Lee Hogan Charlie Sheen and the producers of Two And A Half Men, who cannot disregard another season’s riches, will ultimately reconcile. The modern Pirates of the Caribbean movie will bomb. The Mets will now not make the playoffs. President Obama will win the Democratic primaries. I can pay more for health insurance, but not much less. Check again and see if I’m right on those. I’m pretty confident.
However, I am not as sure as I am about a few trends affecting my corporation and different small and medium-sized groups. In the subsequent two years, I expect that at least three killer apps will emerge with the intention of having an enormous impact on us all. Are you ready for them?
These days, I have determined an incredible way to store cash. I do not bring coins. This way, none of my teenage kids can dig into my wallet after I’m not around and walk away with ten-dollar payments to fund their pizza fix. Instead, all they find are useless credit playing cards. Well, they won’t even be able to discover those in a couple of years. That’s because I’ll be doing all of it on my telephone. As will most of my customers.
First, a few information. Information Week says that 38% of small and medium-sized companies already rely upon cellular apps. American Express is running on a brand new e-wallet software. Microsoft, Apple, and Google are enforcing the close-to-area communications (NFC) era for mobile bills in their next era of products. As we communicate, Google is testing an Android payment gadget in New York and San Francisco. PayPal is teaming up with innovative corporations like Blingnation to carry mobile bills to its customers.
Mobile payments are the subsequent killer app. How will all of its paintings be? It’s not that complicated. Your patron’s credit data will be embedded in comfortable software on their telephone. You may have a wi-fi terminal linked to your cash sign-in or stand-alone to talk with your smartphone about using NFC technology or something similar to transmit data. Using the touch display screen or digicam at the cell device, the era may also incorporate fingerprint, eye experiment, or some different kind of safety is important. Your patron waves her phone over the terminal. The transaction is recorded. A receipt is mailed all around. The transaction hits your bank account and accounting software program without greater human interaction.
Is your enterprise equipped for this? You definitely ought to be. Soon, a customer will walk to your door and ask to pay for a product using her smartphone. At first, when you inform her that you don’t receive payments that way, she’ll understand. But after some time, when increasingly more of your competition and different businesses are taking smartphone payments, she will stop being so patient with you and take her enterprise elsewhere.
Will this price us more? What do you watch? Of course it will! We’ll payloads for new phone scanners, join up for services, and incur extra charges. You realize that is going to happen. You recognize that the individuals who are surely going to get wealthy off this are the companies I referred to above. But it might not forestall us. We will need to offer our customers this capability so they can live aggressively. It may even pressure more enterprise our way. And keep a bit of time in processing, too. We’ll see.
Killer App #2: Lockers
Last week, Amazon announced that it would provide its customers with as much as 20GB of storage for whatever they need – music, motion pictures, ebooks, and many others. They call it a “cloud locker.” One component’s positive – this locker will scent plenty better than my health club locker. Say what you want about Amazon; however, those men do not spot developments properly in advance; in addition, they begin traits in their personal. I never thought people would pass for ebooks once they were first delivered. Now I see that Amazon offered around eight million Kindles in 2010. Shows how much I realize.
But I do recognize this: storage space is cheap, and finding new clients is costly. So we’re always searching out approaches to keep our customers close to us. And what better way is there to keep them close than providing them “lockers” to store their stuff? It makes it easier for them to return to us to shop for new products. Jeff Bezos is a clever dude. And he’s bald, which makes me like him that much more.
Call it something you want to call it, but I trust that many smart commercial enterprises humans will start presenting some “lockers” to their customers in the coming years. Not only Fortune or ebooks. But to save fees, estimates, invoices, orders, documentation, photographs, and so on. For example, when I sell a new software program application to a consumer, I might create a customized “locker” for them to download their trendy updates, manuals, schooling guides, and all of our office work. It maintains them tied to my employer. And it’s an additional value-upload: clients may not fear approximately storing all of these items and can effortlessly get the right of entry to it from our website. And if I want to provide some extra products as incentives, I can do that too. Each patron would have personal space on our servers (or a few servers I hire someplace) with their individual access.