Project
The team consists of Kimberly Oyama, Chihiro Sasaki, Daren Rodhouse, and Blayne Kennedy. Also Dr. John Georgas is the mentor for the team and more infomation on both the team members as well as Dr. Georgas can be found in our Meet the Team section or Here.
About the Project
The localization features of MoneyClip Mobile will provide customers with targeted advertisement, coupons, and loyalty networks that will be an additional feature to an existing web-based payments infrastructure.
Problem and Solution Statement
MoneyClip Mobile (MCM) is a web-based payments infrastructure providing fee-free transactions to customers and merchants through the use of mobile smartphones. Mr. Joshua Cross of Hermes Commerce, Inc. is planning to make this mobile payment system more robust by providing targeted advertisements, coupons, and managing customer’s royalty programs.
This capstone project will develop the localization features for the MCM advertisement, coupons, and loyalty network. The software will be developed for the existing MCM network and database to ease the transition of integrating this feature. The team will be developing the same copy of the existing network and database on a local server to develop in and test the added feature. The prototype of the localization features implemented on the database, web service, and iOS/Android applications will be presented to Mr. Cross at the end of this project.
Part 1: Problem Statement
This project is sponsored by Mr. Joshua Cross, CTO of Hermes Commerce Inc. in Flagstaff, Arizona. Hermes Commerce Inc. produces an application called MoneyClip Mobile (MCM) that allows users to transfer funds to and from other users, merchants or customers, without involving physical money or credit and debit cards. Mr. Cross is responsible for the development of MCM as well as for the business aspects of the product. MCM addresses the need of users to exchange funds regardless of distance.
The general problem facing MCM is competition with popular technologies such as Google Wallet and Square. Mr. Cross’ goal for overcoming this challenge is to combine all the functionalities of the competition into one application and find a niche for that application. In order to accomplish this, MCM application needs to be able to transfer funds between customers and merchants. In addition, the application needs to determine when a customer is making a purchase from a merchant in order for the merchant to push the charge to the customer’s MCM account. Also, MCM will give customers control over the frequency and types of advertisements or coupons they receive, and it will give merchants options for when to push advertisements or coupons depending on customer trends.
This project involves implementing a localization function that notifies merchants when MCM customers are in their vicinity, allowing the merchant to push a payment request to the customer’s MCM account if the customer makes a purchase. This functionality allows true moneyless transactions. The third and final chunk of functionality that we will be developing is the data analysis algorithms that will be used for effective direct advertising. We will be implementing trend finding algorithms that will be used for direct advertising. These algorithms will use past user transactions to find patterns and compute probabilities that will be available to merchants to aid their advertising decisions.
Part 2: Problem Solution
System Improvements
One piece of functionality we are adding is the ability to allow customers to select the amounts and sources of advertisements that are pushed to their account via the iPhone application, Android application, or website. They should be able to customize their settings to choose differing levels of participation from the advertisements. Merchant settings should also be available for change on the website or either mobile application.
The next function being added is the analysis of customer traffic to find patterns that merchants can use for direct advertising. The merchants will have the option to push an advertisement depending on the chance that a customer will respond. For instance, if a customer just ate at a restaurant downtown, there is 40% chance that they will get drinks when they are done. This information will be available to merchants so a bar can set their account to push an advertisement whenever a customer makes a purchase at a restaurant downtown. In this situation, there is a very low chance that the customer will eat again, so another restaurant will probably not push an advertisement to this customer. Related to this, advertisements must be pushed to customers with minimal time lag to make sure that they have not left the area before they receive the advertisement.
Of the data stored by MCM, we will use the customer transaction history to determine purchasing patterns. The algorithms we implement will produce statistics for merchants. The pattern recognition algorithms will analyze past customer transactions in order to predict future purchases. Merchants will be able to look at the probability of a certain customer making a purchase from them and determine whether or not they want to push an advertisement to that customer. The localization functionality requires additional user settings, such as types of advertisements or coupons they are accepting on their account.
System Impact
Our additions will make MCM a more comprehensive and robust commerce application. Therefore, our sponsor will have a better product to pitch, potentially making his job easier. The development team of MCM will be able to utilize localization activity code from the Android and iOS applications and use them to further their development of the applications. By using MCM with localization features, there will be fewer steps in the money exchange, and thus transactions will be faster and lines will move faster. Theft may also decrease because there would be less cash to steal, making it not worth the effort and consequences. With the added localization functionality, MCM becomes a comprehensive commerce application. Many other applications focus on certain aspects of commerce but none so far combine them. MCM will have the potential of removing the need for physical money entirely because you will be able to move money between customers, and between customers and merchants regardless of distance. Merchants will also be able to advertise more effectively, and customers will be able to tailor their account for advertisements and coupons that they are interested in.