Where Is My Magical NFC Phone Wallet? (John Biggs)

According to Gartner Group report, there are 141.1 million mobile payment-ready devices in circulation and that the vast portion of the world’s population (mostly in Asia) is actively using NFC and other techniques to pay for items via mobile. However, the US is lagging wildly in this regard, with nearly no activity in the space at present even though two-thirds of young people would be happy to wave their phones in front of a candy machine to grab a bite. Sadly, two-thirds of older folks would balk at the opportunity.

Clearly there is demand, but what is it in our psyche that is so against the concept of NFC and cellphone payments? First, a word from Gartner:

In developed markets, companies are trumpeting the prospects of NFC without realizing the complexity of the service model,” says Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner.

“We believe mass market adoption of NFC payments is at least four years away. The biggest hurdle is the need to change user behavior by convincing consumers to pay with mobile phones instead of cash and cards.”

Ultimately, when you come down to it, the service model isn’t particularly complex. Instead, it is the hardware expenditures necessary to prepare every credit card station and vending machine to begin accepting payments. I also think that our own current vision – an amalgam of Paypal-esque “SMS payments” and the dumb NFC payment systems offered by some credit card issuers – is at odds with what we truly need to implement in this country. I don’t think Visa and Mastercard will run the next generation of mobile payments. They will be carried on the back of an NFC juggernaut that is connected to an open standard found in almost every phone. But never and in no way will credit card companies control the manufacture of devices themselves.

Our own use cases are strangely quaint. In Japan, where the Suica payment platform is king, NFC is popular because phones have been ubiquitous for almost two decades and everyone takes the metro. For example, our biggest “NFC” play are the vehicle-based EZPass systems that use a radio transmitter to pay bridge and highway tolls. This, in short, is the primary reason why handheld NFC devices seem alien to us – we’re more used to driving than taking mass transit. Everything else has fizzled. For example, the most recent example of NFC hoopla I can think of was the rush of NFC key fobs offered a few years ago at gas stations and McDonalds. Those fobs, I suspect, are now filling our junk drawers at home.

Besides the logistical issue of getting new hardware to countless points of sale, the NFC market in the US is fractured. I believe that soon Wal-Mart will offer an app and NFC component that will allow folks to collect discounts and pay for goods at the register. When – and only when – this giant takes up the flag will the rest of the squabbling NFC camps follow suit. Do I want Sam Walton’s beast to control NFC adoption in the US? No, but it makes the most sense.

In the end, I agree with Gartner: we’ll see NFC payments in the next four years to half decade. I also see the potential for credit card obsolescence by 2020 and – hold onto your hats – the slow reduction of cash usage by 2025-2030. By then we’ll all have our jetpacks and space cars, so we won’t miss these old artifacts of a benighted economic time.

Breath Bird: New Twitter Client Lets Handicapped Users Tweet With Their Breath (Serkan Toto)

A Japanese company called TechFirm [JP] has just a released a very special (and free) Twitter client for the iPad in the App Store [iTunes, bilingual English and Japanese]: “Breath Bird” lets people who can’t use their fingers and have problems speaking post to Twitter by breathing into the iPad’s mic.

The way it works is that when you fire up the app, your timeline appears on the left hand side of the screen (it refreshes automatically to keep things simple).

On the right, an on-screen keyboard with all characters from a-z split into five rows appears (see below). Breath Bird starts highlighting each row, one after the other, from top to bottom. If the row in which the character you’d like to “type” is highlighted, breathe into the mic to make the app highlight all characters in that row one after the other, from left to right.

Once the character in question is highlighted, breathe again and it appears in the tweet bubble on top of the screen – repeat to create entire words and sentences that can be posted to Twitter in the same way.

I tried Breath Bird out: the process is cumbersome at first, but the app actually works pretty well (surely even better with an external mic), and more importantly, it’s probably a godsend for the target group.

Netvibes Debuts Powerful Social Analytics Platform For Brands And Agencies (Leena Rao)

Netvibes, a company that provides social media dashboards and news aggregators for brands and agencies, is debuting a powerful new analytics platform tonight. Netvibes’ new social analytics and monitoring platform is launching in private beta but won’t be available to the general public until later in the month.

As we wrote last year, Netvibes launched Instant Dashboards, which allows users to enter a keyword on NetVibes’ site to pull up an instant dashboard that automatically collects all of the latest photos, videos, news, feeds, search results, Twitter conversations and more around that topic in realtime. The company’s new offering, Social Pack, is complimentary to the Instant Dashboard product, giving brand managers the ability to monitor and analyze at the same time.

The platform’s Social Corpus gives you open access to add and control exactly what sources (blogs, influencers, news feeds) to pull data from. Plus, Netvibes features a built-in library of more than 200,000 original content feeds and apps to choose from.

Similar to analytics platforms like Radian6, Netvibes tracks mentions and topics and gives brands insight to make sense of this data. The platform will identify trends, sentiment, influencers and ideas. You can dig pretty deep with data as well. For example, not only will Netvibes tell you who your top influencer is, but the technology will also show you which blog the influencer write for and what is being siad about a brand or product. And Netvibes will instantly create a new app just to analyze those specific keywords revealed by that one influencer and track them over time.

Netvibes also allows you set specific tags to track certain mentions from specific sources. Netvibes allows managers to create an unlimited number of advanced alerts to automatically monitor the effectiveness of campaigns, brand reputation, competitors and even trigger actions, like adjusting campaign budgets, a newsletter response or invoking a URL. Alerts can be sent to any mobile device in real-time.

While the Social Pack platform combined with the news aggregator platform is certainly an information overload, it could be a comprehensive tool for brand managers. Already many well-known agencies and brands are already using Netvibes’ enterprise offerings including Digitas, Coca-Cola, and L’Oreal. Of course, the enterprise dashboard isn’t cheap. The entire Social pack and Dashboard costs $15,000 for dashboard setup, then $2,000 per month.

But clearly big brands are shelling out the cash for Netvibes product. And the company is profitable on a net income basis.

LinkedIn Surpasses Myspace For U.S. Visitors To Become No. 2 Social Network; Twitter Not Far Behind (Leena Rao)

Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.

Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Twitter.com had 30.6 million unique visitors in June, compared to 27 million unique vistors in May. The increase in traffic is actually a big win for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network.

Facebook also reached an all-time high in terms of U.S. traffic in June, according to newly released comScore data. In June, Facebook saw 160.8 million unique vistors in the U.S., which is up from 157.2 million uniques in May. The company also announced that it crossed the 750 million active users mark worldwide in June as well.

Tumblr saw 11.8 million unique visitors in June, up from 10.7 million unique visitors in May. In June, we reported that Tumblr was seeing around 400 million pageviews per day, thanks in part to international growth and faster response times.

get widgetminimize

China Wants to Buy Facebook (Forbes.com)

China Wants to Buy Facebook

Image via CrunchBase

On Thursday, Business Insider reported that China is trying to buy “a huge chunk” of Facebook.

According to the business news website, Beijing approached a fund that buys stock from former Facebook employees to see if it could assemble a stake large enough “to matter.”  Moreover, Citibank is rumored to be trying to acquire as much as $1.2 billion of stock for two sovereign wealth funds, one from the Middle East and the other Chinese.  Business Insider reports a third source, from a “very influential” Silicon Valley investment bank, confirms that Citi is representing China.

Should Beijing be allowed to buy a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s site?  Business Insider tells us there is “little need” for concern about Chinese censors looking at the photos and postings of the 700 million people who trust Facebook with their personal online activity.

First, China’s position won’t be large.  A billion-dollar investment does not buy much influence in a site expected to be worth a hundred times that when it goes public.  Second, Beijing will be acquiring nonvoting stock.  Third, shareholders don’t get the right to look at what’s on the site.  All of these arguments from Business Insider ring true.

Yet they are all beside the point—and there are other reasons to be concerned.  The business site says that “sovereign wealth funds are pretty distinct from their governments.”

Perhaps Norway’s fund is, but not China’s.  The Communist Party, despite three decades of economic reform, insists on its monopoly of political power.  And to maintain that monopoly, it tightly controls its own instrumentalities.  That’s especially true at this moment because the Party is in the midst of the most comprehensive crackdown on society since the 1989 Beijing Spring.  Chinese leaders clearly view social media as a threat to their rule, especially after seeing its force-multiplying effect in the ongoing Arab Spring protests that have toppled governments.

In short, China’s sovereign wealth fund, which is no more independent of the Communist Party than the Beijing municipal government, wants to buy a stake in the world’s most prominent social networking site because Chinese leaders want to control social media.  And they hope to do that as part of their comprehensive campaign to dominate the conversation about China—not just inside the country but around the world as well.

Beijing, during the last decade, announced initiatives to change discourse on foreign university campuses with its Confucius Institutes—now 322 of them—and Confucius Classrooms in elementary and high schools—369 of those.  Moreover, its “go global” initiative is trying to affect news coverage of China by opening bureaus outside the country to internationalize state media, especially Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television, andPeople’s Daily.

And this is where the Facebook founder is giving Beijing an opening.  Zuckerberg visited China in December and is scheduled to return, perhaps in September, in his bid to access the world’s largest online community, 457 million at last count.

“One big reason American firms stumble in China is that the government tends to favor locals when it comes to regulation,” Business Insider points out.  “One way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to allow the government to own a stake.”

Beijing wants to own stakes in foreign firms because it is trying to control them.  Its ambitions may at the moment look unrealistic to us, but that does not mean swaggering—and strategic-thinking—Communist Party officials do not hold them.

The cocky Chinese are not the only parties deluding themselves.  Zuckerberg, in the words of one reporter, “believes that Facebook can be an agent of change in China, as it has been in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia.”  After the disastrous China experiences of Yahoo and Google and the troubled history of Microsoft there—not to mention Beijing’s recent tirade against foreign social media—the Facebook founder appears both arrogant and naïve.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is reportedly “wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.”  If she loses her argument with Zuckerberg and Facebook enters China, the company will eventually be subject to demands to censor its sites, those both inside and outside China.  That’s apparently why the Chinese want to own a big stake in Facebook.  They are, in short, looking for control in the long run.  No other explanation is consistent with the Party’s other media and “educational” initiatives.

Of course, a Beijing-influenced Facebook will be hit by even more bad publicity—and inevitably defections.  Other social networking sites will spring up to capture fleeing users.  The genius of America is that its open and broad market eventually punishes the arrogant and the naïve by allowing choice.

So who says MySpace is dead?  Perhaps Rupert Murdoch sold it too soon.