2012 will be the year that consumers will learn how to use their smartphones to make payments with smartphones. Mobile payments will see consumers paying for physical goods with near field communications, mobile wallets and PayPal among other options. It has become such a big trend in the digital economy that mobile payments have caught the attention of the federal government.
The Federal Trade Commission wants to get in on the discussion. In April, the FTC will host a workshop on mobile payments and how the trend will affect consumers in the near future. You know an emerging technology is about to explode when the federal government starts poking its fingers in it. See the details below.
The rise of mobile commerce is going to give traditional retail stores a headache. Results from a survey done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 25% of cellphone owners used their phone to look up the price of a product before buying it at a store. More than half of cellphone owners used their phones to determine what product to buy while in a retail store.
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant
Ours is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires and our need to possess, while maintaining a façade of moral righteousness, puts us at odds with the reality that exists within the systems we have created.
In recent days, the character of our era of consumerism has been put in question. We want what is new, shiny, fashionable. We want it now. With this desire we turn our heads from the consequences it takes to produce our toys, our symbols of status. When The New York Times reports that our gadgets are made in Chinese factories where working conditions can be horrendous, we express outrage and tweet the article from our iPads. The culture we have created comes with the cost of doing business.
Legal firm Loeb & Loeb is full of thinkers. Its clients and attorneys know that the world is a fluid place and the technology sector dynamic and ever-changing. As part of its "Media MindShare" series, Loeb & Loeb has turned its attention to the digital marketplace to study what the dominant issues will be in 2012.
One of those issues is mobile commerce. That includes mobile payments and coupons as well as the security issues that inevitably will accompany the mobile commerce vertical. Are people really prepared to pay with their phones? What is holding them back? Check out the infographic from Loeb & Loeb below.
AT&T has a bone to pick with the Federal Communications Commission. In the mobile operator's quarterly earnings call this morning, CEO Randall Stephenson blasted the FCC over its leadership in making additional spectrum available to carriers to handle the explosion of mobile data flowing through the operators' pipes. Stephenson and AT&T are bitter after the FCC blew up its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Stephenson said that because of AT&T's spectrum crunch it will be forced to raise prices and take additional actions against the highest data users.
Stephenson's remarks come as AT&T announced that it sold 9.4 million smartphones including 7.6 million iPhones in the the fourth quarter of 2011. AT&T has been crying about its spectrum paucity for several years now with the iPhone and other smartphones driving the company's desperation. See Stephenson's harsh message to the FCC below.
Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us closer than any other hack before.
One of the most entertaining aspects of studying the Android ecosystem is the fact there is just so much of it. It is overwhelming, especially for consumers that do not know what smartphone or tablet they are supposed to buy because a new device is released every other day.
Samsung is the largest culprit of the flood of Android devices to inundate the flood plains of the mobile coastline. Just look at its Galaxy Tab line of tablets. None have performed well on the market. Unlike smartphones, the "be everything to everybody" approach does not work in the tablet market. There is a reason that Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle Fire are eating Samsung's tablet lunch.
Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone.
Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.
People sure do love jailbreaking their iOS devices. In fact, after Friday's launch of the Absinthe A5 tool, jailbreaking iOS 5 on A5-powered devices was almost as popular as the iPhone 4S itself when it first launched.
Nearly 1 million people jailbroke their iPhone 4S or iPad 2 between Friday and Monday, according a blog post from the Chronic-Dev Team, who took the lead in developing the untethered solution for jailbreaking iOS 5 on Apple's newest gadgets.
What do you get when you combine two companies that innovate some of the best products on the Web and have a propensity to build early and ship often? Some terrific tools and superb functionality, that's what. And that's what is happening today as browser maker Dolphin is teaming with cloud storage juggernaut Evernote.
Dolphin and Evernote are teaming up to release two extensions to Dolphin's Android browser. The first and most exciting is powerful and popular Web-based image editor Skitch. The other is Evernote itself. These new functions are the first time that Evernote has reached out to a third-party Android browser.
