“Everybody is worrying about ‘Are my competitors in my industry learning something that I’m not?’” he says. “There’s an element of ‘Can you tell me what other people in financial services are doing with big data because if they’re doing something I should be doing, I’d better find out about it quick.’”

Big data discussions with customers are almost always involve LOB management and the CIO in large enterprises. And they are vertical-industry centric since each vertical has its own set of business problems. As a result, about half of EMC’s consultants come out of a specific vertical industry, know the business issues of that industry, and only talk to business leaders in that vertical, and EMC Global Consulting is organized by vertical industries rather than territories. The other half are technology consultants that are horizontal and join the engagement after the initial business planning is finished.

Also, despite common belief, most of the business issues EMC consults on are not new problems. “So if you’re talking to a telco and the problem is customer churn, that’s been a problem with telcos forever. Or when a bank officer says, ‘I don’t know if the John Smith who has a brokerage account, the John Smith who has a bank account, and the John Smith who has a wealth management account is the same John Smith or three different John Smiths’, that’s been a problem in banking forever.”

Nor is data analysis a new idea for these industries. The telcos, for instance, have been analyzing their customer data almost since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.

What big data does is allow companies to expand the data set being analyzed far beyond just the rows and columns in their structured databases to include unstructured data inside the company and outside in the cloud, he said. “Now you can bring all that information together. It’s a massive amount of information. Then how do I get some insight out of all that information? Now it’s a technology problem. So these engagements merge business and technology problems.”

Mobile Computing

Big data is not the only major area of transformation concerning companies today. Mobile computing is another. “In banking in particular, huge amounts of effort are being spent right now on ‘How do I render information to users in the way they want to consume it, and how do I design a user interface and a way to interact with all that information in the right way.’”

So for instance he said EMC Consulting is working with a large credit card company on designing an e-wallet. The application is not challenging, “but ultimately we have to create the user interface for the iPhone, the iPad, etc., that you and I will ultimately be carrying around. There’s a strong conversation about what the user experience will be like and how we will enable the mobile worker.”

Cloud Computing

Global consulting is also excited about the opportunity in cloud development. This has three components, he said: people, process, and technology. Most companies are past the planning stage now and are implementing, which is a huge change from two years ago, when very few large industry CIOs even thought cloud was real – almost all those he talked to said it was all hype. “When I asked the 70 CIOs at our CIO Connect Event Monday who did not have a private cloud strategy, nobody raised their hand.”

And in the last year, the trend has shifted from private to hybrid cloud. In the annual Wikibon IT Transformation Survey,  just completed, for instance, 37% of respondents indicated that they were building hybrid clouds, a huge jump from a year ago when only about 9% were considering hybrid.

Gartner has just published a report saying that by 2016, 50% of large corporate data, even in regulated industries, will be sitting in a public cloud, he said. “You say that to people today, and they say, ‘No way!’ But I think four years is way too long. I think it’s happening right now.”

Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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The Appstore currently supports testing of more than 5,000 Android apps, and is enabled for more than 16,000 Web apps. If users have a compatible smartphone, they can first try simulating the app on their phone before deciding whether they want to buy it.

“The more we remove friction for customers who want to try apps, the more apps they will try. Those customers are more likely to find apps they are excited to download,” Amazon said in a post on its Appstore developers blog. “In this way, Test Drive helps customers understand the value of premium apps and helps drive downloads of freemium apps.”

Amazon said the test drive feature will be activated on selected compatible smartphones, and will be available for free for users who upgrade their phone with the latest version of Amazon Appstore for Android.

“Amazon brings the Test Drive experience to Amazon.com and Android phones using the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers,” Amazon said. “When customers click the Test Drive button, we launch a copy of the app on EC2. As customers interact with the app, we send those inputs over the phone’s Wi-Fi Internet connection to the app running on Amazon EC2. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to the customer’s computer or phone. All this happens in real time, allowing customers to explore the features of the app as if it were running locally on their mobile device.”

The blog post goes on to note that apps requiring Java Native Interface (JNI), keyboard, multi-touch, microphone, camera, gyroscope, near-field communication or GPS are not part of the test drive feature, but soon will be included in the upgraded test drive releases.

Google doesn’t offer such lucrative services and deals or app testing to the emerging mobile platform; they are just concentrating on the increased availability of Android applications. Users can ask for a refund only once within 15 minutes from downloading the app from Google Play. We can only hope that Google Play soon introduces more consumer-centric features, which they’ll have to do if they want to remain competitive.

Facebook Upgrades App Center for Mobile

Shortly after its IPO filling Facebook announced the latest development in its forthcoming App Center for mobile apps. The company blog post said that developers can now use the Facebook App Center platform to place their apps, and iOS and Android users have streamlined options to install apps via the platform, either through their computer or mobile devices.

“Facebook sends over 160 million people to mobile apps each month through news feed and timeline,” Facebook software engineer Brent Goldman wrote in a blog post this week. “Soon, with the App Center, it will be easier than ever to drive mobile app installs and reach the over 500 million people using Facebook on mobile devices.”

The App Center is available from Facebook’s iOS app, Android app and mobile website m.facebook.com.

The move will allow developers to better integrate mobile apps with the Facebook platform, and will also provide them a stage to incorporate Facebook login on their apps. This will give the Facebook app experience some structure, as users will have the control to download apps, rate apps and get to know some detailed information about the apps before buying or downloading.

This could also help Facebook’s larger mobile strategy, as the social network could add more mobile users, which will help the company to target monetization through a budding ecosystem across mobile devices.

For installing apps from a mobile device, you can follow Goldman’s instructions as posted on the blog:

“All apps built for iOS, Android, and the mobile web have a “Send to Mobile” button on their app detail page. Once people click “Send to Mobile,”” they’re logged into your app and we immediately send a Facebook notification to their mobile device. By clicking the notification, they’ll be redirected to your mobile web app or the respective install page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.”

China Mobile App Store – An alternative to Google Play

Google Play service isn’t yet available in China because of censorship concerns, despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the smartphones sold in China run on Google’s Android OS.

China Mobile Ltd. saw that as an opportunity, opening its Mobile Market store for Android apps in 2009. Since then, the app store has gained 158 million registered users and more than 630 million apps have been downloaded, making it world’s largest carrier-operated app store.

“Without having to compete with the official Google store, China Mobile has an opportunity that operators in other countries don’t have,” said Kent, a London-based analyst. “China Mobile’s relationship with subscribers leaves it well- placed to take advantage.”

China is a huge market for any mobile vendor.  Smartphone shipments are projected to increase 52 percent this year to 137 million units, according to a March estimate from market researcher IDC.

China’s censored web content and online stores selling apps, games and e-books are helping local players to drive and promote their other businesses.

“If a developer makes a very good app, then it will help boost traffic on our network and help our growth that way,” said China Mobile’s Chief Executive Officer Li Yue.

Android’s Google Play Faces Rising Competition from Amazon, Facebook and China is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Vellante spoke with Capellas about why VCE is so important from a practitioner’s perspective. “I want to write one place, and I don’t really want to care about the physical layer beneath it,” Capellas said about infrastructure. “Between both Cisco and EMC, we knew there would be a convergence between where the network starts and compute ends.”

He continued, mentioning the expectations on new mainframes that could be created via bridging within the convergence between computation and communication.

IBM, he says, has a lot of understanding of the software stack for mainframes, and they added services in the cloud layer to that. In a way, IBM validates markets when it enters into them and “a high tide floats all ships.”

VCE wants to take the absolute best-in-class, such as Cisco with networking and fabric, and Intel blades for the compute and approach from both sides. It’s fitting this is being discussed at EMC World 2012 as EMC has seen a great deal of promise in VCE and sought to invest in VCE’s solution systems and coupled in VMware to virtualize the infrastructure.

Much of his discussion is about virtualization and whole-product solution and this maps back to previous interviews about companies who provide not just service but infrastructures. Between Cisco for network, Intel for computation (blades), and EMC for the rapid storage means that they have everything they need for a virtualizable infrastructure fabric.

We’ve seen a few use-cases of this enter the market and it feels a lot like hardware infrastructure to support a private cloud. Recently, the Tyler Independent School District, the largest in Northeast Texas, looked to VCE to help power their educational computer systems and provide a highly virtualized data center, giving students and faculty unfettered and rapid access to applications in their own secure private cloud.

Schools and other segments aren’t technology companies, they’re service sectors who work with people and they rely on their IT departments to do the heavy lifting and provisions. As a result, by choosing VCE the Tyler IDS of Texas allowed some of that weight to be taken off with the server support and left them to look to providing the proper software and applications for the educational environment onto that infrastructure.

Other sectors might also benefit from this sort of drop-in solution as well, believes Capellas and that’s what makes VCE the powerful startup it is right now.

[Edit May 23, 2012: Correction made to reflect Michael Capellas's proper title within VCE.]

VCE Chairman Michael Capellas Cheers On Convergence in theCube at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Facebook’s Need to Take Revenue Generation Mobile

Facebook’s IPO was one of the biggest in history. However, all of the hype wasn’t nearly enough to keep the company’s stock price afloat. Shares have fallen 11 percent below the initial IPO price because most serious investors view Facebook’s lack of a true mobile business strategy as an enormous problem. Over half of the sites nearly 900 million users access its content from a mobile device, but many of the site’s features and advertising, the primary revenue source, do not appear on mobile clients. All apps, including games, are also notably absent; a gap that eliminates the 30 percent revenue cut that Facebook could make from in game purchases by mobile users.

Although the company hasn’t publically articulated (or leaked) anything even remotely resembling a mobile strategy, they have been purchasing mobile-focused companies like I purchase shoes at a Nordstrom’s sale. In the last couple of months, Facebook has snapped up Lightbox, Glancee, TagTile and of course Instagram in addition to Karma. A big company acquiring smaller companies isn’t unusual, but Facebook isn’t known for having a purchasing habit, well, that’s until now.

Predicting the Future

It’s clear that Facebook made a very bad decision to not to create a more sophisticated mobile platform. The company even mentioned the risk in its IPO filing. Facebook wanted to drive users to its web client. However, users had other ideas. The number of mobile users has continued to climb, and they are being met with a handicapped version of the site. It’s obvious that Facebook needs to strengthen its mobile presence, but how is not so obvious.

Mobile users expect a fast and unobtrusive experience. Advertisers are concerned that ads will be smaller and more difficult to see and understand, which could reduce effectiveness. Inserting ads when users start or shut down the application could be viewed as intrusive. Earlier this month, Facebook launched a new app store, App Center, earlier this month, which might become a key part of its mobile strategy.

The company has begun allowing developers to submit applications, and Facebook will get a percentage of the sale price for any app sold via the platform. Facebook could add mobile applications via its app store and integrate its advertising into products sold via the new App Center. The most natural move may be for Facebook to use activity streams for ads. Ads would appear like any other post in a user’s mobile news feed.

No matter what direction Facebook goes, they need to proceed cautiously. Trying to roll out new mobile features or capabilities acquired from their many new purchases hastily will likely alienate users and investors. Everyone involved with Facebook seems a bit frustrated with the company’s current mobile position. However, there is one group of people that are thrilled by Facebook’s anemic mobile presence – the companies it just acquired.

Where Is Facebook’s Mobile Strategy Going? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Appcelerator unveiled the second generation of its popular web-based mobile development environment just a month ago, rolling out new features to automate backend configuration and add more cloud capabilities to the mix. And it’s having no trouble attracting third party developers to the ecosystem, as Geoloqi may prove to be a big asset in the long run.

The API and toolkit that the company provides have a lot to offer to developers. Both have been optimized to take a minimal toll on a device’s battery, and Geoloqi can automatically transit from one data source to another. Some additional features have been incorporated as well: one such addition arrives in the form of templates for customizable geo-triggered events, such as an ad activating whenever a user crosses a pre-defined geofence.

In addition, the technology now runs smoother in the background and for the first time, also features analytics  capabilities.

“Appcelerator customers have been asking for a true, dependable geolocation solution and location-based analytics platform, and we found one in Geoloqi,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “It’s the first geolocation platform that enables individualized geo-triggered events within an application. This powerful toolkit is an essential addition to our app development marketplace, and we’re excited to offer Geoloqi technology to our customers.”

It’s been a very exciting new week overall for location-based services as far as mobile app development goes.  A few days ago Brave River launched Mobeo, a web-based application that realizes a similar concept and also provides an added degree of customization to clients.

Geoloqi API and Dev Kit Launching on Titanium is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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The first update comes from the courtroom,  or more specifically, a lawsuit from Microsoft alleging that Motorola infringed seven of its patents.  Motorola didn’t come out victorious, but the outcome was a pretty good one all in all.

An International Trade Commission (ITC) judge dismissed six of the claims, but did conclude that one particular feature has indeed been ‘inspired’ by Microsoft software. US patent no. 6,370,566 covers a method that ActiveSync leverages to synchronize appointments set by a user across multiple end points, and Motorola has been ordered to modify the corresponding component found on its devices. That is, if it doesn’t want to suffer from suspension on shipping handsets to the US indefinitely.

In addition, the Android OEM will have to pay $0.33 per each Android phone it’s sold; a sizable sum, but at the same time more than reasonable considering that Redmond’s initial demand was in the range of $5 to $15 per device.

“Microsoft sued Motorola in the ITC only after Motorola chose to refuse Microsoft’s efforts to renew a patent license for well over a year,” Microsof said in a statement. “We’re pleased the full Commission agreed that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope that now Motorola will be willing to join the vast majority of Android device makers selling phones in the US by taking a license to our patents.”

The same day, the ruling came through China finally giving Google the green light to close the acquisition of the Motorola Mobility. The agreement is that in exchange, the search giant guaranteed that Android will remain open source for the next five years.

Android is Too Slippery for Microsoft, Must Remain Open for China is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Worried about open-source longevity? 

Android was built as an “open-sourced platform and it will stay that way,” Page promised, but with the news of the merger competitors were potentially going to be locked out of the operating system, or forced to pay licensing fees for its usage, driving up the cost of the phone and potentially turning away customers.  China’s approval seems to be a mechanism to prevent Motorola from gaining an advantage which might see its mobile devices work better with the OS than rival manufacturers, and the five year stipulation seems to address any ongoing concerns in this area.

There are some areas of worry, such as a fragmentation of Android on non-Motorola products forcing manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung, and LG to find ways to “differentiate their products from Motorola’s more Google-centric hardware.”  Motorola could look more like Apple’s iPhone with Google products such as YouTube, Google+ and Google Drive pushing subscribers to use.  The acquisition now completes Google’s foray into the mobile device field, in addition to Android, they now hold the device.  This complete control over their market share is setting Google up for direct competition with Apple, the only other mobile OS that is fully integrated with the device.

The new hardware model 

Google is planning to alter its model by focusing on direct sales and expanded partnerships and the Wall Street Journal reports on this new tact.  Google is planning to work with five manufacturers to create “Nexus,” an array of devices such as smartphones and tablets.  These then will be sold directly to the customer although at a higher initial cost in the short term; it gives Google more power over its devices, allows them to be available for sale quicker and there is no need for carriers to preload their own apps.  By skipping the carriers completely Google is giving customers control over the cell phone companies which have the ability to block some programs, such as Verizon’s refusal to allow Google Wall onto the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.  Up until this point, it has been Google’s model to work with one manufacturer at a time, notable the Samsung Nexus.

Jay Greene of CNET believes Google’s move to purchase Motorola, while lucrative for the company, is really so the company can get control of Motorola’s patent portfolio.  This is reiterated by Allen Lo, counsel at Google, who said, “We probably would not have bought Motorola if we did not have the situation.”

Google, a company which historically does not file patent lawsuits, with their new war chest of patents will have a better ability to counter and suits brought upon it by competitors, allowing them to file countersuit which typically ends in a resolution of the problem well before a judge ever is involved.  It is likely that having control of the patents though, will help developers create a viable iPad competitor without risk of patent infringement suits from Apple, who regularly files such actions against companies it deems to be adversaries.  While Google’s purchase of Motorola certainly sent shock-waves across the industry, the controls placed by China on the approval of the sale should alleviate fears by other mobile device manufacturers of receiving substandard editions of the Android OS or locking them out of Android all together.

Google/Motorola Merger Sends Shockwaves Across Mobile Market is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Music Unlimited is similar to Spotify and Rdio which allows users to create playlists, stream songs and albums, and customize channels to the taste of the user, personalizing the listening experience.  Music Unlimited previously was only available through Android, Walkman PMP, Sony Blue-ray players, Sony branded TVs and the PS Vita.  By entering the iPhone market the experience is now open to millions more, and with two plans to choose from, a $3.99 basic plan or a $9.99 premium plan, users have greater control over their devices.

There are some drawbacks to the cheaper, basic plan, but there are no limits to the number of times a user can skip a track and the app is ad free, in stark contrast to the free version of Pandora.  The premium plan offers music on demand, which also allows users to save tracks for listening when not connected to the internet.

Music Unlimited is not the only music cloud service in operation; Samsung recently acquired mSpot which has similarities to Google Music and the Amazon Cloud Player, as well as Pandora which offers smart radio streaming.  Samsung phones currently employ the Google Play Store, so it has yet to be seen how mSpot would compete with that, except that the 5GB of free cloud space seamlessly intertwines access from device to tablet, to the internet and Google TV.

Spotify is also available on a wide range of products: PC, Mac, cell phones and home audio systems bringing the music to wherever you may be.  Then there’s Kazaa, created by the founders of Skype, which began as a peer-to-peer file sharing application and has now evolved into Rdio, which is an ad-free, on-demand music program that offers three different pricing schemes starting as low as $4.99 a month.  Rdio is different than other music cloud services because it is based upon a subscription service, as Drew Larner, Rdio’s CEO says in regards to ads, “It’s a very disruptive [music] experience to have to listen to an ad all of a sudden.  We wanted to keep the experience clean,” and the company feels that they are offering something enticing enough that people would subscribe to it.

The music cloud is quickly changing the way that listeners enjoy their radio experience.  Music Unlimited is hoping that by entering the iPhone app store they are able to increase their number of listeners, while players such as Rdio are relying on a subscription based model to entice listeners to their service.  Google Music, mSpot, and the Amazon Cloud are betting on gaining customers through their individual models of cloud players which range from limited free streaming to pay for content.  The unprecedented multitude of choices available allows the music market to evolve and develop to the desires of the listener instead of at the whims of the music industry while has evolved from records to cassette tapes to compact disks and now is travelling into the digital age of an on-demand musical experience.

Sony Heads to iPhone with Latest Music Cloud Move is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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After getting $100 million in investment funds from Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, the new kid on the social media block got a valuation 50 percent bigger than that of Instagram when Facebook brought it for $1 billion.

So what does the future hold for Pinterest that would justify a $1 billion valuation for the cloud-based vision board?  Pinterest still has a ways to go before it becomes a true platform player for social commerce, marketing and user recommendations.  Here are some areas in which Pinterest will need to develop its business:

Advertising in pictures

Pinterest is the third most popular social media site behind Facebook and Twitter, letting you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the Web. The site also includes built-in ways to incorporate mutual respect, authenticity and properly crediting your sources.

The social sharing site shows tremendous growth in its user base. Over 80 percent of pins are actually re-pins of other people’s stuff, according to findings from RJMetrics.

“Pinterest demonstrates some of the strongest user engagement, retention and virality metrics I have ever seen in an online business,” wrote Robert Moore of RJMetrics. “The company has found tremendous success among its core demographic, and the potential reach of its appeal will be tested in the coming months as attention from broader audiences continues to increase.”

Pinterest can use the existing social platform as an advertising marketing tool for businesses selling easily photographed products and services. The company can look at developing their own tools to render itself a relevant business model with its current platform and projected growth.

To do this, Pinterest can build up an e-commerce platform overlapping e-commerce and social networks where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining.

Charging Advertisers

Several brands are beginning to make Pinterest pages, pinning their own products to the site. Pinterest could potentially sponsored pins in the stream that are paid for by advertisers, similar to the model Twitter’s used to build out advertising on its microblog. Pinterest can also work with advertisers to create customized Pinterest-connected campaigns and pages.

Mobile App

Pinterest has yet to explore the mobile space, lacking a mobile app on any major platform and limited mobile-specific options for the mobile web (like pinning). Pinterest could potentially create a mobile marketplace by developing mobile apps where users/advertisers, instead of pinning products on the site, could upload product photos, price, description, and price etc. on their mobile devices itself.

The mobile marketplace could be modified further into a monetization platform where users can buy the pins and seller would be obligated to ship the product.

The biggest benefit of mobile integration is the added context of location to uploaded pins.  Pinterest is likely going to develop some recommendation tools around its site activity, and as retailers and marketers become more interested in user-generated pins, promotions for local venues can leverage Pinterest as a mobile outlet as well.

Pinterest API

Pinterest has the potential to become a notable marketing tool, but for that, the company needs an interface to interact with social and content feeds – an API could accomplish that requirement.

The API could create an environment where retailers can better integrate their offerings for two-way collaboration and sharing with their customers.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann hinted in recent past that the company will acknowledge an API in the near future (although the page was listed for only a short time on Pinterest’s site).  In the post Silbermann said the Pinterest profiles will be very different to those of Facebook and other social networks, and will show a snapshot of what you’re really about. Through an API, Pintrest-related app development would further spur the rapid growth of the site, which already reached 11.7 million unique users in January.

Can Pinterest Build a Business Model to Justify $1 Billion Valuation? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Before you sign up or start using mobile wallets, better check out first what these service providers get from their consumers.

As with any service, you need to register or sign up to use a mobile wallet program.  And signing up entails providing your name, mailing address, email address, age/age range, mobile telephone number and billing address associated with that number.  They’ll also need your bank account number or credit card number, government-issued identification number such as social security number or taxpayer identification number for US residents, login and user password etc.  Though information acquired from users vary from one service provider to another, you can expect that you’d be giving out your basic information when you sign up for their service.

But there’s some other surprising instances where additional data is being acquired by mobile wallet programs, and we’ve uncovered a few:

Taking extra data

Interestingly, some mobile payment services may be taking more consumer data than necessary.  The Canadian banking and credit union industry published the Mobile Payments Reference Model, which serves as a guideline to the limitations and extent of acquiring data, as well as the availability of these data.  The guideline states that “each ecosystem participant should only have access to the minimum information required to perform its primary role. The default for ecosystem participants should be to protect end user and merchant data. Access to and usage of data must be disclosed to the end user and the end user’s permission explicitly granted.”

Mobile wallet providers in the US should take a page from Canada.  Maybe then more people would be interested in using the service, worrying less about the data being acquired by these service providers.

Cookies, cookies, cookies!

But did you know that aside from your personal information, mobile wallets also acquire non-personal information through cookies to get a user’s browser type, IP Address, the URL of the previous website you visited?  Yep, mobile wallets track your internet movement.  But in their defense, they say they do that so they can push promos, discount coupons, notifications or updates to their subscribers.  Mobile wallets also claim that they use information acquired to improve their service and towards the development of new technologies.

Still, it’s a bit freaky to think that there are other people who knows what we do in our daily lives.  Take Google for example.  They discovered how important consumers’ data is   to their end goal, so the search engine giant began collecting things long before privacy and security became an issue.  Because of this, they’ve been able to create Google Wallet, which combines retail payments, coupons, offers and loyalty cards in a single service using NFC technology.

Your data shared with third parties

Another thing you need to know is that information acquired from users is shared with third party service providers, such as merchants or network providers, in order for a transaction to be processed.  These third parties use the information to advertise their products and services – luring in shoppers to purchase more things using mobile wallet programs.

But do you know that there’s a major difference between using your credit cards the traditional way and using mobile wallets that bill your carrier network monthly?  If your credit card or credit card number gets stolen and the thief decides to go on a shopping spree, by law, the consumer is only liable for $50.  But if a mobile wallet from network carriers are used by thieves, the consumer is not protected by the same law regarding fraud.  So in terms of customer protection, credit cards is still better than using mobile wallets.

Consumers embrace technology

.

Despite the recent issues that have popped up around mobile wallet services, like Google Wallet PIN numbers discovered to be quite vulnerable, and even with rising consumer knowledge around mobile payments, there’s an increase in mobile shopping and personal finance across the board.

JiWire’s recent Mobile Audience Insights Report shows that more shoppers are interested in using their mobile phones for shopping and organizing their bank accounts and everyday expenses.  The report stated that 37% of on-the-go consumers have used a mobile wallet within the past three months and 8% of the 63% who haven’t tried the service stated that they were interested in using mobile wallets when shopping.

“This rapid adoption of mobile wallets reinforces that the market is ripe for this sort of technological advance. Consumers seem to be both comfortable and curious about using their mobile phones to purchase,” said Dee Dee Paeseler, director of strategic marketing at JiWire. “This trend is likely to help both brands and retailers close the loop on mobile transactions, ultimately taking them to the next level.”

Why use mobile wallets?

Still you wonder, “Why use mobile wallets when you can pay for things in cash or with your credit or debit card?”  The answer is quite simple: mobile wallets simplify things.
Mobile wallets track your expenses so you won’t constantly ask yourself “Where the hell did my money go?”  And once you’ve tied your accounts in your mobile wallet, managing or transferring money from one account to another is a breeze.  Plus, mobile wallets lets you  know how much credit you have left and quickly inform you which of your cards will give you the best rewards for certain merchants, offering insight to your own data so you can make better decisions.

Retailers want in on the game

If you thought consumers are the only ones who get screwed for messed up mobile wallet services, then you are wrong.  Retailers can get duped by shoppers, causing some to seek out more electronic payment services to gain more consumer data they can use for promotions and protection.  Some retailers even state that they want to create their own mobile wallet service so they can be protected, as most services are aimed at protecting consumers and not vendors.

3 Surprising Ways Mobile Wallets Use Your Data is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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