Tag: mobile

Mobile Payments

A few weeks ago, I was supposed to be on a panel about this two weeks ago. I got sick and couldn’t do it but I did a bunch of digging around/thinking about it.

A friend just asked me why no-one has risen through the noise. I didn’t think about that particular issue but here are some thoughts I did have:

NFC is not new – Nokia for a while – I don’t think it will make a big difference in the use of mobile payments. (Contactless payments aren’t new either, Citibank/MTA, EZ Pass and so on have been using them for a while)

Overall Issues – trust – Who do people want to put their trust in: carriers? banks? manufacturers?

Big winner likely: Amazon – will retailers trust – consumers say they are the most reputable company in the world.

Other Players:
Isis – carrirers – T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon
Google – android – probably open – Citibank and Mastercard
Apple – ios – probably will take a big cut
Apple is probably required – as much as I hate to say it – not friendly to small developers – donations

What works now: – points the way towards what will work in the future
Square – fits with what people already do – friendly to small merchants – attaches directly to phone – simple pricing
Starbucks – App linked to CC – Just scan it and the backend system will charge your CC – Control in hands of consumer

Samsung – Olympics – London 2012 big trial

Business Card Transfers
I wonder/fear it will look pretty much like how we exchange contact information now (via paper business cards).
Standards didn’t catch on – security warnings about bluetooth – same will happen with NFC??

NFC will have to be the most secure tech in the world. There is nothing more juicy for a cracker to hack something that is used to transfer money. People will react with viscerally as well. The local news channels will run piece after piece. The wikipedia page is already filled with potential exploits: eavesdropping, data modification, relay attack, lost property, …

AnDevCon Workshop

I’ll be teaching a workshop at AnDeCon in March:

Developing Media Applications on Android
Learn how to harness the Android’s media capture and playback capabilities in your applications. In this class, we will examine Android’s capabilities for developing applications that utilize the camera and microphone for photo capture and manipulation, sound recording, processing and audio synthesis as well as video capture. We’ll work our way through several example applications that utilize and illuminate these capabilities.
In particular we’ll develop a custom camera application and extend to automatically create double exposures. We’ll create a an audio capture and playback application that allows us interactively to scrub through recordings. Finally we’ll create a video capture example and learn about how we can extend it adding effects such as solarization to the output.
This hands-on workshop is suited for those with some previous Android development experience. Please come to the workshop with a laptop running Eclipse and the latest Android SDK. It would be helpful to have an Android handset that can be used for development as well (don’t forget your USB cable).

Nielson Says: Americans Watching More TV Than Ever; Web and Mobile Video Up too

While I expect Nielson to say that, what I didn’t expect was that they would show mobile viewing on par with internet viewing. That is certainly suspect and looking a bit more closely at their charts it makes more sense.




The top chart indicates that people watch as much on their mobile phones as they do on their computers. The second chart puts this in context, the number of internet users watching video is 131,102,000 and the number watching mobile video 13,419,000, 1/10th of the number. Taken across all of those users, the average monthly video viewing time on the internet is only 3 hours while the mobile user are up to around 3 1/2 hours.

This seems pretty out of whack but then again, the top/first 10% internet viewers are probably watching 10 times that amount (I know I am with NetFlix, Hulu, BitTorrent, YouTube and the like), it seems out of whack because you are only seeing the power users on the mobile phone accessing video while you are seeing broad viewership on the internet.

Consider it this way:

Internet: 131,102,000 users x 3 hours = 393,306,000 (almost 400 million hours)
Mobile: 13,419,000 users x 3.5 hours = 46,966,500 (approximately 47 million hours)
(mobile stills seems a bit over reported but taking into account the numbers they are talking about, it seems more likely)