I’ve already written about Square’s and Google’s upcoming digital wallet initiatives. Already there is a new product related to these soon to be mainstays of retail, Slice is a support app which works much like a remora near the mouths of sharks. The fact is that even now there are growing opportunities for retailers to market things via email, and we all do a growing amount of online shopping. The result is an increasing proportion of your email inbox being flooded with coupons, receipts, shipping details and other shopping related information. Slice is a tool (an add-on for Yahoo mail so far…Gmail may be in the near future…) which collates all of these commerce related emails and organized then for you to keep track of purchases, shipping dates, when and where you bought something, and even a quite way to get started on returning some product you don’t want…
This strikes me as a smart business idea, since the digital wallet is an idea which is out there; it will only take some time for this ‘disruptive change’ to percolate through our society. Slice looks to be poised to take advantage of this huge market…
Slice Creates a Home for Everything You Buy in Your Inbox
http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/slice
The problem is an all too familiar one for frequent online shoppers: Online purchases are followed up with email order confirmations and shipping information messages that can easily be lost in the inbox. Those receipts pack meaningful data and Slice seeks to put that information at users’ fingertips.
Because it’s embedded within the new Yahoo Mail experience, the All My Purchases application helps users extract the commerce data housed inside of their inboxes. The app highlights open orders and shipments, as well as last received purchases under the “Home” tab. The user can dive into the “Track Shipments” tab to check out his purchases in transit or browse within the “Purchase History” tab to view and filter all of his previous online orders.
The startup extracts important data pieces such as item order numbers, customer service phone numbers and retailer return policies — via extraction algorithms that took more than a year to build — and presents the information in an easy-to-find fashion.
And Slice isn’t only interested in online purchases. The startup is tracking the rise of electronic receipts issued by brick-and-mortar stores and will work to extract purchase data from these receipts as well. As more of these retailers adopt e-receipts, Slice will grow in utility, offering users a single place to reference all of their past purchases.
The startup is currently focused on supporting its Yahoo Mail application and the thousands of new users that are just now being introduced to the product through Yahoo. It also makes a Gmail purchase extraction tool, however, currently in limited release.
Slice
https://www.projectslice.com
Big names back Project Slice’s smarter shopping inbox
http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/26/project-slice
Project Slice offers the service through both an embedded application in Yahoo Mail (which should help the company get in front of lots of eyeballs quickly) and through its own Slice Web application, which is currently invite-only beta testing. So the company says users will be able to easily track shipping, bring up a merchant’s customer service and return information, and see all of their purchases — not just the store where they made the purchase, but what they actually bought.
Slice can also aggregate all of your online purchase history with specific businesses, including popular retailers like Amazon.com and daily deals sites, like Groupon. The company says the service is powered by a “sophisticated semantic parsing infrastructure that enables us to extract and organize item level purchase information from multiple merchants and receipt formats.”
Who Will Win at Mobile Payments? Google or Square?
http://allthingsd.com/20110526/who-will-win-at-mobile-payments-google-or-square
Google unveiled a mobile wallet and deals program that will allow users to tap their Android phone at the register to pay using near field communication (NFC) technology.
At the press conference today, it also said it has built a deal network, much like Groupon, that offers consumers discounts and loyalty programs for local retailers and merchants.
(It was only a tiny bit deflating later in the day when PayPal sued Google and its top two payment execs).
Rewind to earlier this week when Square, the company founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, also announced its mobile payment plans.
On Monday, Dorsey showed Square’s way of replacing wallets without using NFC.
Instead of NFC, users order and pay with an iPhone application, where their credit card information is stored. At checkout, they give their name to the cashier, who will need to use an iPad as a register in order to complete the transaction.
Square also envisions building a local deals network.
Both systems are headed into trials at various locations around the country. Google will be expanding nationwide by summer.
In the meantime, which player–Google or Square–is the likely winner?
Put bluntly, neither system is good enough right now.
Even though it seems certain that as a society we will increasingly move away from cash as a primary method of payment, it will take plenty of experiments–and future iterations–to get it right.
Both Google and Square are plagued with the same problem: Making bets on technology and partners that limit the addressable market.
In doing so, neither is able to a cast a big enough net to have a truly disruptive service.
For instance, Google’s solution works only on NFC-enabled Android smartphones running on the Sprint network (Sprint has only one NFC-enabled phone).
Square is on the opposite end of the hardware spectrum.
Its system requires a consumer to have an iPhone and a merchant to have an iPad. It said Android applications are coming soon.
