Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

At last night's Digital Divas event for Social Media Week, we were able to score a couple of the new Square mobile payment devices to take donations for Haiti. The product, from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, hasn't hit the market yet, so guests got a sneak peek at the technology.

These small square devices plug right into a phone's audio input jack and let you swipe credit cards to make financial transactions.

More often than not, it took several swipes for the transaction to go through (but that's why it's still being tested, after all)

Once the card is swiped, you sign with your finger -- something that isn't easy to do right now, but could become more natural (just as teens are more dexterous with their thumbs thanks to texting).

Then, the best part, you can email yourself a receipt. This is currently an option at the Apple Store, and I can't wait until it becomes common practice.  No more hanging onto tiny scraps of paper!

Receipts are accessible on a secure site online, and you can even search for them on their site.

To collect donations, we created a Square account in one person's name. However, Square is going to let you create a payer account yourself to speed up and secure every payment. By attaching your photo to your account, Square users will be able to visually confirm you are the card holder. Coming soon you will also be able to send text message to authorize every payment in real-time.

The service itself is actually going to have a built in microdonation system to make giving easy and routine. Just as many grocery stores and pharmacies now ask if you want to add a small donation to your bill, Square will enable microdonations  by giving a penny of every transaction you take to a cause of your choice.

They are also building in a loyalty feature (that reminds us of what Foursquare is trying to do): "If you frequent a place that accepts Square, they will let them know you’re a repeat customer. That 10th cappuccino may be on the house, no paper coffee card required."

In developed countries, where people are used to using credit cards, this type of product may be the future of mobile payments, at least in the near term. The key is that it's tapping into an existing behavior, not creating a new one.

See a video of Square in action on TechCrunch here.

With fragmented media consumption comes fragmented distribution. Silk Tricky, creators of the interactive zombie video The Outbreak, are working on another transmedia action film called Bank Run. As seen in the video above, the experience combines the live action movie with an interactive online and iPhone game.

Similar to The Outbreak, the first half of this project is online, interactive video. The other half extends the film to an interactive game on a particular distribution platform, such as the iPhone. Depending on the result of this project, it might serve as a future revenue model for other indie media creations online and on mobile platforms.

As more and more consumers find themselves watching television with an app phone by their side, media companies will begin to discover new ways to tie together the two devices for a more immersive experience. NBC Universal and 20th Century Fox have already began to explore this space using iPhone apps for interacting with DVD or Blu Ray movies. These apps provide information about the movie and characters while watching. But that is just the beginning, we welcome the day that Jack Bauer calls from inside our television and we save the day using our Android or Blackberry device.

[via jawbone.tv]

Mobile crowdsourcing is being used to construct traffic maps and forecast crowd flow, now it is also beginning to map noise levels within cities around the world. NoiseTube provides a mobile application that lets users capture the surrounding ambiance through a built-in microphone, and if the phone supports it, tag it with GPS coordinates. Nicolas Maisonneuve's goal was to "turn the mobile phone into an environmental sensor." Using the results, city planners will be able to better realize how to fight noise pollution. Anyone can view the data on Google Earth, and compare sound levels between cities like Brussels and Amsterdam.

[via textually]

Earlier this week the World Wide Web Consortum released their extensive Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap, examining mobile-specific web development conditions and guidelines. Its purpose is "to understand the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones, evaluate existing technologies, and identify the most promising directions to lower the barriers of developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear."

As the WC3 has served to set the standard for web development since 1994, there has been much anticipation for their release of standardized practices and development models for mobile platforms. As a first draft, the document has already received criticism for referencing information that is already dated and paying too little attention to important systems like mobile payments, and the document is sure to evolve as practices emerge from the mobile development community.

[via MobileActive]

BusinessWeek just came out with a roundup of the "Most Intriguing New Businesses," which include a handful of mobile start-ups we've been watching. Here we get all meta and do a roundup of their roundup...

CitySourced

CitySourced's iPhone application lets people snap pictures of potholes, graffiti, and other annoyances and send them directly to the right person at City Hall.

Also see: @TC50: Mobile StartUps that Build Upon Human Behaviors

Bump

One of the hottest free iPhone apps, this software from Bump Technologies lets users share personal contact information and photos simply by bumping two phones together.

Also see: MobileBehavior TV Episode 5: Will Mobile Kill The Business Card?

FitBit

FitBit sells a $99 gizmo that tracks movement, exercise, and sleeping patterns. The data zips wirelessly to a Web site, where you can chart your progress.

Layar

Layar has created free software that lets smartphones deliver "augmented reality"—text and images laid over scenes viewed through a device's camera.

Also see: WTF Augmented Reality Parts One and Two

Sense

Sense Networks' technology, which crunches real-time, location-based data from wireless carriers and cars, can be used to craft next-gen marketing and ad campaigns.

Also see: Find Your Tribe With CitySense

Ever since the dawn of web, businesses, researchers, and even artists have been experimenting with crowdsourcing. Tapping the wisdom of the crowds is not just a smart PR and CRM strategy, it's a much more efficient way to collect information. Sentiment analysis, Aardvark's human search engine, and Victor & Spoils are all examples.

Mobile opens up a new angle on crowdsourcing, one that takes on a more stealth approach. While social media thrives on active participation, powerful data is being collected via our mobile devices while we, for the most part, remain unaware. Around the clock, our phones are collecting real-world information, mapping social processes, and transforming us into human sensors.

We naturally navigate the world using five key senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. With these we construct the realm we live in. In the past, people have discussed ways to integrate these with computers, or build on them using technology. You could say that this is already happening. The current iPhone has about ten sensors including GPS, a compass, microphone, and camera. Smart phones can collect and process the data we are sensing 24/7, even measure the impact of ads we see and hear. With a guided purpose, businesses are using this to observe and innovate while we passively contribute information from our traveling selves.

We've covered Sense Network's Citysense, a startup that uses points of GPS and WiFi positioning data to view San Francisco's live activity and hotspots. After a quick download, data is collected automatically without need for further user action. With this it is possible to view what days of the week are busier, what venues are crowded, and where everybody is going from your current location. (While companies like Foursquare and Buzzd are beginning to provide these popularity contests as well, they are based on active check-ins.) Cartogrammar takes users' photos to paint Harvard Square based on dominant colors of geo-tagged Flickr photos. This passive crowdsourcing is much like sentiment analysis, which takes the pulse of web users by translating expressed emotion into hard data.

As with Citysense, mapping is natural application of this. Companies like Waze, Google, and Biketastic are crowdsourcing the actual creation of real-time traffic reports. Using previous speed and direction data, collected via mobile, Waze can predict future highway buildup and explain unusual situations.

This new forecasting and mapping is also applied to crowd flow through retail and other indoor locations by Sense Networks and Path Intelligence. The latter sets up receivers across a specified area that catch the frequencies sent out as mobile phones ping their towers. With this, they can observe movement through a building, saw a mall for example. This has powerful implications for everything from architecture and urban planning to advertising and marketing.

With data coming in every second of every day, our modern society now has a real-time pulse to be monitored. Like weather forecasters, employees at companies like Path Intelligence are able to use this to predict the future as well as act on alerts and unusual occurrences.

Of course, all of this might spook consumers just a bit. A recent report from Berkeley and UPenn showed that between 73 percent and 86 percent of adults opposes tailored advertising when they found out how it was done. Those techniques include tracking behavior on websites and in retail stores.

Considering this data is all anonymous and not tied to user profiles, that should quell concerns some. But expect to see much ado about this practice in coming years, as well as many more mind-blowing applications of it.

A new report from Juniper forecasts that in developed regions more than one subscriber in ten will be using mobile coupons by 2014.

The report also suggests that "smart posters" with embedded NFC tags will bring to life static billboards, creating immediate interaction between potential customers and their prospective purchases. By simply passing their device close to the tag, users can take away a coupon or obtain product information that can result in purchase decisions. They forecast that ARPU from NFC coupons and smart posters will exceed ARPU from NFC payment transactions.

This concept of interactive media through real-world "hyperlinks" is something we think will become a lot more pervasive in 2010. Every brand should be thinking of their "mobile path," whether its through NFC, Bluetooth,ME QR code, or simply a short code on all their media.