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Commerce Weekly: The competitive push toward mobile payment

Here are a few of this week's stories from the commerce space that caught my eye.

Mobile payments are coming, one way or another

The New York Times (NYT) took a look this week at the push toward mobile payments and the various paths toward that end. The push isn't only coming from a consumer desire for a mobile wallet, but also from the payment companies. The NYT's post reports:

"Merchants are facing heavy pressure to upgrade their payment terminals to accept smart cards. Over the last several months, Visa, Discover and MasterCard have said that merchants that cannot accept these cards will be liable for any losses owing to fraud."

This could be the push needed for mobile payment, at least in the U.S., to get over the technology hump that has thus far been hindering it from catching on. Jennifer Miles, executive vice president at payment terminal provider VeriFone, told the NYT, "Everybody is going to be upgrading ... Before the credit card companies made their announcements, almost no merchants were buying terminals with smart card and NFC capabilities." She says VeriFone no longer installs payment terminals without NFC readers.

NFC technology, however, not only requires upgrades from merchants, but also consumers. The post reviews mobile payment solutions from PayPal and Square, noting the directive for these two companies may be more consumer centric:

"Both PayPal and Square say that asking customers to buy NFC-enabled phones and wait for merchants to install new hardware is folly. Neither company says it has plans to incorporate NFC into its wallet."

This consumer-centric approach might be part of what's behind VeriFone's announcement this week that it would jump into the payment processing fray. Bloomberg reports:

"VeriFone Systems Inc. (PAY), the largest maker of credit-card terminals, will offer an attachment that lets mobile devices accept credit and debit cards, making a deeper push into a market pioneered by Square Inc. and EBay Inc. (EBAY)'s PayPal ... VeriFone's version will allow partners such as banks to customize the service to transmit coupons and loyalty points to consumers, said Greg Cohen, a senior vice president at San Jose, California-based VeriFone."

VeriFone's system will work with Apple and Android mobile devices.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

MasterCard releases PayPass

MasterCard announced its new PayPass Wallet Services this week. The company describes the global service in a press release:

PayPass Wallet Services delivers three distinct components — PayPass Acceptance Network (PayPass Online and PayPass Contactless), PayPass Wallet and PayPass API. These services enable a consistent shopping experience no matter where and how consumers shop, as well as a suite of digital wallet services, and developer tools to make it easier to connect other wallets into the PayPass Online acceptance network.

In other words, it's designed to work with any sort of digital wallet used by its partners. According to the release, American Airlines and Barnes & Noble are in the initial group of merchant partners.

One of the big differences between MasterCard's system and those of its competitors is its open nature. PC World reports:

What sets MasterCard's offering apart from digital wallet systems announced by Visa, Google, PayPal and others is how much the company is opening up its platform to third parties, said Gartner wireless analyst Mark Hung. Banks and other partners will be able to adopt PayPass Wallet Services in two different ways: They can use MasterCard's own service under their own brand or just use the company's API (application programming interface) to build their own platform.

Mobile payment readiness, global edition

How ready is the world for mobile payments? MasterCard has that covered this week, too. In a guest post at Forbes, vice president of MasterCard Worldwide Theodore Iacobuzio wrote about the launch of the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index (MPRI), a data-driven survey of the mobile payments landscape. Iacobuzio says the index "assesses and ranks 34 global economies in terms of how ready (or not) they are for mobile payments of three types":

M-commerce, which is e-commerce conducted from a mobile phone or tablet.

Point-of-Sale (POS) mobile payments where a smart phone becomes the authentication device to complete a transaction at checkout.

Person-to-Person (P2P) mobile payments that involve the direct transfer of funds from one person to another using a mobile device.

Iacobuzio says that "one of the top-level findings is that unless all constituents — banks, merchants, telcos, device makers, governments — collaborate on developing new solutions and services, the mainstream adoption of mobile payments will be slower, more contentious and more expensive." He discusses the needs for mobile payments around the world, including in developed, developing and emerging countries.

But who's ready? The following image is a screenshot of the index summary. Note that no country has yet hit the "inflection point":

A screenshot of the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index (MPRI). Click here to access the full site.

Dan Rowinski at ReadWriteWeb has a nice analysis of the index. In part, he says much of the finance world, including MasterCard, may be viewing the mobile payment situation through "rose-colored glasses":

"For instance, why do mobile payments skew heavily toward young males in developed countries? The answer, more or less, is because it is cool. The actual need for mobile payments (NFC or otherwise) is not as clear in the U.S. as it is in other countries, like Kenya and Singapore."

Mobile shopping needs faster carts

Michael Darnaud, CEO of i-Cue Design, proposed a solution this week for one of the major problems with mobile shopping: speed, or lack thereof. In a post at Mobile Commerce Daily, he says the steps to a purchase simply take too long because of the number of data transfers involved:

"Just clicking a button to 'add,' 'delete' or 'change quantity' on the mobile Web requires sending transaction data from the shopper's mobile device to the vendor's server — average three to five seconds — via cell towers, not high-speed cables. These interim steps, long before checking out, are the challenge — it is all about time."

"Time is money" is no joke in mobile commerce. Darnaud notes: "A recent Wall Street Journal article declared that sales at Amazon increase by 1 percent for every 100 milliseconds it shaves off download times." To that end, he suggests an improvement to online cart technology that "reduces the time it takes to 'add,' 'delete' or 'change quantity' by virtually 100 percent because it eliminates the need for a server call for each of those commands." He describes his solution:

"This 'instant-add' cart solution requires nothing but familiar HTML and JavaScript. It is an incremental change that can be inserted into virtually any new or existing cart.

And what that means to a customer arriving at your site on the mobile Web is that he or she can see a product, click 'add to cart' and have no forced page change or reload or waiting time at all as a result."

Darnaud also notes the "elegance" of the solution: "... it forms a perfect bridge between desktop and mobile Web. The reason is simply that it works identically on both, via the browser."

Tip us off

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

Related:

Mobile payments and the consumer experience

Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner on mobile web design

Mobile web development isn't slowing down

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Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 Web Ops & Performance commerceweekly indexes mobiledesign mobilespeed mobilewallet

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Commerce Weekly: Mobile payments and the consumer experience

Here are a few stories from the commerce space that caught my eye this week.

Don't forget the mobile payment UX

Competition in the mobile payment space is heating up, as Square's payment pace closes in on PayPal's, according to a report at Bloomberg. The report highlights a recent move by Square to lure in merchants: "The San Francisco company is making cash from sales before 5 p.m. on any day available in merchants' accounts on the next business day, compared with as many as five days out for other processors."

The real endgame, though, will be adoption by consumers, and Lauren Goode over at All Things Digital addressed the battle to control digital wallets from a UX perspective. Goode reports on her experience shopping around San Francisco and New York, paying either with Pay with Square or PayPal's mobile app. She says both apps are easy to use and that the biggest issue for both was the lack of merchants accepting payments of this type. Another issue she mentions caught my eye, however — the execution inconsistencies:

"Square has been touting the idea that this app actually allows for 'hands-free' payments ... One shop I bought coffee at didn't see my name right away, even though I had turned on the tab in the iPhone version of the app. I tried to buy another item using the app on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android phone, and my name didn't appear at all on the list of customers in the store.

But at another downtown coffee shop I was able to walk in, place my order and say, 'Charge it to Lauren Goode' — without taking my phone out of my pocket — and the transaction was completed in seconds."

And regarding a beef jerky purchase using PayPal's app:

"Since data service on my phone happened to be particularly bad in that area, I initially had trouble dropping the digital pin within the app that's supposed to let the merchant know I was there. The merchant also had to reboot his phone once to process the payment on his end. But once I switched over to Wi-Fi, I had four options for paying him ..."

Goode also reports on location-based features and the importance of merchant-provided content — her entire account is well worth the read.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

E-gifting and mobile commerce get social

Social gifting is gearing up to be one of the next big mobile commerce booms, according to a report at Reuters. The post focuses on the launch of Wrapp, a Swedish-based app startup, and highlights the blurring lines of online and brick-and-mortar commerce worlds. It describes the app:

"It allows Facebook friends to buy each other gift cards from participating retailers either individually or by teaming up, which they can store on their mobile devices and redeem either online or inside physical stores. Retailers like it because there is little marketing cost and because customers often end up buying more once they are inside the store."

Wrapp's CEO Hjalmar Winbladh told Reuters, "Brick-and-mortar retailers are all looking for new, more efficient ways to drive sales into stores without diluting their brands ... we wanted to really see how retailers can leverage the megatrends of smartphones and social networks."

TheFind also launched a social commerce app this week. It's called Glimpse, and it's a Facebook app that, according to the press release, "uses Facebook Like data from across the web to instantly personalize and curate a stream of fashion and design items that are trending, tailored to the tastes and preferences of an individual and their community of Facebook friends."

Ryan Kim at GigaOm calls the shopping discovery app a Pinterest rival and reports: "TheFind's CEO Siva Kumar told me TheFind has been working with Facebook for some time to bridge the two data sets, mapping a user's likes to products, their taxonomy and a user's profile. Now, when a Glimpse user likes a page, the service can determine what product the URL is referring to, can pull up the most recent availability and pricing data and also fit it into different styles and trends."

Move over smartphones, NFC to unlock experiences for Nook users

In an interview at CNN Fortune, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch talked about the future of the Nook and the recently announced partnership with Microsoft. In talking about opportunities in offline-online integration, Lynch offered an example of how B&N will improve customers' experiences:

"We're going to start embedding NFC [near-field communications] chips into our Nooks. We can work with the publishers so they would ship a copy of each hardcover with an NFC chip embedded with all the editorial reviews they can get on BN.com. And if you had your Nook, you can walk up to any of our pictures, any our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience. That's coming, and we could lead in that area."

Lynch told Fortune the NFC experience could appear as early as this year.

Related:

PayPal's Here service takes on Square

UI is becoming an "embodied" model

An app to end tab walkouts

Will NFC add value?

More Commerce Weekly coverage

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 barnesnoble commerceweekly glimpse mobilecommerceux nfc nook paypal socialmobile square wrapp

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Commerce Weekly: Mobile commerce is on the rise globally

Here are a few of the stories that caught my eye in the commerce space this week.

Survey shows global rise in consumer desire for mobile commerce

TNS Global's recent Mobile Life Survey, which surveyed the mobile habits of 48,000 people in 58 countries, shows that global interest in mobile commerce is on the rise. The screenshot of the survey's interactive results map below illustrates levels of interest for different commerce features — in this case mobile wallets:.

A screenshot of the TNS Global Mobile Life Survey results map. See the interactive version.

In a post for stuff.co.nz, William Mace took a deeper look at the survey results concerning the mobile commerce status in New Zealand. The results showed a bright future for mobile commerce, especially in the feature areas of mobile wallet and mobile banking. Mace reports:

"TNS New Zealand director David Thomas said New Zealanders surveyed liked the convenience of 'mobile wallets' — essentially using a smartphone to pay for goods and services — and placed the greatest trust in banks to provide such a service."

Thomas explained to Mace that technology and infrastructure are speed bumps to mobile wallets, much like here in the U.S. He said, "Mobile wallets generally require smartphones and generally a near-field communication chip in your phone which is still relatively unusual. The technology has driven mobile banking to come first but we can see with the developments of people like PayMark, Telecom and Vodafone are talking about we can see that the infrastructure for mobile wallets will come soon."

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

EU investigates possible mobile wallet monopoly

Mobile wallet news wasn't all positive across the globe this week. In the U.K., where mobile retail is up 254% from last year and up 300% year over year for the first quarter of 2012, the European Union might become an additional speed bump to mobile wallets.

According to a report at Internet Retailer, the EU is looking into three U.K. telecommunications companies — Telefónica, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere — that announced a mobile wallet plan last June called Project Oscar. Plans were submitted in March. A press release from the EU explained that the problem lies in the potential monopoly:

"The Commission's initial investigation revealed that the joint venture and its three parent companies may have the technical and commercial ability and incentive to block future competitors from offering their own mobile wallet services to customers in the UK, or to degrade the quality of these competing mobile wallets so that they become less attractive."

According to the release, the commission has until the end of August to make a final decision.

Boston rail commuters get a paper ticket alternative

Consumers can buy a cup of coffee with an app (even in the drive-thru!) or a hammer with a phone number, and several companies offer local smartphone payment options for breakfast, lunch or dinner. By this fall, commuters in the Boston area can add "buying commuter rail tickets with an app" to that list. According to a post at Boston.com, the MBTA signed an agreement Friday that will allow "[c]ustomers with an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry who download the free app [to] buy one-way, round trip, 10-ride, and monthly tickets and passes using debit or credit cards." The app will have a scannable QR code. The post describes how it will work:

"Riders will activate their pass when the conductor approaches, and it will generate a one-time image lasting long enough to be checked on the trip but not reused on another ride ... Though the mobile tickets will contain QR codes, the T will not initially equip all conductors with hand-held scanners, using them only for spot checks. Instead, digital watermarks, such as changing colors and animation, will help deter fraud while allowing passes to be verified at a glance."

The post pointed out that similar mobile payment options are common in England, "but the T would be the first major US commuter rail to offer passengers an alternative to paper." MBTA officials also told Boston.com they will use the new app to gather more accurate ridership data.

Related:

An app to end tab walkouts

The mobile payment system that's ready now

The return of iPhone NFC rumors

PayPal expands Home Depot trial

More Commerce Weekly coverage

Tags: Mobile commerceweekly ecommerce ecommercesurveys mobileapp mobilewallet

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Commerce Weekly: Facebook's shopping spree continues

You might have noticed I'm not David Sims, who has been writing this weekly payments column since its inception. David's talents now are required elsewhere, and I am delighted to have the honor of highlighting news from the payment space for you going forward. And now, onto the commerce stories that caught my eye this week.

Facebook buys into e-commerce

Continuing its startup shopping spree, Facebook late last week acquired Tagtile, a customer loyalty and direct marketing startup that blends social engagement for the consumer with custom direct marketing for the retailer. In a recent post for ZDNet, Eileen Brown noted that with its pending IPO, Facebook will need to look beyond ad revenues to satisfy shareholders:

"Ad revenue brings in over 83 per cent of the $3.71 billion total revenue reported. The potential for this revenue stream to fail is just too great ... After IPO, Facebook must diversify its revenue streams. And the only way it can currently do this is through online games and e-commerce."

This latest acquisition is a clear move in the e-commerce direction. Emil Protalinski at ZDNet described how Tagtile works:

"You walk into a store, tap your phone against the Tagtile Cube ... and you get discounts or rewards. Customers have to first download the Tagtile app ... which pushes targeted marketing material to their smartphone based on stores they visit. The Cube meanwhile provides data to help businesses pinpoint marketing efforts that work."

"Data" is the key word there — if Facebook has anything to sell, it's data, and if Tagtile has an organized system to manage and analyze consumer data, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Brown pointed out in a later post that "[Facebook] needs to be able to mine its data stores to identify trends in customer spending to sell on to its business partners ... [It] needs to be able to bundle a solution to sell to brands who want to tap into Facebook's store of data for closer customer connections."

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Apple is ripe to disrupt the payment space

Jason Calacanis (@jason) argued over at Launch that "Apple will become a trillion-dollar company based not on iPads and Apple TV, but payments." His argument follows the line of why Apple (and Amazon, for that matter) are so successful: convenience and ease of use. Not to mention, Apple likely already has the data:

"Buying apps is easy and we do it all day long — on iOS at least — because our credit card number is already in the device ... Buying on Amazon is easy and we do it all month long — because our credit card number is already stored ... The person with hundreds of millions of stored credit cards wins big. There are only two people on the planet who have stored over a hundred million active credit card numbers that I can think of: Apple and Amazon.

One is in commerce and one isn't — yet."

There has been much speculation (going back a couple of years) about when and how Apple will enter the mobile payment space, but many agree the disruption that will occur in the payments space when it does happen will be profound. Likening Apple in the payments space to a "PayPal on steroids," an analyst told Computerworld in January that "[Apple has] 160 million users with digital wallets in iTunes accounts. They don't have to do anything other than to NFC-enable their phones."

Calacanis points out the flipside to that — Apple not only could corner the payments market, but also further secure its place in the smartphone market:

"Start doing the math and it gets scary: Apple would have massive margin, and vendors who didn't accept iPhone payments would be at a massive disadvantage the same way folks who didn't take credit cards were in the 70s and 80s."

His piece is well worth the read.

The future of money is mobile

Two surveys and a study this week shed some light on the current state of mobile money and what the future may look like. E-commerce company RichRelevance conducted a study of 4.4 billion mobile shopping sessions that took place between April 2011 and March 2012. As pointed out on Payments.com, the study found that "shoppers on their iPads account for 89 percent of all dollars spent through mobile shopping sessions." You can view the study infographic here.

Click here to see the entire infographic.

And though, based on the graphic above, it seems people are becoming more comfortable purchasing TVs with their iPads, a survey (PDF) conducted by the Federal Reserve showed they're a bit more reluctant to conduct their banking via mobile devices. Ann Carrns at the New York Times took a look at the study and reported that "many consumers still don't see the need for mobile banking, and many also are skeptical of the level of security around banking with their phone." She also noted a statement made by Sandra F. Braunstein, director of the Fed's division of consumer and community affairs, to the Senate banking committee in March: "Specifically, consumers expressed concerns about hackers gaining access to their phones and exposing their personal financial information." You can view the full Federal Reserve survey report here (PDF).

A survey conducted by Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project found that, regardless of any current fears or hesitations, the future of money is definitely mobile. In answering "What is the future of money?" the survey found that 65% of 1,021 "Internet experts and other Internet users" agreed with this statement:

"By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards. People will come to trust and rely on personal hardware and software for handling monetary transactions over the Internet and in stores. Cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared from many of the transactions that occur in advanced countries."

You can view the full survey report here.

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Tags: Mobile acquisitions apple commerceweekly ecommercesurveys facebook mobilerevenue nfc socialmobile

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Commerce Weekly: Bump taps mobile payments

Here are some of the commerce items that caught my eye this week.

Bump taps into payments

Bump relaunched its service this week as a PayPal-powered person-to-person payment service. Bump has been around for a few years, offering a clever way to share data that looks, to the casual user, as if it's transferring data locally from one device to another by bumping the two devices together. Is it using NFC? Infrared? Bluetooth? None of these, of course: Bump sends data through the cloud, locating the two sharing devices by their proximity and the reaction each device had to their bump. It seems pretty clever, as it enables virtual phone-to-phone transfers without having to wait on any assurance that the two phones share technology for syncing locally. As long as both phones can talk to the network — and would they be mobile phones if they couldn't? — Bump can process the transfer.

The capability for payments has always been part of the plan, but until now Bump has promoted itself primarily as a way to share contact and other information. Payments is a far more compelling use, though what Bump is actually doing is just sharing emails and looping PayPal into the process — just as you would if you were paying someone by going to PayPal's site from a laptop.

Still, how big can the market be for splitting the tab at dinner or sharing a tank of gas? The real upside for Bump must be in licensing its technology to other, more established payment processors, like PayPal. If you could Bump to pay at Home Depot or anywhere else where PayPal is accepted in the physical world, that would be simpler than having to key your mobile number into a keypad and faster than having to wait for a manufacturer to build NFC capabilities into your next phone.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

When will Apple enter the mobile payment race?

There's an interesting guest column by Ramzi Yakob, a strategist at digital agency TH_NK, on Wired's UK site about what mobile payments could do for Apple and (more importantly) what Apple could do for mobile payments. Yakob suggests that Apple is uniquely positioned to enter the increasingly crowded field of mobile payments — not exactly late, but not a first mover either — and reinvent it in its own image. What's interesting is that, even though Apple is now, on some days at least, the world's biggest company by market capitalization, Yakob notes that it isn't Apple's market might that gives it the power to enter and change industries:

"The position that Apple has now, not just financially but also within the hearts and minds of the modern consumer, gives it the perhaps unique ability to enter new sectors and make them 'Apple' in a way that feels completely natural to us — and by making them 'Apple', I mean, of course, beautiful, desirable, easy-to-use and hugely profitable."

The post is worth a quick read. (As an interesting aside, to point out how lax credit card security and scrutiny are, Yakob points to his brother's Tumblr where he shares pics of the ridiculous signatures he gets away with on restaurant tabs.)

Tip us off

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile apple bump commerceweekly mobilepayments paypal

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Commerce Weekly: The do's and don'ts of geo marketing

Here's what caught my eye in the commerce space this week.

Placecast's CEO on the secret to successful targeted offers

Last August, I wrote about Placecast, which has been working to deliver coupons and offers on behalf of its retail clients to opted-in customers when they hit geofenced areas. Placecast's platform allows merchants to set up a ring around their locations (or other locations, as described below) and then trigger an SMS to customers who have opted in to receive them. Placecast works with mobile carriers to deliver large tranches of opted-in customers to its merchant clients. This week at O'Reilly's Where Conference, Placecast CEO Alistair Goodman talked about the right and wrong way to deliver ads to a geofenced audience, based on the learning curve they have climbed over the past few years.

Some of these are obvious, like the need to link data about the customers' preferences with the location — the richer the data, the more relevant the message, and the more likely it is to hit home. Goodman explained this as a sort of stack, with positioning data (mostly from GPS, but supplemented with Wi-Fi and other data) at the lowest level. Just above that, a layer on context: What type of place is the user at (mall? stadium? park?) and what's the weather like? Atop that level, demographics and psychographics — who are the users and what do users in their consumer categories tend to go for? Atop that layer, the users' preferences: What do they want to be notified about, when, and how often? And finally, at the top of the stack, the offer itself: What is it the retailer is promoting?

A second key point is the need to find relevant locations — not just the retailer's store, which is obvious, but other places where the customer is likely to be receptive to the offers. For example, you might promote dog food or pet stores at a dog park, or a promo for a sports drink around a gym, or the sponsor of a concert around an arena. Interestingly, Goodman said that while merchants often ask Placecast to geofence around a competitor's store, he advises them that isn't a particularly effective marketing strategy: "If a customer is already headed into a certain store, a message urging them to visit a different location isn't likely to be very effective. A more effective way is to promote the message from a relevant public space." (I noticed the audience received this wisdom in total silence; you could almost hear the wheels of doubt spinning.)

Finally, Goodman said customers react better to offers when they believe it comes to them through this channel with some level of exclusivity. "Customers like it when they feel they're getting an offer that others aren't getting." So the coupons or other offers can't be the same as what's posted on the window of the store.

Goodman said the platform can deliver offers through a variety of channels, but most are delivered as SMS text messages, which remain tremendously effective. And they seem to be working: Goodman said that their research finds that 49% of store visits that occurred after receiving a Placecast ShopAlert were unplanned before the alert, while another 19% served as reminders to visit the store. In these cases, you might say those texts delivered twice.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Jumping ship at Google Wallet?

The departure of Google Wallet co-founding engineer Rob von Behren to join payments startup Square aroused suspicion that Square might be looking to incorporate NFC in its system. Dan Balaban's article in NFC Times puts von Behren's departure in the context of a swath of high profile talent exits from a project that appears to be struggling to find partners and users. Balaban quotes a mobile commerce analyst who believes von Behren's joining Square almost certainly means a move by Square to support NFC. "Else, it would be like hiring Michael Jordan to get advice on golf," the analyst said.

In the past, Square's COO Keith Rabois has questioned the value of NFC, calling it, at last September's GigaOM Mobile Conference, "a technology in search of a value proposition." But as more mobile phones ship this year with the short-range wireless technology, it seems natural that Square would want to tap into it to facilitate its "Pay with Square" (formerly Card Case) system that allows customers to pay at merchants with their Square accounts.

Meanwhile, Balaban's article raises questions about the viability of the Google Wallet project. In addition to von Behren, fellow founding engineer Jonathan Wall and product lead Marc Freed-Finnegan left to start their own mobile-commerce startup, Tappmo, in March. Andrew Zaeske, former director of engineering for Wallet, is also said to have left the project. Speculation centers around disagreements between Wallet chief Osama Bedier (who joined Google from PayPal in February 2011) and other leaders of the team over the project's direction. It can't help that the refusal last autumn of Verizon to allow Google Wallet into its phones, and Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile's plans to launch their own mobile wallet under the Isis brand, cast into doubt whether Wallet will ever be able to expand beyond the Sprint network.

Will carriers like Facebook's post-IPO status?

Mobile carriers run the risk of losing text revenue from Facebook, as more of the service's users access it from mobile devices and use it as their primary communication channel. That's the view of Victor Basta, managing director of London-based Magister Advisors, which advises companies on acquisitions and public offerings. Basta told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that "Facebook's IPO is about the worst thing that could happen to network operators" since the pressure to demonstrate strong earnings to investors will make it harder for Facebook to share revenue with the carriers. Facebook's "over-the-top" service rides on the mobile networks, failing to share any of the revenue from advertising delivered over it and increasingly taking away from the carriers' SMS text earnings, as users send free Facebook messages instead.

"The fundamental challenge for network operators will be finding a way of becoming part of the Facebook ecosystem rather than simply external enablers," Basta said.

Tip us off

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 commerceweekly facebook geofencing google googlewallet mobilepayments paypal placecast square

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Commerce Weekly: Google Wallet vs Isis is coming soon

Here's what caught my eye in commerce news this week.

Who's got the winning wallet?

Several recent articles have speculated about the coming competition between Google Wallet and the forthcoming mobile wallet from Isis, which is set to debut in tests in Austin and Salt Lake City this summer. Tech bloggers love a contest, and even though there's only one major player in this race so far, observers are handicapping the players before they even take the field.

MobilePaymentsToday.com ran a column comparing the merits of the two platforms in several categories. (Where was the massive infographic that we've all grown used to for this sort of thing?) Google took the prize in time-to-market (already out there, a little) and branding, while the nod went to Isis for building a solid ecosystem, with its support from three major U.S. wireless carriers and the top credit card networks and handset builders. Isis should also get the award for most imaginative and compelling demo video, based on the clip of Cyber Illusionist Marco Tempest at SXSW a few weeks ago (demo begins 15 seconds in, after the ad):

Of course, both of these plays depend on NFC wireless capability in phones, and while that's destined to ramp up soon, GigaOm reported that in 2011, NFC in the U.S. lagged far behind other regions. Of the 30 million NFC-capable handsets sold worldwide last year, about five million went to North America, 10 million went to Europe, and more than that went to Asia. Some mobile wallets, of course, don't rely on NFC: PayPal, for example, is getting ready to launch an updated version of its wallet that operates closer to the direct billing model, where you enter your mobile number on the retailer's keypad and then confirm when a text is sent to your mobile. PayPal's system is a bit less elegant than wireless tap and pay, but as we wrote a few weeks ago, it's ready now and available on any phone that supports texting.

We couldn't help notice that all this handicapping of the two most visible mobile wallets overlooked the potential of a third player that has yet to enter the arena. Only a few weeks ago, mobile payment geeks were abuzz about newly published patents from Apple that described a method for payment with credit cards that sends the receipt to the user's iTunes account. And since there are more than 200 million of those iTunes accounts (and 350 million iOS devices out there), that represents a significant installed user base that may be receptive to Apple's familiar interface applied to a mobile wallet. Those who think Apple is coming late to the party should be reminded that Apple has never had to be the first to a market to end up dominating it.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

In-app purchases continue to dominate

In-app purchase screenshot Here's more evidence that in-app purchases are driving most of the revenues in mobile apps. According to Inside Mobile Apps, Distimo, which specializes in tracking app store activity, reports that a majority of the top-grossing apps on iPad, iPhone and Android monetize with in-app purchases. The researcher found that, of the top 200 grossing apps in the iPad App Store, the iPhone App store, and the Google Play store in February, 74% of the iPad apps and 80% of the iPhone apps featured in-app purchases. The numbers are even more remarkable when taken with the additional insight that only 10% of all iPad apps and 6% of iPhone apps even offer in-app purchases. So, there appears to be an awful lot of iOS apps that aren't yet interested in playing in the winning game.

The number was lower on Android apps (56%). Inside Mobile Apps' Kathleen De Vere suggested that may be because Android has a shorter history with in-app purchases (only since last May) and, related, fewer Android apps offer in-app purchases.

The findings support other reports that have also suggested the superiority of the foot-in-the-door model, including one by Flurry Analytics last summer that found freemium emerging as the dominant model for generating revenue from mobile apps.

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News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

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Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 android apple commerceweekly google ios iphone isis itunes mobilepayments mobilewallet

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Commerce Weekly: An app to end tab walkouts

Here are the commerce stories that caught my attention this week.

Tabbed Out connects check-ins with payment

For every one of us who's ever had a hard time catching the server's eye so we can make a hasty exit from the bar, here's the app you've been waiting for. Tabbed Out (available on Android and iOS) lets you check in and open a tab at restaurants and bars. When you set up the app, you link your credit card to it, so checking in delivers that info to the merchant's point-of-sale system. When you want to check out, you can do it on the app, even leaving the tip there instead of on the wet table. That's good for the merchant: There's no chance of getting walked out on, even if the patron leaves in a hurry or deletes the app.

Tabbed Out screens

It's also good for the patron: Not only does it allow you to flee when the urge strikes, but it might save you a trip back the next day. Every bar has a drawer full of abandoned credit cards, tabs opened by good-spirited folks early in the evening who, by the time they left, were too tipsy to remember to collect them on the way out. Do the same with Tabbed Out and the merchant can close the tab — and you don't have to return to the bar the next day to pick up your plastic.

The app offers some of the usual benefits we've grown to expect from a mobile check-in app — allow it to know your location, and it will also tell you what's nearby. Well, eventually it will. As of this week, it's only available at 450 locations in 34 states. Starting this weekend, some of those locations (the ones in Austin, Texas) will begin accepting PayPal as a payment option, too. A spokesperson for Tabbed Out says the company plans to make the PayPal option part of its standard offerings as it continues to roll out nationwide. So, this is another foothold for PayPal in the real world: Now you can use it to charge supplies at Home Depot, then pay for that brew you buy to reward yourself at the end of the day.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Square coming to NYC taxis

An iPad using Square as a cash register Square's back in the news this week, with an upgraded cash register app (timed to coincide with the new iPad announcement) and more details on its rollout to New York City taxis. The iPad cash register isn't exactly new: Square has been pushing it for more than a year, and Cult Of Mac did a nice little round up of nifty iPad holders back in January 2011. But the company has relaunched the app and its integration with Card Case, the buyer's app that lets you run a tab using just your name at Square-accepting retailers (if you can find one).

Bigger news may be that, as The New York Times reports, Square will begin a pilot program in 30 NYC taxi cabs, with iPads mounted where those little TVs are now. (They better bolt them in pretty good!) The big innovation here, at least for the rider, is that you can swipe your card anytime during the ride. Then just sign the screen with your finger and you can hop right out at your destination; no more waiting to sign a credit-card receipt. Cabbies get something out of it too — faster payments and a silent iPad instead of a noisy TV with looped audio.

Despite these innovations, anyone who's been excited watching Square's development has probably also felt the disappointment that goes along with not seeing it used … well, just about anywhere. Dan Frommer, the tech journalist who blogs his own news at SplatF, certainly feels that disappointment. Still, he's enough of an enthusiast to review the company's releases over the past year of its daily processing volumes. While they're still a drop in the ocean compared to more visible options, like credit cards and even PayPal, Square seems to be headed in the right direction, and on a steepening curve that has reached $11 million a day. Considering the few businesses that show up on my Card Case app right now, that's an impressive number of lattes, massages, and farm-fresh produce.

iWallet is coming

While the rest of the Apple-lovin' world focused on the details of the new retina-display 4G iPad, payment geeks were poring over the details of a patent released Tuesday describing features of a mobile wallet to be used in some future version of the iPhone. Patently Apple reported that, while we've seen a number of patents published over the past year dealing with NFC communication and transactions, this patent details credit-card transaction rules, including a note that credit card companies will send statements (or at least receipts) directly to a buyer's iTunes account. "The iWallet project just became a little more real today," PatentlyApple noted.

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Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 apple commerceweekly iwallet mobilepayments nfc paypal square

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Commerce Weekly: Small banks lagging in mobile

Here are some of the commerce stories that caught my attention this week.

Smaller banks lagging in mobile channel

Smaller financial institutions, which depend on a higher level of customer service to compete with the giants, are falling behind in the increasingly important mobile channel, according to a report by Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin says about 37% of customers at big banks use mobile banking, compared with only 21% at regional and community banks and only 15% at credit unions. Javelin's report suggests two reasons for this. First, community bank customers tend to be older, less well off, and less tech-savvy than customers at big banks. Second, big banks can invest more in online and mobile development and marketing, resulting in a better banking experience through those channels. (That's certainly been my experience: my attempts to switch to a smaller bank were thwarted by a virtually unusable online banking system, which drove me back into the warm and fuzzy interface of a cold financial giant.)

Some smaller financial institutions say they benefitted from the anti-big-bank sentiment of the past year, epitomized by Bank Transfer Day on Nov. 5, 2011. Redwood Credit Union in Santa Rosa, for example, says its new membership was three times the normal rate last fall. But to keep that momentum going, Javelin suggests, financial institutions like Redwood will need to funnel some of their new income into development of these channels.

The report also found that mobile usage is beginning to surpass non-mobile online usage, even if those customers tap their accounts through a mobile browser. Most customers reach banks' mobile sites through a browser on their phone. However, at the largest banks, which tend to offer a "triple play," more customers use apps and SMS text instead of the browser.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

How Netflix improves its recommendations

One of the interesting presentations at O'Reilly's Strata conference this week was about how Netflix looks at its data to present recommendations of other shows members might like. Netflix streams 30 million shows a day. It has 5 billion ratings on those shows and collects another 4 million every day. Data scientist Xavier Amatriain discussed how Netflix uses the data from those ratings and other, more implicit data (including what people watch, which listings they mouse over to read, whether or not they finish programs) to offer recommendations that members will like enough to keep their accounts active, month after month.

Netflix gained a lot of attention a few years back with a broad open innovation initiative: it offered $1 million to anyone who could improve the Netflix recommendation engine by at least 10%. Amatriain said two teams tied for the prize with plans that improved the probability that Netflix could recommend shows that members would like based on their previous activities (though, he added, the cost of integrating those new recommendation engines into Netflix' system may have exceeded their value). Even so, since 75% of shows watched on Netflix's streaming service are based on recommendations, it's more important than ever to offer something that will draw viewers' interest.

Netflix queue example

The clues from all this data allow Netflix to present an array of recommendations to its members. First, there's a row of "top ten" most likely shows. Of course, as Amatriain pointed out, these recommendations are based on viewing history and clues of the entire membership household, not just one viewer. For example, when I log on, along with the thrillers and comedies that Netflix recommends to me, there's a fair amount of "Pretty Little Liars" and other teen dramas that my daughters might like. I used to wonder if this bizarre mix confused Netflix, but Amatriain's talk has reassured me that the company understands what's going on. Then, at a finer-grained level, there are "hyper genres" that Netflix can offer based on your track record: not just Kids Shows, but Goofy Kids Shows; not just Family Movies but Feel-good Father-Daughter Movies. Slicing the offerings narrowly improves the chances of a hit, and it's no accident that the single most likely recommendation is the first one in each row.

Of course, the main complaint Netflix receives (other than its new price structure, I would imagine) is, "why don't you have the show I want to watch?" Amatriain said the company also looks at implicit data to decide what new content to license. So when you search for a show that Netflix doesn't offer for streaming, it gets noted. I guess if you really want it to show up, keep searching for it.

Opera enters the payment fray, PayPal and Home Depot go nationwide

Mobile World Congress, the humongous European conference on all things mobile, is happening this week and everyone loosely connected to mobile payments seemed to time an announcement around it. Here are some of the more interesting announcements that have come down the PR wire from Barcelona:

Opera, whose Opera Mini browser has more than 160 million downloads, launched the Opera Payment Exchange (OPX). Opera says it wants to "democratize" the payment space by building a payment platform that works on more platforms and devices than Android and iOS smartphones. It says the OPX platform provides APIs that developers can use to integrate payment systems with the Opera Mini mobile browser.

PayPal and Home Depot said they would roll out nationwide the payment program they have been piloting in a handful of Bay Area stores over the past six weeks. The program is a significant step for PayPal, bringing its payment system offline and into the physical retail world. Customers can buy hardware and other stuff on their PayPal account, with a PayPal card or with a mobile number and PIN — no NFC required.

Isis, the mobile payments joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, announced more partners in its effort to build a payments ecosystem. Customers of Chase, CapitalOne, and BarclayCard will be able to load their payment information into Isis-compatible phones when they're ready. Isis secured deals with the top four credit card companies (or "payment networks" to use the parlance) last July; now it's making agreements with the banks ("issuers"). Isis is planning two pilots in 2012, in Austin and Salt Lake City, though it's not clear what phones the technology will be in by then.

Tip us off

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Bank photo: Old Bank in Sunbury Village by Maxwell Hamilton, on Flickr

Related:

How the cloud helps Netflix

Who will deliver swipe-and-pay first?

PayPal expands Home Depot trial

More Commerce Weekly coverage

Tags: Data Mobile Web 2.0 commerceweekly isis mobilebanking mobilepayments netflix paypal strataconference

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Commerce Weekly: The mobile payment system that's ready now

Here are a few stories that caught my eye this week.

Three reasons why direct billing is ready for its close-up

In a sign that direct billing is gaining credibility beyond the realm of online games and media, WorldPay, a payment network for sellers, said it would add Boku as a method of payment to its system. Direct billing companies like Boku, BilltoMobile, and Bango let people buy things by entering a mobile number online and replying to a confirmation SMS text; the charges show up on their cell phone bills. Execs with these firms often describe them as "banking for the unbanked," but the reality has been that in practice, many of the "unbanked" are online game players who are too young to have bank accounts.

But that seems bound to change. Direct billing has at least three things going for it that make it an attractive option right now for mobile payments.

The first is the potential user base. The graphic above, from Boku's site, shows the numbers that these services pin their ambitions on. There are two billion credit card accounts in the world, but more than five billion mobile phone accounts. Each of those mobile numbers is a unique identifier that the carrier can identify anytime, anyplace in the world. Compare that to the experience many of us have had where your credit card issuer puts a hold on your account because it is suspicious that you paid for a taxi in Chicago on Tuesday but are now buying lunch in Puerto Rico on Thursday.

Second, PayPal is about to train its millions of mobile customers to pay for things by keying in a mobile number. Its real-world retail pilot at 51 Bay Area Home Depot stores allows users to do just that (or use a PayPal card) to pay for hardware and other real-world goods. PayPal bought Zong, a direct-billing leader, for $240 million in July 2011. It has woven that technology into its suite of customer payment methods, though the process now taps your PayPal account rather than showing up on your mobile phone bill. And that's probably a good thing: One of the things that has held direct-billing back has been the reticence of mobile carriers to go along with a scheme that threatens to anger their subscribers when they open their monthly bills to see totals that are hundreds of dollars more than they spent on telecom services. The direct-billing companies have helped the carriers get over their hesitation by offering them a cut of the charge, much higher than the few percentage points that credit card companies charge for transactions.

The third great thing that direct billing has going for it is that it could allow people to pay for real-world goods now, no matter what kind of mobile phone they have. We've written a lot about NFC wireless as a tap-and-pay solution coming "soon." But so far in the U.S., only a handful of Nexus G users on the Sprint network are able to pay for goods using NFC and Google Wallet. Verizon's decision last December to lock Google Wallet out of its rollout of Samsung's Galaxy Nexus due to "security concerns" made the advent of universal NFC a little less certain. Direct billing, however, works on any mobile phone that supports text messaging. As Boky co-founder Ron Hirson pointed out in a column on Venture Beat last year, the more advanced benefits of a mobile wallet accompany direct billing, and no NFC is required. As Hirson wrote, the real advantage to mobile payments isn't the supposed convenience of tapping your phone compared to swiping a plastic credit card; it's the integration with other apps on the phone for record-keeping, bargain hunting, rewards tracking, financial planning, and the option to go social.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Is social commerce not commercial enough?

A Bloomberg story published late last week said Gamestop plans to shutter its Facebook store after disappointing results. The article also noted that over the past year, three prominent retailers — Gap, JCPenney, and Nordstrom — have all opened and closed stores on Facebook, too. The report quoted Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru explaining the disconnect that's leading to disappointment:

"There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop. But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they're hanging out with their friends at the bar."

The report was noticed, and widely reposted and linked to. A counter-point published by Forbes on the same day appeared to get less attention. In that piece, Wade Gerten, CEO of 8th Bridge, which makes social shopping software, suggested these companies failed because they didn't understand what social commerce (or Facebook commerce) really is. Gerten wrote that it's not about setting up your Facebook page as a checkout stand; that's what your website does. It's more about tapping Facebook's best qualities — sharing, bragging, and asking — to help people discover what you're offering. He cites Ticketmaster and Delta Airlines as two successful practitioners of the art. Neither company attempted to replicate its website's transactional activity within Facebook's walled garden, but each organization used that channel to promote their offerings. So maybe it's not exactly F-commerce but F-marketing?

Meanwhile, with Facebook's ability to push merchandise now slightly tarnished, we look for a new champion. Pinterest is barely on the radar screen, but Forbes' Jeff Bercovici writes that it's already a better place for social commerce. "Pinterest isn't a bar," Bercovici writes, referencing Mulpuru's quote in Bloomberg's story. "It's more like a craft fair where people go to exhibit their wares, check out other vendors' offerings, or do a bit of both."

How to dial a telephone (again)

Our smartphones are so capable, and we're so adept at using them to manage our lives, that it's funny to look back and see that people once needed instruction in the most basic of phone operations: how to dial a number and place a call. But an ancient 10-minute black and white film on AT&T's Tech Channel (embedded below) shows the lengths that "the Bell network" went to in preparing their customers for the switch from operator-assisted calls to dialing systems. Rows of nerdy guys in white shirts and pocket protectors line up to yank out the fuses at the stroke of 12, while other white-shirted guys in another room at the same moment yank out strings that activate the new systems. A model who might have been Lucy's Connecticut neighbor explains some of the basics, like what a dial-tone and busy signal sound like, how to look up a number in the directory, and even how to dial a rotary phone.

Actually, the instructions on how to use a rotary dial phone — "making sure your finger firmly touches the finger stop with each pull of the dial" — are as novel now as they were when this film was produced. My young kids found an old one in their grandparents' house (not in service) and had fun marveling at how this heavy, black analog beast was able to make calls.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 boku commerceweekly directbilling facebook mobilepayments paypal socialcommerce

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Commerce Weekly: Google defends its Wallet

Here are some of the news stories that caught my eye this week.

Google says its Wallet is still safer than your leather one

Google's mobile commerce team spent the week doing damage control after the revelation of security flaws. Last week, it was widely reported that engineers at Zvelo, which provides web-categorization services, had found vulnerabilities in Google Wallet that allowed an app they had written to expose the PIN and tap prepaid funds in the wallet. Google's initial response was to advise users not to run Google Wallet on rooted phones, and be sure to have the screenlock on. But further work, as reported by Zvelo engineer Joshua Rubin, suggests that the hack requires root access, but not necessarily a pre-rooted phone: "While it is true that this PIN vulnerability requires root privileges to succeed, it does not require that the device be rooted previously." Rubin's post and a nice summary by Neil J. Rubenking at PCMag give a good picture of the vulnerability.

Security flaws like this feel inevitable to those accustomed to the ups and downs of web start-ups and the public bugs that accompany any release-early, release-often philosophy. They are, however, more alarming to those who work with banks, merchants, and anyone else who has experience moving money around. Bank Technology News captured the split between the two attitudes and cited Aaron McPherson, a practice director with IDC Financial Insights saying the recent security problem demonstrates "an almost cavalier attitude by non-payments companies toward protecting consumer security."

Google wasn't cowed by the charges, responding with a calm coolness and an insistence that, despite any flaws in its payments system, it's still better than what everyone else is doing:

"Mobile payments are going to become more common in the coming years and we will learn much more as we continue to develop Google Wallet. In the meantime, you can be confident that the digital wallet you carry provides defenses that plastic and leather simply don't."

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Buck enters the one-click mobile payment fray

Buck (previously Billing Revolution) announced a one-click credit card checkout for goods this week. Entering your credit card information once in the app allows you to buy with a single click at participating online merchants — providing you want to buy from Glamour magazine, Papaya Mobile's social gaming network, or any of the other (relatively few) merchants now offering Buck.

If, on the other hand, you're at your local Starbucks, you'll want to pay with one click by unlocking your Starbucks mobile payment option, generating a 2D barcode, and holding it up for the cashier to scan. But suppose you were feeling too groovy for Starbucks this morning and you stopped at your local independent coffee house? Then you might want to pay with a single click with Square's Card Case, providing your indie coffee guy has signed up for that. At Home Depot, you'll want to use PayPal, at Macy's you can tap-and-pay with Google Wallet, and you might need to pay with American Express to get the Foursquare deal that your local eatery is offering.

Mobile payment is exhausting in its current, fragmented state, but it will be interesting to see which systems gain critical mass. Recent web history offers some clues. It was not too long ago that a half dozen search engines, including AltaVista, Yahoo and AskJeeves competed for your searches until one company offered a simpler way with more effective results. And five years ago there were a handful of social network sites competing for our profiles, including MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster, until Facebook rose on a platform of sharing photos, social games, and an easy interface. So which mobile-payments option will find the right combination of security, usability and adoption first?

Adele scorns freemium model

Freemium may be the up-and-coming dominant model in mobile apps — particularly in games — but not everyone is in love with the concept. Adele, who just took home six Grammy awards, declined Spotify's request to stream her award-winning album "21" on its service. According to Austin Carr on Fast Company, the reason is that Spotify offers two tiers of service: a free ad-supported service and a premium one without ads. Adele was willing to let "21" stream to Spotify's paying customers, but not to those riding for free. Spotify, which doesn't offer different libraries for its two tiers, couldn't accommodate the request. So while you could buy "21" on iTunes or hear it on Rhapsody (where everyone pays to stream), you can't hear it on Spotify. But, as Carr points out, with a 20% conversion rate of free subscribers to paying ones, who can second-guess Spotify?

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 commerceweekly freemium google googlewallet mobilepayments oneclickpayment

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Commerce Weekly: Facebook finds a mobile commerce partner

Here are a few items that caught my eye this week.

How will Facebook cash in on mobile?

With Facebook's public filings ahead of its imminent IPO, we know now that advertising accounted for 83% of its revenue of $3.71 billion in 2011. But we also know that almost none of its revenue came from mobile users — which is a bit of a problem since mobile users are an increasingly large part of Facebook's user base. Facebook members have embraced mobile apps on smartphones and tablets, and Facebook has encouraged their use by developing and releasing apps that deliver a UI experience that is, in some ways, superior to the traditional browser-based interface.

Now, Facebook has to figure out how to make mobile pay. A deal signed this week with mobile payments firm Bango aims to help. Bango provides mobile payment services and direct billing to carriers (like Boku and BilltoMobile), so that the cost of buying things on your mobile shows up on your mobile bill. That seems like a convenient way to buy, and such services have sometimes touted themselves for nobly serving "the unbanked" — even if many of those unbanked are largely American teenagers who use the services to buy virtual goods in games. The drawback is that mobile carriers have been lukewarm to the systems because they worry about customers seeing huge mobile phone bills and complaining or switching, even if what they're seeing is made up of virtual poker chips and Smurfberries. Direct billing services have helped the carriers get over these anxiety by giving them a cut of the revenues much greater than most payment providers get, often as high as 33%.

There's no word yet on how Bango and Facebook will manage payment or what percentage of those payments will go to the telecoms. But we can imagine what goods will be sold: Facebook Credits, as Facebook last year began insisting that mobile game providers sell their virtual goods using only Facebook credits. But I would expect Facebook's position on Credits to evolve as mobile commerce grows on the site. It's one thing to force users to buy Credits so they can be dispensed within social games; it seems unnecessary when consumers are buying a wider range of digital (or physical goods) throughout their Facebook experiences, and a restriction that could limit the potential. As long as the mobile carrier is taking a cut, why couldn't Facebook take a cut as well, without having to force Facebook's virtual currency into the equation?

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Google Wallet's glitches

Google Wallet is stumbling through some embarrassing growing pains as it comes under the scrutiny of white-hat hackers who are finding and publicizing security flaws. Engineers at Zvelo developed a Google Wallet Cracker app that appears to be able to break Google Wallet's encryption in seconds. Google is working to find a solution for the glitch, which exposes users' Google Wallet PIN numbers on rooted Android phones. Kate Knibbs at Mobiledia writes that the breach "validates Verizon's decision to block Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus," due in part to its concerns about security on the Android platform.

Meanwhile, over at TheSmartPhoneChamp.com, there's a video that highlights another security flaw in the phone. Since the Google prepaid account option within Wallet is tied to the device, not a separate Google account, someone who finds the device can open the Wallet app, clear the data, and then re-launch the app. Although the "new owner" will need to enter a PIN, the old prepaid Google account is still tied to that smartphone. I'm not certain how big a hole this is because I have no idea how much people store on their prepaid accounts — though I would hazard a guess it's not more than $300. All right, so nobody wants to lose $300, but it's not like being upside down on your mortgage.

Add to these issues the growing awareness that malware and crapware are a problem on the mobile side. To fight the malware problem, Google developed Bouncer, a program that scans for malware and spyware on Android apps. To keep out known troublesome apps, the service performs a malware and spyware scan on all submitted material. It also uses behavioral analysis to determine if a given app is trying to do something suspicious. Google doesn't stop there; it also performs fraud and abuse detection to ban and remove malware writers posing as legitimate developers. Google says it's already deployed the service and has seen a 40% drop in "potentially malicious downloads" thanks to it.

What would you buy with a QR code?

PayPal has launched a pilot with "shopping walls" in subway stations in Singapore, where you can purchase stuff by snapping a pic of the QR code while using a PayPal app on a smartphone (see a shopping wall in action here). It looks like a swell way to get some of your Valentine's Day shopping done while you're waiting for the Circle Line. Another nifty experiment would be ordering dinner from a shopping wall while waiting for your train in one station, so that it would be ready for you when you exit another. Snap the QR codes of the meals you want and checkout with PayPal. The system could even be smart enough to know when you'll pick it up, based on the station you ordered from. And there's no question of the food going to waste: The restaurant has your money and your mobile number.

That's my idea — and I freely admit that it's just because I'm late for dinner. Let me know if you've seen anyone selling meals or other interesting items via QR codes.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 android commerceweekly directbilling facebook facebookcredits google malware mobilepayments paypal shoppingwall

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Commerce Weekly: The return of iPhone NFC rumors

Here are some things that caught my eye in the news this week.

When will Apple mainstream mobile payments?

Now that everyone's iPhone 4S has a few dings on it and we've all grown bored flirting with Siri, our curiosity naturally turns to iPhone 5 and what gifts it will bequeath on mankind. Rumors of NFC (near-field communication, which lets phones pay with wireless technology), are at the forefront again, just as they were before the 4S arrived. As far back as August 2010, when Apple hired NFC expert Benjamin Vigier as its product manager for mobile commerce, expectations have been high that the next iPhone would include wireless payment. That was two versions ago; we must be getting close.

Seth Weintraub wrote this week on 9to5mac that a developer he met at MacWorld was building NFC into the next version of his app because Apple's iOS engineers are "heavy into NFC." Over on Fast Company, Austin Carr looked for clues in his conversation with Ed McLaughlin, who leads emerging payments at MasterCard. When Carr pressed McLaughlin for details on which handset makers were developing phones that work with MasterCard's contactless payment system, he didn't mention Apple by name but said he "didn't know of any handset maker out there who wasn't working to make their phones PayPass ready."

Why do we read these tea leaves? There are a few other NFC phones out there already, pushing the far end of the envelope. But Apple is much more significant, as Carr points out, thanks to its:

"... magical ability to transform whole industries. No one paid for music digitally before Apple unveiled iTunes; virtually no one listened to MP3 players, or carried smartphones, or played with tablets before Apple entered the markets."

Even more so than with previous trends, an enormous captive audience awaits the moment when Apple will introduce it to mobile payments. Scot Wingo notes, in a very good summary of the state of mobile commerce on Seeking Alpha, that Apple has "something like 250 million credit cards on file" in the iTunes store. Although only a fraction of those will buy the iPhone 5 in its first months out, they are sure to be customers who are already comfortable buying things through Apple's interface.

I think the biggest and best surprise will be more than just the date when iPhones ship with NFC, but rather how Apple presents a mobile wallet interface. When you think of how iTunes presented a better way to buy digital music, and when you compare the customer experience in Apple's retail stores with what you find almost anywhere else, you have to acknowledge Apple's genius in what we might call the transaction interface. Its programming efforts up front seem as likely to mainstream mobile commerce as any programming that it does behind the scenes to make those transactions occur.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

What PayPal is learning at the point of sale

PayPal's point-of-sale (POS) trial with 51 Home Depot stores is rolling out to Office Depot stores, too — cautiously, according to this Reuters story, which quotes an Office Depot executive saying "there are still some rough spots in that experience." The executive didn't say whether those rough spots had to do with the technology, the way customers are using it, or just the basic unfamiliarity with it. Regardless, the novelty presents something of an opportunity for PayPal, says Anuj Nayar, PayPal's chief spokesperson. "Retailers are not technologists by nature," Nayar told me in a conversation last week. "They have to work and sell in this multi-channel environment, where increasingly the differentiator is based on technology." But keeping up with the evolving technology shouldn't be the retailer's job, Nayar says. PayPal, of course, wants to provide a commercial ecosystem — as Nayar calls it, "a one-stop tech partner for retail."

PayPal had those capabilities on display at the National Retail Federation show last month, showing the various ways it is enabling payment at the point of sale. PayPal aspires to go beyond the concept of a mobile wallet in a phone; it wants to offer a "wallet in the cloud" that lets consumers make purchases with just their mobile number and a PIN — no card or phone needed. No doubt, the trials at Home Depot will shed light on just how comfortable consumers are with this idea. So far, Nayar says, it's too early in the trial to share any of those learnings.

Nayar did share a finding from PayPal's conversations with consumers and retailers about how they want to use mobile commerce: You need to get beyond not only the friction that keeps people from using technology, but also guard against any social stigma that could arise. "For example, when I go to get coffee in the morning, if I get there and see there is a 20-minute wait, I can't wait for that. That retailer has lost a customer because of a friction point. So how do you reduce that friction? Maybe it's giving people the ability to order the coffee over their mobile before they get there? ... But we tested that, and you know what we found? People don't like to jump the line. They didn't like the idea of coming in and looking to everyone in line like they were getting to skip the line. So, maybe you need a separate line and register, a PayPal Express line or something."

In other words, we want convenience, but not at the expense of looking like we're getting special treatment. No doubt, PayPal will learn more in the coming trials, which are ramping up quickly: The company wants to be at 2,000 points of sale by the end of March.

Square hits the hustings

Square picked up a fresh round of publicity this week when word broke that staffers from both the Obama and Romney campaigns were using its plug-in dongle card reader to collect political donations for their candidates.

Obama campaign spokesperson Katie Hogan told Nick Bilton of The New York Times that the dongles were being shipped out to campaign workers across the country. The Obama campaign also hopes to create a donation app that works in conjunction with Square dongles so that any supporter can collect contributions with or without the support of the local campaign organization. All donations would obviously go to the campaign — minus the 2.75% transaction fee that Square keeps from every transaction.

The Romney campaign's digital director Zac Moffatt said the Republicans would also begin using Square as soon as this week, but he cautioned they want to make sure that using Square doesn't break any rules. "The challenge on this sort of thing is never with the technology, it's with the compliance. We're making sure everything we're doing follows fund-raising rules and is compliant with the FEC."

Although DC is generally slow to embrace new technologies, I have a hunch that tech that makes it easier for candidates to collect money will find a swift and warm welcome.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 apple commerceweekly ios iphone mobilecommerce mobilepayment nfc paypal square

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Commerce Weekly: Target doesn't want to be the showroom for online retailers

Here are a few things going on in the world of online commerce this week.

Target wants to fight "scan and scram"

Target Remember all that talk before the holidays about the blissful union between brick-and-mortar retailers and mobile users? Retailers seemed to have accepted that many of their customers shop with smartphones in hand — and retailers even appeared to be embracing it. A Deloitte consultant who follows these things, Kasey Lobaugh, told Internet Retailer that retailers:

... need to invest in providing customer connectivity in the store, including in-store Wi-Fi, ... building functionality that best serves the customer at the 'point of need' and thinking about the capabilities that align with the customer's location and context, as the customer may be in the store with a smartphone in hand or in a variety of other locations and scenarios.

Indeed, Macy's, Sears, and Nordstrom boasted about their in-store free Wi-Fi. Personally, I realized this meant I no longer had to chase after the Home Depot staff whose "Ask Me" shirts always seem to be disappearing just around the far end of the aisle. I could now ask my iPhone.

But a report in The Wall Street Journal this week about Target fighting back against "showrooming" has everyone wondering if all that goodwill is gone with the swept-up tinsel and empty See's Candies boxes. The Journal reported that Target wrote a letter to suppliers asking for their help avoiding the fate of becoming physical showrooms for online retailers. They're asking vendors to make unique products that can be sold only at Target, so there's no option to find them cheaper online. "What we aren't willing to do," the Journal quoted the letter as saying, "is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments, as we do, to proudly display your brands."

The letter certainly points out the missing logic in the equation: upbeat stories about free Wi-Fi in stores all seemed to suggest that those smartphone-enabled shoppers would be checking in at the retailers' own online site for reviews and availability. Who would have guessed that these ungrateful shoppers would stoop so low as to compare prices at other sites? Is all harmony lost? Will our favorite stores try to block our signals or ask their suppliers to come up with unique brick-and-mortar-only SKUs to confuse Red Laser?

There are still some voices calling for reconciliation. Will Reese on CMO.com offers seven ways retailers can combat "scan and scram", including beefing up a store's own mobile presence and being clear to customers about the value the store provides. No one could accuse Target of failing to invest in its online and mobile stores, but I suppose one could make the argument that a little more investment in the customer service aspect of Target's staff could help turn the tide. After all, as Reese describes in his story, Apple Stores aren't afraid of customers with smartphones, possibly because they know the people working those stores — and in particular, their expertise — are one of the company's biggest retail assets.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

iTunes also had a monster year

The huge numbers in Apple's latest earnings report caught all the attention, but if you dig in, you'll also find some pretty impressive stats for iTunes. Apple's online content store sold about $6 billion worth of music, movies, TV shows, and apps in 2011, up 55% from $4.2 billion in 2010. Billboard reported that iTunes moved nearly $1.7 billion of content in the holiday quarter of 2011. It's interesting to compare that with Amazon's $43 billion in sales last year and then realize that Apple didn't need to ship any physical products to hit its iTunes number.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 amazon apple commerceweekly itunes mobilecommerce target

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Commerce Weekly: Slow in-app purchasers are worth the wait

Here are a few of the commerce-related items that caught my eye this week.

Report: Don't rush in-app purchases

Mighty Eagle from Angry Birds It's no surprise that app developers are betting on in-app purchases to generate revenue in the year ahead. Last summer, Flurry Analytics was already reporting that in-app purchases accounted for 65% of revenue in Apple's App Store and last week IHS Screen Digest said it expects to see the same trend across all platforms by 2015.

Now, developers want to know which users are most likely to make those purchases and who among them are most valuable. Localytics has dug a bit deeper to try to identify successful patterns in the freemium formula, and its findings are interesting and maybe slightly counterintuitive. Long-term engagement is more valuable over time, and it looks like those who engage too quickly are also less likely to stick around. In other words, it's better to let the hook sink in a bit. Localytics found that users who purchased quickly were less likely to stick with the app: of users who made a purchase on their first use of the app, only 16% go on to engage with the app 10 or more times — significantly lower than the 26% average. On average, users had the app at least 12 days before making a purchase, and 44% of all users who made an in-app purchase did so after interacting with the app at least 10 times.

When I think about mobile games, 12 days feels about right. Remember your second day on "Cut the Rope"? Still playing? It's fascinating to compare this to the durability of more complex games: "World of Warcraft" holds players for years, and some of us are known to every so often dust off games that are years older. (I'm looking at you, "Call of Duty II.")

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Bankers show interest in Bitcoin

Bitcoin is becoming increasingly mainstream — at least awareness of it, if not actual use. In addition to last fall's New Yorker profile that attempted to identify the real identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, a recent episode of the CBS drama "The Good Wife" focused on a court case in which the U.S. government was suing to get one of the attorneys to give up the identity of Bitcoin's (fictitious) creator.

Bankers being who they are, all this attention has led them to wonder (as they do with all things), "How can we profit from this?" A recent article in American Banker attempts to help them through their thinking. After explaining that the digital currency "was conceived as a rebellion against the banking system," it then goes on to say "it may also present business opportunities for banks that can get comfortable with the risks." The article does a nice job of laying out the pros (offering exchange services, accepting deposits) and cons (limited growth of the currency by design, slow uptake so far among merchants and consumers).

PayPal expands Home Depot trial

PayPal is expanding its point-of-sale trial at Home Depot. Just a few weeks after announcing a trial at five stores near PayPal's home base in Silicon Valley, the experiment will scale out to 51 Home Depot stores: one in Atlanta, six in Omaha, and 44 in the San Francisco Bay Area. All are expected to be online by March.

Customers can tap their PayPal accounts for all their DIY needs in a couple ways: swipe a PayPal card (available online) or, if you don't have one, you can get a pin to accompany your mobile number and use that to draw funds from whatever source your PayPal account is linked to.

Anuj Nayar, PayPal's chief spokesperson, told American Banker that PayPal needed to ramp up quickly to build momentum — and to meet the company's predicted $7 billion in mobile transactions this year. Early in 2011, PayPal predicted it would move $1.5 billion through its mobile channels. It didn't have any trouble beating that number, eventually overseeing nearly $4 billion in transactions by the end of 2011.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 appstores bitcoin commerceweekly currency freemium inapppurchases paypal

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Commerce Weekly: Report criticizes "feeble" mobile strategies of posh retailers

Here are a few of the items that caught my eye this week.

Report says 44% of prestigious retailers have "feeble" mobile strategies

Few high-end retailers are moving as quickly as they should on mobile commerce, according to a new report from research firm L2. In its first survey of premium brands' mobile strategies, L2 looked at the mobile and tablet platforms of 100 prestigious retailers — names like Dolce & Gabbana, Clinique and Cartier. In spite of their high margins, L2 found that most were taking a wait-and-see approach to mobile commerce, even though U.S. m-commerce sales are expected to grow from $6 billion in 2011 to $31 billion by 2016, according to Forrester.

In its report (and accompanying video, below) L2 scolds the laggards, reporting that:

30% of brands haven't developed a mobile app
33% don't have a mobile-optimized site
16% have no mobile strategy at all

L2 placed 44 of the 100 brands it surveyed in the "feeble" category. At the other end of the spectrum, only four companies seemed to be doing enough right to earn a place in L2's "genius" category. Sephora topped the list, thanks to solid mobile and tablet apps, and successful cross-promotion of its mobile offerings across the rest of its digital platform. Nordstrom, Macy's and Net-a-Porter rounded out the top four.

It may look like a dismal showing, but as Lauren Indvik pointed out at Mashable, it may be enough to lead the rest of the retail competition. Indvik cited figures from Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, who told Mashable that a survey of major advertisers in early 2011 found only 21% had launched a mobile site at the time.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Sprint triples your chances to use Google Wallet

Samsung Galaxy Nexus with Google Wallet If you're like me, you've begun to see point-of-sale devices promoting the capability to pay with Google Wallet around town — for example at Whole Foods, Radio Shack, and CVS. Google has a nifty little map app that shows you where in your zip code you can wave your NFC-enabled Sprint Nexus S 4G phone to pay for — oh, you don't have a Nexus S 4G phone? Yeah, that's the problem: I've yet to see anyone actually making a purchase in the wild.

Sprint said this week it will do what it can to help by introducing two more phones that support Google Wallet: Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and LG's Viper. That brings the total number of phones that support Google Wallet to three. Both of the new phones store the payment applications on a secure embedded chip. Buyers will need to use either Google's Prepaid Card or a Citi Mastercard. The secure chips can also store coupons, points and offers.

Google will need all the help it can get from Sprint to spread the base of Wallet users, at least until the other carriers, all of whom are founding members of Isis, decide to let Wallet onto their phones. Verizon's decision in early December not to allow Google Wallet on its Android phones has cast a shadow of doubt on the whole business.

Meanwhile, all the players in the mobile payment system continue to run trials and tests to see where the soft points are. Visa said this week that it has certified six mobile devices to handle NFC payments using its PayWave system, a point-of-sale device that can process Visa payments wirelessly from a mobile device or a PayWave fob or card. On ZDNet, Zack Whittaker reported that in the U.K., Visa is hoping to roll the technology out as far as it can in time for this summer's Olympic games.

PayPal's mobile volume exceeds its own expectations

The volume of mobile payments is rising faster than expected, as shown by PayPal's announcement that it processed nearly $4 billion worth of mobile payments in 2011. That's up from $750 million in 2010 and $141 million in 2009. David Marcus, vice president of PayPal Mobile, made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A year ago, Marcus told VentureBeat, the company predicted it would process $1.5 billion in 2011, a figure it later revised upward to $2 billion. Marcus credited, among other things, Starbucks customers using PayPal to top off their cards and the rise of iPad-based e-commerce.

Next stop: moving offline to point-of-sale devices. PayPal announced a trial using PayPal at the register in Home Depot stores, with no NFC required. For now, it's a limited test with a handful of PayPal employees who can use a PayPal card or just enter their mobile numbers in a point-of-sale terminal to pay for their DIY supplies. PayPal expects to roll it out to a wider audience later this year.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

Related:

You can't get away with a bad mobile experience anymore

Google pairs payment with coupons in one tap

PayPal enters the single sign-on space

More Commerce Weekly coverage

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 android commerceweekly ipad mcommerce mobilecommerce paypal paywave tablet visa

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Commerce Weekly: Yahoo's new CEO has data focus

As the payments world roused itself from its holiday hiatus, here are some of the items that caught my eye.

Former PayPal chief brings data focus to Yahoo CEO position

Scott Thompson's move from leading eBay's PayPal division to becoming CEO of Yahoo received ample coverage in this light news week. The most interesting aspect to me was this former chief technology officer's focus on the importance of data to Yahoo's success. While past CEOs have focused on advertising, the company's role in the media landscape and alliances with U.S. and Chinese companies, Thompson showed his tech-centered origins in an interview with Ad Age:

At PayPal, we were able to create an unbelievably compelling business because we used data to understand risk and fraud better than anyone on earth. And that was the secret sauce. We had more data than anyone else, better tools and models, and super smart people who were challenged by the problem. It doesn't seem glamorous, but that was the reason.

Fast Company emphasized Thompson's background as PayPal's CTO and made clear to its lay-business audience that when he's talking about data, he's not just talking about a better dashboard to understand advertising opportunities. He's talking about the "big data" opportunity, tapping into large datasets produced by the transactions and interactions of Yahoo's 700 million members around the world.

From E.B. Boyd's Fast Company post:

Every day, those 700 million souls log in to the Yahoo universe and start making their way around its sites, moving from story to story to story to story — effectively giving Yahoo a media mogul's dream: the largest petri dish in the world to understand what sorts of content appeal to which sorts of people and what sorts of things will make them likely to consume more and more.

Of course, this is hardly news to Yahoo's data engineers or the big data community, but it will be interesting to see what effect a data-savvy CEO will have on Yahoo's prospects.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Flurry: More than one billion apps downloaded in 2011's final week

While most retailers focus on the crucial weeks leading up to the holidays, the week between Christmas and New Year's Day — when customers are off work playing with their newly received devices — is more important for app developers. In fact, Flurry reports that this particular week was the largest ever for iOS and Android device activations and app downloads.

Flurry estimates that more than 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.2 billion applications were downloaded on the two platforms. Christmas day itself was the biggest day ever for downloads: Flurry estimates that 242 million apps were downloaded while happy recipients explored their new toys.

Flurry also predicted that Apple's App Store will have delivered more than 10 billion apps in 2011 — more than twice the number downloaded in 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined.

EBay's mobile VP goes shopping with Robert Scoble

Just before the holiday, we reported on the "Watch with eBay" feature in eBay's iPad app, which offers viewers a sort of real-time catalog, proffering goods related to the program they're viewing on TV. Robert Scoble has an interesting follow-up interview with Steve Yankovich, eBay's vice president of mobile. Yankovich dropped by Scoble's home office with the app to show him how it works, and he revealed a new feature that identifies fabric patterns in clothing and taps related clothing items in eBay's inventories.

Posters on Scoble's related Google+ thread were more fascinated (or irritated) by Yankovich's comments that even though Android devices are dominating the market, the iOS platform is still more important from a commerce perspective.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

Related:

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Mobile metrics: Like the web, but a lot harder

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More Commerce Weekly coverage

Tags: Data Mobile android appstores commerceweekly ebay epaymentweek flurry ios mobiledata payments paypal yahoo

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Commerce Weekly: EBay's TV tie-in

Not much happening this week as the tech world winds down for the end-of-year holidays, but here's one story that caught my eye.

EBay wants you to watch it with them

EBay knows that one screen isn't enough for us now. As more of us watch TV with tablet or smartphone in hand, the massive auction site and online retail aggregator doesn't want to be left out of an opportunity to make a sale. So it's created a feature for its iPad app called Watch with eBay that ties offerings in real time to whatever show you're watching. Kevin Woodward at Internet Retailer has the scoop. Watching the Packers? Once you've keyed in your zip and carrier information, you'll get a screen of green-and-gold logo wear. Viewing another Rooney Mara interview? Maybe you'll see offerings from H&M's Lisbeth Salander line.

Watch with eBay screenshot
The Watch with eBay function within eBay's iPad app shows products related to whatever television program you're viewing.

All I can say is it's about time this happened. Just to bring some perspective, the first time I wrote about this possible feature — seeing something you like on TV and clicking to buy it — I drew my example from the hottest program on TV at the time: If you like Kramer's retro sweater or Jerry's pirate shirt, just click to buy. It didn't happen then; the integration with set-top boxes never reached that deeply. But by disassociating the purchase process from the broadcast itself and running it in a parallel channel (the iPad) that we know is being used to supplement TV watching, eBay might be on to something.

The related data will be worth watching. We know anecdotally that multitasking on the iPad is more comfortable than it was with a laptop (with a lot less heat dissipated into our thighs and other parts). But as yet there appears to be little data on just how much parallel surfing is occurring. EBay's early results should provide one interesting data point.

Commerce Weekly will return on January 5, 2012.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

Related:

Web-TV convergence is already here, just not the way we expected

EBay CEO: We won't compete with our customers

EBay's commerce platform

More Commerce Weekly coverage

Tags: Mobile commerceweekly ebay ipad mobile television userexperience

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Commerce Weekly: Daily Show skewers freemium CEO

Here's what caught my eye in commerce news this week.

Daily Show corners gaming CEO on freemium

Poor Rizwan Virk. The co-founder and CEO of GameView Studios thought he was going to be featured as a new media visionary whose product (social games) contribute to a thriving virtual economy while the real one staggers on through an endless, grinding downturn. Instead, he found himself being skewered by Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi, who accused him of playing off children's emotional immaturity and propagating a business model that looked a lot like drug dealing. Fame, like the Daily Show's producers, plays by its own rules. Here's the segment:

The sneak attack on Virk centered around GameView's popular TapFish, which features a virtual aquarium where players feed virtual food to virtual fish. The game is free, but as with all freemium games, a small percentage of players choose to buy virtual goods (food, fish, accessories) to enhance it. Virk touted the model in the interview as a new approach that allows more people to play the game: "Traditionally, you had to go to a store and buy a $60 cartridge to play. In this new model, you can play games for free."

Mandvi then switched gears and reported on a family in Montpelier, Vermont, (though it's unclear whether this was a real family or actors) where the kids boasted about maxing out the dad's credit card buying virtual fish and fish food on an iTunes account. B-roll showed someone purchasing $99.99 of virtual fish — though Virk says most of the game's actual purchases are for less than $2.

Virk looked equal parts annoyed and confused as Mandvi accused him of pushing a model that lured people into the game and then exploited their addiction. "You provide a product, the first one is free," Mandvi said. "And then as they get accustomed to your product, the price rises. So you're a drug dealer." He then went on to accuse Virk of targeting kids as the dupes, exploiting their "undeveloped frontal cortex" and their desire to keep the fish alive at any cost.

Virk defended himself in a blog post the next day, saying he felt tricked because the Daily Show said it was producing a segment on the virtual goods, and Mandvi's "drug dealer" comments came near the end of four hours of recording. In the post, he pointed out that most purchases are for much less than the one shown during the interview and that all purchases require the buyer to enter their iTunes password. But of course, far fewer people will read his post than see the Daily Show bit.

The report was an unusual attack on the increasingly popular freemium model, which, as Flurry Analytics pointed out last summer, has become the dominant model for popular mobile games. Stories of kids overspending appear rare and anecdotal. I took a small survey on Facebook and Twitter for this post, asking parents how many of them shared their iTunes password with their kids. For the most part, that trust barrier seemed to break down along age lines, with parents of kids younger than about 8 or 9 not sharing the password, while parents of teens were more comfortable with sharing — especially if, as in one case, the child had set it up for them. That may be because at a certain age, kids are old enough to understand they're spending real money and that they're likely to lose the privilege if they abuse it. At least that's what happened to one of the kids in my mini poll: "[I shared the password] until he purchased a bunch of music with inappropriate content!"

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Isis taps NFC partner

ISIS Isis, the mobile payment platform funded by Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, said it has contracted with Dutch digital security company Gemalto to run the NFC platform on Isis-enabled phones. This means that Gemalto will manage the access to the secure NFC chip on Isis-enabled phones, saying in effect who can access the system for payment or other services.

The move is another step toward Isis' eventual rollout, which will be preceded by two tests planned for the first half of 2012 in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Isis is emerging as a major competitor to Google Wallet, particularly in light of Verizon's recent decision not to allow Google Wallet to function on the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon's network. Verizon and Google say they're in discussions, but skeptics wondered if this might be the first of many blocks to come by the three carriers who support Isis.

Meanwhile, Bank Technology News (BTN) reported that Google Wallet may be planning to roll out a larger demo in London in the first months of 2012, ahead of the Summer Olympics. BTN said that Visa, the payments sponsor of the Olympics, is likely to be part of that trial. Thus far, Google Wallet has been limited only to Nexus owners on the Sprint network who have a MasterCard through Citibank. The London trial is likely to be widespread, reaching more handset owners and, presumably, far more merchants.

Consumers: Make it easier for us to spend

Survey results released this week offer the counter-intuitive finding that consumers might be more comfortable with mobile payments than they are with credit cards. Javelin Strategy & Research conducted the survey that found that (not surprisingly) consumers don't like having to key in 16-digit credit card numbers to buy stuff online. They would be more comfortable with direct carrier-billed mobile payment, which requires only a mobile number and a pin. Those charges then show up on a mobile carrier bill. The survey was commissioned by Payment One — a direct carrier-billed mobile payment provider.

More than half of the 2,000 consumers who took the survey said they've abandoned shopping carts before checking out because of security concerns, and four out of five said they would spend more money online if it were easier and more secure. In the report, Javelin said this could all add up to an additional $110 billion in new revenue for merchants in the U.S. each year. Payment One is just one of several vendors willing to step in to help merchants reach that number, recognizing that 14 numbers is a lot easier to key in than 16, particularly when 10 of those digits are your mobile phone number.

Got news?

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

If you're interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O'Reilly and X.commerce.

Related:

Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 commerceweekly directbilling isis mobilegames mobilepayments nfc visa

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Commerce Weekly: Verizon drops Google Wallet

Here's what caught my attention in the commerce space this week.

Verizon to Google: Leave your Wallet at home

Verizon's decision not to support Google Wallet in a new NFC-enabled phone renewed concerns that the mobile payments landscape is in for a long turf battle. Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, an Android-powered phone in all other respects, won't support Google Wallet on Verizon because, the carrier says, Google Wallet differs from other apps in that it interacts not only with the operating system but also with "a new and proprietary hardware element in our phones" — presumably, the NFC chip.

Few thought that was the whole story: the consensus among observers was that Verizon won't ship Google Wallet because it's one of the founding partners of Isis, a competing mobile-wallet solution. Isis isn't on any phones yet, but it's planning trials in Austin and Salt Lake City later this year. Verizon teamed up with fellow telecoms AT&T and T-Mobile, along with Barclaycard US and Discover Financial Services to launch the Isis effort last autumn. Since then, Isis has signed agreements with the other major credit card services to collaborate on development.

ZDNet's James Kendrick said it's not just about Isis, but about how much Google should pay to reach a new, large pool of customers: "Google will have to pay Verizon to play." And besides, Kendrick wrote, Google has a deal with Sprint right now — though it's going to be a long, cold winter for Google if that agreement keeps it off the other major carriers.

This fragmentation is likely to be the case for a while, noted Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic. Mobile wallets are probably fine for enthusiasts and early adopters, but mainstream shoppers won't take it too seriously until they know they can use their mobile wallets in most of the places they go. "[W]e won't leave our wallets at home until we get a cord-cutting equivalent," Greenfield wrote. "For now, users either have to load a smorgasbord of mobile payment apps, or settle for the current half-hearted solutions."

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Crooks take swipe-and-pay literally

In a reminder that unattended payment points — such as pay-at-the-pump terminals, ATMs, and self-serve check-out lanes — are weak links in the payments security chain, shoppers at Lucky supermarkets in Northern California appear to be the victims of criminals who tampered with card readers to skim debit card and PIN data. As of Tuesday, police in Petaluma, Calif., had 112 reports from customers of the local Lucky who reported unauthorized withdrawals from their accounts.

SaveMart, Lucky's parent corporation based in Modesto, Calif., said on its website that it discovered breaches back on November 23 and replaced compromised card readers at 20 stores. Unfortunately, they missed a few stores, including the one in Petaluma.

It's not clear yet what method was used to skim the data and the PINs. BankInfoSecurity.com reports that there are several ways to capture the PIN, including compromising the PIN pad hardware inside the box. In that case, it's also possible that Bluetooth technology could be used to transmit data to a laptop in a car parked close outside. Michael's craft stores were hit by a similar breach last May, causing that company to replace 7,200 PIN pads.

"Criminals realize that retailers are understaffed to the point that swapping out a [point-of-sale terminal] will go unnoticed," McAfee consultant Robert Siciliano told BankInfoSecurity. "Once they determine the make and model of an easily swappable device, they target a chain they can easily comprise."

Starbucks succeeds with payments, moves on to augmented reality

Starbucks said it has processed more than 26 million transactions on its mobile app since launching it last January. The novelty effect appears not to have worn off: in the first nine weeks of the program, there were three million transactions. For the nine-week period starting in October, there were twice that number. The Starbucks app is a nice example of what's possible with lightweight payments when you have complete control of a closed-loop system. Customers can load up a Starbucks card by credit card online or at a store (with cash or credit). They can draw off that card's credit by clicking a button on the mobile app, which displays a barcode that Starbucks' cashiers scan to debit the card.

But payment is just one part of Starbucks' mobile strategy. In November, it introduced Cup Magic, an augmented-reality application that lets users interact with characters on its red holiday cups and on displays in its stores. After launching the associated iOS or Android app, you find drawings of the characters and view them with your phone's camera. The app identifies shapes in the characters and launches simple interactive animations, like snowflakes falling and the characters playing.

When I first read the release, I thought it was yet another way for customers to engage with their phones rather than anyone else in the store. But when my daughter and I went to a nearby Starbucks to try it out, just the opposite happened: a crowd of curious customers gathered around to see what we were laughing at. Some downloaded the app right away and began doing the same. The two cashiers, who were unaware of the app or the secret behind the character drawings, demanded to know what we were all doing. When we explained, they agreed it was pretty cool and helped us locate the other characters in the store. As we drove home with her hot chocolate, my daughter explained to me how each of those people in the store would probably go home and tell a few other people about what they saw at Starbucks this evening. I smiled and thought to myself: a viral marketer's dream.

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Tags: Mobile Web 2.0 commerceweekly googlewallet isis mobileapps mobilepayments starbucks verizon

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