MasterCard has announced a partnership with Coin to bring MasterCard payments to a wide array of fitness bands, smart watches and other wearable devices. This collaboration builds upon the MasterCard's introduction in October of its Commerce for Every Device program, which aims to enable any consumer gadget, accessory or wearable as a payment device.
The first set of companies working with MasterCard and Coin to implement payment technology in their products are: Atlas Wearables, which designs advanced fitness trackers; Moov, "a personal fitness coach on your wrist"; and Omate, maker of fashionable smartwatches.
"The great thing about the MasterCard program is that we are adding payment functionality to items that consumers are already using – fitness bands, jewelry, clothing, watches," said Sherri Haymond, senior vice president of digital payments at MasterCard. "This makes the products more useful for consumers and enhances the value device manufacturers can deliver to their customers. Coin complements that approach and enables us to reach an expanded set of device partners."
Coin will provide hardware and software technology that can be integrated with the MasterCard Digital Enablement Service and embedded into devices, enabling manufacturers to quickly and easily implement payment functionality into their consumer products, the MasterCard announcement said.
Coin's Payment of Things platform serves as a turnkey product for the wearable/IoT industry. "Leveraging Coin's technology, device manufacturers will benefit from significantly reduced costs and time to market," said Kanishk Parashar, CEO and co-founder of Coin. "MasterCard is our essential partner as we team up to enable the wearable domain that is projected to grow to an astounding $53 billion by 2019."
Read article at Mobile Payments Today
Posted January 7, 2016
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MILAN — Standing in the art-soaked splendor of a Milanese parlor as an array of A-list Italian business leaders listened intently, Howard D. Schultz, chairman and chief executive of Starbucks, recited a remarkable statistic on Friday: Each week, roughly 90 million people pass through a Starbucks somewhere on earth.
Equally remarkable, given that Starbucks operates in 70 countries, is this: Not one of those people is in Italy, a country where coffee culture is central to daily life, and that represents something of a coffee holy grail to Mr. Schultz. Italy, land of the perfect espresso and the exquisitely frothy cappuccino, is a Starbucks-free nation.
Or it was. Mr. Schultz swooped into Milan during Fashion Week to announce that Starbucks would open its first coffee shop in Italy early next year, in Milan. Given that Starbucks is opening 500 stores a year in China, the Milan venture might seem like a nice little ornament. But for Mr. Schultz, coming to Italy is personal. It is also delicate — and a bit of a risk.
“There are very few markets and stores that I’m as intimately involved in as this,” he said in an interview after the announcement. He added, “We’re going to come here with great humility.”
Starbucks has always been careful in Europe, aware that the Continent’s coffee aficionados have refined tastes and an abundance of good coffee shops — and might take offense at the idea that an American company is needed for a better espresso. Yet Starbucks has marched successfully into Britain, France and Germany, and it has even found success in Vienna, the Austrian capital, which gave birth to the coffeehouse.
Italy, though, is Italy.
“I think young people will try it out, for curiosity,” said Orlando Chiari, the 82-year-old owner of Camparino, a century-old coffee bar in central Milan, “but I doubt it will become a major player in Italy.”
Mr. Chiari, impeccable in a gray suit and light blue shirt, said that about 1,500 clients came to his bar every day, and that few were titillated by “new trends.” He decided against deliveries of the sports drink Red Bull because it simply would not sell at Camparino.
“We worship coffee in Italy, while Americans drink coffee on the go in large cups,” he elaborated. “It’s two extremely different cultures.”
Read entire article at The New York Times.
Written by Jim Yardley, February 28, 2016
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