Mobile Wallet: Consumers Are Hesitant, For Good Reason

A new survey by Compete suggests most consumers are not yet inclined to use mobile wallet services, despite apparent awareness of around two thirds of respondents. 


About two thirds of people who use debit cards and credit cards say they aren’t planning to start anytime soon. Just seven percent of banking consumers indicated that they would be very or extremely likely to start using their phone or tablet to make a bill payment. 


About five percent of banking consumers said they would be likely to start using their mobile device to make a deposit. Most also say they aren’t likely to start using their mobile device to make a point-of-sale purchase.


None of that should be surprising. Consumers need a clear value proposition, and it still isn't clear that has been established. Mobile Wallet: Consumers Are Hesitant Few wallet services have been able to fully develop the features they believe will clearly add significant value for consumers, and few retailers are able to support those features, either. 


Beyond that, few consumers actually are able to use near field communications, for example, since their current devices are not equipped to do so. 

Although current use and intended adoption rates for mobile services are low, once consumers adopt mobile financial or money services and start using their phone as a mobile wallet, they use the services frequently, the survey also shows. Some 16 percent of consumers using "Mobile tap and pay" do so daily and another 36 percent use it weekly. A full 87 percent of consumers using mobile couponing do so at least once a month.


There is one important element to keep in mind for any brand-new service such as mobile wallets, namely that it usually is quite impossible for end users to understand or to quantify their possible use of a product they have not yet experienced. 


Apple, for example, has not had a history of conducting market research about any of its new products, on the theory that consumers cannot really describe their possible use of a product they never have seen.

Minimum Viable Product Development: Steve Jobs Didn't Do It

As popular as the approach seems to be, one wonders whether Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO, ever bothered with development using the "minimum viable product" approach. 


One can safely assume he did not, as minimum viable product development requires some amount of end user feedback about the prototype.

The whole point of designing using this approach is that a development team collects the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Jobs never seemed to think that consumers could provide much valuable input about products that solved problems they didn't know they had.


In this, as in other fundamental ways, Steve Jobs broke the rules. Keep in mind that the point of a minimum viable product approach is not to create a "minimum" commercial product, but rather to quickly test a concept with real users, at low cost, to validate an implementation.

Minimum Viable Product

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Minimum Viable Product

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

If you only care about Steve Jobs "the legend" (and I mean that in the best possible way), and not about his personal foibles (he wasn't "perfect."), read Mona Simpon's eulogy. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs








Stanford University Memorial Church, where the eulogy was delivered.

How Steve Jobs Influenced Google

Steve Jobs apparently gave Larry Page, Google CEO, some advice recently:

"We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby and being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great."

How Steve Jobs Influenced Google's Restructuring

New Apple TV Coming?

Rumored Apple television Would have to "think different."

Apple might be working on a television, the Steve Jobs biography apparently indicates.

“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” author Walter Isaacson writes.

Such an effort would likely have to integrate content sources, create some sort of navigation system and then dispense with awkward and cryptic remote controls.

You'd probably want to use a standard-issue iPhone or iPad, for example. But if Apple follows the example of earlier disruptions, the Apple effort would include a significant content delivery mechanism. It was iTunes that made the iPod, the App Store that made the iPhone, Apps that made the iPad.

And since the whole point of TV is to "watch stuff," any new Apple initiative would have to include a content store of some sort, not simply integration of various input sources.

Jobs's final plan: an ‘integrated’ Apple TV