Group items tagged

Of those interested in game challenges tied to products, 27 percent said they would be likely to try out a challenge sponsored by a large corporate brand, and 64 percent said they would try it if sent by a friend or family member.

“Leaders are beginning to understand the enormous opportunities that games hold for businesses, brands and people," says Saatchi S co-founder and CEO Judah Schiller. Games, challenges and the notion of weaving fun and play into the fabric of society is tantamount to a renaissance."

He added, Well-designed games have the potential to create dynamic, rich and deeply enjoyable experiences that can foster innovation, reinforce positive behavior and increase engagement."

Noting that malignant brain tumours represent "a life-ending diagnosis", he adds: "We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation." He fears that "unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps", the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

A first step toward this type of control is a transistor that can send pulses of proton current. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a basic type of transistor that includes a gate, a drain and a source terminal for the current. The UW prototype is the first such device to use protons.

Because their device’s proton current can be switched on and off, it can act as its own kind of electronic current, according to Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. The transistor itself is “a twentieth the width of a human hair,” or about 5 microns wide. It is made of a compound, chitosan, found in both crab shells and squid pen (the structure inside a squid’s body that muscles attach to).

The first applications of this research will come some time “in the next decade or so,” and will be aimed at direct sensing of cells in a lab, researchers say

But further out they could be implanted directly in living organisms to monitor or control bodily processes.

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

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

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

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

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

The second half of the NFC conundrum is that there are a lot of hands reaching for the supposed pile of money that NFC payments will enable. Look at Google's announcement of the Wallet product. Or the ISIS partnership between Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Google is partnering with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (the NFC partner), Hypercom, Ingenico and NXP (another NFC partner). All of these large companies are going to want a slice of the pie. Where does that leave the retailers? You know, the ones that are actually trying to make money with good and services? Sadly, on the outside of the circle. The carriers are the biggest culprits, wanting to take as much as 50% of transaction revenue because it is "going over their pipes." The financial services companies will be happy taking their normal rates in the 1.75% to 3% range as long as there is a promise that more people will pay electronically (read: sans cash). Between retailers, partners and infrastructure, NFC has years to go before it will be viable for all parties involved.

What will happen in this time frame? Think about the so-called "4G" technology WiMax. The technology is already becoming antiquated with LTE and all the major carriers are working on the next version after that. Sprint is keeping a hybrid of WiMax and LTE going forward but overall it is a tech that died before it even matured. NFC may be the same. What if there are massive leaps in quantum teleportation in the next several years? Does NFC become the WiMax of the payment world?

Maturation Of Direct Carrier Billing The "I do not see myself buying a fridge with this" line comes mostly from the direct carrier folks. Direct carrier billing is the perfect area for micro-payments and payments that stem from ease of use. Think of parking. If you could pay for your parking on the street with your phone, would that convenience be worth an extra couple of cents on the dollar to you? The direct to carrier ecosystem has evolved to the point where it actually makes sense for offline and online use. Zong (acquired by eBay for PayPal integration), PaymentOne and Boku are the leaders in this space. PaymentOne has processed $5 billion in mobile payments and lets users pay with their phone numbers, validating transactions via text. Zong allows that capability as well. Payment One's "One Care" features, announced last week at CTIA, makes direct to carrier billing safe and secure. Transparency is important in mobile commerce because consumers do not really trust their phones to handle their money quite yet. The most important aspect of direct to carrier billing now is that the revenue mechanism has been flipped. It used to be that merchants only got some 40% or less of payments while the carriers and partners took the rest. Even with high margin transactions, that is unacceptable. Today, direct to carrier billing provides the merchants with more than 80% of the revenue, sometimes nearly 95%.

The Dongle World: Smartphones As Credit Card Readers Square, VeriSign and Intuit are pushing hard into the dongle department. Jumio is doing the same thing, just without the dongle. There is not much to be said about the dongle world that we have not already touched on at ReadWriteWeb outside of the notion that it is bringing easy credit card readers to the mobile masses.

The dongle competitors are not worried about what is happening in the ecosytem because it does not really touch their core business. For instance, PayPal does not see NFC or dongles infringing on its business in any way, shape or form. As Laura Chambers, PayPal's head of mobile, said in a recent interview, "we are not worried about much in the ways of competition. There is a lot of white space in the industry for horizontal movement."

What Is PayPal Really Doing? In the interview with Chambers, the first question I asked was, "Why does it seem like PayPal has become a "me too" operator in mobile payments?" It is a fair question, even if Chambers balked to acknowledge that PayPal has been in "me too" mode for the last year or so. PayPal has ignored the dongle movement and NFC is not on its radar as a technology it feels it needs to integrate. "What is the difference between a tap versus a swipe?" Chambers asked. "We are working with what works in the current infrastructure ... We have sat down with consumers and merchants to work with them on what they want." PayPal is growing sideways because there is not a ton of room right now to grow vertically. PayPal will get into NFC solutions when the time is appropriate. Its strategy now is to create as much flexibility for consumers as possible through its mobile wallet program. PayPal's stance is data driven - the company can track when and what consumers buy from mobile phones and tablets. Hence, PayPal is focusing on the shopping end of the spectrum, as opposed to a pure payments play. "60% of people buy more and spend more on mobile," Chambers said. "But, we see that people are not really buying different things on mobile ... the No. 1 driver of growth in mobile payments is boredom." That fits in well with what PayPal sees as "couch commerce." They released a study recently saying that mobile shopping is going to boom this holiday season. As such, PayPal is ready to deploy an end-to-end solution for merchants and consumers to reward loyalty and provide deals and offers along with digital receipts. PayPal believes that it has a lot of room to grow in mobile through these types of horizontal movements. We are also seeing this on a non-mobile front with eBay partnering with Facebook and the Open Graph API and the new X.Commerce initiative that consolidates the PayPal, Zong, Magento, RedLaser and Milo technologies. The company is calling it an "open commerce ecosystem."

Future Of Mobile Payments This article is the first in a series of the trends in mobile payments that ReadWriteWeb will be working on in the next several months. There are a lot of questions and the answers are just beginning to emerge. Who are the winners in the space? Are retail shops in danger of "becoming expensive fronts for online shopping," as Chambers said in the interview? Does NFC really have potential to disrupt offline payments or is it just cool technology? These questions and more are what we will be tackling in the months to come.

solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.

Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said

Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

7. Don't Forget The Dongle Dongles refer to a device that is connect to a computer to allow access to wireless or protected software. In the case of mobile commerce, a dongle would be a mobile credit card swiper that attaches to the mobile device. Square, Verisign and Intuit lead the way in dongle innovation. But with Google Wallet and NFCs (near field communications) on the move, do dongles have a future? Square's Card Case digital wallet is a dongle. It lets you pay by saying your name and only your name - if the merchant you visit is in the Square directory. With its dongle reader, Square aims to make mobile payments mainstream. Intuit's recent mobile payments innovation introduce the dongle-to-debit-card. The company wants to make it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to accept transactions on the go. While Square is the leader in the dongle world, Intuit offers QuickBooks, tax refunds, bank partnerships, health check-ins and other management systems. Dongle providers such as Verifone, Intuit, Erply, ROAMPay, TRUSTe and PayAnywhere will continue to push their products as the space evolves.

Conclusion Mobile commerce is at a tipping point. It has not hit a critical, mainstream mass, however. First, the battle of NFCs vs. mobile wallets vs. dongles will need to settle, with one emerging and the others either following and finding their niches, or disappearing completely. Carrier billing will play a crucial role in how consumers start easing into the idea of mobile commerce. The daily deals space will become more focused on mobile, particularly in the ares of personalization and location-based targeting - people who use their phones are glued to them, naturally, and they must start receiving time-sensitive offers at exactly the right moment. Tablet commerce will continue to expand, as more people buy tablets and engage in "couch commerce." Catalogs, tablet-optimized websites and fast conversion rates make this the perfect platform for capturing consumers who already feel devoted to their tablets. In the dongle space, Square will continue to position themselves as the thought leaders, though they will face a fierce competition from Intuit.

Dwolla sees itself more like Visa than PayPal. EBay may actually disagree with that considering that it is pushing very hard into the mobile wallets segment of the mobile payments industry and Dwolla operates in much the same way.

Dwolla wants to position itself as a go-to resource for financial institutions to create a mobile payments infrastructure in communities such as Des Moines. Square, with its recent Card Case update, is also playing in this space.

Consumers benefit from Dwolla because of the location and social features of the platform.

The benefit of Dwolla is that it is basically electronic cash. This is one of the truest "mobile wallets" concepts.

Proxi was released by Dwolla in August. It allows users to open the app and see what merchants are accepting mobile payments via Dwolla in their vicinity.

The company can position itself to be both the front end and back end of the payment process. As such, Google Wallet, Square, Intuit GoPayment (or any of the other dongle-based competitors) could theoretically tie into it as a backend.

It normally costs $30 (£19) a month. However, Amazon is currently offering a year's worth of free storage as part of a promotion, which Tor developers believe their users will qualify for.

Amachai Shulman, chief technology officer of data security firm Imperva believes that cloud services could have a big impact on Tor. "It creates more places and better places to hide," he said.

Tor is also used by people wanting to share images of child abuse. Hacktivist group Anonymous recently launched Operation Darknet which targets such abuse groups operating via the network. "There is an ugly face to Tor," said Mr Shulman. "Studies suggest that most of the bandwidth is taken by pirated content."

Imperva research estimates that there are currently "a few thousand" exit nodes on Tor - the points at which communications reveal themselves on the wider internet.

Around 45 million people in the UK use a mobile phone, and 49% of mobile users surveyed use their device to purchase products at least once every three months. But there is still a big demand for in-store purchases too, as we saw with London’s Oxford Street retailers gearing up for Christmas by introducing a number of tech initiatives to help capitalize on the growing m-commerce trend.

So the real prediction here is that the uptake of mobile payment technology will increase significantly over the next 4 years – something that most people would probably agree with. But at the rate we’re currently going at, and with the likes of NFC technology gaining momentum in the micro-payment sphere, cash could be under threat sooner than we may otherwise have realized.

“We’ll see a huge change over the next few years in the way we shop and pay for things”, says Carl Scheible, Managing Director of PayPal UK. “By 2016, you’ll be able to leave your wallet at home and use your mobile as the 21st century digital wallet. Our vision of money is to enable you to pay for something from wherever you are, whatever device you’re on – a PC, mobile phone, tablet, games console and a whole lot more.”

Indeed, Scheible continued by saying that it will take another 4 years before we’ll see the real beginning of money’s digital switchover in the UK, but he stopped short of any discussion relating to a ‘cashless society’. “We’re not saying cash will disappear entirely, but we’ll increasingly use our phones and other devices rather than our wallets to pay in-store as well as online”, he says. “The lines between the online world and high street will soon disappear altogether. Children born today will become the UK’s first ‘cashless generation’. It will be completely natural for them to pay by mobile.”

PayPal’s findings are based on interviews by Forrester Consulting with 10 senior executives from major UK retailers and other businesses, with a combined turnover of £85bn.

By 2016, it’s thought that UK mobile retail sales will hit £2.5bn. PayPal currently has over 14m active UK accounts, over a million of which have been used to send a mobile payment. Around the world, PayPal expects to process more than $3.5bn (£2.25bn) in mobile payments this year, five times more than in 2010.

Educational practices need to recognize today’s participatory culture and to find different ways of delivering content. Today’s new cultural competencies include the ability to navigate across different kinds of media and to “mashup” the various media content. Games are the ideal model for combining content in different ways and incorporating problem solving. There is a need for educators need to see games as an alternate learning system.

Games today can be divided into entertainment and Serious Game categories. Games are getting much more realistic, and can be incredibly motivating. The use of Ggames as entertainment may be dwarfed by Serious Game applications

Videogames, based on the training of socially valued practices, will create an educational system in which students learn to work and think as professionals. The purpose is not to train students for these professions, but rather to provide students with an opportunity to see the world in a variety of ways that are fundamentally grounded in meaningful activity and aligned with core skills, habits, and understandings of a postindustrial society. Games will help students create representations of professional knowledge.

Videogames are very effective at teaching logical, consequential thinking. U.S. Army studies indicate playing videogames as much as ten hours can improve the ability to process visual information and improve overall spatial orientation skills.

Games involve participation in collective intelligence, and blur the distinction between the production and consumption of information. They emphasized expertise rather than social status. They promote international and cross-cultural media and communities.

As a Guardian article on the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities notes, the capabilities of cyber-weapons have reached a “chilling new level.”

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the price of greater energy freedom will be eternal vigilance.

My next thought was ‘how pathetic we’ve become.’ How utterly pathetic and dependent we’ve all become on technology, which is truly what this is all about.

I am merely making the point of how dependent – and that truly is the operative word, we’ve become as a society.