Forget Your Wallet, Use Your Phone!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how Starbucks had added an app for iPhones and BlackBerry's to be able to pay by phone.  Well, now Google is coming out with a Near Field Communication (NFC) Android phone that will enable you to pay anywhere with any card method of payment.  The new phone will let you pay for items without having to make any contact due to the short-range wireless capabilities in the hardware.
Not only can the new phones give out the sales information, but they can also download information that would help marketers advertise and collect data to know if you bought the item after receiving an advertisement, which would help advertisers on Google be able to know that they are getting their moneys worth of advertising on Google.  The phone also makes it so that you can instantly receive location-specific information.

Another new item that has come up to use your phone with is to have your boarding pass be on your phone, instead of having to carry around and keep up with your paper one.  This is essentially like the way Starbucks uses to have you be able to pay by phone.  On your phone, you would be using a 2-D barcode that the TSA would then authenticate by scanning.  The 2-D barcode contains information such as the passengers name and flight number.  This would help convenience many travelers, so that they no longer have to worry about the paper tickets.  Imagine never having to hold a ticket again!

Although they say that using the pay by phone with Google would be perfectly safe to use, I tend to worry more about hackers and would rather not replace my credit cards with my phone.  However, whenever I travel, I constantly worry about losing my boarding pass, so this is definitely a very convenient option.
In my opinion, if you are going to use your phone to replace your credit cards in the future, you should always use a password to help protect your phone.  Whenever your personal information goes electronic, there is always the worry of hacking and identity theft.  Also, you always have to worry about the potential of losing your phone, so that is the main reason for the password!


Sources:
http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/176_58/google-nfc-payments-1034953-1.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/210861/what_googles_nfc_android_phones_will_mean_for_you.html
http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/paperless_boarding_pass_expansion.shtm

Help Turn Around Myspace

With all the hype surrounding Facebook, has anyone been using Myspace anymore?

Well I sure haven't been and today I finally logged into my account and I was so confused with all of the changes that Myspace has made.  The way they have changed their website now, it is not user-friendly at all.  For example, it took me about 5 minutes to find how to log out of the website.

Although there are many things that users don't like about Myspace, there are ways that Myspace can help increase their number of users.  The main way is for Myspace to help integrate with other social networking websites, such as Facebook.  It appears that Myspace already allows some integration when it comes to setting up a new profile.  According to Myspace.com, "To help save you time setting up your profile (and give you more of the things you love), we can pull your interests (like movies, music, and celebs) and public profile info (name, email, gender, birth date, and photo) from Facebook and automatically add and follow them on your Myspace profile."  So, it appears that Myspace is trying, but it isn't really enough to make it work for them.


Another thing that Myspace could do is to make the site more user-friendly.  Like I said in the beginning, it took me a long time to figure out how to use their "updated" website.  I think that it alienates the previous users that decide to log into their account after a long time of not using it.  The harder the website is to use, the less likely people are to use it!  Below is a chart comparison of Facebook users versus Myspace users in 2008 - 2009.

As you can see from above, there is a significant increase of Facebook users and about the amount of Myspace users has been pretty steady with a slight decline.  The chart clearly shows how much more successful that Facebook is than Myspace.  I believe that all of this comes back to user-friendliness.  It is so easy to use Facebook because everything is laid out nicely, whereas with Myspace you have to search pretty hard to figure out how to do the simplest of things.


These are just two ideas that I came up with for Myspace to do.  Ultimately it comes down to how much advertising that Myspace can do in order to increase usage, but it won't increase unless something is done to make Myspace more user-friendly.  Being able to sync with the social media websites that are available would be able to increase usage because people will see using the website as very convenient.  The more convenient and easy a website is to use, the more users the website will have.  This is very much so the case with social media and the main reason why Facebook and Twitter are so popular.




Sources:
http://www.myspace.com/


http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/myspace-is-in-real-trouble-if-these-page-view-declines-dont-reverse/