Simnett

Global technology executive. Created strategy and delivered new products in diverse technology segments for multinationals and start-ups. Launched a $1B business for Microsoft. "Go-To Lead for hard problems"

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Bitcoin 2.0 ideas include: “smart contracts” whose obligations aren’t managed by lawyers but are executed by a software program; stock trading that requires no brokers; and decentralized registries for transferring homes, cars and other assets without agents, notaries or registrars. But there are many other possibilities, developers say. “We are just millimeters into a marathon in terms of developing the software that can use the blockchain,” Mr. Hill said.

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Disreputable Authority: Apple Pay- don’t leave home without it, and a credit card?

Apple is tying a new (but old) payment method to a new phone and a new OS. While obviously mass market in intent, the rollout means it’s likely to be used initially by tech-savvy early adopters.  These are the same people who have been saving their credit cards with e- and m- commerce merchants for years now (isn’t the magic of Uber the fact you don’t pay?). A quick analysis of my credit card bill shows more than half the charges are stored card-on-file transactions. If my supermarket had its own Starbucks-like app, that would take out another 10-15% of my transactions The protests about Apple Pay being turned off in drugstores are instructive- there are increasingly fewer places where people actually whip out a card to pay. Opentable’s experiments with eaters paying for meals booked through the system via the Opentable app and a stored card will take another chunk of the “payment opportunities” off the table. If Apple Pay data is readily available, will one effect be for high frequency retailers to develop their own apps, as Starbucks has done? While it’s hard to imagine an app for every store, it’s not as hard to see a consumer using a combined shopping, loyalty, and payment app for their top-5 most frequent stores (on in Opentable’s case, top scenario). Apple Pay might be the infrastructure behind that, but Braintree/Balanced/Stripe are surely more likely to be the multi-platform plays. One relatively common activity which does tend to drive purchases at unusual/less frequent places is travel. That’s also a situation where the payment problems can be harder to deal with- you simply don’t know what you’ll get and you can’t just run home. People won’t be heading to the airport relying on their phone as a wallet, in the way Starbucks has meant you can leave your wallet at home when you are running out for coffee. Cloud commerce, often triggered by a local device, is here to stay; whether it needs to mimic a payment mechanic developed in the 1970s is less clear to me.

[gregcohn]

In San Francisco, a group sprang up to battle Bell and its numbering scheme. The Anti-Digit Dialing League—consisting of thousands of members at its height, including the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa*—decried Bell’s version of digital transition. The all-digit dialing system was evidence of “the cult of technology,” the League argued, not to mention that cult’s “creeping numeralism.” To make its point, the group published its own pamphlet—one that was aptly, if vaguely, titled Phones Are for People. “So far,” it noted, “17 million of the nation’s 77-million phones have lost their letters in favor of numbers. The time to reverse the trend is NOW.”

Our Numbered Days: The Evolution of the Area Code (via gregcohn)

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Facebook- once users go mobile they stay mobile- analysis of FB's user numbers by platform

Looking at Facebook's reported data since Q4 2012 it is clear that mobile really is driving growth, and digging in a little further it seems that as users transition to mobile, they tend to become primarily-mobile users, there are very few casually-mobile users of Facebook.

First a look at the PC-only users, people who in a given month only touch Facebook from a PC; these are falling both in absolute and, even more, in relative terms.

Facebook has grown strongly in this period: as these PC-only users have fallen- what has taken up the slack? Mobile-only users have more than replaced the lost PC-only users. On a daily basis, mobile-only users (DAUs or Daily Active Users) overtook other users (i.e. PC-only and people logging in on both platforms) at the end of 2013. 

The trend is the same, but the picture is quite different, on a monthly basis (below). It is very clear that ALL the Facebook growth in the past 7 quarters has come from mobile-only users (MAUs, or Mobile Active Users), but there are apparently a much larger number of other (PC or multi-platform) users.

This relationship looks even stranger if you take one of Facebook’s own important metrics for engagement, the relationship between Monthly and Daily users, i.e. what proportion of monthly users are regular/daily users? As can be seen in the data table below, there are more mobile-only users on a daily basis than there are in a month. How can that be?

  It seems clear that many users who are mobile-only on a particular day check in occasionally on a PC in a given month, while still using mobile on that day. But there is very little evidence of predominantly PC-based users occasionally checking in on mobile. If they did the absolute number of PC-only DAUs might be the same or higher than the PC-only MAUs, what we see is that those proportions are almost the same (so the absolute numbers are lower). The charts below show this clearly. Note how PC-only is the same proportion of daily and monthly use, while the mobile users are mostly purely-mobile viewed on a daily basis, but mostly multi-platform on a monthly basis.

    This all seems broadly positive for Facebook- mobile monetization is improving, and as people shift away from PC, they are shifting towards mobile-only or mobile-first use.  It does raise the question of the benefits of splitting messaging from the core mobile app experience.  If messaging is a gateway drug for mobile Facebook usage, then you want people to be in the core experience, rather than letting them think that they can get what they want from a messaging app, while sticking with the core wall and status experience on the PC.

Notes-

All data from FB annual and quarterly reports.

One number (mobile only DAUs for Q3 2013) is estimated, as it has not been reported by Facebook.

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es» share now clearly above Windows Phone globally

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More than 40% of visitors to Marriott’s website view it on a mobile phone, up from less than 1% four years ago.

Hilton Books Upgraded Technology - WSJ

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es» @maxniederhofer very cool stuff

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Everything’s old that’s new again, or something- how people used to pay in restaurants…

As more and more transactions move away from being quasi-anonymous card transactions, it’s interesting to see how 120 years ago people paid for meals in restaurants.  It seems there was an expectation that people would have accounts at restaurants, and would order in advance. If you had no account you would pay in advance (perhaps this was the model Diners Club disrupted?). From Walter Germain, The Complete Bachelor: Manners for Men (NY: 1897) "All meals in a restaurant, unless organized on the spur of a moment, are ordered beforehand and everything, including the waiter's tip, arranged and settled for. If you have not an account at the restaurant, pay the bill at the time you arrange the menu and reserve the table.” (quoted in http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where-restaurant-reservations-come-from/374919/) This is similar to the way the butcher, the baker, the tailor, the milkman were paid- rather than paying at point of service, people ran accounts with goods providers and settled up from time to time (or in the case of tailors, when caught). Slightly more modern payment methods had moved to a pay at point of service model, it’s interesting to see how more and more account based systems are being reintroduced, in essence recreating the old fashioned “we know you and we trust you” relationship with goods and service providers. Uber is a well known example, Opentable’s new payment experiment another. How long before we move (back to) to “everything as a service” based on subscription/account based pricing?

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