Gemalto Integrates Facebook on the SIM

Gemalto announced today that it has developed a SIM card with built-in Facebook capabilities.  The main implications of this is that users of old-style, 'feature' phones, are able to use Facebook on their phone, opening up a whole new market for Facebook.  Suddenly 2 billion people who currently don't have convenient access to an internet connection, are able to use Facebook on their profile.

Last week I wrote about the upcoming Facebook mobile and its potential as a powerful marketing platform.  Particularly if Facebook managed to integrate on its platform all the behavioral data that will shortly be captured on smartphones (location, purchases, ticketing), it would have an unprecedented ability to map our lives and target marketing messages.

Although, Gamalto's SIM-card development does not enable any of these features, it does demonstrate the increasing integration of social platforms and Facebook on our mobile phones.

The Future of the Internet: a Presentation by Mary Meeker

Mary Meeker, formerly with Morgan Stanley, now with Kleiner Perkins, has long been the most influential analyst in the tech industry and is famous for her insightful presentation.

Although, it is not directly payments related, I wanted to add a link to her most recent presentation, delivered last week, and give an overview of her main points.

Current trends:

• The rise of mobile computing: becoming ubiquitous, affordable and faster
• Increasing personalization: location / preferences / behavior / social relationships all available from information we provide ourselves
• Fun to use: social / casual / rewards-driven / 'gamification' of real life
• Measurable real-world activation: driving foot-traffic to physical stores
• Explosion of apps and monetization: more apps, generating more money
• Rewards influence behavior in real-time: for exactly the right people

On the horizon for 2011 and beyond:

• HTML5 vs. downloadable apps
• NFC: payment / offers / loyalty / ticketing / etc.
• Consumer-led mobile health: monitoring / diagnosis / wellness
• Enterprise adoption of tablets
• Smartphone tipping point > 50% adoption
• "So-Lo-Mo": Social - Local - Mobile convergence
• "Gamification": ultimate way to engage a new audience
• Empowerment: impact of empowering billions of people around the world with powerful, mobile devices has just begun

Meeker finishes the presentation with a quote from John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perins: We're at the beginning of a new era for social internet innovators re-inventing a web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites.
  
Go to Business Insight for the full presentation; http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-matt-murphy-2011-2#-1

Orange Launches its First NFC Mobile with Samsung

Orange launched its first NFC enabled Samsung Wave 578 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.  This is Orange first step into NFC, which is slated to be its big theme for the 2011. 

In coming months, Orange is set to launch similar phones from LG, Nokia and other manufacturers, in order for half its phones to be enabled by year-end.

This positions Orange to partner with other players and enter areas that could become important revenue sources in years to come, such as payments, ticketing and transport.

Seamless Receipts: $1.5M to Growth its e-Receipts & Marketing Platform

Seamless Receipts, a New York-based electronic receipts company, announced on Friday that it has received $1.5M funding from various venture capital investors.  The company delivers technology that enables merchants to replace paper with electronic receipts and deliver customized marketing messages.

The objective of SR’s solution is to drive offline customers online, improve engagement and increase sales.  To enable this, they offer basic components, such as email marketing, promotions and social sharing functionalities to more advanced solutions, such as group buying and reviews.

In additionally, SR has partnered with Fitzgerald Analytics to deliver simple but powerful analytics plug-ins.  With these components and with proper POS integration, SR can deliver:

·      Analysis of “shopping basket mix” (“What products do customers buy at the same time? How can they encourage larger purchases?)

·      Optimization of the timing, targeting, and content of messages to customers

·      Measurement of customer loyalty, return-visit incentives, and other data-driven tactics to improve marketing results

This is information that is generally not available to smaller merchants, unless they invest heavily in costly POS systems.

To support distribution of the system, Seamless Receipts announced a partnership with Canadian Retail Solutions (CRS) last year.  CRS provides POS solutions to small and mid-sized Canadian merchants and will integrate Seamless Receipts with its Retail Pro POS solution.  To support further growth, we would expect Seamless Receipts to announce more such partnerships in the time to come.

However, Seamless Receipts is of course not the first company to provide such services.  Apple has long used their email receipts as a marketing platform with customers and Square builds much of its business around the improved analyses it provides smaller merchants and opportunities to use receipts as a communication platform.

Still, not many stand-alone companies offer similar services, and Seamless Receipts’ independence and ability to freely partner with POS providers should provide a great platform for accelerated growth. 

PayPal Opens Up its MicroPayment Solution

Two days after Visa announced its acquisition of PlaySpan, PayPal today opened up its micropayment solution to publishers, game developers or anyone else who wants to monitize their online content.

The benefits of PayPal's micropayment solution, compared to traditional payment options, is its two-click, 'frictionless' convenience and tailored pricing structure. 


For publishers  that are looking to monetize their content, the main challenge of converting sales lie in getting customers to go through the full payment process, particularly as this requires them to interrupt their online experience to make a payment.  PayPal's micropayment solution, is frictionless, in that it enables the customer to complete the payment without leaving the content with which they are engaged.  Autosport.com, the online magazine, was part of PayPal's early release and saw a 75% increase in sales after implementing the micropayment system.

A second challenge in making a micropayment system work, lies in getting the pricing structure right.  Due to the fixed price element that most payment networks apply to small transactions, these have proven prohibitively expensive to merchants.  PayPal therefore implemented a micropayment-specific pricing structure - for transactions of less than $12, PayPal charges a flat 5 cents plus 5% of the transaction amount.

Thanks to PayPal and other micropayment solutions of this kind, we should therefore expect our favourite online newspapers and entertainment sites to increasingly look to charge for premium content.

Vivienne Tam Helps Square Re-Design Payments

So, Square appears to have taken a leaf out of H&M's book and brought in Vivienne Tam as a guest-designer for a special range of its terminals.  This is a great example of Jack Dorsey's approach to the payments industry. 

This is a complex industry, he says, where people have focused on functionality and reliability and no one have properly designed the user experience.  Merchants might have invested much time and money in designing their retail space - still the payment equipment is a clunky piece of machinery that sticks out like a sore thumb.

Changing this thinking and making payments a more user friendly, well designed process, it seems, is Square's core mission.  And the Vivienne Tam partnership is just one of many steps in that direction.

The Facebook Mobile: Why It Could Become the World's Most Powerful Marketing Platform

In October of last year, Bloomberg wrote that Facebook is launching a phone.   According to reports, Facebook is teaming up with INQ, a London based mobile phone manufacturer that got its start with a Skype phone, and is aiming to launch in Europe during the first half of 2011 and US towards the end of the year.  The phone is also rumored to come with Spotify built in.

Of course, using Facebook on our mobiles is nothing new.  Facebook has long been one of the most downloaded apps for both the iPhone and Android.  However, Facebook’s objective with this launch would likely be to re-define how we use our phones around social media and Facebook.

For starters, our Facebook profiles replaces phone numbers as our primary identity on the phone.  All our communications, from calls, to texts, to IM, to emails would be consolidated on our profile, significantly improving Facebook’s ability to map our social graph.

All other activities that we currently do on our phone could also be organized around our Facebook profile.  E.g. our camera could be synced, so that all photos automatically upload to our profile.

Building Spotify into the phone could also be a transformational move.  Spotify already enable its users to connect through Facebook, making music a truly social experience.  By integrating Spotify in the mobile, Facebook could alter how we listen to music on the fly and directly challenge Apple’s iPod.  If this model was to succeed for music, there is no reason why it could not be extended to other media, such as TV shows, movies and magazines.

Moreover, payment companies have long attempted to leverage the data it captures from their customers’ purchases to develop marketing solutions for its merchants.  Cardlytics has perhaps developed the most advanced solution for this yet.

We are also seeing the emergence of companies, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, that track our movements and target marketing messages accordingly.  Groupon and Living Social have also announced that they are adding this feature to their offers, and Facebook, of course, already has Places.

As we use our mobile phones to conduct more and more of our real life activities, from payments, to ticketing, to key solutions, our phones will capture an unprecedented amount of data about our lives and enable us to map behaviors and preferences with incredible precision.  Ownership of or access to this data will clearly be hugely valuable.

It is therefore no wonder that Facebook is keen to get more deeply involved with mobile phones and attempt to re-define how we use phones around social media and Facebook.