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Apple Pay is now accepted at Target and Taco Bell
Some of the last holdouts on tap-to-pay services are finally hopping aboard. Target, Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Hy-Vee and Speedway have all introduced support for Apple Pay (and services like Google Pay by extension), making it trivially easy to check out when you need to run an errand or crave a Taco Supreme. The rollout will be gradual in some cases. Target expects all its 1,850 locations to support the technology in the "coming weeks," while Taco Bell and Jack in the Box expect to complete their deployments in the "next few months."
Shazam mention, blackout at Super Bowl drives mobile engagement
Velti is a firm that runs advertising on mobile platforms like iOS and Android, and they were paying close attention during last Sunday's Super Bowl game to how and when mobile users were on their phones. The company has released a few tidbits about mobile usage during the big showdown, and they reveal quite a bit about when we picked up our phones during the game. Velti says that while the Ravens may have won the game, Jack in the Box was the biggest win on the mobile side: The company's "Hot Mess" commercial (which featured a big plug for Shazam, who we spoke with about exactly this situation at CES) was the most active mobile engagement driver during the entire show. Viewers saw the bug, and immediately picked up their phones, presumably to either check out Shazam or use the app on the commercial spot (though it was only 30 seconds, so they had to hurry). Mobile engagement also spiked, says Velti, during the brief blackout delay that the stadium experienced. In that same vein, the halftime show was actually the point at which viewers were least engaged in their phones, suggesting that Beyonce's song and dance distracted them back away from the smaller screens. And the game itself distracted viewers from their phones as well -- the relatively boring first half had more mobile usage, while the second half of the game, when the 49ers staged a comeback against the Ravens, saw mobile usage drop. There's a lot of very interesting insight in there about exactly how mobile users make use of their second screen devices. The Jack in the Box / Shazam spike is no mistake, and we can likely expect to see even more moves like that in the future. Our mobile phones are nearly always with us these days, and other screens, including television, have lots of opportunities to use Apple's platforms for even more engagement.
Trains and burgers: Sprint launching NFC trial in Bay Area
For whatever reason, phone-based contactless payment systems have been incredibly slow on the uptake stateside, while others -- those on NTT DoCoMo's well-received Osaifu-Keitai system, for example -- have had no qualms about turning their handsets into wallets. Every so often we catch wind of a trial in the works, though, which gives us hope that we'll eventually all be able to whip our cellies out of our pockets and clog our arteries in one deft motion. Case in point: Sprint has teamed up with Jack in the Box and San Francisco's Bay Area Transit Authority to offer fare and food payments with a tap of a phone in a trial that runs from January through May of next year. Strangely, the pictured phone appears to be the somewhat ancient A920 clamshell, so we're guessing Sprint is modifying the devices for the trial; Boost Mobile customers should be able to get on the action in some capacity as well. If you live in the area, ride BART at least once a week, and are willing to sacrifice that Touch for a trial phone, go sign yourself up -- just take it easy with the bacon burgers, k?[Thanks, Allan]
Planex intros Jack in the Box iTunes/DLNA media server
Looks like Planex is joining Princeton, Buffalo, and others in talking up the iTunes/DLNA capabilities of its NAS media servers, tossing in some added branding for good measure with its new Jack in the Box unit. Like Princeton's offering, Planex's will require you to supply your own hard drive, although it takes things one step further with room for two 3.5-inch SATA drives (up to 750GB each), with support for RAID 0 or 1 configurations. Like some of Planex's other NAS servers, this one also promises to play nice with BitTorrent, with its own client taking some of the load off your PC. Rounding things out, you'll also get a built-in SD/MMC card slot, which you can use to offload data at the touch of a button. Look for this one to hit Japan later this month for ¥39,800, or about $334.[Via Impress]
