Author: JT

Brick and mortar stores had been feeling threatened by smartphone shoppers, but that may not be the case.

As mobile commerce has been picking up at a substantial rate, retailers in brick and mortar locations have been concerned that consumers may begin to be lured online by the ability to shop for a better deal, no matter where they are, instead of heading out to real world stores.

A recent study has shown that shoppers are returning to stores on an increasing basis, to shop in person.

This trend has shown itself in the research of several companies that have been looking into mobile commerce, including Telefonica SA, Tumblr, and Yahoo Inc. This was announced at the Digital Life Design conference that was recently held in Munich, Germany. Though the last few years have shown a greater growth in online shopping than at in-store locations, the mall is beginning to take hold of some of its former share, according to the researcher, Euromonitor’s data.

Many in the industry feel that as popular as mobile commerce may be, real life interaction has been missed.

According to the Tumblr head of creative strategy, David Hayes, “People are craving real-life interaction for shopping.” Hayes stated that he has worked with Levi Strauss & Co., and Gap Inc. in order to encourage consumers to attend events such as promotional parties and music performances being held in stores. He added that “There’s a trend going from URL to ‘IRL’ – ‘in real life’.”

While online and mobile commerce have been turning companies such as Alibaba and Amazon into massive giants that would seem to be virtually unstoppable, some brick and mortar retailers are discovering that the hands-on experience and in-person interaction that they have to offer customers has been giving them an advantage that has been enough to bring people back. The revenue generated through in-store experience is, according to Euromonitor data, going to grow to 4.9 percent by 2019. Comparatively, that figure had been 1.6 percent in 2013, while the growth of online sales is supposed to slow down to 12 percent by 2019 from having been 21 percent in 2013.

A new filing has been spotted that could bring the data from Touch ID to other devices via the cloud.

The US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent filing from Apple that could have to do with part of its mobile security feature that collects fingerprints in order to unlock devices and conduct other functions through certain iPhone models.

The filing was called “Finger biometric sensor data synchronization via a cloud computing device and related methods”.

The patent described a method of recording an individual’s fingerprints by way of the Touch ID mobile security sensor from Apple, so this information could then be uploaded to the cloud and synced with other Apple devices. The sensor necessary for Touch ID has been built into Apple technology in its smartphones since the iPhone 5S, and in the iPads that have been released since that time in 2013. The sensor allows a device owner to use his or her fingerprints in order to access the device. However, more recently, it also became an identity verification feature when making purchases through the new mobile wallet system, Apple Pay.

This potential change to the mobile security feature is meant to help to make the system more convenient.

Apple described in the patent filing that enrollment into Touch ID could potentially be “cumbersome for users in some instances, such as when multiple fingerprints, users and/or devices are used.” By synchronizing the process using a cloud based function, it would help to eliminate the need to re-register a device owner’s fingerprints on every device, in addition to the fingerprints of all of the other people who are to be given permission to access the iOS gadget.

At the time of the writing of this article, the Touch ID security page at Apple explained that “iOS and other apps never access your fingerprint data, it’s never stored on Apple servers, and it’s never backed up to iCloud or anywhere else.”

If that mobile security policy is to remain the same, it makes one wonder how this potential cloud synchronization technology could possible work, and how it could be safely applied in order to protect the data from the Touch ID feature.