Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

In short, the battery replacement program showed iPhone users that a simple battery change was enough to rejuvenate their phones, leading to fewer phone upgrades and a hit to Apple’s earnings. The moral of the story: phones decay as they age, but not as much as you might think — and phone makers may not be eager for you to learn that.

Optical scanning

Capacitive scanning

Apple Pay work?

NFC,

With NFC, two devices (whether phones, cards, or payment terminals) containing a particular chip can exchange small amounts of information when touched together.[790]

radio waves.

Other uses for NFC

Furthermore, with NFC, you can tap your phone against anything with a special sticker to get more information about it. Marketers could embed NFC stickers into advertisements or flyers, and people could just tap their phone against the stickers to learn more. In certain French cities, you can tap your phone against NFC stickers to get maps of the area. And NFC could also help in retail shopping: tap your phone against a package to comparison shop or find coupons, for instance.[803]

NFC is helping blur the line between the physical and digital world, and we think the uses of NFC will get more and more exciting.

augmented reality (AR).[805]

You also find Pokémon in their “natural habitats”: water-typed Squirtles on the beach, for instance, or bat-like Zubats at night.[807] It’s thanks to a mashup of crowdsourced location information, your phone’s internal clock, and some geographic data that classifies an area based on its “climate, vegetation, and soil or rock type.”[808]

Then it uses your accelerometer, compass, and GPS to notice if you’re moving around, in which case the game moves and rotates the Pokémon appropriately.[811]

AR would be a $90 billion market by 2020.[812]

(It shocks us sometimes that tech companies have so much power over policymakers.)

In conclusion, let’s back up and get some perspective. Imagine if you went back in time to 50 years ago and told people that you owned a handheld computer (i.e. a phone), wirelessly bought an item with that computer, and got that item delivered to you by a flying robot with wings. They’d think you’re crazy. But, as you now know, it’s real, and it’s really exciting.

As Salesforce cofounder Parker Harris put it:

“all business leaders need to be technologists… and every enterprise needs to become an app company.”[846]

The radio signals your phone sends out include a unique code that’s embedded in the phone, called the MAC address.[851]

So, whenever you connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot, the hotspot’s owner can see your MAC address.[852] If they keep your MAC address on file, they can remember you if you reconnect.

Triangulation

triangulation technology,

One company even lets retailers measure how many people pause outside the storefront and then walk in — which helps the retailers figure out which window displays are the most effective.[861] This entire method is highly profitable.[862]

Wi-Fi triangulation software,

For instance, stores can make you sign in with your email address before you can use their free Wi-Fi, which lets them tie your MAC Address with your email address. Then, stores can link your in-store activity with your online activity. For instance, if you were browsing for scarves on macys.com, you could, in theory, get a coupon for scarves as soon as you walked into a Macy’s store.[864]

Some new video cameras installed in stores are reportedly so good that they can guess your age, gender, and ethnicity just from video footage.[865] They can also tell which specific products you looked at and how long you looked at them.[866] This information, combined with your in-store movement data and online purchase data, is juicy stuff for store owners.

Love it or hate it?

Tracking customers with tools like Wi-Fi and video surveillance is clearly profitable for retailers, who are struggling with problems of “showrooming,” where people browse for things in stores but eventually buy them online.[868]

But privacy advocates would probably argue that tracking someone’s clicks is much less creepy than tracking someone’s physical movements.

Prime

Amazon’s strategy

it’s important to note that Amazon tends to care more about increasing revenue than increasing profits.

one study found that loyalty programs increase sales by 20%.[890]

Even though Prime might look like a losing proposition on the surface, it’s a treasure trove for Amazon.

Bloomberg even called it the “most ingenious and effective customer loyalty program in all of e-commerce, if not retail in general.”[902]

Uber’s drive for growth has made it impossible to turn a profit

Uber is a two-sided market — it has to match riders with drivers — and so it has to cater to both, slashing its margins on both ends.[916]

three big reasons why Uber is investing so heavily in self-driving cars.

Waymo

Microsoft thinks it can make your LinkedIn profile your central professional

“source of truth.”[935]

By beefing up Dynamics CRM with LinkedIn’s treasure trove of data, Microsoft was suddenly able to compete on even footing with Salesforce’s top-notch CRM solution.[944]

Besides that, there are two factors that always affect acquisitions: money and people.

keep the valuable business and data of LinkedIn away from its opponents.

Facebook isn’t alone — most major Western tech companies have realized they’ve saturated Western markets, running out of room for growth.[994]

China,

India,

Southeast Asia (also known as SE...

Latin A...

A...