Shutterstock/Andy Dean Photography

(No, officer, don’t profile me — I swear I was just doing some relaxing retail therapy before drifting off to sleep.)

While you are shopping online from the seeming privacy of your home, many retailers are keeping track of your every move. And in aggregate, data about online shoppers show some interesting trends and habits that startups are emerging to track on behalf of retailers.

This morning, I covered the launch of Sift Science, a brainy startup from ex-Googlers that’s applying machine learning to detect fraud patterns in online retail.

Sift Science co-founder Brandon Ballinger told me that during beta testing with services like Airbnb and Uber, his company had observed a million different signals that flag any one buyer as a potential fraudster.

For instance, beware of people who try to buy something with a Yahoo email account — they’re twice as likely as the norm to be fraudsters — but users of AOL and Outlook.com email domains are much more likely to be safe.

In a similar vein, I recently met the founder of Commerce Sciences, Aviv Revach, whose company tries to apply behavioral science to increase sales on e-commerce sites. The company supplies an overlaid bar for online stores that is personalized based on observations about an individual user’s visit — for instance, browser type, mouse movement patterns and the specificity of a search term.

“There’s so much that science knows about us that business doesn’t use,” Revach said. For example, he pointed to theories of “hedonic” versus “utilitarian” tendencies in consumer consumption, where it might be more effective to have an entirely different shopping experience for something fun versus something functional.

More specifically, Commerce Sciences can recognize signals that a certain user at a certain time is more driven by sales, or more influenced by his or her friend’s opinions. Then it reformats the bar to push that angle. The goal is to grab the more than 90 percent of people who enter an online store and exit without buying.

I asked each company for fun, odd and interesting examples of things they’d learned from observing shopper behavior. Be warned that both companies have only just become available in the past year, so their data represents a mere slice of online retail. Here are a few from Sift Science:

• People who type their last name in all caps are 5.6 times more likely to be fraudsters.
• People who don’t use Facebook to log in are four times more likely to be fraudsters.
• People who log in from any one of eight particular countries are 219 times more likely to be fraudsters.

By the way, Ballinger noted that stores only need a user’s credit card number and expiration date to process a payment, but they often ask for more information for their own purposes or to try to combat fraud. “There’s a trade-off between fraud and friction,” he noted, which is a nice way to put it.

Meanwhile, here are some findings from the early days of Commerce Sciences, from testing on online stores that sell apparel, flowers, music and other items:

• Social proof — showing what your friends liked and bought — appears to be much more effective at night. In tests, it resulted in 49 percent more sales in the evening hours, and it didn’t help daytime sales at all.
• People who are referred to an online store from Google are especially susceptible to 10-percent-off discount coupons, spending twice the average amount on some sites.
• Adding the word “free” — “You have won a coupon” versus “You have won a free coupon” — increases sales by 15 percent.

Co-founder Brandon Ballinger told AllThingsD that his company has two big strengths: First, it uses machine learning to detect user behavior patterns — one million of them already — that correlate with fraud; and second, it’s made to be easy to integrate with any existing website via free APIs.

After that, customers pay ten cents per user per month for every user beyond 5,000.

Ballinger noted that because it’s standard practice to hold online stores liable for fraud — as compared to offline, where banks often cover fraud instead — this could potentially be a very big business.

In testing, Sift Science has observed all sorts of interesting phenomena. For instance, people who register to buy something with a Yahoo email account are twice as likely to be fraudsters as the norm. Meanwhile, people who register with an AOL account are half as likely as the norm to attempt something fraudulent.

Ballinger had previously developed similar in-house systems at Google to detect malicious advertising. He and co-founder Jason Tan started Sift Science in June 2011, and participated in the Y Combinator program later that year. They now have a team of nine people in San Francisco.

Sift Science has been in testing with companies including Airbnb, Listia, Affirm (Max Levchin’s new startup) and Uber. Customers can either use the service to block transactions in real time or to flag them for review before they’re settled.

According to numerous sources, Vivek Sharma, who is GM of the powerful Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger products, has left the company.

It’s not clear where Sharma — who has been at the Silicon Valley Internet giant since 2009 and has worked in a number of areas, including commerce and search — is going or what the reasons are for his departure from Yahoo.

Some sources said he clashed with CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been involved in the recent overhaul of one of Yahoo’s key consumer products, due in part to recent issues related to email vulnerability and other issues. But others said he simply wanted to move on and has a new job lined up already.

There are several other top Yahoo execs who are likely to go in the coming weeks, especially given many bonuses are awarded this month. Mayer has also been looking over her top management and wider workforce and culling it, sometimes in ways that attract national controversy and even a lawsuit.

Keeping talent and finding new blood has been an issue for the fledgling CEO. As I have previously reported, as well as others in more detail this week, she is approving all new hires herself and has put in place more stringent hiring standards at Yahoo.

Sources said she has been trying to convince a top product exec at Google to essentially replace Shashi Seth — with whom she parted ways in January — who would oversee Mail, Answers, Messenger, the homepage and possibly the media group.

In addition, her COO Henrique De Castro has a search out for a new head of the key Americas unit to man its important sales division and more in the U.S. market.

In other words, a lot of empty desks that need filling.

I have an email in for comment into Yahoo, but you know how that goes (FYI: It doesn’t).

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

And while the marketplace grew 16 percent, which was better than most expected, there’s been a lot of attention recently on eBay’s new initiatives around mobile payments and instant delivery. I had a short conversation with CEO John Donahoe tonight, and here’s a quick summary of what we talked about.

AllThingsD: How do you feel about the state of your mobile business?

Donahoe: Pretty good. EBay invested early and heavily in mobile, and we’re the clear leader in mobile commerce and payments, and our results in the fourth quarter demonstrated that in spades. We ended the year with $13 billion in mobile commerce payments, 120 million downloads of our mobile apps and $14 billion in mobile payment volume. The mobile revolution is here and it’s changing how consumers pay for everything.

Everything? Not just coffee and the stuff I buy online?

We have an app called eBay Now that you can use in San Francisco and New York. It enables you to shop with several retailers like Macy’s and Home Depot and have the item delivered to you within the hour. Not just to your home, but to wherever you happen to be, based on your phone’s location.

Do you still consider Amazon to be your biggest competitive threat?

I think many retailers consider Amazon to be their largest competitive threat. We’re helping them compete in a multi-channel environment.

How is the old-school classic eBay auction business doing?

We give buyers and sellers lots of choice. Five years ago our marketplace business was 70 percent auctions and 30 percent fixed-price sales. Now its 30 percent auctions and 70 percent fixed-price sales. If you’re selling something like an iPhone, you probably want to do it at a fixed price. But if it’s a 1967 Ernie Banks baseball card, the value is in the eye of the beholder and you might prefer to sell it at an auction. It’s still 30 percent of what eBay does, but it’s a smaller and smaller percentage of our business. In the last quarter, fixed-price sales grew 22 percent and auctions grew 7 percent.

Today, a new company called Trustonic launched with backing from ARM (the British chip company whose designs power most of the world’s mobile devices), Gemalto and Germany’s Giesecke & Devrient.

The basic idea is to provide security at the chip level, separate from the operating system on a device. Such chips will provide a Trusted Execution Environment that can be used to store account information, passwords and other sensitive information, making it easier to use and access from a mobile device.

It’s based on an ARM technology called TrustZone, and enhanced by software developed by Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient. The hope is to create a platform that device manufacturers can build into future smartphones and tablets. Trustonic’s approach will be to license the technology to chipmakers, support companies who build phones and tablets while also enabling service providers to turn on services that take advantage of it for which they can charge additional fees.

Ben Cade, Trustonic’s CEO, said that ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient had collectively poured “tens of millions” into the joint venture, but declined to specify how much. ARM owns 40 percent of the company while the other two will control 30 percent each. It will be based in the U.K.

Naturally, Trustonic — since it hails from ARM’s camp — will have an easy introduction to most of the companies involved with the mobile phone and tablet universe. But the question will be whether the kinds of experiences the technology enables not only get the job done, but whether or not they make users happy.

There’s also the question of adding additional parts to the mix. Generally speaking, most chips inside a phone or tablet over time get mushed together so they can be made less expensively. Anything that added to the bill of materials — the combined cost of all the components inside a device — will have to be offset by a perceived increase in value.

That might seem easy at first when it comes to security, but by and large consumers say they put a high value on security but rarely act that way. More often than not people create easy passwords, and are lax about changing them. We’ll see if this new approach makes a difference.

Wall Street is certainly enthusiastic for such an outcome — even grabbing onto a specious rumor that perhaps Google was sniffing around the troubled Chicago-based social discount deals company, which is currently valued at just over $3 billion. On Friday, Groupon’s stock jumped 23 percent on takeover speculation after Tom Forte of Telsey Advisory Group was quoted as saying: “Where the stock is currently trading, it’s a takeout candidate.”

Actually, the stock has been trading at these levels for a very long time, so the sudden attention is decidedly overwrought. More to the point, sources close to Google — which had offered $6 billion for the company before it went public — said that Google has not been contemplating a second foray into acquiring Groupon.

The same is true for eBay, said sources, and Amazon is an unlikely buyer because it already owns a stake in LivingSocial, the second-largest daily deals provider. Additionally, there are lots of other problems that any purchaser would face in buying the company, which sells everything from bikini waxes to GPS devices at a discount.

In an onstage appearance this morning, CEO Andrew Mason declined to address the thinly sourced rumors of a takeover. “What I have said about Groupon is everything I will say about it,” he said. “I am focused on looking forward.”

Given the non-answer, it’s still prudent to ask, is there actually a buyer for Groupon?

First, let’s address the price. Two years ago, Google offered to purchase Groupon for $6 billion. A year later, it went public at $10 billion, and today, it is trading for $2.9 billion. The company has $1.2 billion in cash, and owes merchants about half of that, or around $573 million.

That said, it is still a relatively low price for a company that includes a customer base of 40 million people who bought something in the past year, a hodgepodge of local retailers and merchants that consider Groupon their online marketing channel, and — perhaps most importantly — a better-than-expected mobile business that now represents a third of its transactions.

But, while it costs much less than it once did, that doesn’t necessarily make Groupon a steal.

That’s because over the past year, the Chicago company has stumbled operationally. Europe is underperforming, the company’s main coupon business is slowing as the novelty of the business is wearing off and it has started investing heavily in selling products, a low-margin business that requires tons of logistics to package and ship items to people’s front doors. On top of that, the board recently discussed replacing Mason, who some directors fear may not be the right choice to continue leading the company. While they ultimately decided to keep him, it was a perceptual blow.

At least one big investor is betting something will happen: Tiger Global Management, which recently bought up close to 10 percent of Groupon. The well-regarded hedge fund and private equity firm may be betting it can’t get worse, and perhaps would even push for a sale.

In any case, here’s a look at some of the scenarios:

Google

When Google made the offer two years ago, the search engine was interested in entering the daily deals business as a way to gain a foothold into all things local, including commerce. Since Groupon rejected that $6 billion acquisition, Google has spent the past two years building Google Offers.

While Google Offers still has a very small piece of the market, it has been pivoting toward an integrated ads model, which is less complementary to Groupon’s approach. Google believes that merchants will pay Google only after a purchase has been made, and the sum will be determined by the consumer. The cost per acquisition model is very different from Groupon, which has the consumer paying up front for a heavily discounted coupon.

As one source with knowledge of the situation said: “The timing would be a bit wacky.”

That said, Nikesh Arora, Google’s SVP and chief business officer, had been a very strong advocate of the original deal and might still want more heft in Google’s corner in the competitive local scene. One major plus is that Groupon could also help build a local salesforce to push Google+ Local, which includes Zagat, the online reviews site that competes against Yelp. Groupon might also support its Google Wallet business, which has largely failed to gain traction among consumers.

Another source familiar with the two companies said running a daily deals business is “operationally intensive, and it’s a muscle that Google doesn’t have, so from a synergy standpoint it would be complementary.” But, “if they are still serious about local, is that the business model for local that they want to pursue?”

eBay

For the past two years, the e-commerce company has aggressively been going after the local commerce market by helping transactions occur online or at a nearby store. Additionally, its PayPal division is moving fast into the physical payments space. Strong merchant relationships, like the ones Groupon has, could go a long way toward making those things happen faster.

EBay recently raised $3 billion in debt financing and has $7.3 billion cash on its balance street. Its stock price also has gone up more than 65 percent in the past year, giving it plenty of fire power to make a big move.

It also has the stomach for acquisitions. However, many of its purchases over the past two years have been about buying technology and talent. It bought RedLaser, the barcode scanning technology for $10 million; Milo.com, a local inventory company, for $75 million; and Zong, a mobile payments company, for $240 million. Over the years, it has also made substantial purchases, including GSI last year for $2.4 billion, Bill Me Later for $1.2 billion and Skype for $2.6 billion.

A few months back, the company entered the daily deals business with the launch of eBay Lifestyle Deals, which runs daily deals in a number of markets, including San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. To do so, eBay teamed up with Signpost, which arranges the deals with local merchants. Interestingly, Signpost is backed by Google Ventures, and already provides deals for Google Offers.

The company is also experimenting with eBay Now, a service that allows consumers to buy something on their phone and have it delivered within an hour. “They continue to be interested in local, and they have this experiment going on right now with eBay Now, but they are still iterating and figuring out the local angle,” one source said.

Likewise, PayPal’s local strategy is under development. It is trying to roll out physical payments to big-box retailers like Home Depot while also offering a credit card reader for smaller retailers called PayPal Here.

The biggest argument against this deal is that eBay may not need Groupon, and that it already has the infrastructure to roll out deals through partnerships — which would cost a whole lot less and be a lot less painful.

Amazon

Simply put, Amazon already has its own troubles with its significant stake in LivingSocial, which just slashed 400 jobs. In the third quarter, Amazon took an impairment charge of $169 million, or 37 cents a share, related to its stake in LivingSocial, resulting in the company reporting an overall third-quarter net loss of $274 million, or 60 cents a share.

Any potential Amazon-Groupon tie-up would then be a merger between LivingSocial and Groupon, creating perhaps an even bigger black hole that would also result in a lot of ongoing integration problems. While together LivingSocial and Groupon would easily make Amazon the largest daily deals company and up its local commerce efforts, it’s still not clear if the online retail giant wants to double down here.

Separately, Amazon has entered the daily deals business on its own with a service called Amazon Local that competes directly with LivingSocial and Groupon. The offers became particularly interesting to the company after it started using them to discount the price of its Kindle e-readers and tablets. If owners don’t want to see the offers, the tablets can cost up to $40 more.

The company has said that it essentially doesn’t need help building the business – it thinks it can get to scale fast in the space because it already has 164 million active customer accounts worldwide (which are defined as people who have made a purchase in the past year).

Perhaps most importantly, though, Amazon has a history of building, not buying.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express

These three payment companies have huge market values, and should not be discounted as players in the local commerce space. In addition, a year ago, all of them started looking for new revenue streams after the Durbin Amendment capped the amount that banks and card networks charge merchants on debit card transactions.

Already, many banks are sending targeted ads or deals to consumers based on their spending habits. However, it’s unclear whether they need to be the actual deal makers, or just act as a distribution system for advertisements and coupons. For example, MasterCard recently partnered with Gilt City, the daily deals division of Gilt Groupe. Through the partnership, MasterCard will be able to offer its users deals for restaurants, concert tickets and travel, and at the same time, help Gilt City get in front of some of the card issuer’s millions of users.

MasterCard may be the frontrunner of the three as a potential suitor. Not only has it shown direct interest in the space, American Express is still absorbing its acquisition of Revolution Money, for which it paid $300 million cash in 2010, and Visa has been active with its purchase of CyberSource for $2 billion in 2010. More recently, it made an investment in Square, the hot mobile payments company.

Other Suspects

A number of other companies could be put on a Groupon acquisition list, such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook.

Microsoft and Yahoo both have the money, but have not done much in the space so far. An acquisition would allow them to catch up quickly, but would be expensive and largely not complementary with what they are doing already — which is almost nothing. Facebook, in particular, tried once to enter the space and failed and might be focused on other lower-hanging revenue sources.

Groupon could also look to private equity firms for a buyout, which would allow it to have some space while it fixed some of its issues.

Internationally, there is Japan’s Rakuten, which owns Buy.com in the U.S., and China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has been looking at ways to enter the U.S. market.

Of course, Groupon might simply keep stumbling forward and hope it can turn itself around. But, at some point, without improved revenue and cohesion at the top levels, something is sure to bring pressure to its options. 

In fact, in afternoon trading today, the rumors continued to keep the stock elevated. Shares closed 3.76 percent higher today at $4.41 a share.

Some analysts said yes. (For the record, we at AllThingsD are dubious. But, for the moment, we’re going to pretend that not spending dough on stuff is just like spending dough on stuff.)

Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore, insisted there’s little distinction between whether consumers make the transaction on the phone or whether they later go home and make a purchase on a computer.

“It’s just the introduction of mobile devices into the brick-and-mortar environment that’s affecting consumer behavior,” Lipsman said.

According to recent comScore data, 37 percent of shoppers this past quarter displayed “showrooming” behavior — the act of price-checking using a mobile device while shopping in a traditional brick-and mortar-store. That’s compared with 32 percent of showrooming shoppers in the second quarter of the year. (Note to the math-challenged: This is a small increase, given the explosive growth of smartphones over the last year.)

But Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru echoed Lipsman’s statement in a recent blog post, noting: “Most of the showrooming shoppers told us that they usually find cheaper prices online when they research them … A lot of people switch retailers when they find cheaper prices online.”

It’s apparently not all bad news for brick-and-mortar, though. As Forrester’s Mulpuru pointed out, some research leads not only to Amazon.com, but to another store. About 18 percent of mobile shoppers surveyed opted to head to another store to make a purchase, while just 15 percent said they went online instead.

Key takeaway: We’ll buy lots of stuff in lots more ways.

Apparently, this is now a officially a thing, so here are some stats taken from the latest snapshot as of 3 pm ET, because we just know you’re not shopping on a tablet, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to hear about how many others are:

• Online sales are up 20 percent for this same time period over Black Friday 2011.

• The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site is at 28 percent, up from 18.1 percent in 2011.
• The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase is 14.3 percent, up from 10.3 percent in 2011.
• Shoppers using the iPad led to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices, with conversion rates reaching 4.2 percent, higher than all other mobile devices.
• Shoppers referred from social networks like Facebook and Twitter generated 0.18 percent of all online sales on Black Friday.

So, you might be wondering how IBM gets all this info. It’s all part of its strategic play in the world of big data, essentially helping companies make more sense of the huge troves of data they’ve gathered that were previously being ignored. Smarter Commerce is the area of IBM devoted to helping retailers better understand that data so they can come up with improved ideas concerning how to sell more stuff.

Where they gather that data is the IBM Benchmark. It’s a cloud-based digital analytics platform that soaks up digital information about how consumers respond to different ways of selling things online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, from 500 different online retailers. IBM won’t name them — they joined the network under condition of anonymity — but Big Blue says the companies that participate include about half of the companies named on the Internet Retailer Top 100 list. A lot of the technology comes from Coremetrics and Unica, acquisitions IBM made in 2010.

Last year, I talked about all this with Craig Hayman, IBM’s VP of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group. One quote from that conversation sticks out in my memory; it bears repeating here:

“If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they’re incredibly empowered. There’s not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that: To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was.”

Now you know. Not only are retailers and your credit card companies watching you shop, so is IBM.

The story doesn’t identify which four of the commission’s five members have concluded, after a year of investigation, that Google used its overwhelming command of the Internet search market to hurt rivals in the travel, shopping and entertainment sectors, and to benefit itself. They’re also concerned about Google’s handling of certain patents related to smartphones.

Meanwhile, FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, pictured from his June appearance at D: All Things Digital, has said he wants to see a decision by the commission before the end of the year.

If the FTC brings the case, Google has two fundamental courses of action: Settle or fight. If it settles, the result will be a negotiated order that applies to Google, and Google only. The same will happen at the end of a lawsuit, assuming the FTC wins, which isn’t exactly certain.

There is another course of action the FTC could take, and has been known to take before: Issue guidelines. During the week, I talked with David Balto, a former FTC litigator during the Clinton Administration who has long been my go-to guy on antitrust law. He says enforcement actions can be messy, and even when they’re successful they only apply to the target, not to anyone else.

“Antitrust law is a really narrow tool,” he told me. “It doesn’t really fit in a lot of situations.”

The commission issued guidelines in 2002 in relation to Internet search companies, in an attempt to address practices that many companies were engaging in. Obviously, things have changed a lot in 10 years, so these guidelines would necessarily have to be updated substantially, and probably adjusted again within another two or three years.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Google opts not to settle, but to fight. The result, Balto says, will be a complicated lawsuit that could take years, cost both sides million, and in the end, the FTC could lose. It has happened before. In 2003, the commission brought an enforcement action against chip interface designers Rambus. The FTC argued that Rambus had played fast and loose with the rules of an industry body that set standards for the memory chip industry when after leaving that body it tried to enforce patents against several memory companies.

After almost seven years of costly litigation, an appeals court sided with Rambus, saying that the commission hadn’t proved a violation had occurred in the first place. After all that, the FTC has started to hold hearings on the process of setting standards.

Guidelines would apply to everyone and would set ground rules for every participant in the market, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and whoever else might be affected. And all parties would benefit from participating in the dialogue leading up to the crafting of the guidelines: In the end, there would be a more informed consensus, and everyone involved will know the rules of the road.

It would be more complex and would take longer than it did 10 years ago, Balto says, but in the end, the FTC’s mission is to protect consumer welfare, not bring big and costly lawsuits.

While the site wants to remain an accessible entry point for newbies, it doesn’t want the narrative arc for successful sellers to arrive at the inevitable plot point: “And then I started a real business.”

–From a story by Rob Walker in Wired about Etsy

So why is now the time to shift consumer behavior to mobile payments? It would appear that we’re fixing a problem that doesn’t exist. Are we simply attempting to engineer a revolution?

Actually, no. There’s far more happening behind the scenes that must change — and change fast — for the economy’s sake, and for the sake of the consumers who fuel it.

Many people are speculating about how mobile payments can capture the mainstream’s interest, and their wallets. Here are a few of the things that will drive the mobile payments revolution.

Get Merchants by Crushing the Silent Economic Threat
One of the biggest invisible taxes on our economy (to the tune of $50 billion a year) is interchange, also known as “swipe fees” on credit cards and other forms of payment processing. Merchants pass along these fees to consumers simply because of the need to move money.

For the longest time, the only true zero interchange way of paying was cash (the oldest and arguably the least convenient). But prices for cash-toting customers are often exactly the same for credit- or mobile-paying customers. Up until last year’s passage of the Durbin Amendment, that price equality was actually mandated by federal law. This means that whenever you pay cash, you’re subsidizing the credit card-carrying masses. Credit cards are faster and more convenient, so why not jump on board? And the more people jump on board, the more fees the credit card companies can rake in. You get the picture.

The good news is that increased competition, and some helpful legislation, is already driving these fees down — slowly, but surely.

It’s this shift toward real savings that will motivate merchants to adopt a new payment infrastructure. Not the cool factor, not the desire to be on the leading edge, but cold, hard, economic facts. If mobile payment companies lead this shift (as many like Dwolla are), merchants will adopt them — and consumers will follow. If credit card companies were to lead this shift and price interchange competitively, mobile payment would stop in its tracks.

The good (and bad) news is that the existing players won’t cannibalize their own interchange-driven revenue streams. So it’s up to the new companies — mostly mobile in variety — to push the shift. This means that the opportunity for existing players to shift to mobile is open, but that it’ll take a lot longer because the big guys won’t structure their networks to fuel mass merchant adoption.

Get Widespread Acceptance by Making It Painless
Instead of trying to rebuild decades-old payment constructs or the point-of-sale systems that millions of businesses run on, build a payment ecosystem that’s as painless as possible for merchants to adopt. Entrenched players (Micros, Aloha, PosiTouch) won’t be going anywhere overnight, so it’s incredibly important to take a more open approach to support the systems merchants already have in place.

On the flip side, mobile payment apps have to be easy for any user with a phone to download and access. Everyone is speculating over whether an NFC-equipped iPhone will catapult mobile payments into the mainstream, and the answer to that question is: Probably not. NFC, QR codes, stating your name, swiping your finger, retina scans or the deposit of first-born children should all be acceptable ways to pay. It’s not the medium that matters.

What I’m getting at is simple: Make it as easy as possible for both merchants and consumers to adopt your mobile payment technology, and mobile payment technology will become more mainstream. We don’t need to have painfully long meetings about it. (Disclaimer: I didn’t get invited. I’m totally not cool enough.)

Put Something (Other Than a Phone) Into the Hands of the Consumer
The act of paying with your phone is only a fraction of what’s cool about mobile payments. In theory, paying with my credit card and paying with my phone will do the exact same thing (get me that sandwich or fully functional Iron Man suit I’ve been wanting). So why would I want to make an unnecessary change to the way I’ve always paid?

There has got to be some kind of larger benefit to the consumer to force this change. Just as credit card companies introduced rewards points and benefits to get people to use their cards, mobile payment companies need to do something to sweeten the deal for consumers.

Getting There Might Take Awhile
In conclusion, revolutions don’t happen every day, and for good reason. Change is never comfortable. Many technological shifts throughout history have started out awkward. Just think about how far we’ve come since we started downloading the interwebs through a CD we got in the mail. For now, mobile payments seem messy and fragmented, but a future in which everything just works (and works very much in favor of both the consumer and the merchant) is not all that far off.

At the age of 12, Seth Priebatsch founded his first web start-up. It failed gloriously, achieving profits several times those of Twitter. After completing his freshman year at Princeton (the official requirement to achieve the term dropout), Seth took a leave of absence to found SCVNGR, the parent company of payment network LevelUp.

Some people enjoy shopping. I am not one of those people.

The time it takes me to drive to the grocery store, figure out what I want, wait in line to buy it and drive home always feels like an unnecessary waste of time. I could be using that hour for far more rewarding activities, such as watching BattleBots clips on YouTube writing.

Imagine my elation, then, when I heard about Instacart, an iPhone app that promises cheap grocery delivery to your door.

The start-up is part of a bigger phenomenon of apps that get others to do mundane tasks for you, such as the more high-profile TaskRabbit.

In Instacart’s case, you browse through the app’s categories, pick what you want, and indicate if you want your groceries delivered within the next three hours (for $3.99) or in the next hour (for $9.99). Or, you can pay $99 a year for free, unlimited three-hour delivery.

This annual plan may sound a bit familiar to those with subscriptions to Amazon Prime, which charges $79 annually for free, two-day delivery of most items in the online retail giant’s warehouses.

Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta

And the similarities are not mere coincidence. Instacart’s CEO is Apoorva Mehta, formerly an Amazon supply-chain engineer.

But the two services aren’t the same. Amazon, of course, can offer items at very low prices, because it owns and operates huge distribution warehouses worldwide. Instacart, part of the current crop at Y Combinator, works around the need to have high inventory costs entirely.

If this reminds you of the Web 1.0 flameout Kozmo.com — the much-hyped instant delivery service that was partially funded by Amazon, in fact — you would not be completely off base.

In Instacart’s case, orders sent through the app (which is invite-only for now, and available only in San Francisco, Mountain View and Palo Alto) are then assigned to a driver, who finds whatever you ordered at a nearby store and brings it to you.

There are competitors in the delivery area, such as Peapod mobile, which requires you to make an account before you can see what’s available; there is also MyGofer, which offers delivery from local Kmart stores.

Instacart’s take is for users to open up a Pinterest-like grid of popular items (including Oreos and beer). When you tap on the picture of an item and say how many you want to add to your cart, you’re then taken back to the grid to buy more stuff.

There is also browsing by departments such as “Beverages” and “Deli,” which open into yet another grid of the most popular items.

After looking through all the departments and searching for things I couldn’t find easily, I assembled a full shopping list: More than 15 items, including orange juice, soup, bananas, soda and, of course, beer (but no Oreos).

Instacart offers free three-hour delivery with app users’ first order. My stuff was delivered about two hours after I ordered.

Well, most of the order was. That’s another issue with such services right now. Since Instacart doesn’t have a formal relationship with any stores, the drivers are left to their own wits to find what they can, and Instacart refunds users for the price of whatever they can’t find. This underlines the disadvantages of blindly sending someone else off with your shopping list, and no way to contact them.

Prices are also higher. Besides an invisible convenience fee on top of what Safeway — where my driver shopped — charged, all together my groceries were $20 more than if I had shopped myself.

But if I “Like” something that I have to buy every so often — say, some new sneakers or a pair of jeans — and that “Like” turns into some useful information, such as price updates, that might get me (the most promotion-resistant shopper I know) a little more interested. And that’s exactly what a new feature in Glimpse, a Facebook app by TheFind, aims to do.

Apparently, consumers on Facebook have “Liked” 5.6 million products, and more than 70 percent of e-commerce sites have Facebook’s “Like” button on them. The feature is called Universal Price Alert, and it gives retailers a new channel to reach out to consumes who are already interested by sending them carefully targeted emails with discounts and deals. Mix in the possibility of the rumored “Want” button, and you see the potential.

Tap and Go Is Ready to Go
Near Field Communications (NFC) technology is increasingly being embedded in smartphones, allowing devices to communicate by tapping. For example, tap your phone to a poster to buy a shirt; tap it to a kiosk to buy a ticket. The tap-and-go concept is intuitive, versatile and a great way to share data between mobile devices. NFC is highly versatile, standards-based, interoperable and security-ready. Its adoption in retail and supply is already starting.

Consider this: by 2016, 700 million NFC smartphones are projected to ship. Customers with digital wallets embedded in NFC-enabled phones don’t need a special app to make payments, nor do they need to carry dozens of debit, credit and loyalty cards. They simply touch their phone to the NFC-enabled payment device, sign and go.

Beyond payments, NFC has the potential to positively impact commerce in other ways, including:

• Quick and easy ticketing, much like a “Fast Pay” toll tag on a car.
• Sharing files, contact information and more by simply tapping NFC phones together.
• Tag reading via applications that enable identification, physical access, transportation, inventory, loyalty and marketing opportunities up and down the supply chain.

Who’s the Next Lady Gaga?
Big Data has the potential to unleash a new wave of innovation, responsiveness and service for companies that are able to harness its value. Many pioneering companies are already creating value and competitive differentiation by mining extremely large quantities of typically unstructured data for hidden patterns and insights. The potential impact is virtually unlimited. In retail, we’ve seen brands successfully gathering and analyzing consumer sentiment, then creating personalized recommendations for millions of customers.

Another example is music analytics leader, Next Big Sound, which is using unstructured data to figure out who the next Lady Gaga might be. It uses big data to scan all the different music and social networks (Spotify, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube), analyze likes, plays, downloads — and ultimately provide insight to music executives into how artists become stars.

A New Take on Reality
Augmented reality (AR) presents practically limitless applications. AR is used to superimpose computer-generated sensory input (sound, video, graphics, haptic feedback, etc.) to create a mediated reality overlaying and enhancing the live real-world environment. It’s already being used in navigation, manufacturing, logistics, military services, entertainment, sports, healthcare and numerous other industries.

In commerce, AR has the potential to be a significant driver of sales and conversions. Forward-thinking marketers are already taking advantage of AR to cleverly deliver useful information that adds value to the buying process.

One example of a brand cleverly using AR is Lego. In collaboration with AR technology company Metaio, Lego created an in-store AR system called the Lego Digital Box (LDB). The LDB allows customers to simply hold a Lego box up to a scanner, which recognizes exactly which Lego set it is, and then displays what the set looks like fully assembled on a video screen. You can tilt it up, down and around to see the set in 3-D interactive animation. The initial trial period of LDB in select stores was so successful in increasing customer satisfaction and product sales that Lego made the decision to roll it out in all 80 of its stores, displaying over 200 products.

The Power of the Crowd
Thanks to the Web, brands can tap the vast possibilities of crowdsourcing to shape a product or service. Examples are plenty, with undeniable results. Take, for example, the auto brand Fiat that, in partnership with Brazilian interactive agency AgenciaClick, launched a Web site inviting Brazilian consumers to invent a concept car that Fiat would exhibit at Sao Paulo’s 2010 annual auto show — the Fiat Mio. The challenge was a hit: The site’s 17,662 registrants submitted over 10,000 ideas.

The site was organized much like a social network displaying comments, photos and a Twitter-like sidebar feed. Ideas were divided into categories such as design, materials, safety and infotainment. All designs were shared online for a completely transparent process — turning the traditionally secretive model of auto production on its ear. Dozens of users’ ideas made it into production, contributing to the Mio’s final propulsion method, shape, infotainment, body materials, biometry and driving aids. Throughout the process, Fiat’s engineers reviewed ideas submitted, consolidated the technical design and published the results via open source software in early 2010 before then turning the discussion toward a branding and marketing campaign for the October car show.

Don’t Buy, Rent
According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, the circular economy is not a new technology but rather an innovative industrial model that is restorative or regenerative by design. Its key goals include replacing the “end-of-life” industrial concept with “cradle-to-cradle” restoration, shifting toward the use of renewable energy, eradicating toxic chemicals and eliminating waste.

In the world of commerce, collaborative consumerism aligns with the principles of circular economy by allowing consumers to pay for the use of a product, rather than buying and eventually discarding it. One prime example is Netflix. With over 23 million users, the video streaming and DVD rental company focuses not on selling to customers, but on loaning DVDs/streaming videos. Similarly, car-sharing company Zipcar provides automobile reservations to members who are then billed for the time spent using the cars. Another example is Rent the Runway, which rents dresses from top designers on a four- or eight-day basis.

Dave Bruno is marketing director for RedPrairie, a supply chain and retail technology company. As part of RedPrairie’s research into Commerce in Motion, the company conducts research and analysis of the ever-changing dynamics of global supply chains and the hyper-connected consumer. None of the companies mentioned in this post are clients of RedPrairie.