| CHARGE Anywhere Makes Nexus S an NFC Terminal CHARGE Anywhere, a mobile payments company and gateway provider, has introduced a system that enables the Google Nexus S phone to function as an NFC-enabled mobile payments terminal. Using a mobile application downloaded to the device, merchants can accept NFC payments using just their Nexus S smartphone. An optional printer and swiper enables merchants to accept traditional credit card payments as well.
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Warner Bros Adds 5 More Movie Titles to Facebook Rentals, But Is It a Threat to Netflix? Earlier this month, Warner Bros announced that it would become the first Hollywood studio to make its movies available for sale or rental via Facebook. Its first offering: The Dark Knight. Now Warner Bros has added 5 more blockbuster titles to its Facebook rental catalog: Inception, Life as We Know It, Yogi Bear, and the first two Harry Potter movies. The new films will cost between 30 and 40 Facebook credits (between $3 and $4) for a 48-hour rental period. During that time period, you'll have unlimited streaming access to the movie, meaning you can pause, rewind, watch on different computers, and watch numerous times. The movies are purchased and streamed within the Facebook page, meaning you won't have to leave the site in order to watch. You'll still be able to update your status and chat with friends. However, as the video player is Flash, you won't be able to watch your Facebook movies on your Apple devices.
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GroupMe Brings Brands to Group Messaging GroupMe, one of the myriad of new group messaging apps that has come on the scene in recent months, is introducing a new feature today that hints at how this startup at least, may plan to make money: Featured Groups. These groups will give brands an opportunity to create groups and engage in conversations with fans around their particular brand. By clicking on the new Featured Groups tab, users will be able to create and join in the conversations about various television shows, bands, and music events.
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Google Preparing Mobile Payments System with Citigroup & MasterCard (Report) Google is preparing to launch a mobile payments system in partnership with MasterCard and Citigoup, Inc., according to a report in today's The Wall St. Journal. The service is the long-rumored mobile venture utilizing NFC (near field communication) technology, which allows customers to wave or tap their phones at the point-of-sale to pay for purchases. Google isn't taking a cut of the transaction fees, says the report, but would use the system to provide retailers with more data about their customers so they could better target their ads.
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A Challenge to PayPal? American Express Launches Digital Payments Less than two weeks after Visa's announcement that it was launching its own peer-to-peer digital payment system, American Express is getting in on the game as well. The credit card company today unveiled Serve, its new digital payment and commerce platform. Users will be able to send or receive money from their Serve account, which can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card, or by money from another Serve account. With the new AmEx digital payment system, consumers will be able to make payments via the Serve website, via their mobile phones, and with merchants who accept American Express cards. Accounts will be accessible via Android and iPhone apps and through Facebook.
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Noisey Shows MTV How to do Music TV Online Wouldn't it be great if MTV documented and showcased emerging bands on its television network, instead of making uninspired, irritating reality TV shows? Well if MTV won't do that, then a new web site that launched this month will. Noisey is a video-based "new music discovery platform" that is profiling new bands and local music scenes from around the world. The site was built using HTML5 and as a result it delivers a visually appealing app-like experience. This could be the future of music TV. I for one hope so, at least. Noisey, currently in public beta, features mini documentaries of bands alongside videos of live music. I tested Noisey out by viewing the coverage of a young band I discovered via this year's SXSW Music festival.
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Why Would Google Release an iPhone-Only Group Messaging App? Were you tired of free, data-based messaging with apps like Beluga or GroupMe? Were you over quick and easy location sharing? In-line mobile image sharing? Push notifications? Then worry not, because Disco has come along to take away all the frills and leave your group messaging experience without any of the perks of a smartphone with a data plan. The punchline here is that Slide - the company acquired by Google last summer - has just released an iPhone-only group messaging app that does nothing offered by all of its competition. Even Google doesn't have much to say on the topic, but maybe that's because the company behind the fastest growing mobile OS has something up its sleeve.
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Bieber's 'Baby' Will Hit 500m Views Today; It's Also The Most Hated Video on YouTube (For Now) Teenage musician Justin Bieber will see his music video Baby surpass 500 million views on YouTube today or tomorrow, making it the first video ever to do so. Bieber's Baby is now far ahead of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, which is #2 at 360 million. Only 4 other videos on the site have been viewed even half as much as Baby. Where Bieber dominates the most, however, is in how much his videos are disliked by YouTube viewers. YouTube doesn't provide the option of viewing by most disliked but we analyzed the 150 most viewed videos and here's the harsh truth: Bieber stars in 5 of the top 6 most disliked videos on the site. The #1 most disliked video on YouTube is Baby, with 1.1 million dislikes. That's an incredible amount of dislike! In fact, it's 1 million more dislikes that the #2 most disliked video on the site - Bieber's Never Say Never, which has just under 100 thousand dislikes. We've posted a chart below of the top 10 most disliked videos on YouTube, which you can ponder while listening to Justin Bieber's Baby. UPDATE! There has been a disruption in the force and Rebecca Black's Friday has soared past all other challengers and will likely top Bieber as the most disliked video on the site any day or hour now.
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Awesome Augmented Reality App Could Save Librarians Hours If you've ever worked in a library, you're familiar with the drudgery of shelf reading. That's the process of verifying that all the books on a shelf are in the right order, based on their call numbers. Books get out of order fairly easily, when they're taken off the shelf and examined, for example, or when they're just stuck in the wrong place. Miami University's Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG! - that exclamation point, I confess, is my addition), led by Professor Bo Brinkman, has developed an Android app that could save librarians a lot of time and hassle. Using the Android's camera, the app "reads" a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly.
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Research Examines Who's Talking, Who's Listening on Twitter As a new communication tool - one that operates across the spectrum from mass media to personal sharing - Twitter provides researchers with lots of fascinating material to assess what's known in media scholarship as Laswell's maxim: "who says what to whom in what channel with what effect." New research from Yahoo has taken a closer look at precisely that, finding that a very small fraction of Twitter users - just 20,000 "elite users" - generate about half of all tweets. The researchers - Cornell University's Shaomei Wu and Yahoo Research's Winter Mason, Jake Hofman, and Duncan Watts - have classified these "elite users" by culling information from Twitter lists, identifying those users who show up most frequently there. In addition, the research has placed these elite users into four categories: celebrities, bloggers, media outlets, and organizations.
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