Cambio en el mercado argentino de tablets

Cambia el panorama para el mercado de tabletas local

La Organización Mundial de Aduanas modificó la nomenclatura con la que identifican las tabletas para su importación, y las equipara con las notebooks; esto podría limitar su entrada al país; la apuesta nacional

Hace unos días, la Organización Mundial de Aduanas cambió en Bruselas el número que identifica a tabletas como el iPad o la Galaxy Tab para su importación; ahora la posición es la 84.71.30, compartida por las computadoras portátiles. Este cambio se hace a nivel mundial, como parte de algo llamado Sistema Armonizado, y en el que participa la Argentina.

Esto en sí no implicaría cambio alguno para los usuarios argentinos, pero las notebooks entran, en nuestro país, dentro de los dispositivos que precisan Licencias No Automáticas para entrar al país .

Hasta ahora la importación de tabletas no tenía mayores trabas para su venta, lo que se tradujo en una variada oferta local ; la necesidad de obtener una Licencia No Automática (LNA) podría modificar esto. Como sucedió con las notebooks (que también entran dentro del grupo de los dispositivos que requieren LNA) podría llegar a ser necesario tener presencia en Tierra del Fuego para poder vender equipos en el país sin inconvenientes ( como hizo HP a partir del año pasado ).

El mercado local en el año último, según la consultora Carrier. 

El Gobierno todavía no se expidió al respecto, pero la incertidumbre llegó a importadores como Gasei (que vende en el país la marca Coby), que en declaraciones al sitio especializado RedUsers afirmó: "todavía no sabemos qué tablets estarán comprendidas dentro de las restricciones, así que deberemos ver cuáles podremos seguir importando".

Coby es la segunda marca nacional detrás de Apple, según datos de la consultora Carrier y Asociados , que estimaba para 2011 un mercado de 225.000 equipos.

El Gobierno podría elegir apoyar la presencia en Tierra del Fuego: después de todo ya hay dos empresas que están produciendo equipos allí. Se trata de dos empresas, Positivo BGH y Ken Brown, que en agosto último presentaron sendas tabletas.

 

Así es la tableta de Positivo BGH. 

Positivo BGH anunció entonces una tableta con Android 4, procesador a 1 GHz, pantalla de 7 pulgadas, salida HDMI, 16 GB de almacenamiento y aplicaciones creadas en nuestro país. El precio es de 1699 pesos.

 

El modelo Synkom de Ken Brown. 

En el caso de Ken Brown, el equipo es la Synkom, anunciada en agosto último; corre Android 4, tiene una pantalla táctil de 7 pulgadas, un procesador Telechip a 1,2 GHz, 512 MB de RAM, 4 GB internos mas ranudar microSD, Wi-Fi, GPS, salida HDMI y sintonizador de TV digital (una característica que está siendo promovida por el Gobierno). Según la firma, su precio local es de 1599 pesos..

La Nación

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50 cosas que matan la creatividad

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Los emprendimientos fallan en un 75%

The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail

By DEBORAH GAGE

It looks so easy from the outside. An entrepreneur with a hot technology and venture-capital funding becomes a billionaire in his 20s.

But now there is evidence that venture-backed start-ups fail at far higher numbers than the rate the industry usually cites.

About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don't return investors' capital, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

Coming Sept. 27

The Wall Street Journal reveals its third annual ranking of the top 50 start-ups in the U.S. backed by venture capitalists.

Compare that with the figures that venture capitalists toss around. The common rule of thumb is that of 10 start-ups, only three or four fail completely. Another three or four return the original investment, and one or two produce substantial returns. The National Venture Capital Association estimates that 25% to 30% of venture-backed businesses fail.

Mr. Ghosh chalks up the discrepancy in part to a dearth of in-depth research into failures. "We're just getting more light on the entrepreneurial process," he says.

His findings are based on data from more than 2,000 companies that received venture funding, generally at least $1 million, from 2004 through 2010. He also combed the portfolios of VC firms and talked to people at start-ups, he says. The results were similar when he examined data for companies funded from 2000 to 2010, he says.

Venture capitalists "bury their dead very quietly," Mr. Ghosh says. "They emphasize the successes but they don't talk about the failures at all."

There are also different definitions of failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghosh's research.

Failure often is harder on entrepreneurs who lose money that they've borrowed on credit cards or from friends and relatives than it is on those who raised venture capital.

"When you've bootstrapped a business where you're not drawing a salary and depleting whatever savings you have, that's one of the very difficult things to do," says Toby Stuart, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Venture capitalists make high-risk investments and expect some of them to fail, and entrepreneurs who raise venture capital often draw salaries, he says.

Consider Daniel Dreymann, a founder of Goodmail Systems Inc., a service for minimizing spam. Mr. Dreymann moved his family from Israel in 2004 after co-founding Goodmail in Mountain View, Calif., the previous year. The company raised $45 million in venture capital from firms including DCM, Emergence Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, and built partnerships with AOL Inc., ComcastCorp., and Verizon Communications Inc. At its peak, in 2010, Goodmail had roughly 40 employees.

But the company began to struggle after its relationship with Yahoo Inc. fell apart early that year, Mr. Dreymann says. A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.

In early 2011 an acquisition by a Fortune 500 company fell apart. Soon after, Mr. Dreymann turned over his Goodmail keys to a corporate liquidator.

All Goodmail investors incurred "substantial losses," Mr. Dreymann says. He helped the liquidator return whatever he could to Goodmail's investors, he says. "Those people believed in me and supported me."

Enlarge Image

Alison Yin for the Wall Street J

Daniel Dreymann's antispam service Goodmail failed, despite getting $45 million in venture capital.

How well a failed entrepreneur has managed his company, and how well he worked with his previous investors, makes a difference in his ability to persuade U.S. venture capitalists to back his future start-ups, says Charles Holloway, director of Stanford University's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners has stuck with Mr. Dreymann. The 20-year venture capitalist is an "angel" investor in Mr. Dreymann's new start-up, Mowingo Inc., which makes a mobile app that rewards shoppers for creating a personal shopping mall and following their favorite stores.

"People are embarrassed to talk about their failures, but the truth is that if you don't have a lot of failures, then you're just not doing it right, because that means that you're not investing in risky ventures," Mr. Cowan says. "I believe failure is an option for entrepreneurs and if you don't believe that, then you can bang your head against the wall trying to make it work."

Overall, nonventure-backed companies fail more often than venture-backed companies in the first four years of existence, typically because they don't have the capital to keep going if the business model doesn't work, Harvard's Mr. Ghosh says. Venture-backed companies tend to fail following their fourth years—after investors stop injecting more capital, he says.

Of all companies, about 60% of start-ups survive to age three and roughly 35% survive to age 10, according to separate studies by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes U.S. entrepreneurship. Both studies counted only incorporated companies with employees. And companies that didn't survive might have closed their doors for reasons other than failure, for example, getting acquired or the founders moving on to new projects. Languishing businesses were counted as survivors.

Of the 6,613 U.S.-based companies initially funded by venture capital between 2006 and 2011, 84% now are closely held and operating independently, 11% were acquired or made initial public offerings of stock and 4% went out of business, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Less than 1% are currently in IPO registration.

—Vanessa O'Connell contributed to this article.
Wall Street Journal

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Demanda: Análisis de embudo

Introduction to Analytics: Funnel Analysis

Posted June 10th, 2009

We’ve encountered quite a few people lately who are interested in Mixpanel  and metrics but don’t know much about the details. It seems like an introductory course could be really helpful.

Today I’d like to introduce an idea that has been around for a while, but you might not have heard of called Funnel Analysis.

 

What is Funnel Analysis?

A funnel is a well-defined flow on your website – the checkout process, registration, lead generation – anything where users take a series of actions before reaching some sort of goal.

So, the very first thing to do is find where these funnels occur.  One example would be splash page -> demo -> sign up. This obviously varies depending on your business, but almost everyone can benefit from figuring out their funnels and how users flow through them.

To analyze this funnel, you have to find a few different things:

• Current conversion rates (do you know this?)
• Current dropoff rates

The conversion rate is pretty obvious – what percentage of users who hit the registration page are registering? – but the dropoff rates are less so.

At every stage in the funnel, you lose some people. Generally a lot of people. Even if your front page is entirely focused on getting people to try your demo or sign up, you will likely lose at least half of your visitors before they make it to the next step. You will also lose people who make it to the download page or registration page, who will just decide not to continue. It’s important to be able to figure out where you stand before you do any tweaking.

How it will help you

If you’ve made it this far, I’m sure you see the possibilities – by constantly measuring this funnel, you can see how the changes you make affect user behavior.

You can also find bottlenecks in the process.  You might find that there’s one page with a 90% dropoff rate that is killing conversions.  When you find that out, you can start testing variations of the page and watching your dropoff rate and conversions.

Fixing the dropoff

The first thing to do is approach the problem from the point of view of a user. Move through your funnel and think about the bottlenecks objectively.  If you can identify things that annoy you or turn you off, you have a good chance of increasing your retention.

Some possible issues to consider:

• Do you require registration to continue?
• Is there an obvious way to continue?
• Is there something wrong with the design on that page?

Another possibility is that you aren’t focusing enough on what you want your users to do next.  You might want them to continue to the purchase page, but they could get distracted by ads, menu links, etc. It’s important to remove distractions at the critical points in your funnel, and to make the desired action the easiest to take.

Conclusion

Figuring out your funnels is one of the most important things you can do to increase your quantitative understanding of your website. It’s critical to get the starting measurements – the dropoff and conversion rates – before you change anything.  That’s the only way you can know the effect of the changes you make.

By constantly tweaking and measuring, you should be able to really improve your number of conversions.

We want your input!

Mixpanel

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Hardware: Apple vs Nintendo

The Verbal Elegance Of Apple And Nintendo

TADHG KELLY

Editor’s Note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of the leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Companies often shout in the games industry. They yell with videos, music, press events with booth babes and the monster that is E3. They hustle and go balls-to-the-wall for attention. They make big noise in order to get you to notice what they’re up to and write about it. Everyone, that is, except the two companies that have probably been most crucial to the last few years of the industry: Apple and Nintendo.

Just this week, both Apple and Nintendo made big news with new product launches. For Apple, it was the usual Tim-then-Phil-then-Scott-then-Tim show. It was quiet stage presence — “just look at how incredible this is” — some very mild jabs at the competition, and the whole “best work of their lives” routine. They could, at this point, phone that performance in.

Meanwhile Nintendo out-dorked its usual dorky self with its Wii U announcements on Nintendo Direct, showing (in the EU edition) Satoru Iwata teleporting into the most stilted initial presentation anyone has ever seen in the history of history. This was followed by Satoru Shibata sitting at his desk explaining all the things Nintendo is about to launch with the flair of a high school counsellor. You could not get more lo-fi.

Both companies have the air of the about-to-be-written-off for many journalists. With all the shiny new toys that their competitors seem to be showing off, bloggers seem to feel that neither can go on indefinitely. With Lumia 920′s a-go-go and who knows what console magic from Microsoft and Sony on the horizon, the arguments against both Apple and Nintendo are about conservatism, lack of muscle and so forth. All of which is just inside baseball.

Ultimately it amounts to nothing. The iPhone 5 is already sold out, and Nintendo Wii Us are very suddenly  hot, with the old Mario and Zelda alongside the exciting new Bayonetta 2. With the former we’ve gone from leaks-akimbo and dismissals on Monday to slack-jawed amazement at figures by Friday. And for the latter, a sudden jolt of anticipatory frenzy. Despite supposedly being out of touch, Apple and Nintendo have likely won all over again while their competitors are forced to yell and play second fiddle.

But why?

While most of their competitors are in the business of loudly selling content and (some) innovation, Apple and Nintendo are in the business of selling verbs.

Verbs

The language of game design is confusing because it is a battleground. A lot of people who write about games (me included) find themselves defining new words that don’t have wide acceptance, or using old words in ways that don’t 100% agree with everyone else. Even a term as seemingly innocuous as “game mechanic” is fraught with peril. You often have to provide glossaries of what you mean (for reference: here’s mine) to get any useful discussion off the ground.

So I can only tell you what I mean by “verb”: A verb is a physical thing that you do when interacting. It’s what you do on this side of the glass to effect change in a digital world. Clicking, swiping, pressing, twisting, flipping, pinching, speaking, tilting, typing, holding and shaking are all examples of verbs. However, punching, kicking, accelerating, dodging, leaping, commanding, running, sorting, cutting, pasting, deleting, slotting and so on inside the screen are not verbs. They are “actions.”

You use one or more verbs to create an action. So pressing a button is a verb and causing your avatar to kick is its action. Control-clicking on your Starcraft 2 marines and then clicking on a position in a map is a combination of verbs that form one action: You command a unit to go over there and shoot the enemy.

There are many kinds of actions, but not many verbs. Verb invention is really hard to do and requires a strong aptitude for elegance, very deep thinking about people physics and and an eye for the simple machine with a thousand uses. It also often requires the development of software that works with those ideas to show them at their best. However the companies that invent — or steal, reinvent, and popularise — those verbs attract the most ardent fans. And everybody else pretty much copies them.

That’s the position that both Apple and Nintendo have occupied twice. It was Apple who invented the popular form of the mouse, the graphical user interface, the laptop form factor that worked, the iPod scroll wheel and the touch-screen verbs. Meanwhile it was Nintendo who invented the digital joypad, the analog stick, the stylus touch-screen game controller and the gestural controller. Other companies have basically rushed to fill in the categories that Apple and Nintendo have defined.

In the last few years especially, a flurry of verbal inventions has helped bring Apple and Nintendo to the fore, and consequently to win. Apple entered into the phone market very late, but swept aside the competition in an almost derisory fashion. Nintendo brought the Wii, a console that many assumed would fail due to a lack of graphical power, and then went on to dwarf its competitors.

Both leverage online live blogs and video to send their message. So do their competitors. Both also have a fan base and marketing story that their competitors would kill to have. Both are in the position of true greatness, because they define their respective markets, and both will continue to win for the near and medium future.

And yet…

The End of Verbal Discovery?

In the mid-90s both Apple and Nintendo had hit the skids before launching incredible comebacks. They had always had loyal followers, but companies who were better at partnerships, distribution, and playing well with others were in the lead. Sony and Microsoft were good at collaboration in a way that both Apple and Nintendo were not, and this horizontal approach paid off.

Nowadays everyone is striving to be vertical because Apple and Nintendo show that it works. Everyone wants their big play for the living room, has their tablet in the works, their phone, their TV and their online service. A number of giant vertical ecosystems (Sony, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook as well as Apple and Nintendo) are jostling for position, but none can ever achieve dominance because of a lack of interoperability. The wind is with Apple and Nintendo (and perhaps Facebook, but for other reasons) because they keep redefining the verbal landscape. But what happens when the verbs run out?

Many of us are coming to the conclusion that the iPhone may well be an apex product with nowhere left to go, and iPads likewise. As for Nintendo, the Wii U is in many ways bold, but its GamePad controller could also be read as everything-but-the-kitchen-sink. A sort of final solution for video game play.

If we end up back in the kind of fairly stable space that characterised the 90s, won’t this flip the switch back toward companies who know how to share? Won’t horizontal partnerships come back into vogue (as Nokia and Microsoft are doing), and won’t software and services start to matter more? In these areas Apple has learned some lessons (the App Store), but is also very weak in other areas (iCloud). Meanwhile Nintendo is still very difficult to really want to work with, and perhaps over-protective of its platforms.

We’ve had a great decade of invention in the verbal space and can now interact with our gaming devices in ways previously thought to be pure science fiction. But I wonder whether the next decade of games is really going to be about who can play well with others rather than tell everyone else how it’s going to be.

TechCrunch

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Start-Up: El sendero para iniciar un emprendimiento

The Path To Starting A Startup

SCOTT WEISS

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitzand the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He blogs athttp://scott.a16z.com, and you can follow him on Twitter@W_ScottWeiss.

People often ask me what the best path to becoming a successful entrepreneur is: “Should I go try and start a company now? Or go to grad school? How about working at a large tech company for a few years?”

I spent five years at a large technology company, two years at business school, and then two years in consulting before I went to a startup. Even with that experience, I still believe I was too green to jump right in and start a company. It’s not that those experiences weren’t valuable — it’s just that the most valuable lessons for successfully running a startup come from actually working at a well-run startup. I’d go even further to assert that the startup should be based in Silicon Valley and backed by venture capital.

You could just start a company without any startup experience, sure, but you will have a significantly higher chance of success if you already know how to navigate a startup’s unique challenges, including: raising money, changing product direction, and cultivating a culture. These are hard things to learn on the job, and you may have only one shot at the crucial “friends and family” round to get you started.

Why a Silicon Valley, VC-backed startup? If you just graduated from college, you probably haven’t developed the experience or instincts to judge whether a startup has a great team, a differentiated product or is going after a large enough market. While certainly not perfect, the VCs have done a lot of this important vetting for you, and their decision to invest can be considered a boost of credibility and resources for the company. Also, within each technology region, there is a dense network of specialized talent, financiers, and service organizations (e.g. legal, PR, recruiting) that form a startup ecosystem. Silicon Valley is by far the largest ecosystem and therefore holds the most potential for job opportunities and the strongest network.

What about grad school or establishing a foundation at a large company? It comes down to relevance. The responsibilities, roles, contacts, context, culture, communications, risks, and instincts you need to develop to eventually run a successful startup are best found at a startup.

If you’re trying to prepare yourself for entrepreneurship — the same two to four years at a startup isn’t even comparable to the equivalent time spent in school or a large company. There are probably five to ten times more lessons and relevance at the startup.

The next step involves finding the right startup to join. As it turns out, I moved out to Palo Alto from Boston in 1996 with virtually no connections or contacts and more than $100,000 in school loans from business school. A few things I did are surprisingly still relevant today:

Prepare for a long haul. You’ll need to move out here without a job while most of your friends have jobs locked up well before graduation. If you don’t have enough savings, you may need to get a part-time job while you job hunt. If this step makes you nervous at all, you may want to reconsider the entrepreneurial job choice.

Research. Start by downloading the last four venture capital surveys from the San Jose Mercury News website. These PDFs summarize the last year of companies that have been funded by VCs. Included are the company name, amount raised, VC involved and headquarters city. This is a great list to start with because all of these companies have recently raised capital and are therefore likely in hiring mode. Build a spreadsheet, start researching and then rank these companies by your level of interest. Go to the VC websites, check all the online publications (e.g. TechCrunch, AllThingsD, etc.), and look up the company name URLs. While you are on the VC websites, you should look through all of the companies on their “portfolio” tab to see if any should be added to your list.

Focus. There are many different types of startups and many different jobs within a startup. If you can code, there will be obvious roles within engineering, sales engineering or quality assurance. If coding isn’t for you, you’ll need to figure out the best entry-level role to position yourself. Perhaps in customer care, product management, finance, inside sales, or business development. It will also help to choose between the type of startup: enterprise or consumer. The more you begin to focus, the more credible you’ll become as you deep dive into the differences between the roles and the way the different companies go to market. You’ll want to be as knowledgeable as possible before you start networking.

Make a target list. After doing all this research, narrow it down to 20 to 30 target companies and make a market map or web of every possible link to the company — names of the investors, management team, PR firms — every potential connection (I’m thinking similar to an FBI board targeting a mafia family, but not quite that creepy). Your best chance of getting an interview is if you have a “warm” referral into the company (i.e. someone you’ve met who can refer you to someone inside the company they already know). That’s the goal. Continue to research the companies, the roles, the competitors, and the market so that you start sounding like you know what you’re talking about.

Start networking. I pulled out the Harvard Business School alumni directory, the University of Florida alumni directory, and the McKinsey alumni directory. I sent emails to guys 15 years older than me with “Hey Steve, I’m a fellow Florida grad, blah, blah, blah, can we have coffee?” I went to every meet-up that had the word “Stanford” in it. Before I knew it, one coffee led to another and after awhile I started asking smarter questions and got stronger referrals.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of preparation and persistence throughout the process. It took me four hard months of preparation, research, focus, list-making and networking until August, 1996, when I received a warm referral into a little, 12-person startup named Hotmail. It ended up being the best job experience of my life and I was completely hooked.

TechCrunch

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Financiamiento: Crowdfunding II

Lo que no sabés de Internet: ¿qué es el "crowdfunding"?

Es un tipo de financiamiento colectivo. En la web existen muchos sitios que lo promueven.

ECONOMÍA COLECTIVA. Es lo que plantea esta nueva tendencia de Internet.

Cualquier emprendedor puede convertir un proyecto en realidad gracias al "crowdfunding", mediante el uso de Internet. Se trata de una tendencia novedosa que permite el financiamiento colectivo entre usuarios de la web.

A través de diferentes páginas, como kickstarter o indiegogo, una persona puede pedir donaciones para concretar una idea. A cambio les brinda distintos reconocimientos a los que lo asistan. Por ejemplo, si necesita fondos para realizar una película, en retribución puede ofrecer destacar a las personas que lo ayudaron en los créditos del film.

Un "crowdfunding" exitoso fue el del museo Tesla. Un grupo de de personas decidió impulsar este financiamiento para rescatar el laboratorio del científico norteamericano Nicola Tesla, que iba a ser demolido. La idea fue muy bien recibida en la web y el emprendimiento se pudo concretar.

Otro proyecto exitoso que se realizó con esta modalidad fue el de la empresa de videojuegos Double Fine, que pudo recaudar más de 3 millones de dólares, donados por cientos de "gamers", para crear un nuevo juego.

TN

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Aplicaciones: ViewRanger para montañistas

ViewRanger... The GPS App for adventure

ViewRanger on your phone makes any outdoor activity better. Because whether you’re blazing your own trail or following a planned route, you’ll always know your GPS mapped location and can even share it with your friends using BuddyBeacon.

Product Description

What is ViewRanger?

ViewRanger is the mobile app that will turn your smartphone or tablet into a powerful Outdoors GPS navigator, at a fraction of the cost of buying a dedicated GPS device. Plan, Plot, Navigate, Track, Locate, Record, be Guided, Analyse & Share your outdoor adventures using ViewRanger.

ViewRanger is fully featured and it will work virtually anywhere in the world using Open Source web maps or you can upgrade to detailed topo maps for the USA and a growing number of other countries. Whichever you use, it will keep working even without a mobile signal, as the maps can be stored on the phone - essential for exploring remote places. There's also a free web route planning tool that works seamlessly with the App, so you can plan and share trails using your pc. 

What you need

All you need to use ViewRanger is a compatible mobile phone. It runs on most phones that use either Apple, Android or Symbian operating system (OS), that's a massive range of smartphones. Check if your phone is compatible now.

Página del producto

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Compras sin esfuerzo con Microsoft

Making Purchases with Zero Effort

Inside Microsoft Research

 

Imagine that you walk into a store, select an item to purchase, and approach the cash register. A wireless-proximity transmitter within your smartphone detects your presence, and a facial-recognition program determines your identity. The transaction is recorded onto video, and, as you stroll out, a receipt is emailed to you, along with a link to a video of the purchase.

It’s convenient, it’s secure, and, given the popularity of smartphones, it just could be the future of commerce.

The scenario above is no idle fancy. In Building 99 on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus, it’s currently a reality, part of the Zero-Effort Payments research project, a rethinking of mobile payments by the Mobility and Networking Research group at Microsoft Research Redmond.

The group had created a team, including 11 researchers, investigating ways that mobile-payment security for Windows Phone could be enhanced even further. Zero-Effort Payments (ZEP) is a consequence.

“We thought that mobile payments are an instance of a much more ambitious problem: seamless customer identification—the ability of a store to identify its customers in a seamless manner without relying on any specific or deliberate actions on behalf of the customers,” says Stefan Saroiu, one of the researchers on the project. “We charged ourselves with building an end-to-end system that would provide seamless custom identification using inexpensive, off-the-shelf components.”

And as the researchers devised the technology, they recognized that the project had privacy implications, so they made sure to build in privacy safeguards.

The project uses the concept of seamless customer identification (SCI), which could have implications for a variety of scenarios.

“Let’s start with shopping,” Saroiu says. “With SCI, any store could immediately know the shopping history and personal preferences of a customer registered with their SCI systems.

“As a customer enters the store, the store could dispatch the ‘right’ sales associate, depending on the customer profile. In the absence of a sales associate, the store could try to infer what the customer’s interests are and issue a coupon in the store directly to the customer’s smartphone. The customer could make use of the coupon during the visit before the payment takes place.”

The system also could make returning an item a breeze. A receipt wouldn’t be necessary to gain return credit, because the system would recognize the customer and have evidence of past purchases. And Zero-Effort Payments scenarios include booths at a trade show featuring an SCI system. Upon leaving, participants could receive an automatic summary of the booths they visited.

Such a system is up and running in the coffee stand in the atrium of Building 99, enabling Microsoft Research personnel to pay for coffee and snacks through face recognition, provided by the Face SDK project from Microsoft Research Asia, and wireless proximity.

The payment system works through Microsoft employee badges. Microsoft cafeterias and cafes are equipped with employee-badge readers connected via USB to the payment terminal, the cash register. A ZEP tablet is connected to the USB port of the payment terminal, and the cashier confirms the results of the identified person on the tablet. A camera behind the stand captures video that is processed in real time.

The system was deployed in March during TechFest, Microsoft Research’s annual showcase of new projects and technologies, and generated sufficient word of mouth that Saroiu was invited to present the work during the Society for Foodservice Management Critical Issues Conference in April in New York.

For now, the project will continue to require human validation. In addition, the researchers understood from the start that Zero-Effort Payments could have privacy implications.

“Different people have very different tolerances for the privacy implications of such systems,” Saroiu observes. “Clearly, these systems all aim at providing more convenience and richer experiences in people’s lives. These come with privacy tradeoffs. Some people are happy to make these tradeoffs, whereas others aren’t.”

For that reason, the research team—which also includes Alec Wolman, Bryan Parno, intern Chris Smowton, David Molnar, Jay Lorch, Jitu Padhye, Oliver Foehr, Ronnie Chaiken, Victor Bahl, andWeidong Cui—is making it easy for potential users of Zero-Effort Payments to opt in to participate by devising project-specific privacy principles that adhere to Microsoft’s Privacy by Design approach.

“First,” Saroiu says, “people should not be automatically registered in such systems. Instead, an opt-in policy is required. Second, the identifiable data stored by such a system cannot be abused. Such data should be used only for the original goal of the system, the one described to each participant at registration time. Any change in policy should not happen without notifying the participants and allowing them to permanently erase their data from the system.”

Making purchases with no physical effort at all ... and you thought online shopping was easy!

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Nuevas adiciones en Twitter

Twitter Launches Reporting And Promoted Tweets Self-Service Features

DREW OLANOFF

Twitter is moving the bus forward on monetizing itself and allowing brands to handle all of their advertising on the site. Today, the company announced two new self-service features that companies have been asking for.

Google has advertising nailed when it comes to self-service, and Facebook isn’t far behind. Allowing companies, both big and small, to manage their campaigns without company involvement only helps Twitter stay streamlined.

Here’s what the team had to say:

In March, we announced our self-service advertising solution, giving small businesses an easy way to use Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. Since then, many of our early advertisers are finding success and driving results with Twitter advertising. Today, we’re releasing two new enhancements that our advertisers frequently request: follower growth reporting and manual Promoted Tweet selection.

The first feature is the most obvious one, a graph so you can track your growth over time. This is something that I’d like to have personally, but hey…I’m not Nike. The chart breaks up followers between paid and unpaid, so you can make sure that your dollars are being used wisely.

The second feature revolves around promoted tweets. Up until now, the advertising team had to work directly with a company to choose and set a promoted tweet, now these companies can simply do it themselves. Giving companies the flexibility to just let new tweets become promoted, or set one of the best ones to drive engagement is absolutely clutch.

I personally find promoted tweets annoying, unless they’re super contextual with events that are happening in the moment. That’s not to say it isn’t a powerful advertising play, it’s just something that takes time and thought. It’s not just banner ads and skyscrapers anymore, folks.

[Photo source: Flickr]

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