Consumers like convenience. As with anything else, it is true with payment technologies. A great example is the trend of getting away from cash or checks and the move toward credit cards.
Continue reading… “The mobile payment race, who will win?”
2012 Built in Chicago digital startup report
“Chicago has developed into a city that every investor must watch.”
Chicago’s most innovative minds launched 197 digital startups in 2012, up from 193 launched in 2011. 59 companies secured funding of at least $1M in 2012, an increase from 44 companies in 2011. (Infographic)
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All publishers go mobile this year
Mobile readership offers publishers a new circulation revenue sources.
Media businesses have already gone through a first wave of digital transition, and in the last few years, mobile has been the next frontier. Publishers have been tasked with deciding whether to offer their content on the smaller-screen devices—and how.
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Moving from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time Living
Futurist Thomas Frey: How many extra shavers, bars of soap, or cans of soup do you currently have on your shelves at home? How much money do you currently have tied up in “inventory” of typical household items? What if you could get by without any?
Continue reading… “Moving from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time Living”
Replacing Our Physical Infrastructure with Digital Infrastructure
Futurist Thomas Frey: In the 1980s, as a young human factors engineer at IBM, I spent much of my time working with anthropometric tables, a compilation of statistical data about the human body used for designing a product’s ergonomic interface.
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The library becoming more popular than ever, but books no longer the primary focus
The New York Public Library recently embarked on a controversial plan to move two to three million books off-site.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) retired its pneumatic-tube system sometime last year. It had been used to request books for more than a century. The New York Public Library opened in 1911 and that pneumatic call system had changed little since then. You still filled out a slip, and you still turned that slip over to a clerk, who would load it into a metal cartridge. The cartridge would be driven by air pressure to a station down in the stacks, where another clerk would retrieve your book, which was then sent back up to the call desk by a dumbwaiter. In recent years, this procedure would take about 20 minutes. In decades past, I’m told, it was closer to five.
Young tablet users more willing to pay for online news
People who pay for online news are still the minority – but participation may be growing thanks to tablet computers.
According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s new Digital News Report 2012 those who have paid for digital news ranges from 12 percent in Denmark to four percent in the UK. And only six percent of survey respondents said they would be willing, in future, to pay for news from sources they liked.
Continue reading… “Young tablet users more willing to pay for online news”
Controlling Your Own Legacy
Futurist Thomas Frey: Over the 4th of July, I attended a theatrical production of the history of my hometown of Mobridge, SD. The actors and actresses did a terrific job of illustrating the tough times of the early pioneers trying to forge a new life along the Missouri River in barren lands of northern South Dakota.
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Babysitting goes digital with credit card payments and online bookings
Growing startups in the digital babysitting space allow parents to book, review, and often pay babysitters online.
There are few areas of life that haven’t been changed by the mobile and Internet revolutions for the young, urban smartphone owner. We can book restaurant reservations through OpenTable, take a cab without swiping a credit card on Uber, or crash at someone’s house in a foreign city through AirBnB. Life has moved online, and commerce is moving with it.
Continue reading… “Babysitting goes digital with credit card payments and online bookings”
Digital coupons rival print in effectiveness
Consumers perform online product research, make purchases.
Price-conscious consumers have been driven online by the battered US economy to do research before making a purchase, and eMarketer estimates that there will be 92.5 million online coupon users by the end of 2012. Those savings-savvy consumers will no doubt be helped by electronic circulars, which now rival their print counterparts in penetration, according to a November 2011 study of US internet users by Yahoo! and Ipsos.
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Most college students in the U.S. prefer digital over print when reading
58% of college students prefer digital over print for textbook reading.
According to a new survey from the Pearson Foundation, the majority of U.S. college students now prefer digital formats whether they’re reading textbooks or “fun” books.
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The state of OpenCourseWare (infographic)
The world of academics is changing rapidly.
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative. The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002 and has been reinforced by the launch of similar projects at Yale, Michigan University, and the University of California Berkeley…
(infographic after jump)
Continue reading… “The state of OpenCourseWare (infographic)”
