On Thursday, the technology giant introduced Google Wallet, a mobile application that will allow consumers to wave their cellphones at a retailer’s terminal to make a payment instead of using a credit card. The app, for the Android operating system, will also enable users to redeem special coupons and earn loyalty points.
Starting this summer, the wallet will be available on the Nexus S 4G phone on Sprint and able to hold certain MasterCards issued by Citibank. It will also hold a virtual Google Prepaid MasterCard, which can be loaded with money charged from plastic credit cards.
The mobile wallet will work at any of the 124,000 merchants that accept MasterCard’s PayPass terminals, which take contactless payments, and more than 300,000 merchants outside the United States. The wallet is powered by a technology called near-field communications, which is incorporated into a chip in mobile phones and sends a message to the terminal sitting on merchants’ counters.
“Eventually, you will be able to put everything in your wallet,” said Stephanie Tilenius, vice president for commerce at Google, at a news conference on Thursday.
That grand vision will take a while to come to fruition. Various players have been working on mobile wallets for years, but they have not gained traction because the companies have not been able to agree on how they would be paid or who would control the wallets. Mobile phone carriers, banks, credit card issuers, payment networks and technology companies all have a stake in this battle.
With its wallet, Google will make money on “Google Offers” — advertising deals from local and online businesses that are sent through the phone. Like Groupon, Google will collect a fee from participating retailers every time a person redeems a coupon. Citibank will collect the same fees as it would in a traditional credit card transaction.
It may take a little while for the Google Wallet to be fully functional across the country. While Google has worked with more than 15 retailers, like American Eagle Outfitters, Bloomingdale’s, the Container Store and Jamba Juice, they all need to upgrade their payment terminals. When they do, consumers will also be able to store and redeem special deals with the wallet. Merchants in New York and San Francisco are expected to be ready this summer.
Once the retailers’ technology is in place, consumers will be able to wave their phone at the checkout counter and, in one swoop, discounts will be applied, loyalty points will be awarded and the payment made. Someday, Google said, when consumers enter the store, their phones may serve up a list of items they recently bought, and offer them related discounts.
The wallet app itself will require a PIN, as will each transaction. The payment credentials will be encrypted and stored on a chip, called the secure element, inside the phone. The app itself will be free to users.
Google emphasized that the wallet would be open to all businesses and invited other banks, credit card issuers, payment networks, mobile carriers and merchants to work with it.
“I expect that other payment networks and other banks will join this effort, though in some cases it will be a hedge strategy they employ along with their own mobile payment initiatives,” said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Since these payments utilize the same underlying business model as cards today, there is not significant disruption risk for these players.”
Google is also working with First Data, which processes payments and will serve as the wallet’s “trusted service manager,” ensuring the security of the transaction.
If the phone was stolen, the credit cards inside could be remotely disabled. Consumers would have the same “zero liability” for unauthorized transactions made with their phone as they would with their plastic cards.
Eventually, Google said, its wallet may be able to hold much more than credit cards and loyalty programs, including car keys, theater tickets and airline boarding passes.
But access to all of those items will still require a fully charged phone. If the phone battery dies, even Ms. Tilenius of Google conceded, “I think you need to use your plastic at that point.”
Friday, May 27, 2011
M-money (& NFC) finally gets the catapult it long needed. From NYT: Google Unveils Wireless Payment System
Saturday, May 21, 2011
This post from GigaOm sums up the NEW news well: Curation, Verification and News as a Process
As part of a “social media summit” this week, the BBC posted an overview of how its user-generated content desk handles reports from the field — verifying and curating them in much the same way that Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing for the past few months during the upheaval in the Middle East. As I’ve written before, there is a growing need for this kind of curation, but there is also the need to start looking at news as a process and not as a pristine, finished product.
While many media outlets have web editors who track reports on Twitter and other social media, the BBC is unique (as far as I know) in having a special desk that sits in the middle of the newsroom and pulls in reports from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and anywhere else it can find information. The desk staffers then try to verify these reports, and some of the ways they do that are fascinating. In a sense, they are trying to do CSI-style forensic analysis in real time, by checking things such as:
- looking at weather and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the reported date and time of a photo or video.
checking the accents and language in a video or other report to make sure that they are consistent with the location, using BBC staff who speak those languages. verifying locations against maps of a region, and cross-checking images against known images from that location. Andy Carvin has also talked about how he sees verification as being a big part of his job in curating Twitter feeds from people in the trouble spots he is reporting on — feeds that are made up of people he has hand-picked because they are reliable in some way. Whenever a video is posted that purports to be of an attack, or reports of government leaders or high-profile individuals killed, Carvin spends a lot of time trying to get confirmation from others in the region or other reliable sources.
Storyful and curation
Mark Little, the founder of a curation tool called Storyful — which allows journalists and others to collect videos, photos and other content easily about a specific topic (in much the same way that a similar tool called Storify does) — says that his staff of curators take much the same approach that the BBC’s user-generated content desk does, in trying to confirm reports and videos that claim to be from a particular spot. They also:
- review an uploader’s history and location to see whether he or she has shared useful and credible content in the past, or if they are a “scraper,” who passes off other people’s content as their own.
use Google Street View images to help verify the locations in a video or photo. monitor social-media traffic to see who is sharing the content and what questions are being asked about it. But what’s interesting about the Storyful founder’s post about this process is that he admits that sometimes he has posted things when he wasn’t sure whether they were correct — including a photo that he posted during the floods in Queensland, Australia that showed a crocodile in a parking lot. As he says in his post: “It was too good to be true, so we decided to drop the image into the social media conversation around the floods. Suddenly, we were part of a furious debate about crocodiles in Australia,” which ultimately proved that the photo was a fake. Carvin says that he also uses his network to check the veracity of reports, because he knows they will know more than he does.
Crowdsourced fact-checking
There are no doubt many mainstream journalists and media observers — including some at the BBC, who were critical of Carvin’s approach to Twitter reporting during the social-media summit — who would see this kind of approach as reprehensible, and argue that reports of any kind shouldn’t be posted on Twitter or anywhere else without verifying them. But others (including me) would argue that what Little did was a sensible way of approaching the new real-time nature of news reporting: in other words, post a report and say that it is unverified, and see if anyone can help you verify it.
Little calls this the “human algorithm,” and I think it’s a necessary step in the future of journalism and media. If anyone can report, and anyone can function as a journalist, then we need everyone to be able to help confirm and verify reports like the ones Andy and the BBC are getting. That’s not something a single person or even a group of editors at a specific outlet can do in real-time. Media analyst and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has talked about the need to look at the news as a process instead of a finished product that is turned out at a specific time and in a specific format, and that is something more media outlets need to come to grips with.
In a sense, this is no different from the approach that news wires have taken in the past: a report comes in, it is fact-checked as much as possible and then it goes on the wire, and when it needs to be corrected, an update goes out. Twitter is becoming the real-time news wire for the world, and we need people who can make use of it as such — more people like Andy Carvin, as entrepreneur Bernard Lunn argues in a recent blog post. And we need new attitudes about how we look at journalism as well, now that everyone is doing it.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
A refreshing, real world take on how old & new media can co-exist. Forbes chief's digital approach should be mimicked - Telegraph
He was then quickly hit with the following questions: why bother launching a print edition? Why not just launch Forbes Europe as an app and website? Shouldn’t the first time Forbes enters Europe in its 100-year history, be digitally, to mark the web age?
Without missing a beat, a cool and collected Forbes said: “How you deliver information does not have to rely upon one platform. Most of the content on Forbes.com is not from the magazine. Print allows you to delve into a story in a more thorough way than online. Online allows you to amplify the story and spur on another print story.
“Each of these platforms is different but each has its own unique characteristics for conveying information.”
What is the main reason for Forbes’s confidence? He revealed that digital revenues from Forbes.com now account for 50pc of Forbes magazine’s total revenues, having successfully sold advertising at a premium rate and attracted 19 to 20 million unique visitors per month.
Forbes said that the company may experiment with paywalls and micro-payments in the future as it was important to have a “hybrid model”.
“Not one [business] model fits all [media],” he said. “There are numerous hybrids out there. There needs to be lots of experimentation to see what works for particular brands.”
But for the moment it sounds like premium digital advertising coming together with a premium web audience is proving economically beneficial.
However, what was really interesting was Forbes’s take on preparing his media company to weather the disruptive power of the internet “tornado” six years ago, when Forbes.com was first created. And considering he, like many others, has warned that all industries, large or small, need to gear up for the same step-change, it is an approach worth noting.
He revealed that Forbes approached its digital extension as a new business; treating Forbes.com as a “start up” which was to behave as a total separate entity. The team were housed in a different building and reported directly to Forbes, in order to avoid it becoming a subordinate product.
Moreover, Forbes totally rejected what he sensed was the way his print journalists used to look down on the digital hacks as though they were from a “trailer park”. He says those 'non-forward-thinking types’ have now exited Forbes Media and will soon leave every other organisation if they don’t embrace digital.
The company also has a clear tablet strategy; it only launching apps which pick out themes from the magazine’s content, such as investment, and provides useful tools centred around those topics – rather than reproducing the magazine in app form.
The two sides of the businesses - print and online - were then united in 2009.
Such fresh thinking and the prioritising of digital media by a 100-year old company should be applauded and mimicked.
I am not advocating that all businesses should or even can take out a separate lease on a new building to house their digital squat team. But prioritising it to such an extent that it is given 'start-up’ status and a direct line into the chief executive is the way to go.
It is also really important to focus on making sure a company’s culture is correctly adapting to the new people and fresh approaches the digital era can usher in.
It may have been a jokey aside, but Forbes’ description of the poor treatment of digital journalists at the hands of the print ones, is sadly often the case in many industries, as people are typically creatures of habit and judge things against their own skill-set.
The answer is not to look down or dismiss the importance of digital within any enterprise if a business or an individual is to survive, never mind thrive. It is tool up and keep on learning.
Because, if you don’t, you never know when digital will suddenly turn around and bite you. Facebook, for example, has just been exposed for hiring a PR firm to spread a smear campaign about Google in the US press. Sadly for them, all of Burson Marsteller’s (the WPP-owned PR firm in question) correspondence was saved by the blogger they targeted to spread the stories about Google on email – and then published on the web and passed on around the globe.
PR firms may have been spreading bad things about rival clients for decades, but journalists never had the web before upon which to publish the whole digitally archived affair.
The internet can demand an era of greater care, transparency and most importantly a culture change.
And it is this crucial change of mindset which produces different digital ideas at 100-year old companies like Forbes Media, that allows businesses to stay profitable and keep on producing an updated version of their best product – online or off.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
W/out a killer app; ex. transit tix, PH telcos should do the same. Italian operators launch m-payments platform - GSMA
Five of Italy’s largest operators have joined forces to launch an online payments platform that will allow mobile subscribers to pay for digital goods using their mobile devices. Telecom Italia's mobile arm TIM, Vodafone Italy, Wind, 3 Italia, PosteMobile and Fastweb will provide digital content providers and their customers with a shared standard that converts mobile phone numbers into so-called “client authentication keys” allowing phones to pay for online digital content and services, reports Dow Jones Newswires. "The joint launch of this initiative opens the door to m-commerce for all. A secure and open system based on a device in extremely widespread use," the companies said in a joint statement. Some 46.6 million Italian mobile users will be eligible to use the scheme, which will also work via PCs and tablets.
According to research by PwC Advisory, which advised the operators on the initiative, the platform will serve Italians that are reluctance to use credit cards online. Some 90 percent of transactions in Italy are still settled in cash, compared with an EU average of less than 70 percent, the firm said. The global market for mobile payments will be worth approximately US$500 billion by 2014, the operators said in a statement. The Italian scheme is similar to the ‘Buystar’ initiative between operators Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom announced recently in neighbouring France.