DigiMo Cracks The Code:...

DigiMo , is a mobile payments platform that actually makes sense to me. When I sat down with CEO Yossi Yarkoni and VP of Marketing Nir Shimony at the Mobile World Congress to hear about their concept, which is piloting in Israel right now, the first thing I thought was “wow, why didn’t somebody think of this before”. It’s a pretty good idea and solves many of the problems that plague mobile, face-to-face payments. It actually works with existing infrastructure and requires no Point Of Sale hardware changes by merchants. Really. No NFC terminals to buy. No new card readers needed. This is a major sticking point for merchant adoption of new mobile payments platforms. How does DigiMo’s patented non-NFC reliant payments method work? First, customers upload their payment credentials and account info to their secure DigiMo account in the cloud. Next, DigiMo issues bank cards to merchants (instead of individual consumers like regular issuers). This special DigiMo card has a specific bin range. Participating merchants receive a DigiMo card and unique barcode/number for each of their Point Of Sale terminals. Finally, at the time of a purchase, a customer uses the DigiMo mobile app to scan the barcode at the cash register. They then authenticate the app with pin or other security credentials which connects to their DigiMo account in the cloud. This info is sent to the cloud and lets DigiMo know at which unique cash register the transaction is taking place. The merchant closes the transaction loop by swiping the DigiMo card into the existing POS reader which rides the rest of the transaction on the regular card network and authenticates at DigiMo’s server and debits the customer’s account. Boom. You’re done! So that is the description of their face-to-face mobile payments solution but they also have scenarios for remote commerce, peer-to-peer money transfer and coupon/offers. These are all described in the video below. They are currently trying to raise venture capital to bring their pilot to the U.S.A. I will be curious to see if this is a payments scenario that consumers could latch onto. My guess is that with digital natives this kind of thing will be all the rage.

Analytics Startup Mixpa...

Mixpanel , the analytics startup backed by Sequoia Capital, hasn’t yet succeeded in its goal of unseating established analytics services like Omniture — but momentum is building. Let’s start with the biggest number that co-founder Suhail Doshi shared with me this week. He says the company is now tracking 4 billion actions every month. Back in July 2010, that number was “only” 1 billion . He also says there are more than 2,500 organizations who are sending Mixpanel data every month (I guess that’s Mixpanel equivalent of an “active user”). And that customer base was built through word-of-mouth because, Doshi says, “We basically do almost no marketing” the startup’s total monthly marketing spend is between $3,000 and $5,000. Mixpanel charges customers based on the number of actions it’s tracking, so with billions of actions tracked, it’s not too surprising that the business model seems to be working as well. Doshi says revenue has quadrupled since nine months ago, that Mixpanel now on a run rate for several million dollars of revenue a year, and that the company is cash-flow positive. Even though Mixpanel launched in 2009, Doshi attributes much of the recent success to the launch of a new data store last summer. As a result, he says Mixpanel is now able to examine data at a much more specific and customizable level, on multi-dimensions rather than just one. For example, rather than just telling a customer how many visitors came to their site from Twitter, Mixpanel can show how many visitors came in from Twitter, broken down by country, and limited to those were between the ages of 10 and 13. Doshi also says that mobile analytics have been a big draw — of the startup’s top five customers, he estimates that three or four are mobile-only. “Our next goals involve figuring out how to really grow the company and continue to offer more tools and services around our vision,” Doshi says. “How can we help the world learn about our data? How can we make organizations really data-driven?” In addition to Sequoia, Mixpanel’s backers include incubator Y Combinator, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Square COO Keith Rabois, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch.

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Fly Or Die: Windows 8

If you were only allowed to read one piece of tech news today, I’d bet you’d read up on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview . The beta became available today, though we were lucky enough to go hands-on with the OS for the past week or so, and people can’t stop talking about it. Windows 8 is a merging of old with new. A Metro UI offers up live tiles much like Windows Phone, but there are still some apps that require the old-school XP interface, sending you directly into the past when you least expect it. For John and I, that’s our biggest concern. Metro looks wonderful, Bing’s HTML5 apps are crisp, smooth, and engaging, and the combination of bezel gestures and contracts (which is, essentially, a system that lets one app’s API communicate with another) makes the whole system intuitively navigable. Getting thrown into XP, then, becomes even more awful. John brought up the important point, though, that Microsoft needs to maintain its relationships with big enterprise app developers and programs that expect their products to work the same way they did last year. Remember, we’re introducing an entirely new set of tools to Windows devs with this release, and the ones who’ve been around for forever will need time to transition. And to an extent, so will the consumer. Change can be hard, right? But as I said, we’re hoping that this is just a step in the right direction rather than a vision realized.