Category Archives: Tech

Mobile payment systems are about to become real as companies introduce their offerings and technology to the world. Buying goods or services with your smartphone is almost second nature. We’re all getting used to searching and tapping or scanning to pay.

Scan and pay will be the paradigm shift that transforms mobile commerce. Combine scan and pay with intelligent apps and you have a powerhouse waiting to be unleashed: If you’re paying for something at the register with your smartphone, the retailer may offer you 25% off if you immediately sign up for their credit card, or offer you a heavily discounted scarf to go with your new fall coat. Impulsive shoppers better destroy their smartphones now and pull out the old flip-phone from 2001. The key to merchant success is instant analysis of what you’re buying so they can offer you a complementary or similar item to “buy now”.

Visa, PayPal, Square and Google have been tinkering in this space for quite some time and it looks like their offerings are about to show some fruition. Mobile transactions are already totaling $240 billion annually, but a recent study by Juniper Research reports that by 2015, the transaction totals may reach over $670 billion.

Smartphones, with their built-in carrier service and vast library of available apps, are perfect “wallets” — you always have it with you, and it can securely store your financial information. Some carriers in the US are beginning to test systems that will allow consumers with smartphones that have NFC (near field communication) chips to make purchases by touching the device to a merchant payment terminal. You may be wondering: what is NFC? NFC works like this:

1. A simple connection between two devices is initiated with a physical touch
2. There must be an “initiator” and a “target”. Your smartphone would be the initiator when making a purchase
3. The initiator generates a radio frequency (RF) field with a range of about 4 centimeters
4. The target picks up the RF field and receives the data completing the payment request

But your smartphone is not simply a payment mechanism. Remember the word “smart” connected to the word “phone”. Retailers will be able to offer you loyalty points, coupons, and redeemable items via your smartphone directly before or after your purchase. Starbucks is already doing this with their updated app: buying a latte earns you points that add up to free items.

As is typical in the tech industry, the different players are fighting it out for dominance. Verizon Wireless won’t allow Google’s Wallet on any of their devices, and AT&T was disabling NFC on phones to stop them from using Google Wallet. T-Mobile is piloting its own Isis payment system in Salt Lake City and Austin.

The tech wars will ultimately provide a winner — more than likely multiple systems for quite awhile. Once there is convergence, however, you’ll be the actual winner — and from then on you can leave your over-stuffed wallet with all that old-school paper money at home.

The social business workflow is based on people being able to connect, communicate and share information more efficiently. Collaboration platforms such as Jive, Salesforce.com, and others have not been flexible enough to properly support the rapid transformation to mobile that is occurring in the workforce.

But there are some bright lights on the horizon. At its annual gathering in Las Vegas this month, Jive introduced an extension to their social business platform called Jive Present.

Jive states that “…it’s become a business imperative that teams have an easy, intuitive and controlled way to receive information and leverage social tools to interact with the right content and people. With Jive Present, organizations now have a powerful tool accessible anytime and anywhere.”

Since mobile devices, especially tablets, are entering the business workflow faster than any technology device ever, it’s imperative that companies keep their mobile workers connected to their internal networks. One of the biggest challenges that CIOs face is ensuring that their mobile workforce can seamlessly access important data while keeping that data secure.

By extending their platform beyond the desktop companies like Jive will offer more relevant solutions for collaborating. It’s about time that the burgeoning mobile workforce has the ability to collaborate regardless of their location.

This last weekend, the San Francisco Giants played their hardest and entered into the World Series running.

Monster Products loves the Giants so much, they created limited edition Inspiration Orange headphones and gave them to the players.

As you can see (left) Gregor Blanco, Angel Pagan and Joaquin Aris couldn’t leave the locker room without tweeting a picture of them in the locker room!

Many people have been asking themselves the toughest question of all: iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S III? The smartphone design and manufacturer is important. But oh so more critical is the operating system you choose: iOS or Android. There are so many similarities in the two operating systems that now the lawyers are getting rich — but there is a major factor to consider that you may not be thinking about as you hone in on your final decision:

Platforms matter. They really do.

When you get an iPhone, one of the first things it asks you during setup is to create an iCloud account. What, you don’t have one? You probably do and just don’t realize it. Did you ever create a .mac email address back in the day? If so, you have an iCloud account. If not, what is iCloud you ask? Well, iCloud is Apple’s attempt at a mostly free cloud storage service. Kinda like Dropbox for all your Apple-related content. iCloud is really fantastic if you have multiple Apple devices. With iCloud you can sync your email, contacts, calendar, and even more important, your apps and iTunes media across all your iOS devices and Macs. You never really leave home without access to those trashy reality shows you bought on iTunes.

When you setup your new Galaxy S III one of the first questions it throws out at you is what is your Gmail address? LIke iPhone, Android revolves heavily around Google’s services. And of course, Google helped invent the cloud and what it’s become over the years. So once you type your Gmail address, you will be able to sync all your Google services, including email, contacts, calendar, and Google Drive and Play. Similar to iPhone, you can sync all your media purchased or rented through the Play marketplace.

The gotcha: This is where platform matters. If you mix and match, a la having Mac computers at home, a Windows laptop at work and an Android device like the Galaxy, you’re potentially gonna miss out on what a closed platform brings you. You can’t listen to or watch your iTunes media on an Android device. You can use third-party apps to access your Play media on iPhone, but it’s not a stellar experience. The Gmail app on iPhone is a much different experience than it is on Android. And of course, do we really need to talk about maps on both platforms? It’s a different experience.

As each company reaches for more marketshare, they are closing their ecosystems even more. To be successful, they’re going to need to offer experiences that compel customers to want to commit to one ecosystem. A truly “open” platform is no longer possible. You’re going to have to choose and deal with the consequences. The experience when you’re on one or the other is optimal — it diminishes a bit when you mix and match.

At the end of that day, you may consider important features such as screen size, battery life, ease of use, and more. However, you also need to think about the platform and what it means for you and how you use your device. If you like access to your data and your content across multiple devices, you may need to make a platform decision before you make a smartphone choice.

Big data — a set of technologies that apply complex algorithms to large sets of data in an attempt to extract meaningful results — is currently all about targeted marketing. For years, companies have been trying to figure out how to use the customer data they collect to create more targeted advertising. The retail world has a whole lotta data on you just sitting there waiting to be used to get you to buy more stuff.

In most instances, we all benefit from targeted ads. Retail marketing knows people will click on ads that are relevant to them. And frankly, if you’re not interested in golf, you shouldn’t be shown ads for new golf clubs. It’s as simple as that. In our ad-fueled economy, we are all aware that we have to deal with ads. Why not have ones presented to us that actually interest us?

The trouble that retail is having is how to take all the data and analyze it so that it can then be targeted appropriately. This requires a fundamental shift in how networks are designed and accessed. And on top of that, the transition to mobile is also a wrinkle for big data… how to find more sophisticated ways to parse the data. It used to take over eight weeks for a typical retail operation to analyze data feeds and extract meaningful results — now with advanced data analytics tools this type of processing can happen in one day. This may be bad news for impulse shoppers — but it’s great news for retail.

That’s one reason Silicon Valley is lit up with so many big data startups. All these startups are vying for a new marketplace that promises seriously big returns: the data explosion we’re all experiencing is estimated to be a $100 billion market. The prize goes to the one(s) that can figure out how to take all the fragmented consumer data and package it in a way that provides compelling narratives at very granular consumer levels. There’s so much data available it’s like taking thousands of shredded documents and re-assembling them by hand. But once the solution is realized it will be an enormous payday.

This means networking companies are gonna score big as well. Infrastructures will need to be redesigned to gather and crunch the data and spit out meaningful results. This opens new marketplaces for older, traditional companies as well: switches, networking gear, cable, servers, etc. When you consider the transformation “big data” brings, it will make the social media revolution seem like small potatoes. Just watch and see. And keep buying stuff on your smartphone. You’re creating massive amounts of data that thousands of people are feverishly working around the clock to harness and synthesize… all in the name of selling you stuff you didn’t know you needed.