National Petroleum News (NPN) has been the independent voice of the petroleum industry since 1909 as the opposition to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. So, motor fuels marketing and retail is not just a sideline for us, it’s our core competency.
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RETAIL OPERATIONS BY DEBRARESCHKE-SCHUG The mobile revolution is now, and there are options aplenty to choose from MOBILE COMMERCE AND MARKETING market and the mobile world looks like a match made in heaven. M Outsite Networks' mobile app showing gas stations options. This allows the user to select all gas stations sorted by distance or find gas stations by a specific brand. However, there are many questions around what's to come with con- venience retail and mobile devices, not to mention how social media plays into it all. This article is meant to be an overview of what is happening in the mobile space right now and what might be coming down the pike. The regular occur- rence of consumers paying with their smartphones is already well underway in other countries, most notably in Japan. So con- sidering that, and recent data showing the number of U.S. smartphone users passed the 100-million mark earlier this year, it's a good bet that it's going to become much more common in this country. "Eighteen percent of the population have smart- phones," said Kelly Hlavinka, managing partner of Colloquy, a provider of loyalty marketing research, publishing and education, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. "And it's growing exponentially." When it will start really taking off is anyone's guess, but works fueled by major companies, like Google and Apple, are trying to ensure their technology will be the dominate one. In his educational session at NACStech 2012, NCR Corporation Vice President Chris Lybeer 20 JULY/AUGUST 2012 OBILE PAYMENTS, MOBILE MARKETING, mobile couponing, mobile wal- lets. For an industry grown out of a nation with wander and road- lust, the petroleum and c-store laid out the different methods of mobile payments by putting them into three categories. NFC One technology is NFC, or Near Field Communication. Technically, NFC is a standard for smartphones and similar devices to establish very short-range commu- nication with each other, usually by touching them or bringing them very close together, usually no more than 15 centimeters. Isis, which is based on NFC, is a joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless in the mobile payment space, announced in November of 2010. It is based in New York City and according to its website, www.paywithisis.com, "The venture is chartered with building Isis™, a national mobile commerce venture that will fundamentally transform how people shop, pay and save. The Isis™ mobile commerce network will be available to all merchants, banks, payment networks and mobile carriers." In a test market effort, this summer hundreds of merchant locations in both Austin and Salt Lake City will accept contactless payments, ensuring that consumers can use the Isis Mobile Wallet at the merchant locations they shop at every day. According to Lybeer, the pros of NFC are its security offerings. However, one of the big unknowns about the technology is the rate of consumers getting these phones, although there are a few available domestically already. Also, in order to complete the transaction, merchants have to have equipment that can communicate with the technology. CLOUD-BASED Another method of mobile payment is based on cloud computing, which delivers its services over the Internet. More people, whether they know it or not, likely already have used this kind of technology such as those with a Web-based e-mail account, like Hotmail or Gmail. A Web browser or mobile device is used to NPN Magazine n www.npnweb.com