BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Mobile Payments Are Killing The Cash Register

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Mobile Payments Are Killing The Cash Register (Mobile Marketing Watch)
This year at Mobile World Congress, mobile payments are all the rage. The headlines out of Barcelona speak to the age and influence of mobile in retail. Each headline is a new obituary for clunky, expensive, out-of-date cash registers. With 66 percent of in-store transactions made with plastic today and 180 million Americans carrying credit or debit cards, why force them to find a cash register if the transaction can be completed by a roaming sales associate with a mobile device and card reader? Read >>

Passbook Mobile Ticketing Expanding To 13 Baseball Stadiums (GigaOM)
For the 2013 baseball season, U.S. Major League Baseball is more than tripling the number of stadiums that will accept mobile tickets via Apple’s Passbook app. This year there will be 13 stadiums that will enable paperless ticketing via Passbook. MLB was among Apple’s first launch partners for Passbook, which went live with iOS 6 when it launched in September. That surely wasn’t a surprise to baseball fans who know MLB as the most tech-savvy league of all major professional sports. Read >>

PayPal Founder Launching New Mobile Payment Start-Up (Reuters)
Max Levchin, co-founder of online payment giant PayPal, launched a rival business called Affirm that will compete in the crowded but fast-growing mobile payments business. Affirm's technology helps shoppers complete online purchases more quickly and easily when they are using smart phones and other mobile devices. Affirm is focusing on streamlining the mobile checkout process online, which can involve typing in lots of information, such as an address and card numbers, while using a small type pad. Read >>

Defense Department Says Goodbye To Just BlackBerry (CNet)
The U.S. Department of Defense said that it was dropping its exclusive BlackBerry contract and opening all of its mobile communications networks to Apple, Google, and other device makers. Of the more than 600,000 mobile devices used by the department, 470,000 are currently BlackBerry, 41,000 are Apple products, and 8,700 are running on Google's Android OS. The department has said that eventually it wants to handle as many as 8 million devices. Any company that can meet its strict classified security guidelines can try to get a piece of the department's profitable government contract. Read >>

Apple Smartphone Market Share Grows In China (Kantar via Tech In Asia)
Market research firm Kantar released its data from January 2013, and it shows Apple’s iPhone ascendant, but still a long way behind rival Android when it comes to smartphone operating systems in China’s smartphone market.

smartphone market china ios android

Specifically, Kantar says Apple hit 23.2 percent of China’s smartphone market in January, up from 18.6 percent in September 2012. But Android saw even more impressive growth, jumping from 65.2 percent of the market in September to 71.5 percent of it in January. The big losers, unsurprisingly, were everyone else. Symbian and Windows Phone both dropped and other platforms didn’t even register. Read >>

HTML5 Is The Future (Kendo UI via Venture Beat)
HTML5 looks to be the overwhelming favorite development platform of choice for mobile developers, according to a new study by Kendo UI. Already, 50 percent of developers have developed in HTML5, and 90 percent plan to use the technology in 2013.

html5 development world

What about native-only solutions? Only 15 percent of developers would go native-only when building an app for multiple platforms, a stat that might be a little shocking to those who witnessed Facebook famously and loudly abandoning HTML5 development last year in favor of a faster, smoother, better native app experience. Check out the full infographic. Read >>

Chose Your Mobile Development Path (The Backup List)
When looking at cross-platform portability, the mobile Web comes out on top because it will always give you the best portability. When using mobile Web, the ability to use online marketing is gained. So, which path do you prefer? Read >>

choose your mobile development path