Despite the growing popularity of mobile payment apps like Apple Pay and Android Pay, over the past couple years, retail stores have been slow to adopt them.

A little more than a third of consumers (36 percent) have used some form of mobile payment applications in the past year.

Source: Walker Sands Future of Retail Study 2016

Despite the lack of enthusiasm in embracing this technology, brick-and-mortar retail stores are trying to remove as much friction as possible from the payment process to eliminate consumer frustration and enhance the ‘buyer’s experience’.

To this end, retailers have adopted proprietary retail mobile apps that enable the customer to pay only in their stores (closed-loop payment).

Figure 1: Source: Walker Sands Future of Retail Study 2016

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Barcodes have been around for decades but strangely enough, the use of barcodes in mobile payments have only recently been picking up. Starbucks has been a pioneer in mobile payments using barcodes. Walmart and CVS have recently introduced a similar solution. Because of the embedded cameras, smartphones have been always capable of reading barcodes and that is one of the main reasons why barcodes are so ubiquitous.

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Smart-posters offer higher interaction versus their QR counterpart. With QR codes, the user has to launch an app, aim the camera to the QR code, scan or take a picture, and wait for the device to react. The light conditions, elements, age of the poster, etc. may interfere with the user interaction. With NFC, on the other hand, users simply tap on the poster to get the information (“Tap-to-Get”) stored on the tag (URLs, coupons, etc.). The information is transferred to the phone instantly, thereby improving the user experience (UX).

Smart-posters requires the smartphone to support NFC Discovery Mode which is currently limited to Android and Windows Phone mobile devices. Devices that support NFC Discovery Mode have the capabilities to read tags (and hence can read Smart-posters). Unfortunately, NFC-enabled iPhones don’t support Discovery Mode and can only emulate NFC tags. This is referred to as Card Emulation Mode. Without Discovery Mode support, the iPhone do not have the capability to interact with Smart-posters.

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While walking through mall or a retail store people are bombarded with information as advertisers fight for customers’ eyes.  Traditional posters provide visual promotion displaying phone numbers and/or web addresses, which the customer needs to remember or write down.  Because there is no analytics produced from the information displayed, and traceability is minimal, the response rates are very low.

On the other hand, the Enhanced Displays or Enriched Posters include methods to bridge the physical and digital world. Their goal is to provide a seamless user experience by converting the printed content into digital format, and from offline to mobile.

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Hey Kickstarter,

Here’s the TL;DR summer production update:

• We have 400 populated boards ready for final assembly
• We’ve also received fifty 3-D printed cases and 100 injection molded cases
• But we’re working through a few final issues:
  • Fixing software bugs that are sapping battery life
  • Increasing the precision of our injection molding process for better case fit
  • Ironing out an assembly + QC process to ensure every FloJack we ship is top quality

We’re pushing hard and should be shipping in no time. If you’re interested in the full update read-on:

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This post assumes basic familiarity with Java and the Android SDK.  It gives you a brief intro on how to talk to the NFC API to read a tag and subscribe to an event that detects it.   Read more →

Great demos, thought leaders, and vendors offering every ingredient to bake an awesome Internet of Things. That’s what I encountered at the 3rd Annual Auto-iD & Sensing Solutions Expo hosted by the MIT Media Labs. Flomio got the invite late last week (thanks for that, Stephen) so had to hustle a bit to get out to Boston in time.

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