MasterCard And Intel Pa...

Intel and credit card giant MasterCard are announcing a multi-year strategic partnership this evening, which aims to provide a more secure and simple way for consumers to pay for products online. The two companies will be working to combine MasterCard’s expertise in payment processing and commerce with Intel’s strengths in chip-based security. So how are these two companies joining forces? Details are still being disclosed, but MasterCard and Intel are working on providing a safer and simpler checkout process for online merchants and consumers using Intel’s Ultrabook devices and future generations of Intel-based PCs. Another area where Intel and MasterCard will be working together is in the area of emerging payments technologies, including MasterCard’s PayPass and Intel’s Identity Protection Technology. PayPass is a payment method that lets you make purchases without having to swipe the magnetic strip on your card or provide your signature. The technology uses NFC to to transmit information. Intel’s Identity Protection Technology can allow consumers to use two-factor authentication and hardware-based display protection, which provides increased online security against malware. Additionally, when used with an Intel IPT-enabled reader, consumers will be able to pay for online purchases with a simple tap of their PayPass-enabled card, tag, or smart phone on an Ultrabook device. “MasterCard is constantly working to improve the shopping experience for consumers and merchants,” said Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer, MasterCard. “The collaboration with Intel will deliver enhanced security and faster checkout – with the convenience of a simple click or tap.” McLaughlin adds that this is a starting point for the two companies and there are future collaborations to come. “This partnership is about how to make the payments process more secure without having to change the experience of consumer,” he explains.

E-Commerce: Beyond The ...

Gautum Gupta is an associate at General Catalyst Partners, where he focuses on financial services, enterprise IT, consumer services, and new media. You follow him @gRamblings . For all the excitement around commerce these days, there have been only a few really big changes in the last 100 years. Sears pioneered the mail-order catalog, chains like Walmart consolidated big box retail, and Amazon brought inventory online. After more than 10 years of growth, e-commerce only accounts for about 8% of total commerce in the US. Clearly, we have a long way to go in moving more commerce online. I believe the next evolution in e-commerce—what some refer to as “social commerce”—will use customer identity and data to better personalize and serve customers well beyond what Amazon has done to date. Commerce, both offline and online, has historically been largely anonymous and impersonal. Offline, customers walk into stores, see the exact same merchandise, are greeted by employees who don’t recognize them, and are all bound to the same terms and conditions on the back of every purchase receipt. Online, the pen and paper of the old mail-order catalog were replaced with drop-down menus and search boxes. Amazon and other sites emerged to provide customers with anything they were looking for at low prices. As disruptive as the online catalog has been, the success of these online stores is measured by three and four letter acronyms: LTV “lifetime value” and COCA “cost of customer acquisition.” However, a shopping experience cannot be summarized entirely by metrics. When a customer enters a department store to try on new shoes, she may feel the hesitation of not knowing whether it will match with her wardrobe. Or, she might serendipitously spot a pair of heels out of the corner of her eye, but feels frustrated to learn that the pair is not what she expected, not in her exact size, or the deal is just not good enough. These types of shopping roadblocks—psychic swings from purchasing intent to hesitation or frustration—matter more than metrics can describe. The next evolution in e-commerce will evade these roadblocks by knowing this particular customer’s identity and leveraging the data she has made public (explicit & implicit preferences) to create a more personal shopping experience for her. Knowing her identity isn’t restricted to the customer’s name or basic demographic information, but could also include his or her family and friends’ purchasing history, the customer’s likes, style, brand preferences, and influences. In the retail context, her identity allows the retailer to build a relationship with the consumer. When Sears first sold watches through the mail, to build trust with consumers they promised customers that every watch sold would be accurate for at least six years after purchase or else they would fix it free of charge. Just as Sears did in the late 19th Century, the best online retailers today make promises to us: they promise to show and help us discover merchandise we’ll love (personalization), they promise to help us decide what to buy (tools), and they promise that we’ll be delighted by the entire experience, even after we buy (service). Physical retailers operate under the constraint of finite shelf space and must hope to catch the busy consumer’s eye. In the digital world, with endless choices, truly successful companies will excel at helping consumers find and discover great products. Some companies will even enable consumers to create or customize what they want. Gemvara , a custom jewelry seller, starts by funneling consumers into a specific boutique and then immerses the consumer in customizing a design that catches her eye. One interesting trend is companies blatantly asking customers to fill out quizzes and surveys that eventually inform their merchandise selection. ShoeDazzle has built a large business around style quizzes that engage women in a fun experience to define their personal style. They use the results of these quizzes and their team of curators like Kim Kardashian to build a showroom specific to each customer. Going forward, by using the customer’s past purchase history, likes, and friend’s purchases, retailers will be able to create a completely personalized experience from the very first visit to their homepage. Beyond personalization, J. Hilburn , an e-commerce company providing men’s custom clothing, employs a network of Style Advisors who can take their customer’s measurements to help deliver on the company’s promise of a perfect fit. Given that J. Hilburn’s shirts are fully customizable, knowing your measurements is critical in producing a superior product experience. Not every category requires a stylist to help consumers decide what to buy. BirchBox , built to help consumers discover new beauty products, creates content around products and categories they sell to educate consumers on what products to use for various skin / hair types. In addition to offering the tools to help customers pick the right products, social commerce leaders will excel at providing a better service experience. Proving that customer service extends beyond the checkout process, Modcloth has enabled quick exchanges for its customers whereby customers don’t need to wait for their return to be processed before receiving an exchanged item; instead Modcloth instantly sends a replacement. While it may seem minor, this builds an amazing amount of trust with the consumer. The future of e-commerce will not solely be defined by how to drive down your cost of acquisition or push up the customer’s lifetime value; it will be defined by the personal relationships retailers have built with customers. Efforts to try to optimize lifetime value without understanding the customer will only generate short term success. The next phase of retailing will not succeed by selling the same goods in the same way to different people. Consumers are willing to share data with retailers in exchange for a radically better shopping experience. The internet has enabled us to move beyond the constraints of the mail-order catalog and physical store while making it easier to acquire data on customers. By understanding these two factors, online retailers will greatly increase the portion of online spend from 8% of total commerce. CrunchBase Information Gautam Gupta BirchBox J. Hilburn ShoeDazzle Information provided by CrunchBase

Ping Identity Raises $2...

Ping Identity , a company that creates secure, cloud based sign-in platform for enterprise applications, has raised $21 million in funding from Triangle Peak Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and existing investors Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $34 million. Ping’s PingFederate allows employees, consumers, customers or partners access to multiple cloud resources using a single username and password. PingConnect eliminates passwords for virtually every major SaaS application including Salesforce, Google Apps, Concur, SuccessFactors, Workday and many more and lets companies manage user identities via single sign-on that works across all of these applications. Founded in 2002, Ping Identity has more than 600 customers including 40 of the Fortune 100 and 150-plus SaaS partners already use Ping Identity’s cloud identity management products. The new investment will be used towards product development, and sales and marketing efforts. Not only is the online identity market a billion dollar business, but its set to become a federal issue if the U.S. government pursues its strategy of a “trusted-identity ecosystem.” It should be interesting to see if Ping Identity (and its competitors like Okta ) play a part in this potential initiative. CrunchBase Information Ping Identity Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase

The Man Who Wants Your ...

I first met Charles Nouÿrit at Le Web in 2007. Surrounded by ‘boothe babes’ in tight white T-shirts, he was handing out cards about something called Myid.is. Was this the standard French startup pitch at Le Web? It probably was back in 2007. And it was a little hard to take the pitch, such as it was, seriously. But Identity? “ID”? Yes, it was a hot topic even then – and still is. Since then 600 million users have signed up to Facebook, close to 100 million on LinkedIn. Sure, many of those won’t be fully kosher online identities. But isn’t the issue of a verified online identity slowly being solved? The answer of course is no. Real identity, and more importantly the verification of someone’s ID by a trusted third party is nowhere near being solved online, outside of the banking system. But this is going to be a key battleground online going forward, especially where ecommerce and the ability to ‘sign’ for things enters a new phase. And – since 2007 – Charles has stuck to his guns on his startup and aimed high.And today Myid.is is emerging as a potentially powerful play. A giant trial with the French Post office (La Poste) with a service branded as “Identic” will soon launch, claiming to be a world first in the Identity space. Identic is a brand owned by La Poste but run behind the scenes by MyID.is and allows digital identity to be verified by the La Poste organisation.

Obligations To Dead Sou...

Former Apple board of directors member Jerry York , who died last March, was quite the talker. He divulged confidential information about Apple and Steve Jobs’ to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Fortune, according to those publications. It was all off record stuff, but now that he’s dead the deal’s apparently off. And York looks like a bit of a jerk. “With York’s death, the off-the-record agreement is no longer in place,” says Fortune’s Doron Levin. Even better – former New York Times correspondent Micheline Maynard actually outs her source in the process of saying she’d never out a source: “Jerry York told others of us details about Steve Jobs’ illness. To me, a promise is a promise.” The more I read that Tweet the more my head spins. The hypocrisy is impressive. “I’d just like everyone to know that I’d never divulge that Jerry York, one of my sources, is a source.” Anyway, back to ground level. The precedent for all of this appears to be Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein insisted they would not reveal the identity of Deep Throat until he died or consented to have his identity revealed. There’s a good overview of that on this Quora thread . It’s not clear with Watergate if that was something Mark Felt agreed to as Deep Throat. If he did, the precedent is invalid. For me this comes down to right and wrong, not what a journalist can get away with, or justify. A promise to a source to keep information confidential is giving your word. Unless the source is ok with you divulging that information after his or her death, and you explicitly know this, it’s not ok to out them. Certainly they aren’t around to complain about it or even deny that they were a source, so you’re in the clear. But giving your word to someone should be final. It’s not a situation where you look for an escape clause. Journalists complain about process journalism , saying it’s unethical. It seems to me this is a much more clear cut example of ethics. And one where all the big guys are failing.