Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Michael Abbott, the CEO of carrier-backed mobile payments joint venture Isis, has an interesting take on rival Google Wallet: "It's the best thing that could happen."

That's not the sort of thing you would expect to hear from the head of a venture that is planning to roll out its own mobile-payment system, designed to allow consumers to tap their phone on special terminals to pay for goods. Abbott, however, holds a longer-term view of the business, and believes that the entry by multiple parties is a good thing. It generates greater consumer awareness, stirs the various retailers, carriers, handset makers and banks into motion, and generally gets the debate about mobile payments flowing. He doesn't believe there will be any clear-cut winners or losers, and expects to see many options for consumers.

"There will be multiple solutions out there, and none of them are wrong," Abbott said in an interview with CNET, noting that "competition is what this space needs."

Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.

Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

He is officially called the "Messaging Community Lead" for IBM's WebSphere message queue (MQ) architecture, which is a title that grants some modicum of honor without claiming too much authority. Andy Piper has become IBM's point man for the concept of a planet enmeshed in billions, perhaps trillions, of signal-sending, communicating devices. The case may be made that anything that can be "on" could be made to send a signal on a network - perhaps something as simple as "on" itself, periodically. The possibilities for a world where the operating status of any electronic device may be measured from any point on the globe, are astounding.

Two weeks ago, IBM and its development partner Eurotech formally submitted Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol to the Eclipse Foundation open source group. It's being called "the" Internet of Things (IoT) protocol, but in fairness it's only one candidate. It would serve as the communications mechanism for devices whose size may scale down to the very small level, with negligible power and transmission radius of only a few feet.

One example application already in the field, Piper told RWW, is in pacemakers. Tiny transmitters inside pacemakers communicate using MQTT with message queue brokers at their patients' bedsides. Those brokers then communicate with upstream servers using more conventional, sophisticated protocols such as WebSphere MQ.

Debenhams is in talks to introduce till payments through mobile phones as research finds that handsets are set to become ubiquitous as a way of paying for goods in five years’ time.

The high street retailer said it is exploring ways to let customers use their mobiles to pay for goods in-store.

Harriet Williams, Debenhams’ head of digital, said, ”It is something we are looking at and talking to partners about. When we’ve done research, we’ve seen that it’s something particularly younger customers are more interested in.”

Orange and Barclaycard have launched the UK's first contactless payment service allowing customers to pay for purchases using a smartphone.

Orange Quick Tap allows payments of up to £15 in over 50,000 outlets around the country, including Pret A Manger, McDonald's and Subway.

Customers have to purchase a Samsung Tocco Lite smartphone to use the service, which is available for £55 on pay-as-you-go or free on a £10 per month, two-year contract.

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?

Back in 2007, the Chief Executive of Visa Europe claimed that we could all be living in a cashless society by 2012. With that milestone fast approaching, it’s safe to assume that notes/bills and coins won’t be going the way of the dodo that quickly, but a new forecast has emerged from another giant from the finance world.

PayPal has produced a new report which will be released shortly – Money: The Digital Tipping Point – in which it predicts not only that consumers won’t need cash to go shopping, but they won’t need a wallet at all. And when can we expect this vision to be realized? 2016, it seems.

We’ve written quite extensively about mobile payment technology in recent times. Back in September we spoke with Ben Milne, founder of peer-to-peer Web and mobile payment platform Dwolla, who discussed the future of m-commerce. And prior to that, The Next Web’s Brad McCarty looked at how NFC will get its piece of the $4 quadrillion payments pie. There’s little question mobile payments will play a big part in the future of commerce. But will it completely outmanoeuvre paper, coins AND plastic by 2016?

learn how you can use stats from your blog in order to improve traffic and page views. http://onlinemoneywithgoogleadsense.blogspot.com/2010/04/statistics-to-monitor-on-your-blog.html

“it’s interesting to see how large a company that provides an actually useful service can get bigger than one who’s apparent key reasons for existing are for you to share embarrassing photos of yourself and tend a virtual farm. Skype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web with questionable tools that track your movement from site-to-site, or manipulate your profile because you click a “Like” button somewhere. Skype just exists. If you choose to use it, great, but if you don’t, they aren’t in your face about it.”

Some might say it’s like comparing apples and oranges as one is a social network, and one is not, but it’s still interesting to see Facebook is not the biggest thing out there despite what that company might like to have you thinkGigaOm provided some stats that Skype gave out at the recent eComm ConferenceSkype added 39 million registered users in the fourth quarter to end the year with a total of 560 millionSkype in 2009 accounted for 12 percent of the world’s international calling minutes, a 50 percent increase over 2008

36 percent of Skype-to-Skype calls as of the end of the fourth quarter included video — in other words, Skype is going to figure prominently in the video conferencing business, challenging more established players with its no-cost solutionlike Facebook, there are people with multiple accounts, and there are also spammers, but those accounts get shut down pretty fastSkype has also not felt a need to try to weasel its way into every corner of the Web

Cloud Computing is both an abstract concept which can reffer to every logical grouping of software services provided by one or more companies which may or may not be on the same hardware architectures. ted ar It also stands for the physical architectures involving SOA (services-oriented architecture) systems, server farms and a lot of hardware to provide on demand services 24/24 no matter what may happen. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk.  Of course it’s a 2010 buzzword and I am personally seeing some kind of Terminal Server (Mainframes anyone?…) à la sauce New Millenium coupled with web technologies. The thing is… Cloud Computing along with Software Virtualization are really promising.  I put the second one with it because everything is about having almost nothing on the client side. ore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be ga The idea of having every service in the Cloud is to ensure that eveything you need is always available from wherever you are on the planet.  You don’t need your PC or Laptop anymore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be games, movies or any software.  And with the huge Mobile market, you’re about to have any of your services right there in your pocket. Read more at www.gamasutra.com 

Take a moment and imagine a future where every object you own has a presence on the internet. Your car would have a Facebook status (“just hit 3,000 miles, need an oil change”), your shoes would appear on Google Maps, even your toothpaste would tweet (@shoppinglist you’ll need more of me soon).

the Ctrip team has once again delivered the strong results in the first quarter, marking an encouraging start to the year 2011. Our net revenues grew 30% year-over-year and net income grew 23% year-over-year. With the solid execution, Ctrip has further enhanced its strategic partnerships, improved operating efficiency and elevated its customer service level. The Ctrip team has continued to build the brand’s strength and demonstrate industry leadership. Our hotel [ph] supply network continues to expand to satisfy the growing needs of travelers, reaching approximately 18,000 hotels by the end of March 2011 compared to 10,600 hotels at the same time in 2010. The number of hotels with guaranteed allotment rooms accounted for approximately 75% of the total hotel supply. We rolled out more options for making hotel reservations to keep for different needs of our customers. For example, Ctrip has launched the most expensive hotel group buying platform in China, with the daily participants reaching over 100 hotels. Our hotel group buying 2.0 platform features the most convenient booking process elevating service levels industry wide. Thanks to the great effort and strong execution on the product of IT, Ctrip has continued to outpace industry growth in the air ticketing sector growing far ahead of the industry average.

Developed for McGraw Hill Higher Education Education UK, PRACTICE Marketing is a 3D turn-based Serious Game intended to teach college kids the principles of product marketing and competition. In the game, players are able to fully experience the seven underlying principles upon which to base marketing strategy and efforts: Image, Differentiation, Repeat Business, Ease of Doing Business, Networking, Likeability, and Emotion. Gameplay You’ve been selected to manage a company’s new entry into the backpack market. Your first step in the game is to create a strong product that appeals to a specific market segment and price it appropriately.

You are upfront presented with the info you need to analyze the market, provided by market research, who has narrowed the backpack market down to five potential segments for you to consider targeting, selecting the one that looks the most promising.

Once you have selected a target market, you can use the backpack builder to design a pack that meets the needs of its particular demographic.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the big differences between desktop and mobile platforms: Mobile device hardware is smaller and generally tends to have lower hardware resources than desktops/laptops. Smaller screens bring about different design considerations and challenges. Touchscreen technology introduces new interaction concepts that differ from traditional input devices (keyboard and mouse). With a mobile device, internet connectivity is not always as reliable as a hard-wired broadband connection, which means internet connectivity is a concern and data transfer could be significantly slower. Although these sound as if they are hurdles to get over, with careful thought and consideration, there’s no reason why they should be. Touchscreen technology is exciting. The smaller screen design will really make you think about how to get the user to interact with your mobile web app in the most satisfying way possible. What we should really be doing is looking at the list of differences above and seeing opportunities to deliver our content in a different way. Building mobile web apps will be a paradigm shift from traditional web development and web design.

In the next sections, we will discuss development/design considerations, as well as concepts and techniques for building mobile web apps.

Leveraging CSS3 Mobile web browsers these days are pretty advanced. Android devices use a mobile version of Google Chrome, whilst the iPhone does the same with Apple’s Safari. Some mobile devices come with mobile Opera and others allow you to install a browser of your choice such as mobile Firefox. So we’re talking about some pretty good browsers in terms of CSS3 and HTML5 feature support. CSS3 allows us to render things through code that would previously have required an image. We can use color gradients, draw rounded corners, create drop shadows, apply multiple backgrounds to HTML elements, and more — all of which can help improve performance and decrease development times.

We’ve changed how we use RSS

The simple truth is we’re less likely to use RSS or email subscription now compared to our RSS usage in the previous era of the Web.  We’re just less into RSS readers and start pages.

We’re using real-time web & social networking more

"Drawing on cognitive science, an increasing number of game theorists and designers say that our growing love of video games has important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations. Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles. 'With games, learning is the drug,' writes Raph Koster, the designer of seminal multiplayer fantasy games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. 'In game theory, this is often spoken of as the "magic circle": you enter into a realm where the rules of the real world don't apply – and typically being judged on success and failure is part of the real world. People need to feel free to try things and to learn without being judged or penalised.' Another important element is autonomy as games tap into our need to have control.

Finally another important game design facet is 'disproportionate feedback,' in which players are hugely rewarded for achieving very simple tasks. In highly successful shooters such as Call of Duty and Bulletstorm, when an enemy is shot, they don't just collapse to the floor, they explode into chunks. 'You're good, you're a success – you're powerful,' writes Stuart. 'Disproportionate feedback is an endorphin come-on.'"

When choosing from over one million mobile apps across multiple platforms, which ones are really worth it? What about Web-based applications that aren’t apps but are highly effective when used on your mobile device? Well, there isn’t an app that can figure out which apps are right for you but there is a non-app alternative—humans—that can do that.

Here are three business-related apps that every small business owner should consider trying. PayPal PayPal offers small business owners the ability to sell goods and services, send payments, receive payments and transfer money securely.

Quickoffice It can be very annoying when you are on the road and someone sends a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet for you to review. You click the download link on your phone only to realize that you can’t open the attachment.

Tools for collaboration The Internet of Things will introduce new smart objects to our homes. One challenge is to find effective solutions to enable different products to work together. Currently no standardised tools or distribution platforms exist in this area

A group of Norwegian researchers have been addressing this issue. In the research project Infrastructure for Integrated Services (ISIS) they have created a platform for developing and distributing applications for the Internet of Things. The platform encompasses a programming tool for developers, called Arctis and the website ISIS Store for downloading applications. The project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway's Large-scale Programme VERDIKT

"In a 'smart' everyday life objects and applications often need to be connected to several different communication services, sensors and other components. At the same time they need to respond quickly to changes and the actions of users. This requires very good control over concurrence in the system, which can be difficult to achieve with normal programming," he explains. Dr Kraemer believes that the tool will make it easier to create new applications, adapt them to existing applications and update software as necessary.