All posts tagged as "Money"

AdWeek just posted this interesting article on companies creating interactive experiences for moviegoers. I think this is a set of great examples of breaking down the barrier between physical and virtual worlds. As always, the mobile is involved because it is the device actually in everybody’s pockets.

Briefly, the article talks about a couple of companies making interactive software (and I think hardware in one case) to be installed at movie theaters. Audiences can participate in crowd games, can vote on surveys, and so on. Results are displayed on the big screen.

Of course every game is sponsored (this is AdWeek, after all) and the advertisers are improving brand recall. But it’s also a win for the theaters, the filmmakers, and the audience.

I believe that a major area of growth for retail stores and other spaces is creating extra levels of customer engagement via digital services, accessed by the mobile. Examples can include

• interactive store directories, so you can figure out whether they have what you are looking for


• projects for home improvement stores or recipes for grocery stores, letting you figure out what could be done with the Sputnik-looking vegetable in front of you, and where to find all of that stuff in the store


• user and critic reviews, similar items, back ordering, and more at book and music stores


• increasing interactivity and audience engagement at theaters


• storing my preference for large mocha at my coffee shop, and letting me buy it without standing in line


• airport information interaction – when is my flight boarding, can I change seats, where was my luggage the last time it was scanned, etc.


• information, beer ordering, statistics, small-screen replays, photos to save as memories at sporting events

There are more ideas, but this is a start. Each is, essentially, the sort of interactivity you might put on a well-designed web site selling the same services, except accessible in the physical environment.

Oh, and don’t forget that every one of these has a location component. And many have a phone-as-wallet component.

Electronic cash cards, or rather the infrastructure to accept them, are a necessary precursor to mass adoption of mobile phones as payment. After all, the two things you need to use your phone at a physical point of sale is a way to present the data faster than you can reach in your wallet and a way to read the data. The current best technology for this is Near Field Communication (NFC); it’s the same stuff going into US passports and on smart cards all over Europe.

Of course it is a chicken-and-egg problem: most folks won’t bother carrying a special card when the only place they can use it is a single restaurant chain, but most retailers won’t bother installing the special reader when almost nobody carries the card. Similarly, mobile phone users won’t purchase a special phone when it won’t be useful many places.

That’s why I’m enthusiastic about transit payments, for things like subways and highway tolls. These are payments that people make very frequently, and have motivation to make them fast. The plethora of automatic readers for specific highways illustrates this need; even out here in Kansas we have the K-Tag for the Turnpike. We’ll learn if NFC in the London Underground works out very soon.

To look forward, it is useful to look to Japan and Korea. Events there can suggest (but not predict) events here. What Japan Thinks is an easy and sometimes entertaining method to look at what “real people” are doing in Japan, and its reported surveys frequently cover the mobile space. As of last month, over half of Japanese carry a cash card, dominated by Edy and Suica. The vast majority of those who carry one use it at least once a week.

This is a complex space, one which involves banking regulations, devices, operators, retailers, payment processors, things tried and failed, and more. It’s also one that the mobile industry is entering. The Mobile Payment Forum has worked since 2001 to build all of the relevant processes to make it work. We even helped them with their use cases.

It isn’t far from electronic cash cards to NFC phones. The infrastructure to support them are the same, and the phones have more flexibility: they can support multiple accounts on the same chip. We of course would like to see the system built to support multiple accounts seamlessly, but that is looking unlikely based on our various research efforts and conversations.

Instead, retailers can use multiple readers to start interacting with customers the way that online sites do. Possibilities include:

• The required Starbucks example: walk into a coffee shop, scan the reader, and your standard order appears on the screen. Verify or edit, and go sit down. No need to wait in line.


• Walk into a grocery store, scan the reader, and go shopping. Don’t know what passion fruit is? Snap a quick photo, get recommended recipes and nutrition information, and where in the store to find the best wine to go with it.


• Scan your phone on the way into the hardware store. Select your project from the application, or just get help finding those #2 screws. Store map, related products, and so forth.


• Oh yeah. You can pay with your phone.