July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung gets a lot of flack for aping Apples’ hardware design, but it does its share of copying on the software end, too.

The Korean electronics company is taking the wraps off of Wallet, its ticket management app that’s almost painfully reminiscent of Apple’s Passbook, which it announced last June.

Like Passbook, Wallet stores movie tickets, boarding passes, and membership cards from a central, digital hub. The app also has location-based push notifications, so alerting you when you’re at a place where you can use the stashed digital coupons.

Samsung plans to offer an open API for the app, so third parties can plug in and expand its functionality. (MLB, Walgreens, Hotels.com, and others have already been announced as partners.) It’s all very Passbook-sounding.

The similarities to Apple’s app even extend Wallet’s icon, which looks a whole lot like Passbook’s. Samsung has landed in hot water over this kind of stuff before, so it’s a bit disconcerting to see that little has changed.

The good news here? Samsung phone owners finally have their own answer to Passbook — though who knows if Samsung will open the app up to the larger Android ecosystem. Perhaps Google has created a monster after all.

The video below (found via The Verge) gives you a good sense of how closely Wallet resembles Passbook.

Top photo:Twitter/stroughtonsmith

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has taken inspiration from Apple’s Passbook to give its Android customers a more instantaneous way to pull up their boarding passes with Google Now.

Google Now is a personal assistant app for Android devices that aims to surface the information you want, when you need it: optimal driving route, weather, sports scores, and nearby restaurant options. Google Now also accepts voice commands, making it Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. Today, the app is starting to act like another one of Apple’s interesting apps: Passbook.

Wednesday, Google refreshed its Search application for Android. Version 4.1 comes with a few handy-dandy travel additions to Now, including a new card that automatically surfaces your electronic boarding passes from your Gmail account and shows them to you when you’re at the airport.

Sounds familiar, right? Essentially, what we have here is a Passbook feature-clone, but a pretty clever one at that. Why use a separate app when Google can connect the dots between Gmail and Now to find your boarding passes for you? For comparison, iPhone users add their boarding passes to Passbook from the vendor’s Passbook-enabled application.

Google said the boarding pass card is launching shortly for United Airlines, but will work with other airline’s in the future.

Travelers may also appreciate the addition of Google Now cards that display the weather of your destination city and highlight events happening nearby. Google Search for Android now comes up with other Google Now cards, including one for birthday reminders and one for using your camera to search when at a museum.

Photo credit: Wayan Vota/Flickr

After building a significant business around making push messages easier to use, Urban Airship is now aiming to do the same with Apple’s Passbook with the acquisition of Tello.

The small startup has developed PassTools, a visual editor for Apple’s Passbook that lets anyone create passes without dealing with complicated code. Think of it like those simple webpage creators that made it possible to create a site without the headache of HTML. For Urban Airship, it’s an early play on a potentially explosive new market of mobile publishers.

“Passbook allows companies to have a mobile presence without building an app and having consumers download it. … Now they can just build a pass,” said Urban Airship chief marketing officer Brent Heiggelke in an interview with VentureBeat. “We think this is very complementary [with push messaging].”

Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed. Urban Airship will keep Tello’s Palo Alto offices, which will give it a Silicon Valley base in addition to its San Francisco office and Portland, Ore. headquarters. All of Tello’s employees will move over to Urban Airship’s new Digital Wallet group, which Tello chief executive Joe Beninato will head up.

As Beninato tells it, Apple made it very difficult for publishers to create Passbook passes. The biggest issue? There was no way to see what your pass looked like while you were building it — instead you had to load it on an iPhone after you finished coding the pass. With PassTools, the company developed a visual editor to show what your pass would look like in real time, and it has also layered its own API on top of Apple’s Passbook API, allowing you to fully build a pass without using any JSON code.

Tello originally launched two years ago with a mobile feedback product, but it saw a bigger business opportunity when Apple announced Passbook in June and rushed to release PassTools alongside the release of iOS 6 on September 19.

“The plan wasn’t let’s build this thing and sell it off a couple months later,” Beninato said.

But he quickly realized how well Tello would fit alongside Urban Airship. Beninato said he’s known Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton for several years and that the companies shared some investors, which made an acquisition fairly painless.

As for Urban Airship’s new Digital Wallet group, Beninato said it will be preparing for the launch of wallet services on other platforms (Android already has Google Wallet, though that’s still in its early stages). For now, the team will be working on integrating its tech with Urban Airship.

“We’re really excited about the idea of being able to work with companies outside of the need for having an app,” Heiggelke added.  “We think there are a lot of companies where a pass may end up being a better solution for them than an app. Being able to work with those companies and develop a really effective mobile program … is really significant for our business.”

Urban Airship, which has powered more than 30 billion push messages through its platform, added location capabilities to its push platform September. With Tello, the company is continuing to make the simple push message one of the most interesting features in smartphones.

Tello has raised $2.7 million from True Ventures, Bullpen Capital, 500 Startups, Felicis Ventures, and others. The company currently has five full-time employees and five part-time employees. Urban Airship has raised around $22 million so far from True Ventures, Foundry Group, Verizon, Salesforce, and others.

Influence-scoring startup Klout today updated its iPhone application to allow members to receive rewards on their phones and add an influence identification card to Apple’s Passbook application.

Klout is the San Francisco-based company that scores a person’s influence from one to 100. The startup’s complex scoring algorithm is put to use by brand and marketer partners to offer people with high scores “perks” such as product freebies and exclusive access to content or programs. To date, Klout has issued 800,000 perks to members through more than 450 partnerships.

Klout for iPhone now comes with perks, previously a web-only experience. The application user can check out offered perks, receive notifications for perks that he or she qualifies for, and claim perks from inside the application.

Also new is Klout integration with Apple Passbook, the digital wallet-like application native to the iOS experience.

Members can choose to add a “Klout Card” to Passbook in the latest version of the app. The card, pictured right, displays a person’s name, photo, and score, and includes a QR code that he or she can use at places providing Klout members with special access or services.

The company also promised to dole out rewards better suited for each member, and enhanced the web experience around perks to make offers easier to claim and share with friends.

Photo credit: SynergyByDesign/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Add Starbucks to the list of big-name companies that have updated their mobile applications to work with Passbook, Apple’s wallet-like application for storing mobile coupons, gift cards, electronic tickets, and now making mobile payments by proxy.

The coffee conglomerate officially launched Passbook integration today at a company leadership conference in Houston. The update allows Starbucks customers with iPhones and iPods to store their digital cards in Passbook for quick and easy mobile payments.

Starbucks mobile pay, a prominent feature of the company’s iPhone and Android applications, was launched in January 2011. Customers carry a digital equivalent of their Starbucks cards on their mobile phones and scan a barcode to pay-by-phone at the register. Starbucks has processed more than 70 million mobile payment transactions to date.

The Starbucks iPhone application now prompts you to “add to Passbook” on launch. Application users can also optionally identify their favorite Starbucks locations so that as they walk into those stores, the Passbook icon will appear on their lock screen for instant access to their digital Starbucks card.

Apple’s Passbook aims to put iOS device owners’ important transactional information at their fingertips for automatic access. The wallet-like application doesn’t directly support mobile payments but instead is ideal for storing mobile tickets and coupons from brands and retailers. Passbook can, as demonstrated by the Starbucks integration, store other payment apps and help iPhone owners facilitate mobile transactions faster.

Passbook requires the support of third-party developers. A small selection of companies and brands, including American Express, Target, Ticketmaster, and Lufthansa, already support Passbook. Once an application updates to support Passbook, the application user can choose to then store select items, such as a Starbucks card, in their Passbook.

In other mobile payment news, Starbucks also announced Thursday that it would start accepting Square Wallet payments at 7,000 U.S. company-operated stores in early November. Square makes a much lesser-known wallet application for mobile payments at select merchants.

Starbucks and payment startup Square first teamed up in early August in an oddly structured deal that saw the coffee company invest $25 million in the New York up-start. In return, Square started processing all of Starbucks U.S. credit credit transactions at discounted rates.

The Square Wallet application is not integrated with Starbucks’ mobile applications, or a part of Apple’s Passbook. Coffee buyers can, however, opt to pay with either the Starbucks’ mobile application or the Square Wallet application come early November. By summer 2013, customers can use either app for digital tipping as well, Starbucks said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Surprise, surprise, Apple is being sued again. A San Diego gaming and restaurant software company is suing Apple for infringing four of its patents in the new iOS 6 Passbook app.

While it’s no shock to hear Apple’s being sued, it’s a tiny bit shocking that Samsung’s not on the other side of the V. A little more shocking is that the company involved is not, exactly, a patent troll — Ameranth actually has real, for-sale products. And perhaps even just a bit more shocking is that the company has received strategic investments from both Microsoft and Motorola.

Ameranth v. Apple is all about about Passbook.

Passbook is Apple’s entrant in the mobile wallet sweepstakes. Currently, it’s for tickets, boarding passes, and gift cards, and while it may graduate at some point to hold your VISA or American Express credit cards, currently Apple has only lightly integrated with  one credit card provider.

But it has the potential to grow, and to grow into the mobile wallet space highly coveted by giants such as Google, Microsoft (which just demoed a mobile wallet on Windows Phone 8), eBay, MasterCard, and others.

Ameranth says the software violates four of its patents: 6,384,850, 6,871,325, 6,982,733, and 8,146,077. The first two are both titled “Information management and synchronous communications system with menu generation,” and the second two are similarly titled: “Information management and synchronous communications system with menu generation, and handwriting and voice modification of orders.”

And yes, the patents are just about as bland as their titles: fairly generic-seeming data synchronization routines, plus data display.

But, Ameranth states in its court filing, several of its patents have been cited by Apple:

One of the Ameranth patents-in-suit, U.S. Patent No. 6,384,850 — the first patent issued in this Ameranth patent family — was cited as a prior art reference in two Apple iPhone patents issued to named inventors Bas Ording and Steven P. Jobs.

That, plus the fact that Ameranth has actual products, makes this more than just a money grabbing patent troll assault. Perhaps not much more — a cursory glance at Ameranth’s home page reveals more focus on patents than seemingly anything else — but definitely more.

The really interesting part comes in Ameranth’s PDF product overviews, such as this one for its Poker Room Manager software. Just after the obligatory “Ameranth has a very strong IP portfolio” statement, with reference to acquired patents, is this: “Ameranth has received strategic investments from Microsoft, Motorola/Symbol, Springboard Capital, and Western Pacific Capital.”

A strategic investment is often small in dollars but large in, well, strategy. And sometimes strategic investments cover a company’s posterior portions via guaranteed patent protection.

Food for thought, no?

VentureBeat contacted Ameranth for more information, but we have not heard back yet. We will be contacting Microsoft and Motorola for any comments as well.

photo credit: LucasTheExperience via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

American Express is launching an integration with Apple’s Passbook today. (Disclosure: I own a small stake in $AXP .) Passbook, a feature of Apple’s newly released iOS 6, is a mobile wallet that allows iPhone and iPod touch users to keep frequently used cards at their fingertips. Some examples include a boarding pass from American Airlines or United, or movie tickets from Fandango. Instead of having to fumble through apps, these items are available immediately. They can also pop up automatically based on a user’s location.

Before you get too excited, no you won’t be able to pay with AmEx using Passbook. (Most retailers don’t have the infrastructure to take payments like that.) But you will be able to get details on recent transactions as they happen.

“We’ve essentially re-imagined what’s possible for the newly launched Apple iOS6 Passbook technology – taking it beyond just mobile ticketing, coupons, and loyalty cards,” AmEx spokesman Brad Minor told me in an email. “This is an entirely new use-case for Pass that makes it useful every day, and not just for specific occasions.”

In the initial release, AmEx will be able to notify cardholders when there’s a new transaction on their account. Cardholders can also see current balance and access other recent transactions and customer service information.

The real-time notification capability allows AmEx to have a two-way dialogue with consumers that hasn’t really existed before. This creates a channel that AmEx could use for new features:

• See nearby offers from merchants based on your phone’s location. AmEx has been a leader among the credit card companies in creating offers.
• If a charge is flagged by AmEx fraud systems as suspicious, the network could send a real-time alert to the user’s registered phone number. The user could then enter a PIN to verify the transaction. Or, the transaction could automatically be verified by determining that the phone is in the same location as the merchant. This would help alleviate the pain of false positives in fraud alerts, increasing legitimate transactions, decrease fraud, and decrease customer service calls. Even in the current implementation, simply knowing that a transaction was attempted in Fiji while you’re in Chicago helps to identify fraud.
• Real-time reviews. Once someone has dined at a restaurant and paid, the transaction alert could be used to solicit a review. This would allow AmEx to create a very powerful competitor to Yelp that avoids two of the biggest data problems with Yelp: it ensures that only verified customers can review a business, and it should increase the volume of data collected by closing the loop and soliciting feedback. (Disclosure: I am short $YELP.) As I’ve written before, transaction data makes AmEx the king of checkins.
• Real-time redemption of Membership Rewards points, AmEx’s loyalty program. When a transaction occurs, the notification could offer consumers the option to pay with points instead of with cash.
• Transaction review data for the blind. The real-time transaction information could be spoken to blind customers, allowing them to verify the transaction amount that was authorized and resolve any issues while they are still at a business instead of after the fact.

The Passbook integration will go live later today.

[Update: AmEx has not yet launched Passbook integration. I will update this story when it has launched.]

[Update: The integration has launched as of Sept. 27. Go to amexpassbook.com on a Passbook-capable device to configure your pass.]

Real-time communication between the consumer and payment networks offers a lot of interesting possibilities. Although today’s move is a small step, it’s an important one that shows how AmEx stays ahead of other card networks.

AmEx adds real time account alerts to Apple’s Passbook.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Developers are already releasing their own gift and loyalty card apps for Passbook — an app that puts your loyalty cards, coupons, boarding passes, event tickets, and more on the iPhone. The app launched today, alongside iOS 6, Apple’s latest mobile operating system.

Passbook comes pre-loaded in iOS 6, and is, get this, an app that app builders can build apps for — it’s kind of its own little platform. Developers are able to create Passbook applications of their various gift cards and tickets, branded to their liking. When a user downloads these apps from the App Store, they will immediately be installed inside Passbook for use.

“The tool-set enables folks like us — developers — to be able to personalize [the apps] to our brand,” said senior vice president of Major League Baseball Events Media Adam Ritter in an interview with VentureBeat. “If you think about MLB, we have 30 clubs and every club has a very distinct logo and color palette. We had the flexibility with Passbook to create tickets that were unique to the individual club.”

The MLB was one of the Passbook apps available at launch, and was featured at Apple’s iPhone 5 launch event on September 12.

Ritter says the company is already offering mobile tickets, which are rising in popularity for the sport. The company was even sending them to customers via SMS. Passbook was a natural next step.

And more companies are flocking to the app now that it is available for broad use. According to MacRumors, Ticketmaster, Fandago, Lufthansa, and Walgreens Passbook apps are now all available for download.

While Password is one of those “duh, this should exist” apps, it does have its downfalls. There’s the age-old issue of your phone dying on you before you get to the event, and paper just doesn’t have as many glitches as technology does. But, of course, you could lose the paper and then you’d have no chance of seeing Bon Jovi sing Livin’ on a Prayer. But, for companies such as Sephora and Starbucks, the reason to devote resources to building a Passbook app go deeper than “convenience.”

“Our customers love Apple products and so we like to go where our customers are and do things that enhance their experience and connect them to the brand on devices and with platforms that they are already using and already love,” said Starbucks senior vice president and chief digital officer Adam Brotman in an interview with VentureBeat.

Senior vice president of Sephora Digital, Julie Bornstein, told us that 75 percent of customers who accessed Sephora online (via website or mobile app) did so from an Apple device.

For those looking to develop for the Passbook app, David Nelsen, chief executive of Giftango, has a word of warning. You’ll need to make sure you can connect to the merchant’s servers to get real time information about gift cards and purchases. You’ll also need to comply with any branding that company has. These tasks are less pressing if you are the one offering the ticket, gift card, or loyalty program.

hat tip MacRumors; Passbook image via VentureBeat