Skip to main content

Home/ Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)/ Group items tagged payments

Rss Feed Group items tagged

D'coda Dcoda

Exploitation and Amazon's Mechanical Turk [26May11] - 0 views

  • Since 2007, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $7.15 an hour, yet workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—many of whom live in the US—make an average of $2 (according to the estimates of Mechanical Turk researcher Alex Quinn).  As illustrated in the above image, Amazon, itself, encourages businesses (at least implicitly) to pay workers (or “turkers” as they are called) less-than-minimum wages.  Moreover, to even qualify for these low-paying tasks called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), turkers are often expected to complete unpaid training sessions that can last for up to an hour.  Also, because turkers receive micro-payments for each task and because the time to completion for each task is rationalized to the second, turkers receive no pay during normal periods of rest during the workday.
  • Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing platform that allow anyone to recruit laborers for short online tasks, which cannot be effectively completed by computers.  For examples, turkers might compile contact information for various businesses, sort through images and tag offensive ones, or participate in university research experiments.  Because of the piecemeal and spatially-disembedded nature of the work, it is virtually unregulated. Can we simply dismiss this subversion of labor laws—as some commentators have—on the grounds that “$2 an hour is a decent wage in India?”  Even if we are angered by this exploitation of turkers, is it even possible to regulate an international platform of this sort?
  •  
    Crowdsourcing problem
Dan R.D.

How Mobile Can Bridge The Digital And Physical Worlds In New Ways [01Jun11] - 0 views

  • appending real-world purchase information to its treasure trove of online behavioral data will vastly increase the value of customers’ profiles and increase the rates Google (NSDQ: GOOG) can charge its advertisers. It will be a way for Google to increase its local presence. NFC (near-field communications) is too often equated simply with payments, but Google understands that NFC tags have broad application (working like Quick Response [QR] and other 2D barcodes do today). Google can help retailers use NFC tags for in-store promotions and check-ins, augmenting the understanding of customer behavior for ad targeting.
  • Numerous players—from Internet pure players to operators and retailers—are embracing the mobile/social/local combo. Unifying the online and offline worlds via mobile will create long-term market disruption. There are plenty of new opportunities opening up if you center your approach around the notion of context, trying to invent new product and services that will tie together places, brands, and consumers. Think about mobile augmented reality. At the end of the day, it is all about facilitating the discovery and understanding of information around you.
D'coda Dcoda

A New Approach To Reducing Spam: Go After Credit Processors [20May11] - 0 views

  • "A team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, and they think found a 'choke point' [PDF] that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies. If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, 'you'd cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,' said one of the scientists." Frequent Slashdot contributor (and author of a book on Digital Cash) Peter Wayner wonders if "the way to get a business shut down is to send out a couple billion spam messages in its name."
D'coda Dcoda

How Will Android Play Out in Asia? A Conversation With A-Fund's David Chao [21May11] - 0 views

  • 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.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But both the Chinese and Japanese markets have evolved in fundamentally different ways and have somewhat self-contained ecosystems. In China, there are naturally the large social networking services like QQ or Renren (another DCM investment that went public earlier this month) where developers can publish their games. There is also an emerging group of web MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) that aren’t really dependent on any platform.
  • Japan’s market in contrast has taken an unusual trajectory with companies like DeNA and GREE, Chao says. Often misunderstood in the West, these companies have a blended model where they create their own games in addition to operating a platform for third-party developers. That’s different from the U.S. market, where the biggest social networking sites here have tried to stay neutral and don’t tend to create their own IP.
Dan R.D.

Are developers (and us users!) ready for the 'Internet of Things'..? - CWDN - 0 views

  • It's the so-called 'Internet of Things' right? The point at which your milk carton has an RFID tag on it to let your electronically enabled fridge know that it has gone off. Your fridge (which is Internet-connected of course) then automatically orders your online shopping account to send you new milk and your auto-payment system takes that out of your bank account. All you have to do is pick your milk up at the door, open the carton and pour it into your PG Tips -- nothing more. But are we ready for all this? Are developers ready for this? Are web developers ready for this? Are manufacturers ready for this? Are the world's major IT vendors ready for this? Answer: umm, probably not.
Dan R.D.

PayPal & eBay Get Friendly With Facebook [29Sep11] - 0 views

  • Auction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.
  • Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. S
  • Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.
Dan R.D.

ePayments Week: The rise of location-triggered offers [25Aug11] - 0 views

  • Geofencing: As long as you're here ... One of the promises of mobile advertising — at least from the merchant's perspective — has been the potential to advertise to customers when they're near your store and can act immediately (and impulsively) on your offer. To make these location-triggered offers, merchants need to delineate a "geofence" around their retail outlets — a radius or polygonal area in which customers who have opted into a deal program can be notified on their mobiles that an offer is available nearby. Indeed, Groupon is working on adding such location-based deals to its daily offers, according to a letter sent from its general counsel David Schellhase to two U.S. Representatives who were asking about Groupon's privacy policies.
  • By some measures, 90% of all texts are opened within three minutes of receiving them.
  • Goodman said that location-triggered delivery is highly effective with "exceedingly high" response rates: between 11% and 60% of users are likely to visit a store when pinged with an offer if they're nearby, and up to 46% are likely to make a purchase.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • With that much data, there's a back-end business for the company in aggregating and anonymizing the information so it can analyze it and feed data back to merchants on which offers are most effective and when. Indeed, the company's self-service tool with which clients can manage their offers online also includes some data tools for this type of analysis.
Dan R.D.

Social network NFC tag scans increasing 22% per month [13Sep11] - 0 views

  • NFC tag scans for connection sharing, social networking and marketing are increasing at a rate of 22 per cent per month, according to new research carried out by Kimtag. Kimtag, a UK based connection hub, analysed the visits to 10,000 selected Kimtag connection pages over a six month period ending in August 2011. The company compared QR Code, NFC tag, direct and referral hits from visitors around the world. 
  • During the research, Kimtag regarded a successful visit as a user reaching and fully downloading a Kimtag connection page via an address assigned specifically for NFC tags and then subsequently visiting a connection such as a social network or website.  The research revealed that the number NFC tag scans grew by an average 22 per cent month on month. Over the whole six month period, NFC scans increased by over 170 per cent.
  • Phil Coote, Kimtag’s CEO, commented, "The research illustrates that while a lot of the current focus within the NFC industry has been on payment systems, the use of NFC to empower the new ‘internet of things’ is likely to play an equally important role in it’s growth." 
Dan R.D.

Windows 8 will support NFC | Ubergizmo [14Sep11] - 0 views

  • NFC still isn’t too common in the US, but it looks like it’s going to be a standard feature for all future mobile devices. Manufacturers have been slowly implementing NFC functionality into their phones and tablets recently, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 will ship with native support for NFC. For those not in the know, NFC (Near Field Communications) is a method of communication that two mobile devices can use to communicate with each other just by being in each other’s presence. It can be used for a whole range of functions such as making payments, to collecting information. Today at the BUILD conference, Microsoft also demonstrated the usage of NFC on its Windows 8 tablet. Using an NFC-enabled business card, the demonstrator could simply collect the website address from it by pointing the corner of the tablet towards the card and tapping the notification. It sure beats launching a QR code scanner or manually typing it in. Check out the video after the break:
Jan Wyllie

Four mega trends shaping the future of commerce [18Sep11] - 0 views

  • In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.
  • Mobile
  • by 2020 and each consumer will have approximately seven devices connected to the Internet.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Local
  • By leveraging inventory sharing and local mapping, buyers can now access real-time inventory data while on the go
  • merging of mobile and local is also leading to the creation of entirely new business models and opportunities
  • Social
  • share it on her social network of choice and get a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ within minutes
  • The explosion of consumer interest in social networks has spawned the so-called social commerce opportunity.
  • the group gifting apps and the ‘social shopping mall’ concept that allows sellers to offer their products directly to hundreds of millions of Facebook users.
  • Digital
  • Digital has changed everything—including how we use and think about currency. People now have the ability to bump phones together to pay off a friendly wager, order and pay for a meal
  • The Future
  • , the pace of innovation will determine which businesses will go boom or bust.
Dan R.D.

Amex, Foursquare take mobile wallet scheme national [23Jun11] - 0 views

  • Program doesn't require coupons or NFC chips; discounts appear on Amex statements after a purchase
  • Computerworld - American Express Thursday announced the national rollout of mobile payment system that pairs its Amex credit card with a user's smartphone-based Foursquare profile to offer discounts for retail purchases. The discounts, initially available from retailers H&M and Sports Authority, are credited to a user's Amex card within three to five days of a purchase, the company said, adding that no coupons, smartphone codes or NFC smartphone chips are needed. Foursquare, a mobile platform that uses GPS technology, currently has more than 10 million subscribers who use the service as a social network to share their location with friends. The joint effort requires that cardholders register with Amex to link their card to their Foursquare profile.
« First ‹ Previous 461 - 471 of 471
Showing 20 items per page