Posts tagged Credit
SEO Marketer For Credit Personal Loans Services Given Christmas Present By … – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Dec 25th
|
SEO Marketer For Credit Personal Loans Services Given Christmas Present By …
DigitalJournal.com (press release) As a part of their announcement, they wanted to let their SEO Marketer, for their credit personal loans services, to know they are sending a gift to his family for their Christmas celebration. USAPaydayForever.com felt as if this particular employee … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Survey: 80% of Consumers Want Alternative Payment Methods to Credit Cards Online
Dec 13th
When it comes to mobile payments, how much do you really trust your credit card being attached to your smartphone? Is it secure? Are merchants going to sell your personal information or start sending you piles of junk mail? These are some of the concerns that a new report from Javelin Strategy and Research surfaced this fall during a survey of consumers’ fears of mobile payments and online transactions.
The survey concludes that four out of five consumers would spend more money online if they considered credit cards safer and had payment alternatives. Javelin predicts that an additional $109.8 billion would be spent by offering a “no credit card required” way to pay online and at merchants.
Sponsor
It is important to note that Javelin’s survey was commissioned by PaymentOne, a direct-to-carrier payments company. PaymentOne has a direct benefit in trying to get consumers’ off credit cards and start paying through their cellphone or cable bills. The survey was conducted in the fall of 2011 and polled more than 2,000 U.S. adults concerning payments preferences.
95% of respondents had mobile phones while only 36% had used that phone to pay for an item, be it an app, game, music or media streaming such as Netflix or Spotify. The top concerns around using credit cards online were privacy related concerning personal data falling into the hands of advertisers, marketers or malicious hackers.
There is a tenant in the payments industry that the more clicks that a user has to make, the less likely they are to make a purchase. These are often referred to as “pain point” or “friction.” Think about why Apple or Amazon do so well. Consumers enter their credit card numbers once and after that it is one-click processing with a password. Both companies have done masterful jobs of taking the friction out of payments.
On the other hand, the results of this survey should definitely be viewed through the lenses of a direct-to-carrier billing company trying to drum up support for its business model and get more online and offline merchants to use carrier billing, especially for smaller purchases. “No one is going to buy a fridge through carrier billing,” a PaymentOne executive said at CTIA in San Diego in October.
Users should think long and hard about storing credit card information on their smart devices. A report surfaced this morning that the Google Wallet leaves some information unencrypted if the device it is on is rooted. In the Android ecosystem there are also security concerns with malware-ridden apps that can theoretically gain root access and steal all information on a device. The Google Wallet sandboxes a lot of that data but as the Javelin survey points out, consumers have their fears regardless of the truth behind the technology.
What are your concerns with mobile payments? Is there a reason to fear using your credit card online or is the survey slanting its findings towards the benefit of its client? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal … – PR Web (press release)
Nov 22nd
|
USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal …
PR Web (press release) USAPaydayForever.com Sees This And Hires A New SEO Marketer To Help Their Promote Bad Credit Personal Loans To Aid Those Who Will Be Affected By The Super Committee Failure A recent Yahoo news article stated that the congress super committee has failed … USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal … – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Nov 21st
|
USAPaydayForever.com Announces New SEO Marketer For Their Bad Credit Personal …
DigitalJournal.com (press release) A statement was issued by USAPaydayForever.com about their new SEO marketing professional, their role with the bad credit persona loans promotion campaign, and the economy in general. In this statement, USAPaydayForever.com said, “There is some unease … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
New Visa Credit Card Comes With Its Own LCD
Nov 2nd
Earlier this fall Visa announced a new credit card in Europe that comes with its 48×8 pixel LCD panel on the back, just above where your signature would normally go. Called the CodeSure Matrix Display Card, the idea is to have a more secure credit card, that can be used for online shopping where you have to use your card without swiping it at a retail payment terminal. This is what the credit industry calls “card not present” and they charge higher per-transaction fees to the merchants because of the fraud potentials seen.
Sponsor
The CodeSure card can be used as a regular Visa debit, credit or pre-payment card. In addition to the display, it comes with a numeric keypad and a battery that is supposed to last up to three years. After testing over the past year, the card is now commercially available in Europe.
Visa says that the card “can also be used for services like eBanking, telephone banking, transactions signing and access to third party services.” It can offer messages in non-Roman alphabets too, should that be an issue. Similar to an encrypted key fob, it provides a one-time PIN number that is used during the transaction to verify the owner’s identity. This is done via the numeric keypad. Issuing banks can use this card to verify that they are indeed talking to their customers and not someone who has stolen their card.
Two vendors have helped bring this card to market: NagraID Security’s display technology was combined with Emue Technologies, who handled the authentication piece.
The small display on the card reminds me of one of my first portable computers, the classic Radio Shack model 100. It had a 40×7 character display and built-in text editing and communications software, along with a blazingly fast 300 bps modem, all in a package about the size of several iPads stacked on top of each other. Now of course, this had a full QWERTY keypad, but it seems we have come a long way since this trusty old beast.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What Will Wal-Mart Do With Square Mobile Credit Card Readers?
Oct 24th
Mobile credit card transaction platform Square is coming to the nation’s largest retailer. Square has struck a deal with Wal-Mart that will bring the dongle into retail stores across the country. The move is huge for Square but seems antithetical to its core business model, which is to bring mobile credit card readers to the masses.
Bloomberg Business Week first reported the story. Outside of saying that Square will now be located in 9,000 retail stores nationwide, Bloomberg does not say exactly what the use case inside of Wal-Mart stores will be. There are a variety of possibilities.
Sponsor
Mobile Checkout
Ever been in an Apple store and made a purchase directly with the sales rep that you were working with, as opposed to going to pay at a register? Imagine that in the middle of a Wal-Mart store. Say you are shopping for clothes, or shoes or … Wal-Mart sells everything. You just want to make a quick purchase and head out of the store. In theory, Wal-Mart could arm all of the floor representatives with Square dongles and have customers in and out. It may even help alleviate long lines at the checkout.
It is also imaginable that Wal-Mart could set up in-store payment kiosks away from the registers with the Square Register. It could just be a little booth in every department of a Wal-Mart that would be designed to handle payments for a couple of items.
It would be doubtful that Wal-Mart would go to 100% Square, especially at its existing register system. One would think that it would be cost prohibitive to rip out its entire point-of-sale system and replace it with iPads and Square Registers.
Square Card Case Deal?
One of the biggest benefits for Square could be to get Wal-Mart to leverage its existing Card Case program that allows for simple payments and transaction information between the customer, the retailer and the payments platform. The Square Card Case was unveiled in May and initially only rolled out to five cities and 50 retail partners.
Square posits the Card Case as an Amazon-style “one-click buying” method, except in the real-world as opposed to digital payments. Users that download the app can set up a “card” from a retailer and see what is happening with the retailer, from new deals to changes in the menu. Wal-Mart could institute the Card Case in a variety of ways, from the national level for what is happening with all Wal-Mart retail stores, to dedicating local managers to updating the card case for each individual store.
The best use case for Square has always been the notion of bringing credit card readers to small and medium business. We often think farmers markets or taxis when we think of Square’s growth potential. Square’s COO Keith Rabois said in the Bloomberg article that will continue to be the case. In terms of that goal, the Wal-Mart adoption may have the affect of a giant marketing campaign. The greatest benefit to Square from Wal-Mart may not be actual transaction revenue, but helping to speed up the awareness and adoption of the platform.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Hortonworks Responds: Counting Hadoop Code and Giving Credit Where Due
Oct 11th
Things are getting lively in the Hadoop community, especially between Hortonworks and Cloudera. The issue? Which companies are contributing the most to Hadoop, and how contributions ought to be tallied up.
It started with Owen O’Malley of Hortonworks, who did some calculations of contributions to Hadoop based on lines of code. The problem is that O’Malley credited work just by looking at the initial employer of contributors, rather than employers at the time of contribution.
Sponsor
Patches or Lines of Code?
Mike Olson of Cloudera took another whack at the numbers, which I looked at last week. Olson broke out the numbers by looking at the patches contributed to Hadoop and its ecosystem (projects like HBase, ZooKeeper, Pig, Mahout and Oozie).
O’Malley has come back with a counter-post that tallies contributions by lines of code but sticking to Cloudera’s method of counting current employer. The result shows Hortonworks far ahead of Cloudera, Facebook, IBM and even Yahoo. For 2011, according to O’Malley, Hortonworks has contributed more than 42% of the lines of code to Hadoop, Yahoo nearly 26%, and Cloudera a bit more than 15%. Lines of code are a better measure, says O’Malley, because “patches differ in their investment of time and effort.” (Of course, the same thing can be said about a line of code, too.)
Finally, O’Malley does provide a comparison that looks at patches and lines of code since 2006 and another comparison for 2011 alone. This puts Cloudera in a much better light, with nearly 30% of patches in 2011 so far, compared to 25% for Hortonworks and about 23% for Yahoo.
Lively Competition
If you’re going to be comparing contributions, I think that the best way is to sum up patches and lines of code. There’s really no concrete way to objectively say “company Y absolutely contributed the most” to a project just by counting code. A company’s code contribution might be a small code drop that adds a killer feature. A company’s contribution may be a series of patches that effectively removes thousands of lines of code, but improves the project with better code.
I think it’s safe to say that Cloudera and Hortonworks are both providing a good showing when it comes to Hadoop contributions, regardless of which company is actually contributing the most. And the results show that Hadoop is getting contributions from a healthy group of companies.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Updates Sharing Options, Credit Google+?
Aug 25th
Facebook has launched a set of new privacy options that give users greater control over tags and post visibility. The new controls seem to be an attempt to match the most praised features of Google+.
Facebook’s New Features
Facebook’s post ann…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Credit Cards Are Killing Creativity: The Case for a New Online Payments System
Aug 25th
With the rise of startups like Square, and near-field communication technology going global, we’re seeing payment systems change drastically in the real world. These tools are making our lives easier and are enabling new transactions to occur that would not have been possible before.
Surprisingly, however, we are not seeing much change at all in payment systems online. PayPal is still huge. We still need a credit card for almost all transactions online. In my opinion, attention on payments needs to be directed back to the Internet – because there are a huge number of negative effects resulting from using credit cards online.
Sponsor
Michael Moore-Jones is a 16-year-old New Zealander passionate about technology and business. He is the founder of They Don’t Teach You This In School, a website which helps young people benefit from the experiences of adults through short videos, and a co-founder of Duo.
10 Cents and $1
We are all very used to receiving free content on the Internet. But why is that? Do we no longer place value on quality? A high-quality news article on the New York Times, for example, is worth about 10 cents to me. I’m willing to pay that. I would bet that millions of other people worldwide would pay it too. However, because of the fact that existing payment systems online are controlled by the credit card companies, it isn’t profitable for anyone to charge less than a dollar for content, as there are minimum transaction fees.
This gap between 10 cents and $1 is where all the problems are occurring. Most credit card payment systems on the Internet charge a minimum of 30 cents per transaction. Content sellers would lose money if they sold content for anything less than this, and, depending on their costs of production, they’d still lose money at prices up to a dollar. This means that content producers are forced to give their content away for free, because people won’t pay a dollar for an article.
Enforced Generosity, Enforced Mediocrity
What are the implications if credit card companies continue to dominate, and everyone is forced to give content away for free online? For starters, less quality content. If people can’t make money from what they produce, they start to lose the motivation to produce.
There really is no incentive quite like money. Of course there will always be bloggers and news websites and musicians and movie producers – but unless there is a monetary incentive, a much lower quantity of content with much lower quality will be produced if people are not incentivized enough to put in the effort.
Content, in its broadest form, is information available to individuals. Information makes the world go around, and therefore content is crucial to societies. It is of utmost important that multiple news sources exist, so that democracy can function effectively.
We’ve seen the huge benefits from citizen journalism, for example. But perhaps those citizens decided to be journalists because of the novelty factor. Once that novelty wears off, will we still have as many citizen journalists unless they can profit from their content? I would argue that we are going to see the number of citizen content producers decrease over the coming years after the novelty of these technologies wears off. Therefore if we want to continue to see the benefits of citizen journalists, the ability for these people to be incentivized will have to be introduced to the Internet.
Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Must
There is no reason for all content producers to start charging for their content. Steven Brill, the founder of Journalism Online, recently said that “publishers don’t need to make a choice between advertising and circulation revenue. By charging only certain kinds of readers or for certain kinds of content, they can still maintain a big, non-paying audience capable of generating ad revenues.”
To create a positive and beneficial Internet, we have to give content producers the ability to choose how they monetize their content. The first step in that is reducing the importance of credit card companies in online payments.
To create a positive and beneficial Internet, we have to give content producers the ability to choose how they monetize their content. The first step in that is reducing the importance of credit card companies in online payments.
There is another benefit to having an alternative to credit card payments online: a Nielsen study recently showed that 71% of global consumers would pay for online content, provided that it is in some way better than what they would receive if they bought it in the physical world.
What this means is that content producers have incentive to produce better content. At the same time, consumers will receive higher quality content. It’s a win-win situation for all parties.
Micropayments Aren’t Enough – We Need Nanopayments
So, what should we do to provide an alternative to the current credit card payment system? Micropayments aren’t enough – we need to be talking nanopayments. There must be a ubiquitous digital payment system that gives content producers the ability to charge for their content, from amounts as small as one cent. Bitcoin is one of the key current players in this space, and the new social exchange MyCube is also working on solving this problem.
The Internet is fantastic at breaking down barriers. The problem we have here is that credit cards have been incorporated into the very fabric of payments through the Internet, and it is therefore slightly harder to break the barriers set up by credit card companies. It is very possible though – and there is no solid competition as of yet. So get to work.
[Disclosure: I was a member of the Digital Life Academy, of which MyCube is a sponsor].
Credit card photo by Andres Rueda
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
