Hackathon Reaps Rewards

I recently launched the Mitek Developers program which promotes our technology for new use cases and undiscovered market demand.  We built our program of APIs and MiSnap SDK to be easily consumed and leveraged, with clear migration options for long term use of our technology.  As part of the launch, we joined dozens of other technology companies at a large “hackathon” on the west coast which brought over 1,200 college students together to explore, collaborate, and prototype market concepts.  Yesterday I posted to the Mitek blog a brief summary and pictures from the hackathon, which you can find here:  http://www.miteksystems.com/blog/02/28/14/thinking-outside-of-the-bank

Our participation at this hackathon, www.Hacktech.io, was a tremendous success, providing benefits to our customers, our employees, and ultimately our company stakeholders as well.  Here’s why.

For our customers, the value starts with product and process improvements.  As one of the primary sponsors, we enjoyed placement of our booth right in the thick of it – center of the action for student hackers.  This location allowed the Mitek team to experience first-hand and immediate feedback about the ease, and challenge, of integrating our technology into innovative mobile experiences.  If the goal is rapid deployment of leading edge technologies, we learned a lot of lessons about how to make that deployment easier and what additional important capabilities are required to harden it.

Mitek employees would tell you they felt truly rewarded for their 48-hour time commitment.  Six of us managed to keep the Red Bull, coffee, and snacks flowing so that we could be available full time to answer questions and help code-up the prototypes.  Ultimately we were exposed to a wide variety of development languages, coding paradigms, and challenging questions to help sharpen our skills.   We networked with students to discuss future employment options at Mitek.  We provided leadership opportunities for several team members, and enhanced our team solidarity.  It was invigorating!

And company stakeholders of all kinds should feel excited about the demonstrated potential for so many additional use cases of Mitek technologies.  Eight student teams used the Mitek APIs and MiSnap SDK, preparing amazing prototypes and demonstrating the kind of value they’d expect to see in today’s marketplace.  Some examples:

• A mobile application for scanning nutrition labels and easily counting calories
• A mobile solution to enroll as a driver or sign-up as a buyer for hauling services, with mapping services
• A solution for multi-factor authentication e-security of point-to-point payments with Mobile Deposit
• Smart Pinterest recipe creation via image capture and data extraction from grocery receipts

I am proud to say that our involvement in this first hackathon generated some truly “out of the box” thinking, just the type we want, to be a showcase for the nearly unlimited potential to integrate mobile imaging into both enterprise and consumer apps.  It’s an exciting time, and we have been inspired by all the interest in Mitek Developers.

For those of you building and publishing open APIs, an experience like this should be on your roadmap.  If you’re interested in more information about our program, check out https://developers.miteksystems.com.

Happy Hacking!

Mitek’s Mobile Photo Bill Pay® Now Deployed by BBVA Compass

Excited about my client, BBVA/Compass, for their deployment of Picture Bill Pay – leveraging our Mitek Mobile Imaging Platform.  Compass customers can now easily and securely pay a bill with the snap of a smartphone or tablet camera!  http://www.miteksystems.com/about/news/banktech-bbva-compass-adds-mobile-photo-bill-pay-to-iphone-app

U.S. Bank adds mobile bill payment from Mitek to its mobile offerings

Great progress last week at Mitek – announcing a major bank to launch Mobile Photo Bill Pay early next year.  Looking forward to working with US Bank and the Mitek professional services team to put another innovative convenience solution into the US market!

“Paying bills isn’t fun, but for U.S. Bank customers it will be easier. The financial institution, the fifth largest bank in the U.S., is partnering with Mitek Systems to offer its customers Mitek’s Mobile Photo Bill Pay.”

http://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/article/204825/U-S-Bank-adds-mobile-bill-payment-from-Mitek-to-its-mobile-offerings

Android Achieves 75.0% Market Share in Third Quarter, According to IDC

Huge growth in just four years from nothing.

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23771812

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. November 1, 2012 – The Android smartphone operating system was found on three out of every four smartphones shipped during the third quarter of 2012 (3Q12). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, total Android smartphone shipments worldwide reached 136.0 million units, accounting for 75.0% of the 181.1 million smartphones shipped in 3Q12. The 91.5% year-over-year growth was nearly double the overall market growth rate of 46.4%.

Top Six Smartphone Mobile Operating Systems, Shipments, and Market Share, Q3 2012 (Preliminary) (Units in Millions)

Operating System	3Q12 Shipment Volumes	3Q12 Market Share	3Q11 Shipment Volumes	3Q11 Market Share	Year-Over-Year Change
Android	136.0	75.0%	71.0	57.5%	91.5%
iOS	26.9	14.9%	17.1	13.8%	57.3%
BlackBerry	7.7	4.3%	11.8	9.5%	-34.7%
Symbian	4.1	2.3%	18.1	14.6%	-77.3%
Windows Phone 7/ Windows   Mobile	3.6	2.0%	1.5	1.2%	140.0%
Linux	2.8	1.5%	4.1	3.3%	-31.7%
Others	0.0	0.0%	0.1	0.1%	-100.0%
Totals	181.1	100.0%	123.7	100.0%	46.4%

Source: IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, November 1, 2012

Disruptive UX – How to Measure in Mobile?

Today I saw Sean’s retweet of a good post by Baruch Sachs called Disruptive User Experience: Being a BPM Thought Leader (Part 1)  http://t.co/zHhyZ4I2.  Excellent points about the convergence of BPM and UX – a good read.  I look forward to Part 2 and hope to see discussion about the outcome measures: any BPM initiative needs to have the yardstick in mind.  But it leads me to a further consideration that has been top of mind lately.  What are the best ways to measure UX changes in mobile applications?  The last 5-8 years have seen dramatic improvements in measurement of customer satisfaction via Net Promoter Scores and web analytics.  Should, and can, the same concepts and technologies be applied to measure success of mobile applications?  How to measure clicks or abandonment?  What is the most effective way to publish this data to the ISV without violation of privacy or impact to product performance?   Are the app-store metrics sufficient?  Probably not.

 

 

Mobile Upside: Mobile Banking Service Adoption to Reach over Half a Billion Users by 2013 Despite Economic Downturn

Press Release from Juniper Research:  Despite the challenging economic climate and threat of further global recession, a new report from Juniper Research finds that mobile banking users worldwide will reach 530 million by 2013, up from just over 300 million in 2011. Indeed, Juniper finds that mobile services are becoming a fundamental component of banks’ business strategies as they respond to the current financial crisis.

Indication of market trends, JPMC hires new leader for next generation (mobile) payments

Continuing to show their focus on innovation, Mitek customer JPMC announced the hire of a new leader to focus on mobile and emerging digital payments. The new leader is Susan Ehrlich as “SVP of Next Generation Payments”.  This appointment signals another data point in the trend of market adoption and readiness for mobile and digital innovation and 2^nd generation mobile banking.   http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jpmorgan-chase-hires-susan-ehrlich-to-help-develop-next-generation-payments-2011-09-29

Congrats to Mitek – another fantastic quarter!

Congratulations to the team at Mitek Systems for another giant quarter.  Our outstanding sales team and distribution partners have doubled the total number of signed customers over the past quarter and six of the top 10 U.S. banks have now agreed to deploy Mobile Deposit.  Our technology team has launched a first-of-its-kind cloud service for mobile imaging, and we have several projects underway in non-financial verticals.  Mitek has found a way to help partners and customers innovate by supporting the creation of exciting solutions utilizing the camera as a keyboard to simplify the consumer experience.

http://www.miteksystems.com/pages/press/Mitek_Fiscal_3Q11_Earnings_Release_FINAL.pdf

Mitek Systems on a Roll!

Mitek Systems – leader in Mobile Imaging Solutions made some great announcements today, elevating the company to a new level.  Second quarter earnings up 89% (year over year)  with a gross margin of 91%.  Mitek announced an additional 26 banks signed on to deploy the application, including five of the nation’s top ten retail banks. 

Additionally – Mitek announced completion of a private placement of $15M to be used towards working capital for the company.

Great news for Mitek Systems!   Announcements at this link:  http://www.miteksystems.com/InvestorRelations.asp

Online Backups

I was chatting today with some folks about my biggest home-IT horror story from the year and what I’ve done to alleviate a rerun.   In a nutshell – get a home data backup strategy.

Solve your data backup concerns TODAY and subscribe to an online backup service.  It is well-worth the cost.   Yes – there are certainly ways you can save money, but in my opinion, an online backup plan is the most hassle-free (hands off) and worry-free approach.

This blog isn’t meant to provide you with a comprehensive comparison, nor to sell you a particular product.  I simply am sharing this to advocate action now.  It has already saved my family a number of small headaches – and it would have saved me over $1200 if I had it in place at the beginning of the year.

• What would you do if your hard drive crashed or your laptop was stolen today?  How much would it be worth to you if you could instantly recover the important data?
• What would you do if you were working on a file for several hours or days, diligently saving it along the way, and it suddenly became corrupted?  How much would it be worth to you if you could easily recover the version saved just before it got corrupted?
• Let’s say you are working on a project and you get called away.  Can you easily retrieve a file via the web or phone?

Solutions to problems like these are readily available at a very affordable cost.  For around $5/month, this is some of the best insurance you can buy.  Depending on what you need, it may even be free.  A few of the products available are listed here:

• SugarSync
• Carbonite
• Mozy
• DropBox
• Box.net
• MobileMe

Since each tool has various compelling feature advantages, you should spend a few minutes to think about what you need and how much data you have.  Then take the plunge and make it happen.  At these price points – you can change your mind later too if your needs change.

Some key questions to consider:

• Do you need to backup any folder – or only selected ones?
• How much data do you have?
• Do you need versioning – archive of multiple saved versions of each file?
• Do you need remote or mobile access?
• How many PCs/Laptops do you want to cover – and do you need to share space/data between them?  What are the operating systems you use?
• Are you saving and sharing media (photos/music/video)?

If you have another suggestion, please share!