Monday, June 9, 2008

Knocking Down Barriers to mCommerce

Today, Digby announced the release of Powered by Digby which is already deployed for Godiva Chocolatier & will launch later this year for 1-800-Flowers.com. I'm happy to see Digby make headway with their mCommerce application & not just because they too are located here in Austin, TX.

I was commenting earlier today on a post by Stacey Higginbotham that discussed the potential growth of mCommerce. My comments point to the clunky user interfaces that were developed for computer monitors. These UIs were never intended for mobile phones & it should not be a surprise to anyone that consumers are hesitant to try purchasing something through a web site that wasn't developed for their medium. This is the major value I see with Powered by Digby - it's a retail site application developed specifically for mobile phones. It's that simple & that's the beauty of it!

Will the New iPhone be enabled for NFC?

The Apple developer's conference kicks off this morning in San Francisco & the word on the street is that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, will be announcing that the new iPhone will have 3G support. If you are like me & rushed out to get the first release of the iPhone you are by now so frustrated with the speed of AT&T's Edge network that you rarely use your iPhone's Internet connection unless you are connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Of course the news of a 3G enabled iPhone will make me happy, what I'm most looking forward to finding out is whether or not the new iPhone will be enabled for Near Field Communications (NFC). Like so many others in the space of mobile transactions we all want to see more mobile phones hit the market with NFC capabilities. We all know how other companies follow suit when Apple does something so let's hope Jobs & his team engineered this iPhone release with NFC support. Combine the iPhone's SDK with NFC & we can make magic happen!

Friday, June 6, 2008

Standards with Standards & more Standards

My head is still spinning after a discussion today with the folks at BrightCard. I was looking for more information about a NFC SD Card from Wireless Dynamics & BrightCard had a great deal of knowledge to share. Like so many other technologies, there are standards with standards & more standards. Since Near Field Communications (NFC) is such a new technology & the market is basically open to so many possibilities it’s imperative that we all start talking the same language & adhering to the standards that are in place today.

A quick tutorial on some standards & language used in this market space:

To start with, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) & Near Field Communications (NFC) are not the same thing. In the market, RFID has come to refer to inventory tracking where NFC is more specific to person transactions. A key difference between RFID & NFC protocols are the way in which the master/slave relationship is handled. In RFID there is a master & a slave & the master & slave roles can now be reversed. Whereas with NFC, the role of master & slave can be reversed, you can even have a peer to peer relationship when using NFC.

Take this NFC use-case for example to better understand this role reversal. A woman walking through a subway terminal sees a movie poster with a NFC tag affixed to it. The women pulls out her NFC enabled mobile phone & reads in the information about the movie via the NFC tag affixed to the movie poster. In this scenario the movie poster is performing the master role & the mobile phone is performing the slave role. The woman then proceeds to purchase a ticket for this movie using Over The Air (OTA) technology – following the OTA purchase a ticket stub is downloaded to the woman’s mobile phone. The woman then arrives at the movie theatre & taps her mobile phone at the NFC reader installed at the checkout counter. The mobile phone pushes the movie ticket to the NFC reader fulfilling the mobile payment. The mobile phone just filled the master role & the NFC reader at the checkout performed the slave role.

You got have a standard without ISO, right? ISO14443 & 15693 are the international standards for contactless smart cards operating at a radio frequency of 13.56 MHz. ISO14443 has a range of 10cm (4 inches) & is viewed as the more secure of the two standards. ISO14443 is what the Near Field Communications protocol adheres too. ISO 15693 has a much wider range of transmission, 1 – 1.5 meters, & is more likely to be used for tracking of inventory in a warehouse (asset tracking).

It doesn’t end there. There are two main communication protocols supported under the ISO 14443 standard series – Type A & Type B. The main differences between Type A & Type B concern modulation methods, coding schemes, & protocol initialization procedures. Type A is the most common of these two types. An attempt to include legacy systems as appendixes – Type C (Sony/Japan), Type D (OTI/Israel), type E (Cubic/USA), & Type F (Legic/Switzerland) & Type G (China) – but these legacy types were not accepted as ISO-standard.

As you can see, there are a number of new standards being developed & the language we use when discussing this market is going to be complicated & messy at first. Because there is so much potential for this market & integrations are already complex enough I believe it is our responsibility as industry leaders to help define these standards & start talking the same talk.

Open Market for NFC Innovations

I had a conversation yesterday with a gentleman who is with M:Metrics. M:Metrics provides statistics & data based on mobile media. Like many other companies, we at NetworkIP are looking to obtain some real-world data on the number of mobile phones available & that have been purchased with Near Field Communications (NFC) support. Come to find out that M:Metrics isn’t even tracking this data right now. The response from M:Metrics was that they are aware of NFC, but not directly measuring it currently because the market place is essentially zero. The market for these things is huge; as an example, take the search for data that many of us in the space are involved in.

Unfortunately what M:Metrics is saying is true. You’ll be hard pressed to find a NFC enabled mobile phone here in the U.S. I was happy to see Nokia release their
6131 model phone with NFC support in early 2007 & too my knowledge the 6131 remains the only mobile phone available with NFC here in the U.S.

We do know that Samsung played part in the
NFC BART pilot conducted in San Francisco, CA earlier this year. Unfortunately I’m not aware of the model of phone used for this pilot. Maybe it was Samsung’s X700 which has been rumored to have NFC capabilities or possibly they used a SD chip with NFC capabilities such as the SDiD 1010 NFC SD card from Wireless Dynamics.

As more pilots like the BART pilot are conducted, both businesses & consumers are sure to see the value in NFC & we’ll see the number of mobile phones with NFC capabilities on the rise. Industry leaders suspect NFC will be widely adopted nearer end of 2009. The good news is that it’s not a question of “if”, but “when” it will happen.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Registration Complete for Prepaid 2008

Today I completed my registration for the upcoming Prepaid Expo & Conference taking place later this month in London. Attending this conference is an exciting opportunity for NetworkIP as we look to talk more about our recent release of our Transaction Processing Engine & how the capabilities of our engine will play part in the growing & developing mobile transactions space.

Standards For Mobile Banking

PaymentNews.com recently released an article that the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FTSC) will soon be kicking off an initiative to make recommendations on an approach that would facilitate an interoperable mobile payments infrastructure in the future.

Interoperability amongst key participants (in this case handset manufacturers, banks, mobile operators, & wireless network providers) is an essential element to ensure mobile banking & transactions take off. Like any other technology that requires integration among many participants standards must developed & ultimately adhered too. Without such a standard, I’m afraid it will take too long for us to realize the potential for mobile banking & transactions.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Starbucks Could Lead The Charge

Yesterday, in a USA Today article, Starbucks announced their approach to offering “free” Wi-Fi to their customers. There are basically 3 things each customer must do for their “free” Wi-Fi.

Purchase a Starbucks card with a minimum balance of $5
Register their Starbucks card with Starbucks (give away your personal info)
Use your newly registered Starbucks card at least once a month (you’ll have to continually add money to your account – ensuring repeat business for Starbucks).

While I think Wi-Fi should be free to begin with I have to applaud Starbucks with their approach here. The benefit they’ll receive from having their customer base register their cards will be invaluable. This opens the door for Starbucks to learn so much more about their customers. They’ll be able to identify a customer’s specific demographic, purchase habits, & most importantly will have the ability to now directly market Starbucks products to that customer.

The
USA Today article concluded with Starbucks making mention of how they eventually want to have Starbucks card data landing on a key fob, a cell phone, & even a travel mug. I about jumped out of my seat when I read this! This would mean we could all ditch those Starbucks cards, our credit cards, etc. when walking into a Starbucks. If I could simply walk into a Starbucks with my cell phone for example & pay for my morning cup of coffee without having to have anything else on me I’d be ecstatic. I’ve always got my cell phone on me – too often I’m the guy in line with the cell phone pinned to his ear talking (usually my morning conference call) as I wait my turn to order my caffeine fix.

If there is a U.S. retailer that can make Mobile Payments a reality I think Starbucks can do it. The demographic make-up of the average Starbucks customer will surely be the first group of people to purchase those mobile phones that have Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities. Putting NFC ready mobile phones in the hands of the customer is half the battle.