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You’ll Be Able To Deposit Checks To PayPal Via Mobile Pictures In The Next Day Or So

Today, TechCrunch.com mentioned last month, that PayPal would soon launch a new version of their iPhone app that would be more check-friendly. PayPal’s Laura Chambers revealed on stage today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, that the app should be released in the next day or so.

On a panel alongside Keith Rabois from Square and Holger Luedorf from Foursquare, Chambers said that this new app will allow you to take a picture of the front and back of a check with your iPhone camera, and it will be added to your PayPal balance.

Such functionality has been explored by some banks already, and it’s a very useful technology. Chambers notes that the ability to do this actually stemmed from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 nine years ago when much of the infrastructure of the U.S. was either shut down on purpose or was struggling under the weight of demand. The U.S. then started to pass legislation to make things like this possible. Such a system allows you to easily transfer money under a variety of situations, obviously.

Mobile Receipt – The Best Expense Management App

So much for games and utilities, iPhones can be great aids as well when it comes to monitoring and systemizing your finances. Businessmen or employees who are required to submit expense reports normally have to fix up their receipts and make sure that they are itemized and ready for reimbursement. The Mobile Receipt app from Mitek Systems does just that and is perhaps one reason why it jumped all the way to number one at the App Store.

And while many deny it, one common practice is forging some receipts to so that they can reimburse a higher amount that what they had actually spent. Some get away with it while others get caught. Between the two, you would not want to be caught cheating your way for some extra cash.

But for the people who want an easy way to create and expense report, the Mobile Receipt app is the app for you. No wonder it made its way to the top! The app is available at the App Store for FREE. You can view a video demo here.

Growing Smartphone Adoption

Forrester Research has run the polling stations in an effort to determine how many of the Generation Y and Generation X in the US are using smartphones. Those two generations are the people 18-44 years of age, and the combined results returned 23% of them declaring smartphone ownership.

The youngsters of Gen Y, which are 18-30 years old, have been the fastest to adopt any new and trendy features appearing in their smartphones. Social networking, for example, has exploded in the last two years, and 2/3 of Gen Y has a profile online.

Gen X, on the other hand, are also early adopters, but being more mesmerized by the sheer fact they can browse or navigate with their phones, while the younger crowd takes phone capabilities for granted, and is not spending so much time perfecting their usage. The survey has been done with 43, 000 participants, in the second quarter of 2010.

Using Your Smartphone

People use their smartphones for far more than keeping in touch with family, friends and colleagues. Research finds that while smartphones get used a lot for communicating, people also pull out their phone to surf, play and work. The results come from a study that tracked people on their smartphones in the United States and United Kingdom.

Volunteers received free phones running the Windows Mobile platform and equipped with an unlimited voice and data plan, along with software that recorded the phone’s use. The study also looked at how much people used their smartphones. The results show that people spent half the time on their smartphones to keep in touch with others through emails, text messages and phone calls. The next most common activity, accounting for 12% of smartphone use, was browsing the internet.

The phones were also versatile entertainment gadgets. One-fifth of phone time was split almost equally between media and games. People listened to music, looked at pictures, watched videos and played games like poker and solitare. The phones weren’t all play, though. People did spend a portion of their time, although small (just two percent), being productive. They consulted calendars, read PDF files and wrote documents. An equal amount of time was spent looking at maps.

Despite most people having at least 40 applications on their phones, almost everyone only handled one app at a time. Seldom did people multitask with their phones.
Interestingly, it mattered little what people said their main reason was for using a smartphone. Some wanted a smartphone to keep connected with people, others wanted a tool to help them manage their life. Still others hoped a smartphone would enhance their productivity at work. Regardless of their reasons, everyone ended up spending similar proportions of time using their phone to play, surf, work and communicate.

Your Smartphone and You

Some people say you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at what they drive, others say by looking at what they wear or what they eat, but in today’s high-tech culture I think we may be about to tell a lot about someone by simply looking at what smart phone they use.

Users of Apple’s iPhone tend to be younger and favor the Macintosh, Android smartphone owners tend to be more technical than the average consumer and BlackBerry users are “old-fashioned.” That’s according to a recent report by Retrevo, a consumer electronics review and shopping website that said it surveyed 7,500 people from March through July of this year.

Several of the questions only yielded slight differences in results. For example, there was only a 1% difference between the percentage of iPhone, Android and Blackberry users who don’t recycle their old devices. But that didn’t stop Retrevo from coming up with a profile for each user category.

According to the website, 49.4% of iPhone owners own at least one Mac. Conversely, households where the Macintosh operating system is listed as the primary technology, users purchase more than three times as many iPhones and almost six times as many iPads. Iphone users are also more likely to make purchases with their handsets and watch television online. For some reason, they are 23% more likely to rent videos from Blockbuster than Android users.

Android users, Retrevo says, tend to be tech-savvy, own net-books, use their phone for GPS navigation and don’t read books (so passé?). Almost a third of Android users surveyed also said they don’t own a landline, compared to just 23% of iPhone and BlackBerry owners.

In a possible sign of the BlackBerry’s diminishing coolness factor, Retrevo says BlackBerry users are slightly more likely to still be using old tube televisions as their primary TV (59% versus 52% of iPhone owners and 57% of Android users), get music from the radio and are less likely to buy things with their phones. They are, however, good citizens; they recycle their old gadgets at a higher rate than owners of other devices (38% versus 37% of iPhone owners and 33% of Android owners), Retrevo found. That is if they live in areas where electronic waste recycling is available.
The average iPhone user is 38.7 years old, compared with 39.3 for Android owners and 41.1 for BlackBerry users, Retrevo said.

Apple Knows How to Profit

The below chart is so telling, showing as it does Apple’s slice of mobile industry profits in comparison to its actual sliver of a slice of the mobile industry itself.

Apple’s market presence and the overall mobile market will continue to grow and their profits will follow. Mitek, much like Apple, predicted the growth of the mobile market and is now fulfilling many peoples wants, needs, and desires with their great innovative mobile applications. The applications that Mitek offers are supported on major smartphone platforms like Apple, BlackBerry, and Android.

Smartphones and Mobile Deposit

When camera-phones were first launched the digital camera industry was not at all concerned, claiming they would never catch on and never rival their sales. This confidence was shattered when camera-phones took 90% of the market. The world’s first camera-phone was launched in 2000. By 2003, more camera-phones were sold globally than all stand-alone digital cameras. By the next year, camera-phones alone outsold all types of stand-alone cameras (digital and film-based). Today camera-phones outsell stand-alone cameras by 10 to 1.

In hindsight, it should have been clear from the outset, the huge consumer uptake. Mobile phones are everywhere, portable, convenient and always on you, it just makes sense.

At the beginning the camera-phones had a few issues, like low mega-pixels and only being able to send it as an MMS. But as these problems were overcome, there was nothing standing in the way, and the entire mass market shifted. Most if not all of the current Smartphones have cameras, and their cameras are quite good. The quality of the images that the smartphones deliver are as good and sometime better than the regular digital cameras. Because the cameras on these smartphones are so awesome the technology based around them has become phenomenal. Utilizing your phone to deposit a check is possible with ease due to a combination of high quality Mitek technology and high quality cameras that are now on smartphones. As the market for smartphones continues to grow, so will the demand for Mitek’s Mobile Deposit application, which is offered on iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android platforms.

Putting the Smart in Smartphones

Being away from your desk is no excuse for not getting work done. With the e-business era companies are looking to automate their entire business processes by going mobile. Today’s smartphones have become work necessities, not mere niceties. The smartphones available in the market combine portable storage with e-mail, camera, browser, push email, business card storage, video functions as well as compact word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications, and apps for almost everything else — all in an ultra-portable and lightweight form.

Shady Saeed, Senior Manager Product Marketing, Wireless for Etisalat, says that companies that adopt office automation have two main needs. “One is basic communication which is now moving to email, replacing fax and other forms of paper communication. As companies use email for official business communication, there is a need to access email no matter when or where the employee is, especially for companies that run businesses that are sensitive to time schedule and team coordination,” he says.

Advanced companies however are not only using e-mail, but they have started to automate all their businesses processes to move towards the eBusiness era and are looking for methods to mobilise this eBusiness infrastructure.

There are several solutions, and BlackBerry is one of them. The BlackBerry solution has an element called MDS (mobile data system), a part of the BlackBerry enterprise server that is installed on the company side and integrates with the company IP network. The MDS is capable of integrating different IT systems that the company has and makes it possible to access these eBusiness processes no matter when or where the company task force is.
“New features on the BlackBerry move an office out of a brick and mortar environment and include full integration to the company IT system including e-mail, high-speed access due to the integral design of the system that gives it an edge over any other mobile solution,” says Saeed.

The evolution of broadband devices, technologies and services, as well as the growing number of mobile technologies supporting personal communication, has further urged businesses to embrace mobile working policies.

Schedule Some Downtime?

Once upon a time, we didn’t have gadgets surrounding us all the time. Do you remember that? You might, but perhaps only vaguely if research reported by the New York Times is true. Researchers at the University of California have determined that we need downtime/periods of low activity in order to digest things we’ve experienced while active. These periods allow the brain to turn things learned into long-term memories, which is the process of learning by doing.

Current technology has given us the ability to be totally connected to, and often immersed in, the world-wide web. We are bombarded with information from the minute we wake up in the morning until our head hits the pillow at night. We have computers flooding us with information all day. We even use our laptops or iPads to access expanded content for TV shows we are watching. Worst have smartphones connected to the web — and thus the world — 24/7. We have them with us all the time, even when we shouldn’t, and they steal our attention during much-needed periods of downtime.

Once we pull the gadget, whatever form it takes, out of our pocket or bag, downtime is over. It’s bad enough that we’re not giving our brains sufficient time to process the constant information bombardment, but we interrupt those times we should be focusing on things that really matter. Smartphones and current technology are great, but sometimes you just need to take a break from using them every so often.

I make every effort to step away from the gadgets and allow myself some healthy downtime, but having information available all the time makes that harder to do, as it’s now a habit. It’s not unusual to find two people out at a restaurant and both of them focused on their small smart phone screens or people emailing/texting while driving. What people are not doing is taking a break. Instead they are opting for further information stimulation. Sure, we talk about what we just read, as we like to share things. That’s not the point.

It’s almost like a craving: the need to know what’s going on everywhere, every minute. It used to be we only worried about missing a favorite TV show. Now we worry we’re not keeping up with everything in the world. It doesn’t make sense when you see it in black and white.

What we must do is put down the gadgets and step away from the computer at regular intervals throughout the day. If your job absolutely requires that you be connected via a computer throughout the day, that is fine, just make sure to take a break once you leave the office. Things like regular conversation, taking a walk, playing a sport, or simply reading a book are great ideas for downtime. Your brain needs the downtime to turn the things you learned earlier into long-term memories. Otherwise they’re lost.