15May

American Consumer Satisfaction Index Says Smartphone Owners Love Apple Most, T-Mobile Tied With AT&T For Satisfaction

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The American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) released their latest findings yesterday, revealing consumer satisfaction scores for cellphone manufacturers and wireless carriers. So who were the top two victors in their respective field? The first may not surprise you  one definitely will as Apple and Sprint take top honors. ASCI collects data from more than 70,000 customers from more than 225 companies in 47 industries and 10 economic factors. This is the first year … [read full article] View full post on TmoNews

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10May

Carrier-Led Mobile Wallet Isis Partners With American Express: Adds Consumer, Biz Cards & AmEx’s Digital Payments Platform Serve

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Isis Mobile Wallet screenshot

Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is gaining steam and has today announced a new addition to its mobile wallet: American Express. The Isis Mobile Wallet will now support American Express’ Consumer, Open Small Business and Serve cards, joining Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard, which have previously committed to the program.

A mobile wallet leader has not yet emerged – Square is growing, and Google Wallet has been floundering – but the space is still really new. Although half of the U.S.’s mobile population use smartphones, making transactions via the phone has yet to establish itself as a real, or more importantly, as a better alternative to the swipe. But if there’s a piece of the mobile payments pie to be had, you can be sure the carriers want in. Hence, Isis.

The initiative is slowly moving forward, with its bankcard partnerships having been announced in February, new POS partners Verifone, Ingenico and ViVOtech announced in March, and last summer, its partnerships with payment networks (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express) and device makers (HTC, LG, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson).

Of the new AmEx relationship, the Serve addition may be the most interesting. Serve, as you may recall is American Express’ new digital payments and commerce platform which is, in effect, its own digital wallet of sorts. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card. With Isis, the Serve digital platform becomes a bit like a mobile wallet within a wallet. This actually makes more sense, as a real mobile wallet should mirror our offline counterpart and include all the bank cards we use, not just those from a single entity.

Later this year, Isis will roll out its first pilot tests in Salt Lake City, Utah and Austin, Texas, in advance of its public availability. While the moves seem slow to those watching the space, you have to acknowledge that building up the partnerships in advance and then thoroughly testing the product before hyping its launch, maybe be a smarter way to encourage eventual consumer adoption of the Isis wallet over..well, Square perhaps, and whatever Apple might announce one day, if it chooses to do so.



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12Apr

Mobile Social Startup CrowdOptic Raises Another $500K, Plans Consumer Launch

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CrowdOptic, a startup trying to create a new way for people to interact via line-of-sight “clusters”, has raised another $500,000 in debt financing.

CEO Jon Fisher says this brings the company’s total funding to $2.5 million (including $500,000 that Fisher himself invested in January), and that the round serves as a bridge to CrowdOptic’s profitability, which he plans to reach next quarter. Fisher isn’t disclosing the source of the new funding.

CrowdOptic creates clusters of people based on what you’re looking at through your smartphone camera. If multiple people are looking at the same thing, CrowdOptic will send a notification asking if they want to create a discussion group, where they can share photos and comments. Imagine, for example, if you were outside the Academy Awards and pointing your camera at Angelina Jolie — CrowdOptic could create a discussion group on-the-fly with everyone else looking at her, where you could all comment on her dress.

Unlike most mobile social services, CrowdOptic hasn’t been marketing this as a consumer app, but rather partnering with event organizers. Fisher says the company has singed up nine major event businesses, bringing CrowdOptic to tens of thousands of events. However, CrowdOptic is actually planning to launch a consumer smartphone app of its own at this summer’s London Olympics.



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20Mar

How to: Respond to Consumer Reports’ iPad getting “very warm” discovery

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war-of-tablets

I was hoping when reports came through of iPads getting “very hot” during use, that we’d all realize it was being blown out of proportion, just like every other Apple controversy, of course I was hoping in vain. “Heatgate” is being mentioned on just about every tech blog in the world, why? Because an Apple product is showing signs that it isn’t absolutely…

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19Jan

No More Swiping: Card.io Launches New Consumer App, Developer Tools Which “See” Your Credit Card

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cardio_payments_03

Card.io, the toolkit for mobile app developers which lets users pay for items by holding their credit card up to the phone’s camera, is today launching a consumer-facing app. It’s something like Square, but without the dongle. It’s also not aimed at merchants, as Square is. Instead, the new Card.io applications, available for both iPhone and Android, are meant for person-to-person payments. Splitting lunch, borrowing money, paying for gas – that sort of thing.

This doesn’t represent a change in direction for the mobile commerce company, though, explains former AdMob employee Mike Mettler, now Card.io Co-founder and CEO. He says the company will continue to invest in both its consumer and developer businesses. To that end, Card.io is launching a new, fully functional mobile SDK (software development kit) for developers this morning, also available for iOS and Android.

For those unfamiliar, Card.io’s mobile payment solution is meant to speed up the process of inputting credit card numbers on the small screens of mobile devices, like smartphones. Instead of having to manually type in the digits using your phone’s keyboard when making a purchase, Card.io-enabled apps let you simply hold up the credit card to the phone’s camera. Card.io will then “see” the numbers using advanced machine viewing techniques.

There are now over 160 apps which have integrated with the Card.io solution, including Venmo, Qthru, Newegg,Spotze, EventDay, Clinkle, TaskRabbit, Ambur, InvoiceASAP,BeagleApp, Floktu, WillCal, and others.

With its new consumer-facing app, Card.io is actually now competing with some of its developer partners, as it, too, will enable easy, person-to-person mobile payments. After “scanning” the card using the app, Card.io users will enter in their friend’s email address and the money is transferred to either their bank or PayPal account within seven days. The app is free and there are no monthly charges, but pricing is 3.5% plus $0.30 per transaction.

Also new today is the mobile SDK. Previously, Card.io’s mobile SDK was for scanning credit cards only – meaning developers would have to have their own merchant account and payment gateways set up in order to use the service. Now, with the updated mobile SDKs, developers have access to an end-to-end solution provided by the company itself. This puts Card.io in closer competition with payments company Jumio, which launched a similar service for both desktop and mobile this past summer. Like Jumio, Card.io now offers its own payments network.

It should be noted, however, that Jumio just raised $25.5 million in funding on top of the $6.5 million raised last year. Card.io, meanwhile, has $1 million in seed funding from angel investors Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Jeff Clavier and Charles Hudson of SoftTech VC, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, Alok Bhanot (former VP, Risk Technology at PayPal), and Omar Hamoui (CEO and founder of AdMob).

In addition, the company won’t talk much about how it fights fraud, only saying that it takes precautions, like Square does, which are its “secret sauce.” These involve things like tracking a user’s location and using a one-way hash of the phone’s unique identifier (UDID on iOS).

The new mobile applications are available for download here: iOS and Android. And the SDK is here.



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