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Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Like Dwolla, SCVNGR is Building Local Mobile Payments Groundswell With LevelUp [24Nov11] - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ilding_local_mobile_paymen.php

3BT_NFC mobile payments

shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 25 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • 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?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Then there are the deals and game mechanics. When merchants sign up, they are prompted to give buyers a credit.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • "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."
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Here is the philosophy, according to Priebatsch:
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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."
D'coda Dcoda

Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality [10Mar11] - 0 views

thesocietypages.org/...mediated-and-augmented-reality

4AR

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 26 May 11 - No Cached
  • In the tradition of much post-Modern theorizing, “augmented reality” offers a new conceptual paradigm, seeking to implode/queer/do category work on the real/virtual dichotomy and make room for a more flexible understanding of social media that allows for recursivity between these two concepts.  A person embedded in augmented reality is a cyborg in the Harawaysian sense.  For this reason, the editors of this blog have proposed – somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that our research is best understood as “cyborgology.”  In augmented reality, the culture is hyper-literally super-imposed on the material.  Our bodies and all other objects in the world become canvases for the digital and its rapid circulation of signs and symbols.  In Bauman’s term, everything becomes a conduit of Liquid (post-)Modernity.  However, the symbolic order expressed through the digital does not emerge out of nothing; it is a reproduction or extension of what has always existed.  The digital and material are always in circulation and neither can be abstracted from the new order of social relations.  That is to say, society is neither online or offline; it is augmented.  Thus, augmented reality and the cyborgs who populate it are now the proper objects of sociological inquiry.
  • three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.
  • D'coda Dcoda on 26 May 11
     
    Re-frames the inquiry into virtual,mediated, augmented reality (vs. "physical world" reality) ... a liquid post-modern view
Jan Wyllie

Social friending - William Deresiewicz on the meaning of friendship [18Jun10] - 0 views

aminotes.tumblr.com/...z-on-the-meaning-of-friendship

applications practice spirit trending risks

shared by Jan Wyllie on 19 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?
  • Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it.
  • The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won. In a world ordered by relations of kin and kingdom, its elective affinities were exceptional, even subversive, cutting across established lines of allegiance.
  • Friendship was a high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of character—rooted in virtue,
  • Christian thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be turned to God.
  • The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Truth and virtue, again,
  • We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free.
  • Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories. (…)
  • The culture of group friendship reached its apogee in the 1960s. Two of the counterculture’s most salient and ideologically charged social forms were the commune—a community of friends in self-imagined retreat from a heartlessly corporatized society—and the rock’n’roll “band” (not “group” or “combo”), its name evoking Shakespeare’s “band of brothers” and Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, its great exemplar the Beatles.
  • Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls.
  • And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have “friends,” just as we belong to “communities.” Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a “sense” of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.
  • The more people we know, the lonelier we get.
  • But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one’s emotional generosity, that one’s moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third.
  • So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture.
  • in ancient times
  • No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Increasing Brand Awareness with NFC Technology and Social Media | Social Media Today [2... - 0 views

socialmediatoday.com/...fc-technology-and-social-media

shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • It conjectured the use of NFC (Near Field Communication) and how it could benefit brands, their awareness and message all through social media.
  • The hypothesis that brands can utilise NFC technology within their stores, which may further enhance their brand message with brand awareness, along with social media tie-ins with NFC technology should be taken seriously.
  • There’s already an associated cost with print labels, which uniquely identify a product, so the respective costs associated with reproducing the same product with an NFC tag should be negligible, right?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A tag is a mechanism from which information can be wirelessly shared; in the same way a QR code can be read by a scanner (NFC reader). 
  • In some stores there will be a combination of tags and tag readers – the Smartphone will contain a tag/reader combination, as it is capable of sharing information, so that a store can retrieve your name, contact information and so on (with your permission) and likewise you can read information from a tag
  • At the backend of the NFC application, there may be several other applications supported by a web-portal or, in fact, a link through to a social media platform – ‘Likes’ a ‘retweet’; ‘+1’ and so on.  Of course, adoption will be slow at first and there will also be the early adopters which, in turn, will fuel the greater purchasing community. 
  • The brand tie-ins are potentially large.
  • With social media alone, brands can (and should) develop a dialogue with their consumers, which could well be further compounded by NFC supporting an ecosystem where consumers can begin to resurrect that loyalty spirit. 
  • NFC has the potential of creating a lively and dynamic market community sharing experiences and purchases with the wider community all enjoyed through social media.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Gamification - Richard Baxter at Distilled's SearchLove - State of Search [25Oct11] - 0 views

www.stateofsearch.com/u-richard-baxter-at-searchlove

shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Get Glue:
  • In their first three months, 1 million users, 100 million data points and shipped out thousands and thousands of stickers. Amazing, but how on earth are they making profit? Because it’s an advertising platform and collecting information on demographics, popularity, etc. and providing the entertainment industry with amazing data – sold.
  • SEOmoz
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • “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.
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