Google Wallet: Gen Y credit card? – MarketWatch

Google Wallet: Gen Y credit card? – MarketWatch.

By Quentin Fottrell 

Facing stiff competition and tepid demand, Google Wallet has not made a big splash in the world of mobile payments. But experts say young Americans may help revive its fortunes.

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Google Wallet: Gen Y credit card?

Experts say young Americans can reverse Google Wallet’s fortunes. Quentin Fottrell weighs in on Lunch Break. Photo: AP

In an effort to boost the popularity of its mobile payment system, GoogleGOOG +0.59%   this week announced that it is integrating Google Wallet with Gmail. Customers who’ve linked Google Wallet to their bank account or maintain a balance with Google Wallet can simply click the dollar icon on their Gmail to make a payment. It’s not the first time Google Wallet introduced new features. Last year, it launched a pilot Google AdWords business credit card for small businesses in the U.K. and flirted with the idea of a Google Wallet card for consumers too.

But there are signs that there is untapped demand for mobile payments. Just one-fifth of young Americans ages 18 to 30 always carry cash, according to a new survey by CouponCodes4U, a discount code website. Nearly half said cash would not be used in the future. “It’s a generational trend,” says Brent Shelton, a spokesman for deal site FatWallet.com. And some 72% of Gmail users are under the age of 34, according to a survey by Hunch.com, a personalized recommendation site. “The younger generations are adopting this technology in droves.” PayPal and Google Wallet, for example, connect to a bank account or a debit or credit card through a person’s smartphone.

Google still faces hefty competition. PayPal has an Android and an iPhone app and, on Tuesday, said it would waive fees for the rest of the year for businesses that sign up for its service. Verizon Wireless, one of the country’s major cellphone operators, stopped supporting Google Wallet in 2011. Instead, it’s now part of the rival Isis mobile payment system it launched with AT&T and T-Mobile. Square Wallet, a mobile app for Android and iOS launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, last year signed a deal to access some 7,000 Starbucks stores nationwide.

“It’s early days for mobile payments,” says technology analyst Jeff Kagan. “I have children in their early 20s who rarely carry as much as $5 in their wallet.” That’s just enough for tips. “Today, we leave the house with a wallet, car keys and smartphone,” he says. “There will come a time when it will only be our smartphone.” Thus far, PayPal appears to lead. Some 72% of consumers are aware of PayPal, and 48% say they’ve used it, according to a recent survey from ComScore, while only 41% say they’ve heard of Google Wallet, and 8% say they’ve used it.

Since its release in September 2011, Google Wallet has had a bumpy ride. Thousands of merchants are still not set up for mobile payments, making it more difficult for smartphone evangelists to cut up their plastic. What’s more, some consumers are still concerned about security issues of making payments via mobile phone. One U.K. survey found that 44% of people were reluctant to adopt mobile wallets due to fears of phone hacking; only 17% of those surveyed say they would use mobile wallets. (Google did not return requests for comment.)

Une première banque “mobile” en Belgique – Belga Economie – Trends-Tendances – Trends.be

Une première banque “mobile” en Belgique – Belga Economie – Trends-Tendances – Trends.be.

jeudi 16 mai 2013 à 14h04

(Belga) BNP Paribas Fortis a officiellement lancé la première banque “mobile” de Belgique et d’Europe, “Hello Bank!”, jeudi lors d’une conférence de presse. Cette banque numérique, uniquement accessible en ligne, s’adresse aux utilisateurs de smartphones et de tablettes numériques. BNP Paribas Fortis assure cependant qu’elle ne concurrencera pas ses agences.

Une première banque “mobile” en Belgique

La banque se télécharge sur les tablettes numériques et les smartphones via une application gratuite et permet d’effectuer toutes les opérations bancaires en ligne. “Hello Bank!” ne dispose donc pas d’agences physiques mais communique avec ses clients par téléphone ou via les médias sociaux. Lancée en Belgique et en Allemagne, avant la France et l’Italie, la nouvelle banque s’adresse principalement aux utilisateurs de technologies digitales mobiles, alors que 52% des Belges posséderont un smartphone et que deux tiers des ménages auront acquis une tablette numérique d’ici la fin de l’année, selon BNP Paribas Fortis. Elle espère séduire 1,4 million de clients d’ici cinq ans. “Hello Bank!” pourrait cependant concurrencer les agences et les services de BNP Paribas Fortis, notamment grâce à sa facilité d’accès. “Nous avons établi un plan en ce qui concerne les agences et le lancement d’une nouvelle banque ne changera rien”, a contesté Peter Vandekerckhove, membre des comités exécutif et d’administration de BNP Paribas Fortis. “Nous continuerons donc à investir dans les agences. Les deux banques sont complémentaires, pas concurrentes.” En début d’année, le groupe a annoncé la fermeture de 50 agences cette année, avant une centaine d’autres en 2014 et 2015, soit un total de 150 agences en moins de trois ans. (Belga)

 

Top 4 Digital Marketing Trends for 2013 | Visual.ly

Top 4 Digital Marketing Trends for 2013 | Visual.ly.

“Top 4 Digital Marketing Trends for 2013”, our latest infographic, provides a comprehensive analysis of tools and technologies that will define the digital marketing landscape this year. It traces the impact of the digital revolution on consumer behavior and highlights key trends that marketers need to focus on in 2013. It provides insights on optimally utilizing various elements of a digital marketing strategy like mobile marketing, social media, content marketing and author rank, to offer greater reach, better relevancy and higher customer engagement.

Un orchestre symphonique piège son public

Avec la complicité de l’Orchestre National Symphonique Tchèque, le public du Théâtre de Prague a eu la surprise d’assister à une étonnante performance musicale. Avertissement avant le spectacle, vous pouvez garder votre téléphone allumé. Découvrez http://www.hellobank.be The mobile bank, just like you.
Musique : Georges Bizet — Carmen (Prélude)
Chef d’orchestre : M. Libor Pešek

Pub GALAXY S4 – Group Play (Share Music)

Want to share music or play games with your friends? With the Samsung Galaxy S4 you can do just that. Group Play is just one of the new social features on the smart phone that everyone is talking about.

With Group Play you can wirelessly share photos and documents, blast music across devices like an integrated speaker system, and host a multiplayer game, like a poker tournament.

So whether you want to get friends together and let them enjoy your music simultaneously or wirelessly connect devices to play games and share photos, the S4 allows you to do it. Essentially it turns a group of Galaxy S4 phones into a complete network.

Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead | TechCrunch

Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead | TechCrunch.

SARAH PEREZ

Lucky Sort, a Portland, Oregon-based startup behind a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch that helped to discover patterns in live data streams, has been acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal were not immediately available, but the company has announced via its website that it will be shuttering its service in the coming months, and several members of the team will now be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco offices to join the company’s “revenue engineering department.”

The startup had operated somewhat stealthily until early 2012, when word came out that it hasraised a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite Media) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs (Shutterstock.com), BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne, plus chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer, and roulette wheel hacker Norman Packard, Ph.D., who became the Chief Science Officer at the firm.

Packard is not joining Twitter, but CEO Noah Pepper, Jesse Smith, and Daniel Fennelly, are moving to San Francisco.

With the company’s first product, TopicWatch, users could sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary in real time to find, summarize and analyze any text-based content. It was more than a “social listening” or “sentiment analysis” firm – those were only subsets of its overall capabilities.

Analysis of Twitter data was also only part of what this platform could accomplish, as well.

In effect, Lucky Sort was a big data play – it used NLP (natural language processing) techniques to discover information from huge, unstructured data sets. What made it unique was its ability to derive structure without having to first define a database of nouns, verbs, etc. as traditionally would be the case with NLP. Instead, Lucky Sort was moved towards data mining through statistics rather than input ontologies.

Last November, the engine was put to practical use through a partnership with the social network for traders, StockTwits. The relationship offered the entire historical database of StockTwits (everything that had been tweeted or shared within the community), as well as a real-time feed coming into its service. These data sets were made available in Lucky Sort’s analysis interface, allowing investors to come in and examine how chatter in the StockTwits community has correlated with price action.

This could produce visualizations (like the one below), which could be operated via touch – including on the iPad.

Today, Lucky Sort says that three of its team members are headed to Twitter, and a plan to transition customers off of its platform is underway. Asked what he meant by Twitter’s “revenue engineering department,” Pepper would only say, “it’s where we’ll be shoveling coal into the money printing machine.”

However he did say that as far as he knew, Twitter is not interested in getting into the finance vertical itself. “They wanted our technology and expertise for other things,” he says.

Lucky Sort had raised a total of $600,000 before the acquisition, with $100,000 coming from Howard Lindzon, StockTwits CEO and co-founder.

The startup joins other recent Twitter acquisitions, including another previously data-focused servicecalled Ubalo, as well as others like We Are Hunted (which led to Twitter Music), Vine,Crashlytics, Bluefin Labs, and more.

The company’s official announcement is below:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

This story is developing….

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Packard was joining Twitter. He is not. 

Which Social Networks Are Growing Fastest Worldwide? – eMarketer

Which Social Networks Are Growing Fastest Worldwide? – eMarketer.

Twitter, Google+ see major gains in active users

The social audience is growing across networks and countries. That is the takeaway from GlobalWebIndex’s “Stream Social: Quarterly Social Platforms Update.” The study found that Facebook remained the No. 1 social network worldwide, with just over half of internet users logging on to the site at least once a month in Q1 2013. eMarketer puts worldwide Facebook penetration slightly higher, expected to reach 60% of internet users this year.

Behind Facebook, there was a crowded field of second-place contenders, with Google+ out front at 26% of internet users. In the US, Google+ gets limited attention, though its user base is growing. Worldwide, however, Google+ has been much more successful. Given that YouTube was right behind, in use by one-quarter of active internet users, there’s no question that Google, which owns YouTube, is giving Facebook a run for its money in the global social network space.

Twitter came in fourth worldwide at 22% of internet users, but GlobalWebIndex also found that the microblogging service claims the title of fastest-growing social network. Between Q2 2012 and Q1 2013, active users of Twitter rose 42% globally, according to the study.

After these major networks, local Chinese social networks garnered among the greatest percentage of users worldwide, a reflection of both the vastness of the social audience in China and the limited availability of foreign properties, like Facebook, in the country.

LinkedIn and Pinterest each came in at less than 10% of global internet users.

Growth in social network usage came especially from the mobile phone and tablet, which were increasingly used for a variety of social activities. Watching videos on Facebook saw among the biggest jumps in usage, with viewing increasing by 47% on both PC and mobile, and nearly doubling on the tablet. Messaging friends on a one-on-one basis via Facebook also grew substantially on mobile phones and tablets.

In terms of which regions saw the biggest user gains, Asia-Pacific countries were the biggest growth drivers. On Facebook, Japan saw the fastest growth, at 42% change vs. Q2 2012. In South Korea, Google+ use exploded, increasing 209%. And on Twitter, participation in Indonesia rose 44%. Saudi Arabia was not far behind, with the number of account holders increasing by 42%.

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Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Which-Social-Networks-Growing-Fastest-Worldwide/1009884#mvhFhSV2r5VbAYr3.99