There is no question about it, the way people pay for things is fundamentally changing. When it comes to mobile payments, 2011 was the year that the major players began marshalling their forces. Partnerships were forged, baselines of technology were established. In 2012, the ecosystem will deploy its innovations, testing the market to see how it will react.
That brings us to the most important question regarding mobile payments in 2012: does Near Field Communications (NFC) have a legitimate future? Shaking the Magic 8 Ball, the answer remains, "answer cloudy, ask again later."
There is little in the world that provokes the fury of smartphone consumers more than when one of the major carriers institutes a data cap, eliminates tethering or makes customers pay an exorbitant rate to use their smartphones as hotspots. Users want to be able to use their mobile bandwidth unhindered by any restrictions.
Prominent mobile developer Koushik Dutta has an answer. He created an app that allows users to tether their Android smartphones to their computers and use the data connection as a mobile hotspot. The greatest part, it is nearly untraceable by the carriers.
We may still be a few years away from the mainstream adoption of mobile payments, but that hasn't stopped a whirlwind of buzz and product development from going on in the space. Some of the biggest players in tech, telecommunications and finance are all working on solutions that will enable people to pay for everyday items using only their phones.
So what's the hold up? For one, there are technical challenges. Technologies like NFC are not yet ubiquitous in handsets, and smartphone adoption itself is still growing. Few and far between are the retailers who have the infrastructure in place to support accepting payments this way. Another issue is consumer demand and trust. Only 23% would be willing to us their mobile device to pay for things, according to a recent report from KPMG.
What becomes possible when technology cuts out the middlemen in music publishing and distribution? A lot of very strange and sometimes wonderful things.
Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you're not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It's a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.
During the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, users downloaded more than 1 billion apps for the first time ever in a week-long period. Across iOS and Android, over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded, according to a new report by Flurry Analytics. That was a 60% increase over early December.
The holiday season typically sees a surge in mobile application downloads, especially once Christmas Day arrives and countless consumers all over the world unwrap their new Android devices, iPhones, iPads and iPods. In a true testament to the continued proliferation of these devices, this year's holiday spike in app downloads was a one for the record books, according to Flurry's data.
The last week of December and first couple of weeks of January is when analysts and pundits climb out of the woodwork to make bold predictions for the new year. Some are data driven, some are just based on hunches from following the trends. Investors Business Daily is no exception and has one bold prognostication for 2012: Apple will "lose its cool."
Apple?! No. Everybody's darling is impervious to internal or external threats. Or so the legions of Apple idolaters would have you believe. Could Apple be in for a rough 2012?
Mobile payments solution LevelUp is ringing in the new year with some big news in an attempt to grow into a leading mobile payments provider. The SCVNGR-owned platform has bagged its first big brand. LevelUp is teaming with Villa Pizza, a national pizza chain with more than 400 locations, to use smartphones, deals and QR codes to entice users to pay with their mobile devices.
The announcement coincides with the launch of a Villa Pizza location in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Users will get a $10 LevelUp voucher the Manhattan location good for all day, essentially giving people free pizza while they celebrate 2012. The partnership is also a sign of things to come for LevelUp.
Mobile analytics company Flurry has been tracking the progression of iOS and Android application penetration across the world. No surprise, the United States is the most mature smartphone market on the planet. The rest of the world is catching up. China and South Korea both have made great leaps in 2011 to bring smart devices to users and where there is a smartphone, there is an app for that.
The U.S. has the highest install base of Android and iOS devices running apps in the world at 109 million. China is second at 35 million with the United Kingdom third at 17 million. The mobile app market is by no means saturated. Flurry still sees lots of room for it to grow.
We swim in a world full of data. Every time we play a mobile game and swipe a piece of fruit, shoot a bad guy, fling a furious fowl at a pen of swine or tap an ad, data is being created. Over the days and weeks that data adds up to the point where we can break it down into larger trends and take a full look at the landscape that has been created.
That is the macrocosm view. What about the microcosm? How much data are we producing per minute? We found an old infographic from mobile advertising company Mobclix that shows just just how much data we are creating each minute when using our mobile devices. Check it out below.
Amazon is making a move to highlight its wealth of music, books, TV shows, movies, apps and games today with the release of a new "best of" digital store. Got a shiny new Kindle Fire for Christmas? Amazon wants you to download, download, download to your heart's content.
For Amazon, this is an "of course they would" moment. The company loses money on the hardware for the Kindle Fire and basically breaks even on other Kindle products. Amazon then must push consumers to its digital products. What better way to do so then by highlighting some of its best paid apps and expensive books?
