Groupon Disappoints 40% of Retailers

A study of retailers using Groupon found 66 percent of the 150 merchants saying it was a profitable exercise, while 32 percent said their Groupon campaigns were unprofitable, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Forty percent of the respondents said they would not run such a promotion again, the study by Rice University’s  Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business found.

The point is that any mobile, web or transaction service can work well only when retail partners find the application or service profitable, easy to use and desired by end user customers. So far, Groupon might need to work on that a bit.

Mobile anthropology

Mobile anthropology: you will have to wade through it, but there are insights here.

http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/joshclark/going-native-the-anthropology-of-native-apps

Adidas Gives Up On Apple's iAds?

Control issues might be an issue for iAd advertisers

http://www.techmeme.com/101002/p14#a101002p14

How Little Guys Can Win in Local Mobile Advertising: Mobile

Local mobile campaigns are affordable and targeted. If a business uses the Yellow Pages, it typically can afford a local mobile campaign.

http://jkontherun.com/2010/10/02/how-little-guys-can-win-in-local-mobile-advertising/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%29

Millennials Will be a "Great Generation," Wait and See

We might sometimes think Millennials are spoiled, flighty of attention or non-literate (in the older sense of reading lots of books). They also just might be the absolute right people to make American history. They have principles and values and will act on them, for example. And that might be just the thing America needs, sometime in this generation, when the wheels threaten to come off the car.

"Members of Gen Y strive to be awesome and distinctive. They make choices that are consistent with a set of personal values, even when they mean personal sacrifice," says Carol Phillips of Milennial Media.

"They are distinctive in the matter of face way they set audacious goals for themselves," Phillips says.

Says Alex Pearlman’s profile on The Next Great Generation Blog: "I’m a 23-year-old journalism and philosophy student, I love the John Adams miniseries, Aaron Sorkin, and reading Time magazine in bed with a glass of red wine. My interests range from libertarianism to beer bongs to the New York Times crossword puzzle. This box will one day read: Alex Pearlman, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent."

Pearlman also is an editor at http://www.thenextgreatgeneration.com/. I very much am counting on Pearlman, and her Millennial cohorts, being absolutely, dead-on right. We will need another "Great Generation," and I am counting on Millennials to be just that generation.

For Millennials, Brands Are People, Too

No Wi-Fi Business Model? Hardly

The Wi-Fi hotspot market continues to experience strong growth in deployed venues and usage, driven largely by wireless and broadband providers embracing Wi-Fi both as a competitive differentiator and enhancement to core services, says In-Stat.

Despite the continued growth in hotspot deployments, the underlying business model remains uncertain, the firm say.

“We are a decade into the introduction of hotspot services and the market is still working out the revenue model,” says Amy Cravens, Market Analyst. That might not be the best way to put matters.

“Initially the market was based on pay-as-you-go revenues, with providers hoping it would evolve into ongoing subscriptions and corporate accounts," says Cravens. There is a business of that sort, but it arguably is much smaller than some initially had expected.

But that doesn't mean there is not a business model. The business model simply is largely indirect, rather than direct. For some hotspot operators, the revenue model is products sold. For service providers, the revenue model is subscriptions to fixed broadband services that offer metro Wi-Fi access as a feature. For others, such as some airline lounges, Wi-Fi is an amenity paid for through the annual membership fee.

Wi-Fi hotspots most certainly have a business model. It simply is not a direct model, in most cases.

In-Stat - Press Releases

Does Retransmission Consent Apply to Internet Relay?

"Retransmission consent" is a decades-old issue in the cable TV business. Basically, the issue is what entities must do if they relay a broadcast TV signal, without altering the contentof the transmission.

Ivi is a service that lets users watch live television on the Internet. But ivi has not sought permission to do so from over-the-air broadcasters, nor has it paid retransmission fees.

Ivi believes it can do so because ivi does not change the original signal in any way. For a premium, ivi offers DVR “time sifting” features such as pause, rewind, and fast forward, though.

Ivi currently streams programs from New York and Seattle affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and a few other networks.

Broadcasters and copyright owners (including the major networks and Major League Baseball) have filed a lawsuit against ivi in New York federal court on September 28, as you might have expected.

Ivi has pegged its legal hopes on the “passive carrier exemption.”

The exemption makes it lawful to retransmit a transmission intended for the public so long as the retransmitter lacks control over the content of the original transmission or over the recipients of the retransmission.

Ivi believes that by retransmitting freely-available, over-the-air broadcasts and offering basic DVR-like services, it is nothing more than a passive carrier and exempt from copyright liability.

An unfavorable ruling will kill ivi; a favorable ruling would add just a bit more pressure on the rest of the video ecosystem. But most of the best programming these days is "cable only," and in a different legal and regulatory category.

After Ten Years, Round Two Of The Legal Battle Over Internet TV Is Here

Distimo's Latest App Store Analytics

Sometimes pictures are better than words, and I found that to be the case for Distimo's latest round of numbers on mobile app stores and applications. So rather than write it, here it is in pictures.

Enterprise Communications Still Relies on Email and Voice, Study Suggests

A new study of enterprise workers suggests that workers rely on more traditional forms of communication than social media to drive results, as you might expect. Some 83 percent of professionals say email is “critical” or "very important" to their overall success and productivity, and 81 percent said the same for phone calls.

Email and phone ranked the highest above all other forms of communication with audio conferences third at 61 percent.  Sending or receiving an instant message rated as critical for only 38 percent of respondents while social media ranked last at 19 percent.

If a conversation is about closing a deal or making a mission-critical decision, 77 percent of those polled said they would prefer to do it in person. And of those polled, 65 percent said they preferred talking in person when discussing complicated technical concepts and
64 percent would rather do their brainstorming in person.

In fact, 53 percent of all respondents said that they spend 10 or more hours on the phone each week. How can that be if one-to-one phone calls have declined? It appears that more phone time is spent in audio conferences rather than one-to-one conversations.

About 83 percent of respondents said that they dial into an audio conference “frequently" or "all the time” for work. About 56 percent
said that most calls were made from a desk phone, followed by amobile phone (39 percent) and softphone (five percent).

The survey also suggests enterprise workers are making more use of virtually every form of communications with the possible exception of traditional phone calls.

Plantronics surveyed 1,800 enterprise employees in the US, UK, Germany, China, India and Australia. All work in medium or large size companies (100+ employees) and identified themselves as knowledge workers (people whose work centers on developing or working primarily with ideas and information) who use a variety of communications technologies to stay in touch with colleagues, partners and clients. The research was conducted in May and June of 2010.

Vinod Khosla Offers Some Serious Advice for Entrepreneurs

 According to investor Vinod Khosla, too many companies who want to think big are doomed to remain small because they pick the wrong investors.


“Any investor who looks at exit strategies, or multiples of investment or even does an IRR calculation, a rate of return calculation, probably is the wrong partner for you,” says Khosla. 

“I think the single, most important fact about doing a startup is being clear about your vision and not let it get distorted by what pundits and experts tell you," Khosla says. "But the second most important thing is finding the right team, and that’s really, really hard."

Khosla says he spent well over 50 percent of his time recruiting, and he encourages all entrepreneurs to try and do that.

Vinod Khosla: New CEOs Should Spend More Than 50% Of Their Time Recruiting (TCTV)

AT&T Voicemail Viewer App Delivers Home Phone Messages to Smartphone

AT&T has announced the launch of the "AT&T Voicemail Viewer" app, which lets AT&T U-verse voice customers easily check and manage their home phone messages with visual voicemail on their smartphone. It isn't immediately clear whether the app works only on AT&T mobile devices or with any smartphone with a mobile broadband plan, but the absence of any language to the contrary would tend to suggest the mobile has to be using AT&T service.

The Voicemail Viewer app lists a user's home voicemail messages and allows you to choose the order in which you wish to listen to them. The app also provides a notification when a new voicemail arrives on your home phone, plus the ability to delete voicemails remotely.

New AT&T Voicemail Viewer App Delivers Home Phone Messages to Smartphone

Smartphone Subscribers Now Drive Mobile Browser Use

The number of Smartphone users accessing mobile content through browsers and applications now surpasses that of non-smartphone users, says comScore. In the three-month period ending August 2010, smartphone subscribers made up 60 percent of those who used a downloaded application and 55 percent of those who used a browser.

In August 2010, 75.6 million mobile subscribers ages 13 and older used downloaded applications, with smartphone users representing 60.4 percent, up from 43.6 percent in August 2009. For the same period, 80.8 million mobile subscribers used their browser, with smartphone subscribers comprising 55.5 percent, up from 41.4 percent a year ago.

Smartphone Subscribers Now Comprise Majority of Mobile Browser and Application Users in U.S.

North American Mobile App Revenues will Reach $10 Billion in 2015

North American mobile revenues from mobile content and applications will total $10 billion in 2015, according to Juniper Research.

Juniper predicts 150 percent growth from $4 billion in mobile content and mobile apps revenue earned in 2009.

North American Mobile Revenues will Reach $10B in 2015:

Windows Mobile 7 is Important for Microsoft,Gets AT&T Help

 Microsoft Corp. will formally unveil a lineup of smartphones using the revamped version of its mobile operating system on Oct. 11, and AT&T will begin offering them four weeks later, on an exclusive basis at least initially, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Samsung Abandons Symbian

Samsung has decided it will no longer be supporting the Symbian mobile operating system, as of the end of this year.

Sony Ericsson last month announced it would be dropping Symbian as well.

Fujitsu, Sharp, and Nokia seem to be the remaining firms still building and selling Symbian devices, at least over the last 12-month period.

Symbian takes another hit, loses support from Samsung