Microsoft Is Saying Exactly “Nothing” About The Surface Pro 4Apple has released a series of four videos today that show — explicitly — exactly what the Apple Watch can do, how it will do it and why you might be interested in buying one.If it seems to be a bit late in the cycle to get something like this out, I agree. Apple’s early marketing around the Watch has focused mainly on its construction, originality and possibilities for customization. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it’s much more suited to a product that’s entering an upgrade cycle. The last few years of iPhone or iPad releases is a good example of this. If you’re going to convince someone they might like to purchase the new one you’re going to highlight differentiating design, color, materials or functionality.For a completely new category of product, Apple had to dig back — all the way to the original iPhone — to remember how to position these things. It’s probably difficult to recall, but the first iPhone was such a radical departure from anything that had come before it that Apple had a ton of explaining to do.Part of that explaining was laying out the features and functions (and their theoretical usefulness) in a series of to-the-point instructional videos like this one. They went over things that seem second nature now: deleting a voicemail, reading and flagging email, browsing the web in a ‘real’ web browser.The instruction was largely based on the fact that we were moving from buttons to a brand-new interface: multi-touch.So a set of four videos, which will be expanded in the future, that explains very plainly how Apple Watch features work and why you’d want to use them makes a lot of sense. The Watch is also introducing the ‘new’ Digital Crown and Force Touch mechanisms to Apple’s interface lexicon. Those new interaction methods add additional possibility, but also need an introduction that ties them in with explicit actions like sending emoji, checking your calendar or transmitting your heartbeat.Related ArticlesNew York Times Will Deliver One-Sentence News Stories To Apple WatchApple Explores Ways To Secure, Set Up And Sell iOS Devices While Still In The BoxHow The Apple Watch And iPhone 6 Plus Might Flip Your Mobile Computing HabitsAnother thing that is emphasized heavily throughout these videos is how features like glances, Force Touch and the very nature of ‘a watch’ will enable you to interact with apps or messages quickly and get back to what you were doing before. This very, very strong selling point for the Apple Watch has thus far been missing from its marketing — including during both of its on-stage appearances.We’ve made the point here on TechCrunch that the primary early selling fulcrum of the Apple Watch would be that it would save you time by letting you use your phone less. Apple has apparently caught on to this sales bullet and project lead Kevin Lynch recently spent a lot of time emphasizing it during an interview with Wired.“People want that level of engagement,” Lynch says. “But how do we provide it in a way that’s a little more human, a little more in the moment when you’re with somebody?”That point is made in both straightforward and subtle ways throughout these videos, and I would expect to continue to see it highlighted as Apple gets into the full swing of selling the devices. The long-term possibilities of Apple Watch as a lubricant are another matter entirely — but that’s down the road and there is plenty of time to paint that picture later. For now, the metric is still (or finally, depending on how you look at it) time saved.
Showing posts with label Behind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Behind. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
PayPal Buys Paydiant, The Mobile Wallet Behind CurrentC, To Raise Its Game v. Google + Apple
yCairo Witnesses A New Kind Of Spring: The Egyptian Startup Spring
PayPal, the payments service with 162 million users preparing to separate from e-commerce giant eBay later this year, is announcing an acquisition today to help build out its mobile business targeting physical merchants, and sharpen its focus in competition with other tech payment hopefuls like Apple and Google.
It is buying Paydiant, a startup out of Boston that makes mobile wallet technology. That technology, in turn, powers payment apps for large business like Subway, Harris Teeter supermarkets, Capital One bank, and — perhaps most notably — MCX, a merchant-owned network that is developing a payment app called CurrentC.
CurrentC, you may recall, was in the news last year when it emerged some merchants that were part of MCX — they include large businesses like Walmart, Target, CVS and many others — were building CurrentC as their own way to take on Apple Pay and other solutions.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed by PayPal and Paydiant but it will include technology, customer relationships and about 70 Paydiant employees. Re/code is reporting that it is a $280 million deal. The acquisition is expected to close in March or April of this year, Paydiant’s CEO Chris Gardner tells me.
Gardner says Paydiant had raised about $42 million in funding from investors that include General Catalyst, Stage 1 and North Bridge.
Although Gardner and Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives, both stress that this acquisition is not an arrow shot across the field at Apple and Google — “Apple Pay and Google make a lot of noise, but we’ve never been competitors,” insists Gardner — you cannot deny that the mobile payments landscape is heating up and there appears to be a kind of landgrab shaping up among the biggest players.
As Apple has finally pulled the trigger on Apple Pay, and the iPhone maker’s entry has been met with so much enthusiasm that it’s become a catalyst for others to get their skates on.
Visa is making acquisitions to expand the kinds of services that it offers; point-of-sale device companies are putting out new Apple-Pay and NFC compatible hardware. And Google is getting serious again about payments.
It has its Android Pay API — which Sundar Pichai gave a namecheck to during a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — and Google also recently purchased technology from Softcard, a joint venture between carriers. That will also give Google a new connection to those carriers and their customers, which will be key to getting more scale for its services.
If Google is focusing on carriers, and Apple has a beautiful but very device specific experience, PayPal is looking for a role as the leading touchpoint with merchants — arguably an area where the others are making headway, too.
This is an important move for the company. As a business, PayPal was built for online commerce, and this is still where the majority of its transactions sit: just under 20% — $46 million — of its $226 million in 2014 sales were made on mobile devices, and of that a very small percentage were point-of-sale, physical transactions. Adding Paydiant will bring more point-of-sale volume on to PayPal’s platform, and it will also give PayPal a more established route into tackling more of that large-merchant market, offering them the proposition of developing their own-branded mobile wallets and credit cards alongside other marketing programs like gift cards and loyalty cards.
“With the addition of Paydiant, PayPal becomes an even stronger business partner for merchants,” PayPal president Dan Schulman notes in a blog post announcing the deal.
To date, Gardner tells me that the majority of CurrentC transactions are made using a QR-code system developed by the company, but more generally the platform is device agnostic. And coincidentally, to that end, PayPal today also announced a new Here point-of-sale reader that will let merchants add NFC reading capabilities to take contactless payments. That reader is launching first in the UK and Australia, markets where PayPal and eBay often test things first, before coming to the U.S. later this year.
For Paydiant, Gardner says the deal was a no-brainer because it gives its wallet technology significantly more scale and firepower. If that’s the thinking for a larger startup, imagine the proposition for the hundreds of other, and smaller mobile payments and mobile commerce startups out there.
“There will be a lot more consolidation in the space,” says Thomas Husson, an analyst at Forrester. “We will see a lot more bigger players acquiring smaller companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of these coming.”
PayPal, the payments service with 162 million users preparing to separate from e-commerce giant eBay later this year, is announcing an acquisition today to help build out its mobile business targeting physical merchants, and sharpen its focus in competition with other tech payment hopefuls like Apple and Google.It is buying Paydiant, a startup out of Boston that makes mobile wallet technology. That technology, in turn, powers payment apps for large business like Subway, Harris Teeter supermarkets, Capital One bank, and — perhaps most notably — MCX, a merchant-owned network that is developing a payment app called CurrentC.
CurrentC, you may recall, was in the news last year when it emerged some merchants that were part of MCX — they include large businesses like Walmart, Target, CVS and many others — were building CurrentC as their own way to take on Apple Pay and other solutions.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed by PayPal and Paydiant but it will include technology, customer relationships and about 70 Paydiant employees. Re/code is reporting that it is a $280 million deal. The acquisition is expected to close in March or April of this year, Paydiant’s CEO Chris Gardner tells me.
Gardner says Paydiant had raised about $42 million in funding from investors that include General Catalyst, Stage 1 and North Bridge.
Although Gardner and Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives, both stress that this acquisition is not an arrow shot across the field at Apple and Google — “Apple Pay and Google make a lot of noise, but we’ve never been competitors,” insists Gardner — you cannot deny that the mobile payments landscape is heating up and there appears to be a kind of landgrab shaping up among the biggest players.
As Apple has finally pulled the trigger on Apple Pay, and the iPhone maker’s entry has been met with so much enthusiasm that it’s become a catalyst for others to get their skates on.
Visa is making acquisitions to expand the kinds of services that it offers; point-of-sale device companies are putting out new Apple-Pay and NFC compatible hardware. And Google is getting serious again about payments.
It has its Android Pay API — which Sundar Pichai gave a namecheck to during a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — and Google also recently purchased technology from Softcard, a joint venture between carriers. That will also give Google a new connection to those carriers and their customers, which will be key to getting more scale for its services.
If Google is focusing on carriers, and Apple has a beautiful but very device specific experience, PayPal is looking for a role as the leading touchpoint with merchants — arguably an area where the others are making headway, too.
This is an important move for the company. As a business, PayPal was built for online commerce, and this is still where the majority of its transactions sit: just under 20% — $46 million — of its $226 million in 2014 sales were made on mobile devices, and of that a very small percentage were point-of-sale, physical transactions. Adding Paydiant will bring more point-of-sale volume on to PayPal’s platform, and it will also give PayPal a more established route into tackling more of that large-merchant market, offering them the proposition of developing their own-branded mobile wallets and credit cards alongside other marketing programs like gift cards and loyalty cards.
“With the addition of Paydiant, PayPal becomes an even stronger business partner for merchants,” PayPal president Dan Schulman notes in a blog post announcing the deal.
To date, Gardner tells me that the majority of CurrentC transactions are made using a QR-code system developed by the company, but more generally the platform is device agnostic. And coincidentally, to that end, PayPal today also announced a new Here point-of-sale reader that will let merchants add NFC reading capabilities to take contactless payments. That reader is launching first in the UK and Australia, markets where PayPal and eBay often test things first, before coming to the U.S. later this year.
For Paydiant, Gardner says the deal was a no-brainer because it gives its wallet technology significantly more scale and firepower. If that’s the thinking for a larger startup, imagine the proposition for the hundreds of other, and smaller mobile payments and mobile commerce startups out there.
“There will be a lot more consolidation in the space,” says Thomas Husson, an analyst at Forrester. “We will see a lot more bigger players acquiring smaller companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of these coming.”
Sunday, 1 March 2015
The Story Behind Samsung’s Galaxy S6 And S6 Edge Design Departure
The Story Behind Samsung’s Galaxy S6 And S6 Edge Design Departure
Advertisement
Samsung has done something very different with this year’s flagship – or different for Samsung, at least. The company that has long held on to the belief that it can produce top-tier hardware using platics as the core component of device industrial design has switched to an all metal and glass enclosure.
And for those who wondered what a Samsung smartphone using premium materials might feel like, the Galaxy S6 edge in particular is a very promising result. But how did Samsung, of all companies, ever launch a device where design was the primary tentpole feature?Zero
To get to the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, Samsung says it had to start from zero – meaning tossing out the design book that led to dimpled plastic mock-leather backs and shiny plastic hamburger outer ridges. It mean taking a step back and opening up the design process to feedback, listening to the complaints of both professionals and consumers regarding Samsung’s previous design choices, and then building anew from there.
To get to the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, Samsung says it had to start from zero.
Some might argue that Samsung didn’t start from nothing when it decided to move away from its plastic design legacy. Apple, after all, has created devices that look quite similar to the Galaxy S6, and details like the arrangement of ports and holes on the bottom edge of that hardware do look quite similar to the current setup at the base of an iPhone 6. But despite familiar port layouts, antenna placement and materials choices, the new Galaxy phones still feel distinctly Samsung, perhaps in part because they’ve retained familiar features like the rounded rectangle home button and center-set camera lens.
And the unique qualities of the curved display not the S6 edge are also Samsung through-and-through, with a reeling-in of a far-out feature the company introduced last year which in some ways helps illustrate down their entire product development process. The Note Edge has a curved edge with a dedicated display, which appears continuous with the rest. Reviewers mostly found that cute but ultimately extraneous, however, and the S6 edge is an iteration in action based on that response: it’s mostly aesthetic, rather than functional, and it contributes what it needs to without ending up feeling flippant.
Samsung says the design for these devices has been in the works for the past several years, rather than over the course of a few months or just since the Galaxy S5 was introduced. Its design came about in parallel with the choices made on the S5, Note and Note Edge line, though you also get the sense from the company that there were clear camps that favored one track vs. the other, and that the kind of metal-and-glass approach used on the S6 didn’t gain ascendancy without struggle.
It’s possible that Samsung’s recent struggles in its dominance of the global smartphone market helped give credence to voices within the company that sought to change their reputation for making handsets that seemed more functional than fashionable. It’s also likely due to the changing nature of Samsung’s business: The company was knocked off its lofty perch atop the key greater China smartphone market, first by Xiaomi undercutting its wide product range on price, then by Apple outdoing it in the premium sector with iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Whatever the reason, Samsung has decided to break with tradition and take a risk on a design more in line with what premium customers expect. It’s not a guarantee that they’ll be able to retake lost ground in that segment, but it’s clear the opposite strategy wasn’t working in terms of long-term growth.
Practicality And Personality
Even though they changed their material strategy, with the added pressure to continue to offer ever-thinner and sleeker devices, Samsung didn’t want to also make their devices colder and less approachable. That’s why they developed, in-house, the sub-surface reflective coating that gives the GS6 and S6 edge its metallic- or jewel-like finish, which has the added benefit of being protected from scratching or marring itself thanks to being underneath the Gorilla Glass 4 outer surface.
The color options, including the bold and bright exclusive options for each model, were Samsung’s attempt to acknowledge that increasing desire on the part of consumers for a device that reflects their own personality. In smart watches, the trend towards greater customization is clear, but Samsung’s design choices are meant to appeal to that same instinct, in a way that still maintains the same general device feel and handheld user experience across variations.
On the practical side, Samsung’s designers made some changes that reflect usability challenges with previous designs. The rear-facing speaker is replaced with a downward facing one, which Samsung says makes for 1.5 times louder sound. There’s also a customizable LED with color options based on who’s contacting you, and quick reply settings that you can assign to the rear IR sensor next to the camera, so that you can automatically respond with just a finger press without ever lifting the phone off the table. Designers also made sure to extend the metallic frame above the glass surface all the way around the edge, in an effort to make it less likely to shatter in case of a fall. This was a passion project that emphasized user experience in minute detail.
Can Design Save?
The big question about making design the central selling point of the Galaxy S6 is whether or not it can turn things around for Samsung’s smartphone division, and help it resume growth and reclaim its position of absolute global device dominance. There’s no question, in my mind, that what Samsung has done vastly improves upon its existing track record of hardware look and feel, but ultimately the market will have the final say.
This was a passion project that emphasized user experience in minute detail.
That may dictate whether or not Samsung takes more of these kinds of design risks in the future, instead of the kind of conservative approach that has been the hallmark of Samsung’s Galaxy flagships over the course of the past few years.
AdvertisementSamsung has done something very different with this year’s flagship – or different for Samsung, at least. The company that has long held on to the belief that it can produce top-tier hardware using platics as the core component of device industrial design has switched to an all metal and glass enclosure.
And for those who wondered what a Samsung smartphone using premium materials might feel like, the Galaxy S6 edge in particular is a very promising result. But how did Samsung, of all companies, ever launch a device where design was the primary tentpole feature?Zero
To get to the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, Samsung says it had to start from zero – meaning tossing out the design book that led to dimpled plastic mock-leather backs and shiny plastic hamburger outer ridges. It mean taking a step back and opening up the design process to feedback, listening to the complaints of both professionals and consumers regarding Samsung’s previous design choices, and then building anew from there.
To get to the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, Samsung says it had to start from zero.
Some might argue that Samsung didn’t start from nothing when it decided to move away from its plastic design legacy. Apple, after all, has created devices that look quite similar to the Galaxy S6, and details like the arrangement of ports and holes on the bottom edge of that hardware do look quite similar to the current setup at the base of an iPhone 6. But despite familiar port layouts, antenna placement and materials choices, the new Galaxy phones still feel distinctly Samsung, perhaps in part because they’ve retained familiar features like the rounded rectangle home button and center-set camera lens.
And the unique qualities of the curved display not the S6 edge are also Samsung through-and-through, with a reeling-in of a far-out feature the company introduced last year which in some ways helps illustrate down their entire product development process. The Note Edge has a curved edge with a dedicated display, which appears continuous with the rest. Reviewers mostly found that cute but ultimately extraneous, however, and the S6 edge is an iteration in action based on that response: it’s mostly aesthetic, rather than functional, and it contributes what it needs to without ending up feeling flippant.
Samsung says the design for these devices has been in the works for the past several years, rather than over the course of a few months or just since the Galaxy S5 was introduced. Its design came about in parallel with the choices made on the S5, Note and Note Edge line, though you also get the sense from the company that there were clear camps that favored one track vs. the other, and that the kind of metal-and-glass approach used on the S6 didn’t gain ascendancy without struggle.
It’s possible that Samsung’s recent struggles in its dominance of the global smartphone market helped give credence to voices within the company that sought to change their reputation for making handsets that seemed more functional than fashionable. It’s also likely due to the changing nature of Samsung’s business: The company was knocked off its lofty perch atop the key greater China smartphone market, first by Xiaomi undercutting its wide product range on price, then by Apple outdoing it in the premium sector with iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Whatever the reason, Samsung has decided to break with tradition and take a risk on a design more in line with what premium customers expect. It’s not a guarantee that they’ll be able to retake lost ground in that segment, but it’s clear the opposite strategy wasn’t working in terms of long-term growth.
Practicality And Personality
Even though they changed their material strategy, with the added pressure to continue to offer ever-thinner and sleeker devices, Samsung didn’t want to also make their devices colder and less approachable. That’s why they developed, in-house, the sub-surface reflective coating that gives the GS6 and S6 edge its metallic- or jewel-like finish, which has the added benefit of being protected from scratching or marring itself thanks to being underneath the Gorilla Glass 4 outer surface.
The color options, including the bold and bright exclusive options for each model, were Samsung’s attempt to acknowledge that increasing desire on the part of consumers for a device that reflects their own personality. In smart watches, the trend towards greater customization is clear, but Samsung’s design choices are meant to appeal to that same instinct, in a way that still maintains the same general device feel and handheld user experience across variations.
On the practical side, Samsung’s designers made some changes that reflect usability challenges with previous designs. The rear-facing speaker is replaced with a downward facing one, which Samsung says makes for 1.5 times louder sound. There’s also a customizable LED with color options based on who’s contacting you, and quick reply settings that you can assign to the rear IR sensor next to the camera, so that you can automatically respond with just a finger press without ever lifting the phone off the table. Designers also made sure to extend the metallic frame above the glass surface all the way around the edge, in an effort to make it less likely to shatter in case of a fall. This was a passion project that emphasized user experience in minute detail.
Can Design Save?
The big question about making design the central selling point of the Galaxy S6 is whether or not it can turn things around for Samsung’s smartphone division, and help it resume growth and reclaim its position of absolute global device dominance. There’s no question, in my mind, that what Samsung has done vastly improves upon its existing track record of hardware look and feel, but ultimately the market will have the final say.
This was a passion project that emphasized user experience in minute detail.
That may dictate whether or not Samsung takes more of these kinds of design risks in the future, instead of the kind of conservative approach that has been the hallmark of Samsung’s Galaxy flagships over the course of the past few years.
Thursday, 12 February 2015
Vista Acquires Automated Insights, The Startup Behind The AP’s “Robot” News Writing
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