Apple Pay: Burger King Sides With PayPal and It Won't Matter In the Long Run

Source:  iMore.

Burger King is siding with PayPal as its mobile payment of choice for its mobile app.  To entice users, it'll be offering special deals.  It'll be interesting if the details of such a deal come to light and what Burger King gets out of this deal or if it only wanted to to partner with PayPal as a means to differentiate with rival McDonald's who partnered with Apple Pay.

Before folks go head first into how Burger King is signing its own death warrant or other end-of-life analogy, remember that Starbucks has yet to offer Apple Pay and has been offering mobile payment through its own app for years now and has been quite successful.

In the long run, it won't matter if Apple Pay continues to flourish and more retailers realize that by not offering Apple Pay, they will miss out on Apple's more affluent iOS users as a percentage of user base. 

The differentiators won't be about mobile payment of quality of service and food.  Customers will not switch to Big Macs if they prefer Whoppers just because they can't use Apple Pay.  The can't be said about the backlash for drugstores CVS and Rite Aid because they have nothing to offer mobile warriors that is different than Walgreens. 

In the long run, many of these retailers will have to offer Apple Pay and Paypal as these mobile payments are here to stay.  Paypal does seem relatively more secured than the CurrentC, as offered by the MCX retailers, being prepped as an alernative to NFC payment (which is what Apple Pay is based on). 

Apple Pay is here to stay.  There is already defection from the MCX cartel and more will follow.  Retailers on the fence will also fall in line with the more secured NFC platform. 

What Happens When Your iPad Is Destroyed By A Space Vehicle? Apple Will Replace It

Apple will replace your damaged iOS device if it was destroyed by a spaceship...with this kind of publicity, it is no wonder that Apple has some of the most loyal and fanatic customer base?

Source:  Cult of Mac.

Mobile Payment: Question for MCX guys - What Happens When You Get Hacked And the Bad Guys Empty My Checking Account?

Every few weeks, you hear about this or that retailer getting hacked and millions of credit cards are stolen.  Okay, when that happens, we talk to our bank and change the numbers on the credit card or, worse, have charges reversed if we happen to be unlucky enough to have been a victim of credit card fraud. 

With the consumer-unfriendly CurrentC being developed by good folks at Walmart, Target, CVS, and a few others and slated for 2015, there is one question that has been bugging me beyond these retailers asking for very personal questions like social security numbers and sharing with each other our buying habits that has not been asked.

What happens when, not if, one or more of these retailers and "third parties" they will inevitably blame when the CurrentC system is hacked to our bank accounts?  Do we need new bank account numbers?  Change banks? 

And will will put the stolen money back in when they're emptied by these hackers?  Does anyone know? 

CurrencyC: The Mobile Payment System Supported by CVS Hacked Already

MCX, the retailer group that wants everything but your first-born from you, that is offering their own mobile payment system as an alternative to other forms of payment systems like NFC, is still months if not a whole year away from offering the dubious service.  The system, CurrenyC, is still in beta.  Neverthless, it's never too early to get hacked right?

That's exactly what happened when it informed beta testers and folks interested in the system that there was unauthorized access to their e-mails.  (Source:  Macrumors)

Given the bad press that CurrencyC is getting, I'm going to go ahead and make this prediction:  we're going to see some defections just ahead of the Christmas shopping season starts.

Mobile Payment: Retailers, Here's How To Have A Great Christmas This Year

With all the back and forth over NFC payment (I know there is a lot of attention on Apple Pay but it is more than that - it's NFC implementations like Google Wallet), here is how a retailer can do well this Christmas shopping season.  Open up a couple of checkouts just for shoppers who want to pay with the NFC-enabled mobile devices.

That's right.  It's that simple.  While many in the Apple camp like to boast about how wealthy the iPhone demographic is, Android users savvy enough to use Google Wallet probably are not doing too badly themselves.  In general, those who are likely to take up new tech features probably are smart and wealthier.  If I'm right, this is how retailers not beholden to the Merchant Customer Exchange that forbid its members from offering NFC payment options to potential customers can race ahead of the competition. 

Already, Android and iPhone fans are calling for an united front to boycott CVS and Rite Aid and there are dozens more companies that we can put the financial hurt on this Holidays season.  Savvy retailers who do offer NFC can make it easier for us and use this opportunity to capture our hard-earned money.

Offer us an exclusive checkout lane or two along with your deals, and we'd gladly spend our money at your stores.

GTA Bit Off More Than It Could Chew In Deal With Apple, And Apple Picked the Wrong Partner

Source:  Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg post does shed some light on the failed venture between Apple and bankrupted GT Advanced.  While all such deals carry risks, the amount of risk GTA took on was more than it bargained for.  I believe the part that in the post where Apple told GTA that it required the same terms from other supplies.  GTA simply was not the right company or had the right people to follow through.

It does sound like I'm placing the bulk of the blame on GTA but I think it's Apple that picked the wrong partner for sapphire covers that was obviously meant for the iPhones.  Had this deal worked out, it would have been a selling point for Apple that would further set the iPhone apart from competing devices. 

Having said that, there are few companies out there that can take on this kind of risk and Apple is obviously one of them. 

Yosemite's New Spotlight Features Are Awesome And Should Worry Search Guys

Here is a reference post from Appleinsider that is worth looking at on the new and improved Spotlight that comes with OS X 10.10, Yosemite.  I've been using it since it came out last week and I'm loving how fast and powerful it is.

In fact, it kinda made me wonder how inefficient I was before.

Calculator, currency conversions, movie times, and search results as well as easy to understand privacy settings for us paranoid folks.  All done the Apple way which means everything is presented beautifully and easy to use.

I would love to see this translate over the iOS, particularly on the iPad.

What would really make take Spotlight up another level is for Apple to merge Siri with Spotlight on the Mac soon.  What are missing are results likesports scores, weather, and other inquires that we don't quite need to go to the search engines to find.

And yes, while some of the search results do come from search engines, Apple is slowly peeling away the layers of search one result at a time to deprive Google in particular of valuable search revenues.  If users can find what they need in Spotlight without having to go to the Web, that means there will be less tracking for Google and ad revenues.

What's that Chinese saying?  Death by a thousand cuts?  Well, Apple won't quite kill off traditional search this way.  But it is making search engines less and less relevant for a sizable amount of inquiries.