A Primer on Google Wallet and Android Pay

Description: Android Pay is essentially a digital payments system that consumers can use to buy things online or in stores from retailers and others who also use the service.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Date: May 28, 2015

To use Android Pay, smartphone users with up-to-date versions of the Android operating system will be able to load Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover cards onto their phones. From there, they will be able to wave the phone over the terminals in more than 700,000 stores around the United States to pay for items. Android Pay will also work inside mobile apps from participating developers.

Google will use a technology called tokenization to provide merchants with a customer’s payment information without having to hand over their actual credit card number.

As with Apple Pay, Google will let customers verify their identity using their fingerprint, a technique which will be built into the next version of Android.    Read Rest of Story 

 Questions for discussion:

1.  Will this new payment system succeed “ANDROID PAY”  Why or Why Not?

2.  What is the business model of both Android Pay, Google Wallet or Apple Pay?  Is it sustainable?

Listen to Pandora, and It Listens Back

Description:  After years of customizing playlists to individual listeners by analyzing components of the songs they like, then playing them tracks with similar traits, the company has started data-mining users’ musical tastes for clues about the kinds of ads most likely to engage them.

Source: NYTimes.com

Date: Jan 4, 2014

A few services, like Pandora, Amazon and Netflix, were early in developing algorithms to recommend products based on an individual customer’s preferences or those of people with similar profiles. Now, some companies are trying to differentiate themselves by using their proprietary data sets to make deeper inferences about individuals and try to influence their behavior.

This online ad customization technique is known as behavioral targeting, but Pandora adds a music layer. Pandora has collected song preference and other details about more than 200 million registered users, and those people have expressed their song likes and dislikes by pressing the site’s thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons more than 35 billion times. Because Pandora needs to understand the type of device a listener is using in order to deliver songs in a playable format, its system also knows whether people are tuning in from their cars, from iPhones or Android phones or from desktops.

So it seems only logical for the company to start seeking correlations between users’ listening habits and the kinds of ads they might be most receptive to.  READ REST OF STORY 

Questions for discussion:

1. Do you feel companies that are trying to differentiate themselves by using their proprietary data sets to make deeper inferences about individuals and try to influence their behavior is ethical? Why or Why not?

2.  If you were a company that had access to this type of data, how would you price this type of asset in the marketplace?  Who are your potential customers ?

Algorithms        iPhones or Android        

Why Android Gets Apps Later Than IOS

Description: There are too many operating systems, devices, and models for app developers to keep up. This diversified market makes the future of apps look  more corporate than entrepreneurial.

Source: Mashable.com

Date: March 6, 2013

Even though there are more Android phones than iPhones in the United States, the number and variety of Android apps lags compared to Apple’s offerings. For instance, Android users had to wait a year before they got Instagram or Pinterest apps. New research helps explain why.

There’s got to be more to the story than the number of phones. Flurry, a mobile-app analytics firm, released a report this week that helps explain the problem, laying out the challenges app developers face. It also shows that Android apps are unlikely to catch up and that small developers coding for either device will get squeezed out of the market READ REST OF STORY

 Questions for discussion:

1. Which operating systems or devices do you think would be most profitable for app developers to focus on?

2. How can app developers meet the needs of all users?

The Reason Why Android Gets Apps Later Than IOS

Description: There are too many operating systems, devices, and models for app developers to keep up. This diversified market makes the future of apps look  more corporate than entrepreneurial.

Source: Mashable.com

Date: March 6, 2013

Even though there are more Android phones than iPhones in the United States, the number and variety of Android apps lags compared to Apple’s offerings. For instance, Android users had to wait a year before they got Instagram or Pinterest apps. New research helps explain why.

There’s got to be more to the story than the number of phones. Flurry, a mobile-app analytics firm, released a report this week that helps explain the problem, laying out the challenges app developers face. It also shows that Android apps are unlikely to catch up and that small developers coding for either device will get squeezed out of the market READ REST OF STORY

 Questions for discussion:

1. Which operating systems or devices do you think would be most profitable for app developers to focus on?

2. How can app developers meet the needs of all users?