3% of SMBs Accept Mobile Payments

The SMB Group, a research firm focused on the small and medium size business market says three percent of SMBs accept mobile payments today and this number will increase to seven percent in the next 12 months, and 16 percent by the end of 2012.

Can Square, Intuit and Other Mobile Payment Providers Compete With A 12-Cent Debit Card Transaction? - Bank Systems & Technology

Android US Mobile Market Share Jumps 34%

While Google Android remained the second-most-popular US smartphone platform in the three-month-average ending December 2010 with 28.7 percent market share, that share improved about 34 percent from 21.4 percent in the three-month-average ending September 2010, according to new comScore data.

In contrast, number one RIM saw its market share drop 15 percent, from 37.3 percent to 31.6 percent. Apple’s share of the US smartphone platform market grew about three percent, from 24.3 percent to 25 percent.

Android US Mobile Market Share Jumps 34%

OpenX Upgrades Ad Platform

OpenX, a provider of digital advertising technology for Web publishers such as Groupon, has updated the ad technology platform in use by Groupon, Orange-France Telecom and Excite Japan.

OpenX ad-serving products are used by more than 200,000 websites in more than 100 countries, and serve more than 350 billion ads monthly.

OpenX Upgrades Ad Technology Platform

HTC Buys Gaming Company

HTC has bought mobile video specialists Saffron Digital and OnLive, suggesting HTC soon will launch a cloud-based, gaming-on-demand service.

HTC Puts $40 Million In Gaming Co OnLive

Email is Going Mobile

More people are using their mobile phones to access their email, causing a drop in web-based email usage.

Web-based email has always been about ease of access. If you’re only using Outlook then your work emails stay at work and home emails stay home. Forwarding emails from one computer to another was the only way to gather all of the information in one place and if you were traveling the you were stuck.

According to comScore’s stats, the number of people visiting a web-based email site went down 6% over last year. Not a huge number, but look at the other side. Mobile email usage grew by 36% over last year.

Age plays a huge factor in the web vs mobile saga (surprise, surprise), with a 53% decline in web-mail usage in the 12-17 age group.

Like Everything Else, Email is Going Mobile | Effective Marketing Strategies

Allot MobileTrends Report, H2 2010 - Allot

http://www.allot.com/MobileTrends_Report_H2_2010.html

Third French Bank Joins Mobile Payment Test in Nice

Credit Agricole has joined the pre-commercial trial of near field communications services in the French city of Nice.

Credit Agricole joins Credit Mutuel-CIC and BNP Paribas in launching mobile payment for the Nice project. The two other banks had launched services during the latter part of 2010.

About 3,000 users can tap to pay at a limited number of merchant outlets in Nice, along with paying fares on buses and trams and tapping NFC tags in posters for information.

Third French Bank Launches M-Payment in Nice, Hires Gemalto as TSM | NFC Times – Near Field Communication and all contactless technology.:

Scoial CRM 8% of Total in 2012

By 2013, spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes will exceed $1 billion worldwide, out of a total of about $12 billion in spending for all CRM, according to Gartner. Social CRM will represent approximately eight percent of all CRM spending in 2012, up from approximately four percent in 2010.

By 2015, a third of spending on new CRM software will be delivered using software as a service, and hosted in the cloud.

In 2009, 24 percent of the CRM software market was delivered by SaaS, and this rose to more than 26 percent in 2010, up from virtually zero in 1999. By 2015, Gartner forecasts that 32 percent of the CRM software market will be delivered by SaaS.

Gartner Says Spending on Social Software to Support Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Processes Will Exceed $1 Billion Worldwide By 2013

Square's Market Segment: 16 Million Non-Traditional Retailers

Square, which makes a card reader that plugs into the headphone socket of an iPhone, Android Phone or an iPad, is designed to allow anyone can accept credit card payments anywhere. And Square has a clear idea of its niche in the market, though it is a large "niche."

“Most of our competitors (including the likes of VeriFone and Intuit) focused on seven million merchants who have the ability to get merchant accounts from say Visa or MasterCard,” says Keith Rabois, Square COO.

Many have good enough credit to be approved for taking credit cards, but many do not. “We are going after 26 million folks who are not merchants in a classic sense,” he says. "Nearly 60 percent of these wouldn’t qualify for the more traditional merchant payment solutions."

Who’s Afraid of NFC? Not Square: Tech News and Analysis

Facebook Got 10% of U.S. Page Views in 2010

Facebook accounted for 10 percent of U.S. page views in 2010, while three out of every ten Internet sessions included a visit to the site.

Users spent about 26 minutes a day on Faceook, comScore reports.

Click on image for a larger view.

In December, Facebook’s U.S. audience grew to 153.9 million, an increase of 38 percent from the same month in 2009, and the social network became the 4th most visited web property. The total time spent on Facebook in December 2010 vs December 2009 surged 79 percent to 49.4 billion minutes. Total page views grew 71 percent to 76.8 billion.

comScore: Facebook Keeps Gobbling People’s Time

Groupon Pulls a "Go Daddy"

Go Daddy now makes a practice of proposing Super Bowl ads racy enough to be rejected, then runs the acceptable ads on TV, with the "rejected" versions online and gets lots of incremental viewership and attention.

Groupon worked the same sort of approach and has gotten a serious bump in attention. One can argue about whether "negative" attention is a good thing or a bad thing, but there is an argument that even arguably "negative" attention is still valuable. Chitika data shows the spike in online traffic for Groupon and its ads.

If one measures success on the "branding" benefits, with traffic as a proxy, it worked.

What Future Roles Could Netflix Play?

Cable operators and other multichannel video providers, as well as studios and networks, now are worried about Netflix. Some investors and analysts are worried about Netflix as an equity. One might say Netflix is a marketplace, like Amazon or eBay. That's basically another way of saying Netflix is a distributor, a middleman between sellers of content and buyers of content.

Some might argue there are other possible roles for Netflix that do not cause concern in other parts of the video ecosystem. If Netflix were part of the payments ecosystem, for example, would it be the retailer, the buyer's bank, the retailer's bank, a settlement bank or a settlements processor?

Right now, you'd probably say Netflix is the retailer, a distribution channel for content creators and packagers, and buyers of content. One might speculate that a better long-term model if for Netflix to become a settlements processor, getting out of the retailer role. In other words, Netflix would cease to be a retailer (not Best Buy or Amazon or eBay) and become Visa or MasterCard, a processing network that basically deals in messages that instruct issuing or acquiring banks where and how to settle payments, but not dealing with the actual payments themselves.

You can decide for yourself how difficult it would be for Netflix to change in that way, and how others in the video ecosystem would react.

Visa: Netflix's Future

The Mobile Traffic Explosion

If Cisco's projections for mobile data consumption are anywhere near correct, some changes in end user retail pricing for access, or some other new revenue streams based on such traffic, will be needed. Smartphones represent only 13 percent of total global handsets, but 78 percent of total handset traffic.

And if the predictions for tablet growth are anywhere near correct, demand is going to grow even more than projected for smartphones. In 2010, three million tablets were connected to the mobile network, each generating five times more traffic than the average smartphone.

Mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, as a result. In fact, there might be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015.

To be sure, bandwidth and cost-per-bit do not scale linearly. In the global backbone network, additional capacity can be purchased at lower prices "per-bit" of capacity. New fourth-generation networks are helpful in the access network, where most of the actual cost of end-to-end service lies. But it stands to reason that an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth consumption, with matching investment in facilities, must be accompanied by some increases in retail pricing, even if the increases are not linear.

The likely way such increases could be avoided or limited is if significant new revenue streams can be created that are not the result of end-user subscription fees.

The Mobile Traffic Explosion and its Impact

Nearly 11 Percent of US Houses Empty

Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2010, 11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round.

That is bound to have a depressing effect on all services and products sold to "home dwellers," ranging from fixed-line voice and entertainment video to home furnishings, household goods, remodeling and so forth.

Home Ownership—Nearly 11 Percent of US Houses Empty - CNBC

Brands See Mobile Social Channels Growing in Importance

U.S. marketers surveyed by PRWeek and MS&L Group believed mobile social would have important consequences for their brand.

Asked which social media efforts would have the greatest effect on their company, 17 percent said more usage of social media on mobile platforms and a further 12 percent cited uptake of mobile location-based social networking.

The Influence of Mobile on Social Marketing’s Future - eMarketer