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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.

Verizon Wireless and financial management company Intuit announced today a partnership that will bring Intuit's mobile card reader to 2,300 Verizon retails stores across the country. The partnership is yet another big move in the mobile card reader industry that has been popularized by Square and includes Verifone, Erply and PayAnywhere among others. Intuit operates QuickBooks, a system used by merchants to manage finances. As such, GoPayment fits well in Intuit's product line. Verizon will be able to put the Go Payment in front of millions of people looking for mobile payment options. It is a win for both companies and a strike to Square, which is putting up a big fight against the large financial companies that are rapidly entering mobile payment industry.

The GoPayment card reader will be "free" to Verizon customers granted activation of a GoPayment account and a mail-in rebate of the $29.97 purchase price. The app itself is free and has no monthly transaction or cancellation fees with a 2.7% rate for each swiped transaction. A paid version of GoPayment is available that lowers the per swipe transaction rate to 1.7% with a $12.95 monthly fee, which will be good for retailers with high volume.

Square sells for $9.95 at the Apple Store but consumers get a $10 credit from the company when they sign up for an account. Square also has a 2.7% fee for swiped transactions

What kind of services is Schmidt referring to when he says that Google is looking at Google+ as an identity platform that could support other services? Dave Winer thinks that the company wants to effectively become a bank — something he also suspects that Apple and Amazon are interested in as well — and that’s definitely a possibility. Apple and Google both seem interested in NFC technology (near-field communication), which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets, and having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy. Ross Dawson says Google wants to build a “reputation engine” using Google+ as a platform.

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." 

Gamification is a hot space, and Got Badge? is a new entrant.

The phrase “Pic or it didn’t happen” might be something you’ve heard before. Basically it means, you can’t say you’ve done something unless you’ve taken a picture of it. It’s the honor system that Got Badge? works on for claiming badges.

Badges are broken up into categories, ranging from “Lifestyle” to “Geeky” to “Fun”. Got Badge? is super simple, super fun, and kind of addicting really.

According to calculations by Cisco, 50 billion devices will connected to the Internet by 2020. Top technology infrastructure companies like IBM, HP and Ericsson are investing big in the Internet of things. IBM envisions a smarter planet, Ericsson envisions the social web of things.  But when I look at these visions I get the feeling something is missing—the consumer. Well, she's there, but always in a passive role. These visions are more about automation and efficiency. An exemplifying scenario can go something like this one, from Cisco: Imagine your morning meeting was pushed back X minutes, and your car knows there has been an accident on your driving route causing a Y minute detour; this is communicated to your alarm clock which allows you Z extra minutes of sleep and signals to your coffee maker to turn on the appropriate minutes later. Or, from Ericsson: You call your wife on your way home in the car, asking what she wants for dinner. When you arrive home the oven has calculated with precision the time it should turn itself on and at what temperature, depending on the groceries you got from the store. I'm sure these are plausible scenarios, but I don't think the killer apps of IoT will be the connected car or Internet-oven. 

I'm much more interested in big questions like: What will be the iBeer moment of Internet of things? What will be the Farmville of connected devices? These are the seemingly silly applications that always pop up in the wake of new technological possibilities. The simple, cheap, entertaining stuff. Humans are a curious species, and we don't always make rational decisions.

Instead of thinking about the buttons on a phone or a laptop, manufacturers and designers need to think about what will happen when computers are embedded in everything and connected all the time. Instead of computing confined in a box on a desk or in the hand, computers will be everywhere pulling data from a variety of places.

Of those three elements the patient input screen is likely gathering the least important information and must convey complicated information simply.

How will a machine know when someone waving their hands while they talk to a friend becomes someone trying to tell a computer to do something? Of course, when a device can watch us and interpret our movements and commands effectively it essentially gives computers the illusion of humanity. That’s the illusion Rolston apparently is trying to create.

Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.

In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,

Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.

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.

At 500 Startups’ Smash Summit in New York today, Robert Scoble revealed that PayPal is launching something big with Facebook in two weeks, and that it would be a more expansive partnership than the existing PayPal-Facebook integrations.

Last year, PayPal announced its new micropayments product, which Facebook integrated. In early 2010, Facebook announced that you could use PayPal to purchase Credits.

“We’ve been talking for a while about how the four megatrends of mobile, social, local and digital will change commerce. Yesterday at f8, Facebook made some great announcements that will change social networking. When social and commerce join together great things will be possible and developers will be able to monetize these new developments very quickly.”

Badges for Javascript courses are currently being developed at the School of Webcraft by Mozilla. It also plans to rope in diverse groups such as P2PU, 4H, NASA, PBS, US Department of education and Intel to develop badges. This new process claims to be of advantage to learners as they will be given an opportunity to collect badges from any internet website. These collected badges will reveal the learner’s proficiency in various subjects. And that’s not all, it is believed that open badges may prove beneficial for users to build online reputation, look for collaborators and find jobs. “Open Badges is a response to this trend: an open specification and APIs that provide any organization the basic building blocks they need to offer badges in a standard, interoperable manner. If we’re successful, the benefits to learners will be tremendous. Open Badges will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved,” states the Mozilla blog.

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?

Speaking at a press briefing here Tuesday, Bidaud pointed out such mobile strategies would also provide "contextual and social user experience", which he described as "enriched reality" in which information would be meshed with the real world. For example, location-aware apps that could inform users which bus stop they were at and the arrival times of buses that stopped there, he said.

viewpoint, the Gartner analyst said the Internet of things, also known as machine-to-machine communications, was an arena in which there were "lots happening". Defining it as having a network-connected device sending information back to the network, he predicted that beyond smart utility grids, the technology would be used by consumers to share community-specific information such as a weight-watchers group, for instance.

"Restrictions could be in requiring social networking sites and Web companies to host their data centers locally, as well as having a tighter compliance environment for shared data," Sengar suggested, noting that this could stifle the growth of social CRM uptake in Singapore.

Governance can mean a lot of different things. In this context, it needs to be the foundation of the content plan. Not in terms of content creation but in terms of standards and processes for expanding into a certain market. For example, Company A wants to launch a Facebook page and Twitter channel in Latin America to support its operations into that region. A governance model will ensure that the regional marketing team has the following lined up before launch: A content plan to include frequency and context of Tweets, Facebook Updates, blog posts (or whatever relevant tools/platforms are used in that region) An established moderation policy A crisis communication plan An understanding and “buy in” of the measurement philosophy (everyone in the organization SHOULD be measuring social media the same way)

Content Library If it’s one thing that marketing teams in other regions lack, it’s content. The reality is that most brands do have really good content. It’s just scattered all across the internet, various internal portals and even within employees’ inboxes. Content can include videos, PDFs, spec sheets, FAQ, blog posts, infographics and the list goes on.

Community Management Without an active community manager, a content marketing plan will fail. A community manager will not only be responsible for actively posting and aggregating content; but he/she is essentially the face of the brand and should be sanctioned to solve customer problems. A proficient community manager will answer questions and provide real and “tangible” solutions to disgruntled customers. Additionally, he/she should have the authority to provide rewards to random customers simply for being customers.

Can the UK overcome sector fragmentation to build an ‘Internet of things’ industry? The European Commission recently approved a plan to encourage farmers to use electronic tagging to identify cattle. This, regulators believe, will help make rearing cattle more efficient, cut fraud, and help stem the spread of diseases.

revealing new patterns of interconnectedness in the physical world.

A broad term (even by the standards of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘big data’), it was first coined by British-born MIT researcher Kevin Ashton in 1999. Its approximate meaning today is a system for integrating the data produced by devices such as RFID tags or sensors in order to monitor, measure, manage and enhance physical objects.

companies must:

Empower employees

STOP being afraid of your customer!

Should enterprise applications be as addictive as Angry Birds? A true believer in gamification would say yes, if you want people to actually use them.

[Social media is a powerful tool to connect with customers, but it can create big problems for your company if it's not done right. Learn more at 10 Social Networking Don'ts.]

Most of all, gamificiation is about understanding that "if you can make something more fun, and include notions of play, you can get people to do things they otherwise might not want to do."

PayPal has shown their new peer-to-peer NFC payment system at MobileBeat 2011 today, using two Android powered Samsung Nexus S phones.  The premise is simple -- open the app on both phones, enter the payment amount on one, and bump them together.  After the buzz, enter account details, and the payment is processed.  Afterwards, the normal email receipts are generated and sent out, just like we did it in the old days.There's no firm date when to expect this, but PayPal says "late this summer".  Another compelling reason for manufacturers to put NFC capabilities in their new models, or just a security concern?  Either way, we'll find out soon enough.  Hit the break to see a demo video.

Imagine getting points in an online game each time you drink more water, floss your teeth or take a step toward some other healthy lifestyle goal. That's the promise of Green Goose, a company that uses tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers or credit cards to track everyday behavior and record it online.

Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.

All thanks to a simple sticker or other attachable sensor. It's the simplest and most pleasing example we've seen yet of the widely anticipated trend called The Internet of Things.

China's inland and maritime rivers and canals are now part of the Internet of Things. The Chinese maritime authority has outfitted cargo and passenger ships with RFID chips and has placed RFID readers at strategic locations. Now, keeping track of the identify of ships, their speed and what they carry is automated, at least for a segment of the populous country's water traffic. Almost all waterways Grade IV and higher have been equipped, according to the People's Daily. The Maritime Safety Administration of China made this announcement recently, explaining that the tags use the Automatic Identification System, a maritime Internet of Things platform designed to track waterborne traffic.