Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Whether service professionals are meeting with customers at home or sales associates are interacting with visitors at a retail location, the new Vantiv solution is part of Vantiv’s overall strategy to address customers’ growing mobile payment needs.

“Merchants and consumers are seeking greater mobility, control and timely access to data,” said Bill Weingart, Chief Product Officer, Vantiv. “We’ve teamed with Verizon to combine our payment and security expertise with Verizon’s ability to tailor development of mobile technologies to address those needs.”

The Vantiv mobile payment solution serves merchants who require mobility, convenience and security and addresses many business needs through a value-added suite of applications including accounting, payroll, workforce management, loyalty, inventory and customer relationship management (CRM). Having complete business control in a packaged, intuitive and flexible platform is a significant differentiator in the realm of tablets, and allows merchants to conduct data enriched customer interactions and transactions, anytime and anywhere.

JKrete Supply in Mason, Ohio is among the first Vantiv customers to participate in the field trial.

“This technology gives me more flexibility and makes it easier to serve my customers,” said Jay Rhoden, Owner, JKrete Supply. “Having the option of being mobile takes my business to a whole different level. I have everything I need at my fingertips. I can sell my products anywhere I go at any time. Vantiv tailored this product to meet my needs; it is clear they listened to customer demand.”

“Verizon, through our Private Application Store for Business, is leading the charge to work with innovative companies to develop industry-specific mobile solutions,” said Chandan Sharma, Vice President and Global Managing Director of Verizon’s financial services practice. “The ability to customize enterprise tablets and applications has been characterized as a potential ‘game changer,’ and we look forward to working with Vantiv and its customers to advance the playing field for mobile commerce.”

The capabilities were featured in a Tab Times article “The 10 most important tablet trends, products, and stories at CES 2012.”

For more information on Vantiv and to view more information on the Vantiv mobile payment solution visit us at www.vantiv.com .

Motorola plans to begin trials of NFC-enabled phones in the U.S. later this year, the company said. The phones will be used with MasterCard International Inc.'s PayPass payment service, it said. Motorola did not specify where the trials will take place.

NFC-based payment functions have already been announced by several handset vendors, including Panasonic Mobile Communications Co. Ltd., Sharp Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. They will make products compatible with a payment system developed by Felica Networks Inc., a joint venture between NTT DoCoMo Inc. and Sony Corp.

Nokia Corp. and Samsung Electronics. Co. Ltd. have also announced plans to incorporate NFC-based payment functions in their respective handset lines.

Square says it plans to offer its mobile payments technology in international markets in 2012.

Listrak sampled Internet Retailer's Top 1000 online retailers, loading up carts and then abandoning them ("Hey you kids! Knock it off!") to see who would follow up. Only 14.6% sent a follow-up email, and fewer still sent a second or third email which, Listrak's CEO Ross Kramer told Internet Retailer, is where about half of the revenue comes from. Among Listrak's suggestions to retailers: get the shopper's email address first.

Intuit cuts payment rate for AT&T subscribers Intuit announced a partnership with AT&T for its GoPayment mobile payment solution, which competes with Square. Like Square, Intuit offers a free card-swiping attachment that plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry device, allowing anyone to collect credit card payments. Intuit's basic rate of 2.7% slightly undercuts Square's 2.75%, but AT&T customers will pay even less (1.7%). Intuit originally charged customers $175 for the swiper dongle, but last January, in a bid to compete with Square, it began offering the dongle for free. Still, Intuit has struggled to gain the visibility that Square founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois and high-profile investors like Richard Branson have brought to Square. This week's deal with AT&T is a reminder that Intuit is serious about GoPayment, which may actually offer more to merchants since it integrates with QuickBooks, its bookkeeping package that also targets small businesses.

PayPal embraces NFC (just a little) PayPal has made something of a point of not jumping on the NFC bandwagon, emphasizing the technology-agnostic nature of its mobile payments platform. Demonstrations at PayPal's recent Innovate conference emphasized payment options like PayPal's Empty Hand system, which lets you buy things with only your mobile number and a PIN. Still, NFC seems an inevitable part of the payments picture in the years ahead, and this week, PayPal delivered the peer-to-peer NFC payment technology that it promised last July. Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile Applications, wrote on the PayPal blog that the technology for NFC P2P is included in version 3.0 of PayPal's Android app. No need for it in the iOS app yet, obviously, since the most recent iPhone upgrade disappointingly didn't include support for NFC. As we noted back in July, in practice, the transfer of funds through PayPal's NFC system isn't substantially different from what was already possible using Bump, which sends the transfer through servers in the cloud rather than wirelessly between the mobiles. But the NFC system will let PayPal developers acquire experience with NFC wireless transfers, which should serve them well as NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals begin to show up next year and beyond.

Williams said the department store chain would “love” to run a trial next year if all the participants needed to make mobile payments work – such as the banks and mobile operators – come together.

Research by PayPal said that 2016 will be the year when UK shoppers will use their mobiles to pay for their shopping, increasingly replacing cash and cards.

Robin Terrell, House of Fraser executive director of multi-channel and international, said payment through the mobile phone will “absolutely” be introduced in the future.

However, retailers have voiced their concerns over the difficulties in ensuring all the various players work together on NFC technology.

“As a customer, I am not going to have a different wallet for each financial institution, network and handset I have,” said Terrell. “Equally, the financial institutions will need to work together to raise the current £15 limit on NFC contactless payments. None of these issues are insurmountable, however, and the overall direction of travel is clear.”

Just this week Starbucks said that it is launching the high street’s first iPhone mobile app payment system after growing impatient with the rate of development of NFC technology

The coffee chain said it “did not want to wait” for the development of NFC and for it to become mainstream. Instead, it has developed its own mobile payment system using iPhone apps because so few handsets are currently NFC capable.

French Connection said mobile payment was not on its agenda just yet but it could see the method being taken up in the future.

Jennifer Roebuck, French Connection’s digital director, said, “There’s no reason why in five years you can’t swipe your mobile to pay for products. It’s too early days for us [but] it is logical, everyone uses a mobile for everything, such as shopping with Ocado. It’s becoming a little mini system to make payments.”

David Smith, IMRG chief marketing and communications officer, said, “The use of smartphones is going up and more technology that goes into them so the compatibility is not beyond it. But consumer trust and how quickly retailers have a system that’s foolproof are the biggest factors. It will inevitably come but how big it will be remains to be seen.”

The ‘Telefonica Wallet’ is enabled on BlackBerry Bold 9900 (pictured below), Curve 9360 and Curve 9380 models, allowing staff to make payments and access the company offices by tapping their smartphone against a reader.

The system replicates a physical wallet, allowing users to choose from a range of cards to make transactions or simply check account balances.

But concerns around security will be the main obstacle, and Brill says that in his experience consumers tend to be polarised into those who think NFC technology is a great idea and those who are suspicious about it.

Brill, who also chairs the DMA mobile council, believes the dual functionality of the Telefonica Wallet could be key to its success.

“Touch payments have been available in debit cards for some time but there hasn’t been a major take up. It is difficult to force new behaviours on people, you have to tie it in with something they are already doing,” said Brill.

Phone manufacturers would certainly have us believe that NFC is the future, and PayPal claimed today that we will be living a cash-free existence by 2016.

Mark Brill, CEO of Formation, warned that the test won’t mean much unless Telefonica and RIM can learn something from it.

But with predictions that up to 50% of smartphones could be NFC-enabled in the next three years, it may be the case that carrying cash could soon become passé.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

Metaio's view is that AR is "more than a marketing gimmick or hype, it's actually an interface revolution". However, there are currently relatively few companies able to take part in this revolution, since creating AR content remains the preserve of developers willing and able to get to grips with the tools.

People actually get a kick out of locating themselves. They want to know where their colleagues are. There will be more programs like Sococo. The idea is to have a virtual office on your screen. You see your virtual coworkers located in their “office” room, can “walk” to their room, when in the same room the mics let you talk and listen seamlessly, you have conference rooms with whiteboards, water coolers and tea kitchens for those in need of small talk, etc. People’s real location doesn’t matter, but they choose to locate themselves in respect to the virtual office so the team cohesion is supported.

The thing that’s far-fetched is robots with their own intelligence. Who knows if general purpose A.I. is ever going to happen? But robots that can move around in an office and be used as communication devices isn’t science fiction at all. Now we’re getting to the point where you can do it over a much larger distance because you can just do it over the internet, and the cost is low enough and reliability is high enough that it makes sense to do every day in an office. Our goal is to have 100,000 of these out there in five years.

Of course, both technologies boil down to an extension of video conferencing, with the likes of Sococo adding the possibility of spontaneity and easy initiation of contact, and robot avatars offering mobility and the ability to inspect locations. Still, whichever technological future you favor, there will still be a screen between you and your fellow humans.

The most important thing that Tolva said that he has been able to change in the first months of the young administration is integrating technology into more of Chicago's governing culture. "If a policy point is being debated, and decisions are being made, people are saying 'let's go look at the data.' The people in office are new enough that they can't run on anecdotes. There's the beginning of a culture merging political sensibility with what the city is telling us."

They can also be thought of as the "over-scheduled" generation.

The approximately 70 million Gen Yers came next, born in the mid to late 1970s through the late 1990s. They have often been called the "Trophy Kids" because on sports teams and in school, each child, regardless of capability, when provided a chance to contribute and perform, was often given some kind of a certificate or award just for having participated. (Recall, in contrast, how previous generations received credit only when they won.)

Mentoring. Strong, relationship-oriented mentorships are a great value for young employees.

Motivating Gen Yers

Multitasking. Provide more than one task to accomplish at a time, but without overwhelming them.

Collaboration. Create work teams or partners to work with, where appropriate.

Structure. Provide structure and clear guidelines, and at times, specific processes or approaches for achieving goals.

Technology. Encourage and allow them to use the latest technology in the work setting.

Challenges. Positively challenge their interests, abilities and achievements.

Relationship building. Create a bonding relationship with them so that they feel comfortable asking for input and direction and know they can rely on you as the authority figure when the need arises.

Positive reinforcement. Reward them frequently with positive feedback and citations for successful accomplishments and milestones on the road to longer-term achievements.

Engaged leadership. Set up specific and regular times to meet with and supervise them. Demonstrate your sincere interest in their professional growth and success.

Communication. Understand that they prefer using electronic means to communicate with you as opposed to face-to-face meetings.

it will finally be the year to move beyond pilots and trials into real, full-blown commercial deployments.

NFC is a “great technology,” mobile payments is already happening really quickly.

Dave Talach, vice president of global product management at VeriFone, affirmed that he loves NFC because of the frictionless and seamless experience it offers customers as it enables the possibility to pay, utilize coupons, earn loyalty points and more all with a single click — thus creating a unique experience tailored to each consumer.

In the end, it’s really about producing a solution that is secure and convenient for both the consumer and the seller more than anything else.

NFC-enabled phones are expected to allow consumers to make payments, store and present loyalty cards and redeem offers at participating merchants with the tap of their phones

However, the industry has been slow to implement the technology as different groups – particularly credit card companies and cell phone service providers – have maneuvered for control of systems in deployment and lobbied for support and critical mass.

"NFC is the future of mobile payments and will ensure that transactions are done securely from mobile devices,"