No longer just about using your smartphone to make purchases, mobile payment options are now popping up in transit systems in metropolitan areas, as companies look to gauge consumers’ appetites for buying products while truly on the go.

EBay-owned PayPal has just launched a pilot in Singapore’s subway stations for commuters to buy goods while en route. The experiment, through which eight merchants will offer Valentine’s Day gifts at reduced prices, is being conducted across 15 subway stations across Singapore.

Commuters can make purchases by using their smartphone to scan a QR code on a billboard or poster, and can then pay through a PayPal account. (For those wondering how cell service might work while riding a subway, Singapore has long boasted complete underground coverage, in addition to being one of the most Wi-Fi-friendly cities in the world.)

Earlier this week, New Yorkers learned that they would be able to purchase beauty products while riding in some taxicabs, with just a swipe of their smartphones.

Launched by Glamour magazine as part of a Fashion Week experiment, 50 Manhattan cabs will be equipped with SnapTags from technology company SpyderLynk; according to a Wall Street Journal report, VeriFone, which handles payments for New York City cabs, will power the beauty product purchases, as well.

The experiment was inspired by the virtual stores launched in the Seoul subway system by the Tesco supermarket chain, the Journal says.

While mobile payments are becoming increasingly popular — even the Obama campaign has hopped on board — the companies pushing mobile payments forward are divided on their approach to the technology. Square, for example, uses a dongle that plugs into the iPhone to accept mobile credit card payments; it also offers an app that uses geo-fencing to allow a customer to pay when he or she is within a certain distance from a store. Google’s mobile payments app, Google Wallet, uses near field communication technology to transmit payments.

For PayPal, which recently doubled its mobile payments predictions for 2012 to $7 billion, the emphasis has been on options that don’t require near field communication; which, as my AllThingsD colleague Tricia Duryee points out, can be a limiting factor for adoption.

PayPal says that, aside from a smartphone and an app with bar-code scanning capability, no additional infrastructure — such as an NFC-equipped terminal — is required for merchants, retailers and consumers to participate in the Singapore pilot.

Late last year, PayPal began testing point-of-sale purchasing at Home Depot retail stores, in which a select group of PayPal employees can purchase items by using a PayPal-issued credit card or by entering an account number at the register.

He is forecasting that mobile commerce — purchases made from apps or the browser on a phone or tablet — will hit $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume this year, up 60 percent from $5 billion in 2011.

Donahoe made the predictions last night in Las Vegas, where he gave the keynote at a technology dinner for leaders of the Consumer Electronics Association.

Additionally, the company predicted that PayPal will reach $7 billion in mobile total payment volume this year, increasing from $4 billion in 2011.

He made the bold predictions despite the recent unsettling departure of PayPal President Scott Thompson to join Yahoo as CEO, indicating that he is still confident about PayPal’s mobile future.

During the keynote, Donahoe also announced that Best Buy was its newest partner to use the RedLaser barcode scanning app to offer local in-store pick-up services. Other companies that offer it today include Toys “R” Us.

Other big data figures: 

• EBay Mobile currently has more than 65 million downloads of its mobile applications across all platforms.
• More than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113 percent increase year over year.
• PayPal’s original prediction for 2011 was that it would achieve $1.5 billion in mobile total payment volume for 2011. Instead, it hit $4 billion. A year earlier, it totaled only $750 million.

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
• Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video)
• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
• Kinect Helps Keep Aging Xbox at the Top of Its Game
• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

The document shows MasterCard’s push to create products based on information about people’s purchases that help marketers understand consumer behaviors, target ads and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

One portion describes how shopping histories could be used to understand people’s lifestyles and motivations. “The combination of actual purchase behavior with attitudinal and demographic information provides an unparalleled understanding of the consumer,” it says.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Companies are signaling they’re more comfortable spending money on technology now that sales and profits are expanding. “What drives tech spending are profits,” said Bill Whyman, head of tech strategy research at equity research broker dealer ISI Group Inc. Corporate profits have been surging the last few quarters and spending usually lags profits by three quarters, he said.

World-wide information technology spending is forecast to increase 5.1% to $3.6 trillion this year, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The program will encourage users to purchase virtual goods that their friends have already bought.

Speaking to an audience of application developers who are concerned about Facebook’s move to require developers to use its Facebook Credits virtual currency system, Liu mentioned Buy With Friends as an example of a program Facebook is providing that will help developers make more money.

Liu said Buy With Friends gives developers tools to help users share their in-game purchases. In testing so far, she said “more than 50 percent of users elected to share a purchase.” As an example, after a friend has made and shared a purchase, a player might see a message that says, “Your friend has unlocked this deal for you–get 40 percent off this special monster food,” Liu said.

I’ve argued in the past that much of what we call “social commerce” isn’t very social yet, but this seems like an example of a product that actually deserves that label.

Facebook is also offering incentives, including promotion and premium ad targeting, to developers who use Facebook Credits as their in-game currency.

Facebook Credits are used by some 150 developers, but many of them elect to also use their own branded currency so as not to be locked into the Facebook system. This introduces a silly amount of complexity, with users often having to convert their real-world money into Facebook Credits into in-game currency, all at different exchange rates.

Liu also said that Facebook is testing a feature that improves users’ ability to purchase additional credits without leaving the game environment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

“We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along, that we are in a unique position to take advantage of because of our strong cash position,” he said. “You know, we’ve demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don’t let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don’t allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we’d like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future. That’s the biggest reason.”

That remark spurred all sorts of speculation about what sensible large-scale acquisitions Apple might make. And while it was certainly reasonable to conclude from Jobs’s remarks that Apple is preparing itself for some big M&A plays in the future, there was another equally plausible conclusion: What if by “strategic opportunities,” Jobs was referring to supply chain investments–money spent to overcome impediments to growth? Apple has done this before, most notably in 2005, when it arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND flash output for use in it iPods. It inked a similar iPhone-related deal in 2008, forcing Samsung to reduce its supply to other customers to fulfill its obligation to Apple. And there was another half-billion-dollar deal with Toshiba is 2009.

And according to COO Tim Cook, Apple just did it again–but on a much grander scale. During the first-quarter earnings call last week, Cook said the company had invested $3.9 billion to secure component supplies and capacity.

“We’ve historically entered into certain agreements with different people to secure supply and other benefits,” he said. “And the largest one in the recent past has been we signed a deal with several flash suppliers back at the end of 2005 that totaled over $1 billion because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for the company, and we think that, that was an absolutely fantastic use of Apple’s cash. And we constantly look for more of these. And so in the past several quarters we’ve identified another area and come to some recent agreements that [CFO Peter Oppenheimer] talked about in his opening comments, in that these payments consist of prepayments and capital for process equipment and tooling. And similar to the flash agreements, they’re focused in that area we feel is very strategic. And so I’d prefer not to go into more detail about what specific area it’s in, but it’s the same kind of thinking that led us to those deals that led us to the flash deal.”

For what particular components, he wouldn’t say. There are some likely candidates, though: The high-res LCDs used in the iPhone 4 and iPad; solid-state drives like the ones in the new MacBook Air, which are presumably headed to other portions of the MacBook line as well; or perhaps some new system on a chip that will infuse the next-generation iPad and iPhone with significant performance gains. I’m sure there are others as well. And all fit quite nicely into Jobs’s vision of “strategic opportunities.”

Latest example: Boku, a mobile payment start-up that raised $13 million last June, has added another $25 million via a C round led by DAG Ventures. Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures are all re-upping.

For now, Boku and competitors like Zong are focused on letting people use their phones to buy “virtual goods,” primarily on social games run by the likes of Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish from Electronic Arts (ERTS).

But even if you believe that the virtual goods business is not going the way of Pet Rocks, it is going to be somewhat limited–the most obvious users for this stuff are kids who don’t have their own credits cards–and competition will ratchet up if Facebook decides to finally offer its own payment platform, which seems very likely.

But the amount of money the start-ups are raising indicates that they have much bigger ambitions. They want to turn your phone into a payment system for “real” stuff. Easy enough to see how you could extend this to other digital purchases, like music, video, etc., but there’s no reason you couldn’t buy physical goods this way.

Could happen, too. Though we’ve been hearing about that scenario for more than a decade, and it hasn’t taken off yet.

One near-term obstacle, at least in the U.S., is carrier fees–AT&T (T), Sprint (S) et al generally take up to 50 percent of each transaction that happens on their networks. If the mobile payment business is going to go up, those numbers need to come down.

This, according to research firm Forrester, which claims technology spending will roar back to life in 2010, ending the econalypse once and for all.

“While the Q3 2009 data for the U.S. and the global market showed continued declines in tech purchases (as we expected),” the company said in its report, U.S. and Global IT Market Outlook: Q4 2009, “we predict that the Q4 2009 data will show a small increase in buying activity, or at worst, just a small decline.”

Forrester (FORR) expects U.S. IT spending to grow by 6.6 percent in 2010 after falling 8.2 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, global IT spending, which plummeted 8.9 percent last year, will rise 8.1 percent in 2010 to more than $1.6 trillion.

Driving the recovery: Software, hardware and communications equipment. According to Forrester, worldwide spending on software is set to grow by 9.7 percent in the months ahead, spending on hardware and other computer equipment by 8.2 percent and spending on comm gear by 7.6 percent.

Said Forrester principal analyst Andrew Bartels: “All the pieces are in place for a 2010 tech spending rebound. In the U.S., the tech recovery will be much stronger than the overall economic recovery, with technology spending growing at more than twice the rate of gross domestic product this year.”

But this assumes there will be no further financial disaster in 2010. If this is not the case, then we have something else to look forward to.

“The most likely alternative to our forecast that the U.S. and global IT markets will recover in 2010 is a faltering tech market due to a double-dip recession that returns in 2010 after a brief two- to three-quarter economic recovery,” Forrester explains. “Should this happen, U.S. tech purchases would decline by 3% to 4% in 2010, with a second-half decline offsetting a first-half tech revival.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Econalypto: A Rightsizing Roundup
• Google: Whoops! Econalypse
• Econalypse Now
• Analyst: The Great Dark Times Cometh!
• Wall Street: Give Me Something to Stop the Bleeding
• GOOG at $398? Clearly, You’re Dyslexic.
• WaMu: Epic Bail
• Ballmer: Better Safe Than Lehman Bros.
• Lehman Brothers: $2.5 Billion for a Bankruptcy Well Done
• Here’s $39 Billion in Recognition for Your Hard Work on the Forthcoming Financial Crisis
• Weekend at Bernanke’s II
• Weekend at Bernankes

The consulting firm discussed some of its research in advance of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which formally kicks off Jan. 7 in Las Vegas.

For starters, service contracts associated with technology products might seem like an area that cash-strapped consumers might forgo in tough economic times. Yet some 49 percent of the vendors surveyed by Accenture said consumers had increased purchases of new service contracts during the downturn; 22 percent said sales hadn’t changed, and 18 percent said sales had declined. (The remainder said they don’t offer service contracts).

Read the rest of this post on the original site

With the new open software, called Paypal X, users won’t have to type their username and password into a separate PayPal Web site in order to complete a payment. Instead, people will be able to sign into PayPal and make purchases, such as virtual weapons, right inside an application such as a game.

“We’re taking all of our product capabilities and making them open and that much easier for you to use,” said Scott Thompson, PayPal’s president.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In the job listings Microsoft posted for its new stores yesterday, the company lists a number of unsurprising requirements for prospective retail workers. They need to be able to provide a “warm welcome” for customers, “execute the sales and service strategies” of Microsoft’s retail group and restock shelves. The listings also say workers need to be able to lift and carry 75 pounds (“loading and unloading all those great products and carrying purchases out for our customers will be required!”).

That hefty weight requirement raises some questions: Will Microsoft have barbells at the ready during its interview process to test how much staffers can deadlift?

Read the rest of this post on the original site