Building on its success with laptops designed for developing countries, the One Laptop Per Child project is set to unveil a long-awaited tablet at CES next week. Here's what you get for $100.
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The $100 OLPC Tablet Is Really Real and Debuting at CES - 0 views
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The OLPC has been kicking around the idea of a super-affordable tablet for over a year. Originally known as the XO-3, but now dubbed the XO 3.0, the tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024x768 screen with some models also offering a PixelQi 3qi display that mimics E-paper. A Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM reside in the tablet's ruggedized shell and will run either Linux Sugar or Android OS.
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What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 2 of 2 | Business901 - 0 views
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In the Business901 podcast, What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 1 of 2 we looked at a more strategic view. In today's podcast, we looked at the more tactical practices and how they related not only to a political campaign but to a typical marketing campaign. Derek A. Pillie has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana’s Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions. After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports. Related Information: Preview of Political Campaign Marketing Podcast Political Campaigning – Strategy Update What political campaigns can teach business Lean Six Sigma for Government
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Transaction Systems Architects reports third quarter results - 0 views
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Transaction Systems Architects, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSAI), a leading global provider of enterprise e-payments and e-commerce software, announced today that revenue for the third quarter ended June 30, 2004 was $72.5 million, a decrease of two percent over the same quarter last year.
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Net income was $18.7 million, or $.49 per diluted share, which includes a net one-time tax benefit of $10.6 million, or $.28 per diluted share. This net one-time tax benefit is attributed primarily to certain tax restructurings and associated tax elections related to the Company's MessagingDirect Ltd. subsidiaries. Net income of $18.7 million, or $.49 per diluted share, compares to a net loss of $1.9 million, or a net loss of $.05 per diluted share, which included a goodwill impairment charge of $9.3 million, for the third quarter of fiscal 2003.
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For the third quarter of fiscal 2004, revenues were comprised of software license fees of $37.5 million, maintenance fees of $23.1 million and services fees of $11.9 million. The Company's recurring revenue was $45.5 million, or 63 percent of revenue, and non-recurring revenue was $27.0 million, or 37 percent of revenue. Recurring revenue consisted of monthly license fees of $20.2 million, maintenance fees of $23.1 million and facilities management fees of $2.2 million.
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Operating income was $13.0 million, with an operating margin of 17.9 percent, compared to operating income of $4.7 million, with an operating margin of 6.3 percent, in the third quarter of fiscal 2003. Operating cash flow was $23.1 million with a cash balance of $158.9 million, compared to operating cash flow of $12.1 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2003, an increase of 91 percent.
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For the nine months ended June 30, 2004, revenue totaled $223.1 million, compared to $205.5 million for the same nine-month period in fiscal 2003, an increase of 9 percent. Operating income for the nine months ended June 30, 2004 was $42.5 million compared to $23.4 million, which included a goodwill impairment charge of $9.3 million, for the same period last year, an increase of 82 percent. Operating margin was 19.1 percent for the first nine months of fiscal 2004, compared to an operating margin of 11.4 percent for the same period last year. Operating cash flow was $44.7 million for the first nine months of fiscal 2004, compared to $26.1 million for the same period last year, an increase of 71 percent. Net income was $36.7 million, or $.97 per diluted share, compared to $5.2 million, or $.15 per diluted share, an increase of 604 percent for the same nine-month period in fiscal 2003.
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During the quarter, the Company added 13 new customers while maintaining a worldwide presence of 76 countries. ACI Worldwide, the Company's largest business unit, added seven new customers during the quarter. Solutions licensed to these customers included BASE24®, BASE24-es™, WINPAY24™, and ACI Proactive Risk Manager™. ACI Worldwide also licensed capacity upgrades to 13 customers and licensed seven new applications to existing customers during the quarter.
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Insession Technologies, the Company's e-infrastructure business unit, added six new customers and licensed 12 new applications to existing customers during the quarter. Solutions licensed to new and existing customers include GoldenGate™, WorkPoint®, VersaTEST™, WebGate, SafeTGate, ICE™, Automated Operator™ and AutoDBA™.
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IntraNet, the Company's international payments and message processing solutions provider, added one new Money Transfer System™ customer. IntraNet also licensed one capacity upgrade and entered into 17 services contracts with existing customers during the quarter.
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The Company completed the third quarter of fiscal 2004 with $232.8 million in backlog. Included in backlog are all software license fees, maintenance fees and services specified in executed contracts to the extent that the Company believes that recognition of the related revenue will occur within the next twelve months. Recurring backlog includes all monthly license fees, maintenance fees and facilities management fees and amounted to $173.6 million. Non-recurring backlog includes other software license fees and services and amounted to $59.2 million.
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"We are pleased with the quarter's and year-to-date financial results," said Gregory D. Derkacht, President and CEO. "We continue to make progress on our tax-planning initiatives and other projects, and we look forward to building on our worldwide leadership position in the financial services sector with our proven software solutions."
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The Company has revised its revenue estimate for fiscal 2004 from a range of $282 to $292 million to a range of $291 to $296 million. The Company has also revised its EPS estimate from $.74 to $.83 to $1.10 to $1.17, which includes the $.28 net one-time tax benefit.
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Irancell demonstrates NFC payments, ticketing - Telecompaper - 0 views
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Iranian mobile operator MTN-Irancell teamed up with technology provider Etick Pars Intelligent Technologies Development and Bank Pasargad to demonstrate a number of NFC services such as payments and ticketing designed for the Iranian market, writes online publication NFCWorld.com citing Etick. Etick and Irancell will test a system that enables the recharge of prepaid accounts on NFC mobile wallets by either transferring money from bank accounts or making a cash deposit at a contactless point-of-sale terminal, Etick project manager Bahram Ehsandoust told NFC World. If required, funds may also be transferred back from mobile wallets to bank accounts. Using their NFC mobile wallet, end-users will be able to pay for retail purchases, for bus tickets in the cities of Mashhad and Ahwaz, where Etick runs the current smart card-based public transportation ticketing system, and for purchases from vending machines. At the same time, customer loyalty applications have been developed. Both NFC phones using a SIM as a secure element as well as Gemalto's Upteq N-Flex NFC device support the tested technology.
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PayPal unveils NFC Android-to-Android payments - Tech News and Analysis - 0 views
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PayPal today unveiled a new peer-to-peer payment functionality that allows Android users to pay each other by tapping two near field communication (NFC)-enabled devices together. The feature, which follows an earlier contactless PayPal payment tool using Bump Technologies, shows how PayPal is gearing up for NFC as part of its larger push on mobile payments.
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The payments work through a PayPal widget that allows a user to request or send money. A user enters the transaction information and then taps their phone up against another phone also equipped with the same app. After the phones buzz together, the recipient can decide to send or receive money by entering a PIN number.
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PayPal’s new mobile payment service will only work currently in the U.S. with the Samsung Nexus S from Sprint and T-Mobile but will expand to other Android phones that include NFC functionality in the future. The transactions utilize an encrypted token and don’t access the secure element inside the NFC chip, where payment credentials reside. It appears this is set up for just peer-t0-peer transfers, which is still a big part of PayPal’s mobile payments business.
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he company said it is now on pace to do $3 billion in mobile payments this year though much of that is person-to-person transfers using the PayPal app, which don’t yield much revenue for PayPal. Users do not have to pay a transaction fee when payments pull from bank accounts or an existing PayPal balance.
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In many ways, this is similar to personal transfers PayPal has previously enabled through its mobile app using Bump Technologies. Users are able to send money back and forth by bumping their phones together, a solution that doesn’t rely on NFC. It’s unclear how much of that may have happened through bump payments, so I don’t know how significant person-to-person NFC payments will be. It’s nice to be able to make a payment to someone by just touching phones but, again, it’s not like many PayPal users don’t have that ability now.
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Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile, however, said the NFC solution has fewer steps than bump payments and can be activated even when only one person has launched their widget. Bump payments require both people to have their PayPal mobile app open. He said PayPal turned to NFC because it simplifies P2P payments.
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“What I’m looking for is what is simplest and easiest for customers and NFC is the simplest way to request money,” he said.
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The bigger opportunity is in enabling real-world payments as retail and local merchants, something PayPal is still set to unveil later this year. That will be a much bigger deal because it will signal how PayPal will counter moves by Google and its NFC payments initiative, as well as other challengers like Square and the carrier consortium, Isis project. Samuel declined to comment on how PayPal will use NFC specifically at point of sale but he said the company takes every opportunity to learn from its products.
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PayPal needs to figure out how to tap that market for offline purchases, which is much bigger than than pure online transactions where it’s excelled. So it’s nice that PayPal has enabled some P2P NFC payments, and it’s showing that it’s getting up to speed on NFC. But we’re still waiting to see the real fireworks.
UK: Museum Goers Tap Their Phones for Further Information | NFC Times - Near Field Comm... - 0 views
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Tinkercad Raises $1 Million, Aims To Popularize 3D Printing | TechCrunch [08Nov11] - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“We use game-like quests to teach what we call ‘design literacy’, understanding the design of physical things. By lowering the barrier of entry, our users have been able to create and print a wide variety of awesome items”, he adds.
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Tinkercad is free, and encourages sharing designs under a creative commons license. Once users create designs with the software, which seems pretty easy to use based on my rudimentary testing, they can order designs directly from printing services like Shapeways and i.Materialise or download STL files to use other printing services or personal 3D printers like Makerbot’s Thing-O-Matic.
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Branson's Next Mobile Act: An Investment In Mobile Payments Startup Square | paidConten... - 0 views
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Richard Branson is no stranger to investing in mobile media: among his more notable moves have been establishing Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) years ago, and more recently moving into iPad publishing with Project magazine. Today comes news of his latest foray into the wireless world: an investment in the mobile payments startup Square.
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Square raised $100 million at the end of June in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the time, that valued the company at $1 billion.
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Square built a business initially on an iPhone-based mobile payments service that is now avaialbe for both iOS and Android devices. It provides a square-shaped dongle to merchants, who can plug the device into a phone to make instant card transactions. Some 800,000 merchants in the U.S. are now using the dongles, and there are around $2 billion in payments processed annually through the platform. At the standard 2.75 percent commission that Square charges merchants, that works out to annuals revenues of $55 million from those transactions going to Square.
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Last week, the company upgraded its payment app, Card Case, which now uses geofencing technology built into smartphones to let a user make purchases without even presenting the device. About 20,000 merchants have signed up to work with the Card Case app to date.
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American Express Launches $100M Fund To Invest In Digital Commerce Startups | TechCrunch - 0 views
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Recently, American Express has been pushing its own internal digital commerce initiatives including the company’s digital wallet, Serve. 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 also announced a number of recent partnerships in the payments space include Foursquare, Facebook and even Zynga for personalized deals. But today, the financial company is reaching beyond its own internal payments projects to launch a $100 million fund to invest in startups and companies in the digital commerce space.
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The digital commerce initiative will make investments in a number of areas involving the digital commerce experience, including loyalty and rewards, mobile and online payment management, fee-based services, security and fraud detection and data analysis.
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“The payments industry is undergoing a fundamental change as the very nature of commerce is redefined,” he explains. “This fund is designed to encourage innovation in the payments space.”
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AmEx has previously invested in a number of technology companies such as Clickable, Rearden Commerce, and Payfone but this is the first formalized fund established by the company.
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Online Video Ad Budgets Expected To Rise Sharply In 2012 | TechCrunch [08Nov11] - 0 views
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Here’s some good news for web video publishers and producers. Online video advertising budgets are expected to jump sharply in 2012. Brand advertisers who purchased online video ads this year are projected to spend 47 percent more next year. These numbers were released this morning in the second annual “Video State of the Industry Survey” by Adap.tv and Digiday.
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For advertisers that didn’t purchase any video ads so far this year, 84% say they will include digital video in their campaigns in Q4 2011 or 2012.
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Advertisers say they are most likely to shift spending away from display and print ads to fund the increased online video spending.
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The report, which surveyed nearly 600 advertisers, publishers, and video technology providers, says rates for interactive video ads are up an average of 19 percent over last year.
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Some other key findings: Brand engagement is the top online video campaign objective. Sharing video via social networks is an important return-on-investment metric for buyers. Rich media overlays, pre-rolls, and content integration are the favorite ad formats. Page-roll, expanding video banners, and post-rolls are the least favorite. Video ad spending on the iPad is up 18%, the highest among all devices. Average CPM for Premium content, broadcast content online: $21-$30 Average CPM for Mid-Tier, professionally produced content: $11-$20 Average CPM for User Generated Content: $0 – $5
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New 5 Billion Page Web Index with Page Rank Now Available for Free from Common Crawl Fo... - 0 views
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A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.
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The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.
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The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."
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The organization was formed three years ago, just now started talking about itself publicly and believes that free access to all this information could lead to "a new wave of innovation, education and research."
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Open Web Advocate James Walker agrees: "An openly accessible archive of the web - that's not owned and controlled by Google - levels the playing field pretty significantly for research and innovation."
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Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile Invest $100M in Google Wallet Competitor [REPORT] [29Aug11] - 0 views
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Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile are planning to invest more than $100 million to take on Google with Isis, the companies’ mobile payment project, according to a report.
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Isis, which the three carriers announced last November, is a mobile payment system that uses near-field communication. The three companies hope that it will be a viable competitor to Google Wallet, a NFC solution from the search engine giant that is rolling out in the market this year.
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According to Bloomberg, the three carriers have earmarked $100 million for the venture. Previously, no funding had been announced.
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In addition to enabling mobile payments, Isis would also let consumers redeem coupons at the point of sale. Isis has built partnerships with the top credit card firms — Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express — to make that possible. The service is expected to roll out sometime in 2012.
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Meanwhile, Google unveiled Google Wallet in May. A range of merchants, including CVS, Petco and 7-Eleven now accept Google Wallet for payment.
Behavioral Economics Applied - Gamification - Digital Influence Mapping Project [29Aug11] - 0 views
IBM unveils brain-like cognitive computer - News - Windows for Devices [18Aug11] - 0 views
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ROI for Social Technologies? In a Word, Squishy | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com [18Nov11] - 0 views
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a survey administered by Jive Software that found both executives and knowledge workers believe social software will become a necessary part of doing business — even though the return on investment for this kind of software is still pretty squishy.
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Improving customer loyalty and service levels and driving increased revenue or sales were among the top reasons for using social software mentioned by survey respondents.
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they shouldn't become so focused on attaining a hard ROI that they miss opportunities to use social to solve business problems.
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Morgan noted that while none of the participating organizations were able to offer a projected ROI, all agreed that enterprise collaboration technologies solved business problems, and that doing so was a good enough reason to make the investment.
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report titled "Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications." According to the survey, which was sponsored by a group of 20 companies that sell social software, just 12 percent of organizations must make a financial business case for social business investments, down from 20 percent in 2010's survey.
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27 percent said social applications were considered part of the infrastructure, in much the same way as email or teleconferencing, up from 12 percent last year.
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In my interview with AIIM President John Mancini about the survey, he told me social technologies were becoming "the digital dial tone for organizations." He said:You wouldn’t have to do an ROI analysis for your email system. These types of systems are going to be adopted in some way, shape or form by most organizations. They decide, “We need this capability. It should be a platform. It’s going to be a core infrastructure.” Then they figure out how much they want to spend. You don’t go through the kind of elaborate analysis you do for other systems, including content management systems, which AIIM does a lot of.
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Like Dwolla, SCVNGR is Building Local Mobile Payments Groundswell With LevelUp [24Nov11] - 0 views
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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.
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LevelUp is the path and it dives deep into the fundamental nature of payments, merchants and how people interact with money.
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Levelup is a mobile payments system at its core. It currently has 100,000 users across four cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco) with 600 merchants signed up.
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The basic payment structure is that LevelUp provides the merchants with an Android smartphone with a QR code reader and consumers with the LevelUp app that has a personalized QR code that effectively acts as the interface to their wallet
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Users tie their debit/credit cards to the QR code in LevelUp's app. The security behind that is what could be considered a triple-blind token system. No actual payment information is being stored on the device (unlike the Google Wallet, for instance) and there are three steps from the phone to the bank to obfuscate where the payment is actually coming from.
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Then there are the deals and game mechanics. When merchants sign up, they are prompted to give buyers a credit.
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The more times that people pay with LevelUp, the more opportunities for credit to be accumulated (hence, the notion of leveling up to a new offer).
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About 45% of users return to pay full price at the merchant and users on average use LevelUp about twice per week. The location system comes in by seeing on a map in the app what merchants close to you are using the service and what kind of deals they have.
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"With LevelUp being transactional, we wanted to make it as fundamentally simple as humanely possible," Priebatsch said. "Frankly you should never have to do anything other than just pay with it and good things should happen to you and that should make you want to keep using it."
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LevelUp has a certain type of groundswell that other local mobile payments options do not. In that way, LevelUp's closest kindred spirit is more likely to be Dwolla than it is something like Square or Google Wallet
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There has been talk of SCVNGR being acquired but it is more likely that the company will eventually make partnerships with other ground-swell mobile payments companies like Dwolla.
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What LevelUp and Dwolla have done is created a local ecosystem of merchants willing to use mobile payments in their communities. This is the bottom-up approach and, as of yet, is proving to be as effective than the top-down approach taken by companies like Google and PayPal.
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What are the pain points for mobile payments? For the consumer, it is having the app and the ability to tie it to a payments process. LevelUp cuts down on the pain points by having the ability to tie the wallet to a debit/credit card through its triple-blind token system and using QR codes.
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According to Priebatsch, QR codes are not necessary to the process. Any interface (like NFC) will do but the QR code is working for now and LevelUp can work with any device that can project a black and white image
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This is where Priebatsch starts to get deep into the nature of payments and the notion that money is nothing but a form of information that transfers from one point to another. Priebatsch's grand plan, that translates well to a five to 10 years down the road for the company, is to bring the payments process down to "interchange zero" where the cost of moving that information from Point A to Point B is next to nothing.
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People will eventually make the flow of money more and more efficient, and the cost of transferring information, or money as information, will eventually converge to zero. This concept is something that we describe as "interchange zero". And as money flows frictionless-ly, all sorts of great things happen around that. You get to pay less at the store because the business does not have to pay interchange on top of their prices.
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The really fascinating thing with that, is that a new monetization model needs to be found for the payments industry because somebody needs to make the $50 billion dollars a year to actually support the whole thing. And I believe, and I have a game mechanics background, that the way that that money is going to be replaced, as the idea of me paying you to just move money back and forth goes away, the way that people are going to make money on payments is taking the information inherent in payments and applying a series of game mechanics.
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To create a series of actions which get consumers to spend more and come back more often. And this help the business make more money off of each transaction. So the payment, as a utility, will be frictionless, and the money will flow to the company, enterprise, person, organization who can add the most value to the transaction."
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shared by Dan R.D. on 29 Apr 10
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Heightened Connectivity - US Teens on the Mobile Web [27Apr10] - 0 views
openintelligence.amplify.com/...eens-on-the-mobile-web-27apr10
mobile web opportunities Socialmedia trends
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The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s “Teens and Mobile Phones” report indicated that black teens were more than twice as likely as whites to go online on their mobile phones, at 44% versus 21%. Hispanic teens were also relatively active on the mobile Web.In addition, teens living in households with annual income under $30,000 used the mobile Internet at almost twice the rate of more affluent groups. They were notably less likely to have access through a home computer. Pew reported that, overall, 21% of teens who had no traditional PC access to the Internet went online via mobile phones.See more at www.emarketer.com
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shared by D'coda Dcoda on 25 Apr 10
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Know the Flow - Socializing Content - 0 views
knowthenetwork.com/...w-the-flow-socializing-content
socializing content applications social media software
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If you take the time to create good content, take the time to share it well. There is no magic formula, only thoughtfulness + tools. Know the Flow is my approach to social media data flow. Over the next week I’ll be sharing some of my theory and tips that I touched on in a recent #SoSocial presentation. Consider this the starter pack. Tools & Theory for social media content distribution
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Networked Blogs App – This is the best method for publishing an RSS feed to your Facebook profile or page. Easy setup and clean integration. Selective Twitter App – Allows you to update your facebook status by adding #fb to the end of a tweet.
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Twitter Hootsuite – Full featured twitter client, that cross posts to Linkedin & Facebook, also allows scheduled updates and RSS integration Twitter Tools Wordpress Plugin – This is THE twitter wordpress plugin. Autotweet new blog posts, twitter status sidebar widget all in one. Reader2Twitter – Tweet any items you share from Google Reader [ Example] Favorite Tweets – Tweet any tweets you mark as favorite [ Example]
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Even More… Recommended Reading Wordpress Plugin – Create blog posts from Google Reader shared items. Good customization and easy setup. [Example] Linkedin Twitter Integration – Update your Linkedin status by adding #in to the end of a tweet Su.pr – URL shortener that allows you to update Facebook & Twitter simultaneously and scheduled updates
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Power Apps Yahoo Pipes – Advanced data manipulation and output. Not a beginner tool but very powerful. [Example] Friendfeed – Easy method to autotweet any inbound content stream
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Cosy social networks 'are stifling innovation' - 0 views
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Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature.today’s software developers work in social networks in which everyone is closely linked to everyone else. “The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking holdTo restore the kind of aggressive innovation needed to build the next-generation internet will require re-engineering of the social networks of software developers themselvesThis could be doneif funding agencies ensured that research projects were carried out by many small, competing groups over longer periods.To enable innovation it may be necessary to reduce the number of social ties Read more at www.newscientist.com