there. For everyone else, there's Verizon, who has teamed up with T-Mobile and  At&T to work on its version, Isis, which will begin trials next year, note Efrati and Troianovski. And Visa too is apparently in the works for its own mobile payments system, they add. We also can't forget third party apps like Square, Venmo and ZipPay, which allow users to pay others who have the app using stored credit card information. This almost works as a replacement for the wallet, and would theoretically work better than Google Wallet, if only every single place everywhere accepted Square payments -- but they don't. 

So we have two types of fragmentation happening in the mobile payments world. With these "wallet" payment systems, like Google Wallet and Visa's mystery service, the service is only as useful as having that single credit card. And then the system is fracturing on a retailer level. Even with Google Wallet, only stores with the compatible card reader accept it; same with the Square-like services. While the number of retailers accepting Square has grown, as this chart posted by The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal shows, it can't become a wallet replacement unless every single retailer has it. The same applies to Google Wallet: Not every retailer has the capabilities. Like we've seen with Netflix and streaming movies, the services are nice supplements to cable. But not yet a replacement because they all have somethings but no one has all things. The same can be applied to mobile payments. They all can be used with some credit cards and at some retailers, but we won't leave our wallets at home until we get a cord-cutting equivalent. For now, users either have to load a smorgasbord of mobile payment apps, or settle for the current half-hearted solutions. 

The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining.

Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?

Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.

It’s no secret that credit card companies are shelling out big bucks and aggressively forming partnerships and deals to start cashing in on the mobile and digital payments innovations currently taking place. American Express, which recently debuted its own digital payments product Serve, has been particularly aggressive on the partnerships front, striking recent deals with both Foursquare and Facebook. Mastercard has bet on NFC with a partnership with Google for Google Wallet and bought online payments gateway DataCash for $520 million last fall. And Visa has made a number of major moves in the mobile and digital payments space of late; including making an investment (and taking on an advisory role) in disruptive startup Square, buying virtual goods payments platform PlaySpan for $190 million, and acquiring mobile payments company Fundamo for $110 million. We sat down with Visa’s Global Head of Mobile Product Bill Gajda and the company’s Head of Global Product Strategy, Innovation and eCommerce Jennifer Schulz to discuss how the financial company is planning to compete in both mobile and digital payments.

In May, Visa announced its plans for the digital wallet. We’ll explain this initiative later in the post, but part of this platform would allow you to access your loyalty points, credit cards and more from your mobile phone at the point of sale. And the third pillar of Visa’s mobile strategy is incorporating value-added services like real-time alerts, contextual services, and offers at point of shopping based on where you are.

Gajda explains that Visa is licensing mobile payments applications PayWave for integration with the ISIS wallet and the company is actively looking for other ways to integrate with NFC into the company’s mobile payments structure.

For as long as Facebook has been running its Facebook Credits program—the virtual currency that users can redeem on games and other content peddled through Facebook’s network—it has been letting users top up those Credits using their mobile phones. It does this in partnership with companies like (reportedly) Boku and (definitely) Zong, the payments company bought by eBay’s PayPal last year. Users can also top up their Credits via PayPal and credit cards.

It’s not known how much, exactly, is purchased via the mobile channel today, but it is an example of how mobile is actually already driving significant revenue for Facebook. “Facebook Credits make a lot of money through mobile phones,” enough that Zong was “growing very fast last year” because of Facebook purchases, according to Frederic Court, a partner with Advent Venture Parnters, one of the VCs that backed Zong before the eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) buy.

This is because while sometimes the mobile payments were actually more expensive than a PayPal or credit card transaction, they are often a lot quicker to do, especially if you are in the middle of a game. And, as with other mobile-based payment options, they appeal to those who don’t have or want to enter card details.

Exclusive - Tinkercad, a startup that aims to introduce browser-based 3D printing CAD to the masses, has landed $1M in seed funding from True Ventures, Jaiku founder Jyri Engestrom, Delicious founder Joschua Schachter, Eghosa Omogui and Taher Haveliwala.

The company’s mission is to ‘reach and teach’ a wide audience on the use of CAD software and creating ‘fun and meaningful’ things like jewelry, toys, car parts and whatnot, using 3D printers.

Kai Backman, Tinkercad’s co-founder and CEO, explains that one only needs a browser and a couple of minutes to use its browser-based software and have a 3D project ready for printing.

Inviting customers back to their carts

Only three out of every 10 online shopping carts actually make it to checkout, according to email marketing vendor Listrak. That's 70% of carts lying abandoned in the virtual corridors of ecommerce. Listrak wants to improve those numbers. It's one of several vendors offering "shopping cart abandonment solutions" — essentially, programs to follow up with shoppers who've left the store and ask them, "Haven't you forgotten something?"

Retailers would love to close more of those sales: Listrak estimates $18 billion lost in sales to U.S. retailers every year. A Forrester study last May found that 89% of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Forrester's authors attributed that high rate to growing user sophistication: as shoppers become more experienced online, they are more likely to comparison shop even as they move toward checkout. Other industry observers offer a simpler explanation: shoppers are shocked at high shipping costs. A 2006 study by Goecart blamed comparison shopping, high shipping costs, and plain old running out of time as the leading causes of abandonment.

“it’s interesting to see how large a company that provides an actually useful service can get bigger than one who’s apparent key reasons for existing are for you to share embarrassing photos of yourself and tend a virtual farm. Skype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web with questionable tools that track your movement from site-to-site, or manipulate your profile because you click a “Like” button somewhere. Skype just exists. If you choose to use it, great, but if you don’t, they aren’t in your face about it.”

Some might say it’s like comparing apples and oranges as one is a social network, and one is not, but it’s still interesting to see Facebook is not the biggest thing out there despite what that company might like to have you thinkGigaOm provided some stats that Skype gave out at the recent eComm ConferenceSkype added 39 million registered users in the fourth quarter to end the year with a total of 560 millionSkype in 2009 accounted for 12 percent of the world’s international calling minutes, a 50 percent increase over 2008

36 percent of Skype-to-Skype calls as of the end of the fourth quarter included video — in other words, Skype is going to figure prominently in the video conferencing business, challenging more established players with its no-cost solutionlike Facebook, there are people with multiple accounts, and there are also spammers, but those accounts get shut down pretty fastSkype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web

With a veritable “Cambrian explosion” of low- and high-end Android devices in Asia, venture firm DCM recently made a big bet that there will be some winning startups in the next few years by launching a $100 million early-stage Android fund with Japan’s GREE and mobile operator KDDI.

“We all recognize that Android is going to really take off in China and Japan over the next 12 months and we wanted to make sure we intersected with the best and brightest whether it’s apps guys or people working with chips,” he said. Chao says he sees Android as the fourth wave in a series of shifts affecting the gaming industry in Asia over the last several years. While there aren’t any truly reliable statistics, Chao says there might be about 15 million Android devices shipped in China by the end of this year. Higher-end Android devices like Sony Ericsson’s Xperia line of phones are starting to find a foothold in Japan.

“All of the majors are jumping on the bandwagon and the Android smartphones tend to do really well in Japan,” he said. “They’ll have traditional Japanese phone functions like FeliCA, which is a local payment method, and the ability to play GREE games.”

Facebook Updates Open Graph, Lets You Share EVERYTHING You Do Steve Kovach | Sep. 22, 2011, 1:53 PM | 3,626 | 3 A A A   x Email Article From To Email Sent! You have successfully emailed the post. inShare30 See Also: Eight Fascinating People You'll See At IGNITION THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Microsoft Could Play Kingmaker In Potential Yahoo Sale Facebook Users Are About To Riot Over Massive

Facebook announced the latest addition to the social graph. Instead of "liking" objects, you can participate in events. That means watching movies, going on trips, reading a book, whatever

Everything shows up in the new ticker, the real-time update list in the upper right corner. Zuck says this will make it possible for people to develop social apps based on the acitivities people do. Starting with media: movies, music, news, books, etc.

Card.io, which was founded by Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher, has raised $1 million in seed funding.

Card.io is focused on solving a specific part of the mobile payments business — buying things with a credit card on the phone, whether it’s digital goods, like a song, or physical goods from a site like Amazon.

Rather than having to type in the credit card number, users just hold a credit card up to the phone’s camera, which automatically reads the card information and enters the appropriate data.

Zoosh is a new technology that brings NFC-like payments to any phone with a speaker — i.e. every smartphone on the market.

Using the almost-inaudible 20,000KHz range — which almost every cell phone speaker is capable of — Zoosh technology can then send data to a receiving microphone. The end point can either be a point of sale — a shop, a ticket machine — or it can be another mobile phone. Apparently the technology has been successfully used in noisy environments — and it’s also fairly safe to assume that a technology like Zoosh would be designed to incorporate as much redundancy and error checking as possible.

Narrate, the company behind Zoosh, envisions two main use cases for its ultrasonic payment system. The first is just like Google Wallet: for $30 — a third of the price of NFC hardware — Narrate says that points of sale can be upgraded to accept Zoosh payments.

The highest scoring “influencers” like to think they deliver widespread impact with their followings. Every single book I’ve read by a blogger on influence claims this. In actuality, that influence lies closer to home. When real researchers parse influence we get a different story than the blogger myth propagated by social scoring. Instead, we see that true influence comes from those who are closest to us in our on and offline social networks, our peers.

But generally, their writings serve as a credibility point for readers, just like Consumer Reports, and nothing more. Why? Because relationships — true meaningful interactions beyond social platitudes (Like, love, you rock, etc.) — don’t scale after a certain point.

By selecting our friends, we’re also choosing to be influenced by their ideas, beliefs and behavior systems