It uses a technology called NFC (Near Field Communication) to securely send your payments digitally.

The only phone in the US that supports NFC is the Google Nexus S, available with t-mobile and Sprint, and there are high hopes that the iPhone 5 will support it too.

Right now, Google Wallet only works with Citi-Mastercards and the Google Prepaid Card. Visa and Google announced a worldwide agreement to support the Visa payWave app, but it will still be up to the financial institutions and banks to add support.

The “tap and pay” method of payment is cool, but the Google Wallet feature that has the most potential is what Google is calling SingleTap. The SingleTap experience means that users can combine their coupons, loyalty cards and payment method all with one tap. It’s an interesting concept … digital save all your credit cards, loyalty cards, and soon tickets, boarding passes, and more.

Security

At first it might be scary to think you will enter all your data into your phone … what if it gets lost? Well, it’s a lot better than if your wallet gets lost … at least your phone has an initial passcode, a second pin number for Google Wallet, and if you’re smart, a remote format feature to securely delete your entire phone’s data should it get stolen.

Privacy

A big question that many would-be users are sure to have about Google Wallet is “does this mean Google knows what I buy.” The answer, at least right now, is no. Google does record local transactions on your phone, but these transactions are only identified by amount and location and are only viewable to you.

In practice, this means that if I look at my Google Wallet history, I only see a date, an amount and an approximate location. Google says that it is working to roll out a more robust digital receipt system in the future.

Diversity

American Express, Visa, Paypal, Google, and the major carriers are all racing towards raining the NFC arena. Google was the first to go-to-market, and there’s a recent announcement that American Express, Discover and Visa have all licensed their NFC technologies to Google, the next step is to get the thousands of financial institutions and merchants on-board with an NFC system.

Other uses

NFC is going to be one of the key technologies of 2012 … with easy communication among phones and cheap RFID tags, we will not only see seamless mobile payments, but also tap to get additional info on any product, posters, magazines, or socially connect to other phones for gaming or networking. NFC’s possibilities are endless – so expect an innovative and fun year to come.

The first Google+ infographic was released an the numbers pretty much confirm it: 26 million users, 100% of which work in software engineering, web development, advertising, or related careers. Should be interesting to watch it shift (or not) now that Google+ is open to the public.

NFC is already starting to be built into a range of Android smartphones, RIM and Nokia have committed to the technology and Apple is reportedly adding the contactless technology to its new iOS devices. GPlus has created an infographic detailing how NFC will replace our wallets and shows how companies are set to revolutionise the way we shop.

This infographic is focused mainly in the US, and it should be very interesting to see if Google Wallets would add more credit cards, and what ISIS has really planned as it gains support from all the major carriers.

Security has to evolve, new types of fraud and nfc sniffing will arise, and along with mobile merchant payments – we should keep a close eye on peer to peer money transfer that will enable the second market and shadow economies.

]]> http://takemetoyourleader.com/2011/07/11/the-future-of-mobile-payments-infographic/feed/ 0 http://takemetoyourleader.com/2011/06/28/things-that-happen-on-the-internet-every-sixty-seconds/ http://takemetoyourleader.com/2011/06/28/things-that-happen-on-the-internet-every-sixty-seconds/#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:17:20 +0000 Freddie Laker http://takemetoyourleader.com/?p=1634

A couple fun and digestible bits of digital content were shared with me today. Infographics and well edited videos seem to be used increasingly as a great form of self promotion but at the end of a day I’m a sucker for well presented stats and figures.

Check out the video below which reflects the latest update to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ series.

The visual above, created by Go-Globe.com, reflects the following:

• Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries
• 6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr
• 600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, amounting to 25+ hours of content
• 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Social Networking site Facebook
• 70 New domains are registered
• 168,000,000+ emails are sent
• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Social Networking site Twitter
• iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times
• 20,000 new posts are published on Micro-blogging platform tumbler
• Popular web browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1700 times
• Popular blogging platform WordPress is downloaded more than 50 times
• WordPress Plugins aredownloaded more than 125 times
• 100 accounts are created on professional networking site LinkedIn
• 40 new Questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com
• 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
• 1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content
• 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com
• 1,200+ new ads are created on Craigslist
• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users
• 13,000+ hours of music streaming is done by personalized Internet radio provider Pandora
• 1,600+ reads are made on Scribd, the largest social reading publishing company

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SapientNitro mastermind Rob Gonda talks about marketing in the digital age and the declining importance of mass media By Santiago Campillo-Lundbeck

At the World After Advertising conference in Düsseldorf, Rob Gonda tried to shock the public by saying that traditional advertising is dead. In an interview, though, Gonda, who is SapientNitro’s Global Head of Creative Technology, gave us a more complex picture of the communication revolution sparked off by the internet and how marketing has to respond.

Horizon: Your job is to find opportunities worldwide for SapientNitro to creatively use technology in marketing. Why has technology become a strategic issue in digital marketing all of a sudden?

RG: People’s relationship with technology is the critical issue. Technology changes our habits and so it’s only logical that technology also changes the way we see brands. Technology puts new filters between customers and brands.

Horizon: What’s new about that? A TV commercial is also, in essence, a filter between consumers and companies.

RG: The difference is that digital technology has a much greater impact on the brand experience than traditional marketing ever could have had. Nowadays, the bulk of interactions with my bank are actually with an ATM or online banking. In the U.S., only four percent of all customers aged between 15 and 50 know any of their bank’s employees by name. And without a personal bank advisor, mainly what’s left to shape brand awareness is the bank’s technological interfaces.

Horizon: Aren’t you just adding new meaning to simple customer service features? Brand awareness has always been one of the core tasks of advertising.

RG: That’s not going far enough. Brand loyalty is largely built on the real experiences the consumer has with the brand. And there is often a huge gap between how the company sees itself and the real picture, given the digital options that are theoretically available. 80 percent of all CEOs believe that their brand provides a superior user experience. Yet only 8 percent of customers agree, on average.

Horizon: Is that proof that traditional advertising as we know it is officially on its deathbed?

RG: No, advertising will not die, but it does have to change. Brand building is just as important as it was before. But you can’t just shout out your messages any more. Brands have to become part of their users’ way of life or build loyalty by being useful.

Horizon: That sounds like a good idea. But how would it work in practice?

RG: As we have been saying for years, the important thing is to give the right message to the right people at the right time. A marketer can use digital touchpoints such as smartphones to provide consumers with customized messages right when they need them. For example, if my cell phone knows from my social community that my wife’s birthday is coming up, it could display coupons for flower shops nearby. That type of marketing works because it is useful.

Horizon: That type of marketing also reaches deep into the private lives of consumers.

RG: For it to work, consumers will need to see the benefits it offers. A personalized financial management service increases in value for the consumer with the more personal financial data they disclose. The more data that is available, the more relevant the recommendations will be. Marketing needs to succeed in showing that, then acceptance will grow.

Horizon: Currently, old and new media are waging a battle on which is more valuable for brand building. What advantages do old media still have, in your view?

RG: I think this is an increasingly irrelevant debate because the digital and physical touchpoints are getting progressively closer. For example, if a store window displays QR codes that refer to information online, is that a digital or a physical touchpoint? The real challenge today will be to develop a marketing platform that integrates analog-physical touchpoints and digital touchpoints. The digital formats will be the ones driving innovation though; there is a budget of 50 billion dollars available for digital advertising. And that is the goal that media marketers should be concentrating on. So it is “business as usual” for the advertising industry, just with different advertising media? Digitization will inevitably change the advertising industry. The future will be a lot less about mass media. Wide-reach media are no longer the only media with a communication value, they are just a part of the context needed in the digital world to really make a marketing message relevant. They are shifting from an anchor position to just being another link in the chain of the brand building process.

Horizon: What does that mean, in real terms, for those involved?

RG: The advertising environments of the mass media are increasingly becoming a bulk commodity and they will be treated that way as time goes on. Traditional media will be facing changes too. Newspapers will need to find new business models and television will have to develop into an addressable media.

Horizon: Marketers are confronted with new communication platforms every year. What else do we need to get ready for?

RG: We are currently in a phase in which marketing technology, the Mobile Web and cloud computing are becoming relevant to the mass media. 2015 will see the beginning of the Semantic Web, with the Internet of Things starting by 2020 at the latest. And the range of exciting new options is much wider than that. The video-game controller Windows Kinect presents completely new intuitive possibilities for users to move around in a story. This is already causing a revolution in the user’s gaming experience, so you can imagine the impact it could have on marketing.

Google, like Amazon, hasn’t secured licenses from the four major recorded-music companies, according to these people, and is likely to include a system that functions much like a remote hard drive. Users of the service are expected to be able to listen to songs they have uploaded to the service in a so-called streaming mode but won’t be able to download the files themselves.

It’s funny how Google follows every amazon stop … Amazon Elastic Computing (EC2) -> Google App Engine … Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -> Google Storage for Developers … Amazon Cloud Drive / Player -> Google Cloud Drive / Player …

With Google’s amazing track record (of zero) of building friendly services and applications, I don’t expect their music locker to really take off … especially again if it’s based on Google Storage for Developers, which is not being used by any developer.

Google, do you want to really get anywhere with this? Buy Orb, scale it, embed it seamlessly into your cloud, and offer up the first cloud based full media center.

If the typical Indian business owner thinks the much talked about smartphone revolution does not concern their business then they should think again. Given the rapid growth of the smartphone market, it is only a matter of time till Indian consumers get their hands on one of the new generation mobile phones. This presents a great opportunity for Indian small businesses that know how to capitalize on this trend to gain competitive advantage.

Although India boasts to have the 2^nd largest telecommunication network in the world after China (with 771 million mobile lines in service) and over time internet usage has surged (currently standing at aprox.  50 million active monthly internet users on PCs and phones), consumers in India have historically avoided mobile internet. The reason was the slow speed of the connections and an overall poor experience on feature phones. This is about to change.

India’s telecom providers are now driving consumers towards a new wave of inexpensive smartphones that will be powered by their new next generation 3G mobile networks, which should be fully rolled by 2012. According to IMRB and IAMAI the total number of mobile internet users in India in 2010 was 12.1 million. In 2011 the number is expected to reach 30 million. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group has predicted there could be as many as 237 million mobile internet users in India by 2015, up from the current estimate of about 11 million. This not only implies exciting times for telecom companies but also presents a unique opportunity for businesses that are ready to deliver rich mobile content, games, and useful ‘apps’ to consumers and businesses hungry for great experiences on their new smartphones.

Smartphones, for many Indian consumers in cities and rural areas alike, will represent the equivalent of their PC, opening the flood gates to reaching the previously untapped consumers throughout the country with compelling digital experiences. Consumers, who had been previously limited to retail businesses in their local area, will now have full access to online commerce sites. Since historically e-commerce sites have not been formatted for mobile devices, India’s future presents a perfect opportunity for small businesses to serve this new need, while avoiding global players as competition.

In the future, consumers will also have full access to ‘apps’, the latest hot trend in mobile, that will allow for businesses to provide experiences that move well beyond the capability of the mobile browser. Free, for sale or designed to drive awareness of their business, applications will provide businesses with a permanent foothold on consumers’ devices. In a recent report, Gartner forecasts that global sales of apps for the iPad, iPhone and other portable mobile phones and devices will exceed $15 billion in 2011. It also predicts that this year 17.7 billion apps will be downloaded, the revenue from which will exceed the mobile app revenue generated in 2010 by 190%.

 Though digital technologies are yet to conquer the Indian market, the country has already set out on a path to its digital future. Smartphones will bring rich digital experiences to the masses, which they will not only desire but will come to expect – and entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of such platforms will reap the benefits.

]]> http://takemetoyourleader.com/2011/05/09/the-future-rise-of-smartphones-in-india/feed/ 4 http://takemetoyourleader.com/2010/11/02/will-the-desktop-be-the-next-marketing-battleground/ http://takemetoyourleader.com/2010/11/02/will-the-desktop-be-the-next-marketing-battleground/#comments Tue, 02 Nov 2010 05:58:09 +0000 Freddie Laker http://takemetoyourleader.com/?p=1566
I love apps on my mobile devices. Some might argue I have an app addiction with literally 15 to 20 apps being bought a month between my iPhone, HTC Desire, and my iPad. Since apps are reviewed by the app stores I don’t worry about my devices crashing and if I don’t like them they’re easy to uninstall so I’m always to try out apps by businesses and brands a like.  In fact it’s pretty normal fair these days for brands to be creating apps and games and distributing these (typically free) brand experiences through the app stores. In fact I find they tend to make their way into almost every digital pitch these days.

Why then did desktop applications as brand experiences never take off?

Adobe Air made it easy for Flex and Actionscript developers to create multi-platform desktop apps and yet the world of desktop apps as marketing experiences never went mainstream. There are so many clear benefits including being an ongoing engagement with consumers on one of their most personal devices that they might spend hours and hours a day on.

The reality is that I think there is a natural hesitation to install anything on your desktop as you never really if your computer (which for many of us is holy ground) would survive the experience due to malware, viruses, poor coding, etc. For most the risk just wasn’t worth it – which is exactly why I’ve always recommended to creative teams that they avoid installable desktop apps at all cost because the drop off rate would be too high and stick to in-browser experiences whenever possible.

We’re in a new age though, an age chock full of apps that do pretty much everything, an age when consumers trust the concept of apps and an app store.  Apple’s recent announcement that they will start selling desktop applications through an App store is a major opportunity for marketers. It has an excellent chance to bring in the age of the desktop as a favorite place to provide app based brand experiences and the feared drop off rate might finally plummet.

There is no doubt that apps on mobile devices are here to stay and I think this is the beginning of a major trend in desktop experiences. Mobile devices have been able to install applications for quite some time before the current generation app stores existed – it was just difficult and cumbersome for your typical user.  Expect the same revolution to happen to happen on the desktop and start preparing for a whole new wave of specialists to help agencies and brands alike.

For marketing experiences to be successful on the app store I think we should look to guidance from the successes of apps on mobile devices. Expectations should move away from large blown out applications and games that some might expect on a desktop machine and think about lightweight, focused, and sometimes “disposable” experiences. Consumers have reset their expectations around low risk, short-term, experiences that serve one function very well.

Application developers and marketers alike should be looking at the functionality of desktops and thinking what can I do here that I can’t do in a browser or via streamed content. I expect a lot of more advanced uses of cameras, processing power, your local computer content, and “always on” experiences to be fertile territory for brands to create memorable moments for consumers. These are areas where browser based experiences still struggle and the desktop offers a chance for new creative approaches.

It’s time to challenge our selves to ask “how can brands bring value to the (mac) desktop?” as it’s just about to become another great battleground for the hearts and minds of consumers.

Google announced and released instant search today, a feature that combines instant dynamic results with predictions to instantly populate the page with results as you type.

• Dynamic Results – Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
• Predictions – One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
• Scroll to search – Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:

Google posted a few hours after the launch that “you may see fluctuations in traffic for organic keywords”, which could translated into, oh, btw, you might need to re-build your KPIs as we just changed all metrics …

For instance, because Google refreshes the results every 300ms, your impressions may go through the roof, but yes conversion or clickthroughs may stay the same, go up, or down … depending on they keyword relevance for partial sentences.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant:

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:
2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

In conclusion … SEO is not dead, Google did not kill it, but Google Instant is definitely a game changer for SEO and data metrics & analytics.

Sites will need to optimize for particular letter combinations, not just entire keywords. It will be interesting to see whether results get spammed or if Google will gain the upperhand in this constant cat and mouse game.

Imagine if you were in Hawaii for your honeymoon, taking a cruise to all the different islands … now imagine if each photo had a geo-tag, and a time stamp, and you could comment and add your thoughts and feelings … Facebook places would be the platform to help you re-live this experience, follow your path or trace … but also, what if you come back 5 years from now, to the same place … how nice would it be to match it to your previous experiences? Or how about you go to Disney parks, and you need advice on the rides for your new kids … you can see comments your friends made in previous experiences, recommendations, reviews … ditto for restaurants … you get the point.

Facebook hasn’t made it official, but while I was lecturing last night at the Miami Ad School, I checked in, later on visited the place page, and I noticed that there’s a section titled “Photo Memories“.

Geo-tagging rich content is a huge differentiator against the currently actively vocal by desperation Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s CEO. Let the memories begin.