Sue Walsh brought up a good point in Gadgetell on Deloitte research that found holiday shoppers are going mobile this year. Walsh wrote, “A new study out by Deloitte has found that more consumers then ever plan to use the web and their cellphones to find those bargains. They surveyed over 10,000 consumers about their holiday shopping plans. The study found that 45% plan to use their cell phones to research prices and 32% will use them to search for discounts. 25% will even go so far as to actually buy gifts on their phones.”
What do you think? Will you shop with your mobile phone? What will you consider buying with it? For you merchants, will you sell items through a mobile platform this year?
“Now that 87 percent of people in the U.S. are carrying cell phones, big companies like MasterCard believe mobile banking could experience significant growth. Outside of the U.S., millions of people already use their cell phones to transfer money, pay bills and even buy products at a store. The concept just hasn’t caught on in the U.S. A few companies want to change that, specifically when it comes to mobile payments. Recently, MasterCard inked an agreement with a mobile payments start-up called Obopay“ as reported on NPR’s All Things Considered
We shall call this the “use your phone” series. If you live in NYC, fly Delta, and like to fly from LaGuardia, you can now test out this new “check in with your cell phone” thing! Here’s a little summary:
If you’re flying Delta Air Lines out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport, you can now flash your cell phone to get onboard. On Tuesday, the airline rolled out a partnership with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to test out a “paperless check-in”–passengers download a boarding pass onto their cell phones and have it scanned by the TSA at the airport’s security checkpoint as well as when they board the plane.
Ok. We have been talking about cell phones, iphones, Blackberries, and a bunch of tech stuff here for over 2 months now. I bet some of you stumble upon our site randomly, not knowing what we actually do, so I decided that we should explain (and introduce) ourselves a little bit.
In a one liner, Obopay lets you transfer money to anyone in the US – fast and secure. Plain and simple.
You can use our product online on our website, from AOL Instant Messenger, SMS, our Obopay application on your cell phone, or even through our WAP page at (http://wap.obopay.com). It doesn’t even matter what bank you and I use. I can have my money in Bank of America and you have Citibank, HSBC, Wells Fargo… it really doesn’t matter. I can send money to you easily and you get it fast.
Why can’t our cell phones do all these things in America? Supposedly, in Japan, you can use your cell phone to pay at a store and even scan the barcode on a Big Mac to see the nutritional facts!
Not sure if this really happens in Japan or not, but this video sure makes it look real. I have been to Asia many times though, and their phones are just so much cooler and more advanced over there. On second thought, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this is real.
Going back to the big $10 million prize money that we talked about before on our own blog as well as the Google blog, the Locale group actually won $25,000 and is one of the finalists of the big grand prize!
This also totally reminds me of how Google got started. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both Stanford students at that time. Google was their Ph.D project. One thing let to another, and now you have… Google!
Pretty amazing. I am very curious in seeing how all this will pan out.
Going back to the previous Android entry, T-Mobile has announced that they will be carrying Google Android cell phones by the end of 2008. It seems like Google’s dream is going to turn into reality soon.
What makes Android stand out is the fact that it’s open. For the longest time, the carriers, like AT&T and Verizon, have been reluctant to release that kind of information.
SIGN UP FOR OBOPAY!