NFC: Not Just for Payments

These days, most of the attention focused on near field communications seems to be about the mobile payments function, and rightly so. But think of NFC as "Bluetooth," just a way to allow devices to communicate with each other over short distances. Then think about syncing of information or sharing of small files. There could be lots of "pedestrian" applications that allow two adjacent devices to communicate and exchange files or data. It could be PC to PC, PC to tablet, tablet to tablet, tablet to phone, PC to phone, tablet to a retail terminal or phone to a retail terminal. NFC might be a way to sync status information or update small files between various end user devices. Maybe NFC would communicate with peripherals.

Location-based offers might be delivered to a device using a mobile broadband network or Wi-Fi, then use NFC to automate the process of paying for something with a discount offer or loyalty reward, without much more work than waving the phone near the NFC retail terminal. NFC to make the phone a mobile wallet, or mobile money, might be the biggest "new" application. But there are plenty of other "hygenic" operations that NFC might support.

NFC-equipped iPhone could power mobile Mac OS X accounts

Google's Potential Angle on Mobile Payments

Google will begin testing a mobile payment service at stores in New York and San Francisco within four months, Bloomberg has reported. And there is a potentially-important element of the test: Google is paying for the terminals required to accept mobile payments built by VeriFone systems. You might argue that is part of any test, and you would be right. But even as tests go, Google reportedly is paying to install "thousands" of merchant terminals, apparently removing "cost of terminals" as a retailer objection.

Okay, you might say, it's a big test. But this is Google, a company that has demonstrated the ability to spend gobs of money on browsers and operating systems without any direct monetization scheme. In fact, one might argue that Google has proven willingness to spend heavily primarily so other providers will also spend money and thereby improve the utility and value of products in whole categories.

The reason, some would argue, is that Google believes it benefits when the whole application and device ecosystem gets better. That makes Google a dangerous competitor. It can ignite development arms races. It might also be willing to answer one obvious objection to faster and broader adoption of mobile payments, namely the need for a retailer to spend money upgrading the payment terminals.

It's just a question, but to what extent might Google be willing to defray the cost of terminal upgrades as part of an effort to spur wider adoption of near field communications payments at retailer locations? You might argue that is a big proposition, and that Google could not hope to get an immediate return in any direct sense.

But as has been the case for other innovations, Google might bank on its ability to create something new and meaningful at the point of sale that does create direct revenue for the rest of its advertising business, broadly defined (coupon and other direct offers, though classically considered "promotion" rather than advertising, are a growth area).

Maybe Google ignites a virtuous cycle where other contenders themselves move to subsidize new retailer terminals. By its historic logic, Google still wins.

Google Is Said to Test Mobile-Payment System With VeriFone - Bloomberg

A Good Look at Google's Culture and Strategy

A "Fast Company" article about Google's culture and strategy is a worthwhile read, if you wonder how Google might change under Larry Page's leadership. It's also an illustration of how a major application provider's business strategy will continue to be unnerving for Internet and mobile access providers.

Basically, a mobile or broadband access provider has to work pretty diligently to position its service as somewhat better than all the others. Google believes it benefits whenever the entire universe of access providers get better. Consider Google's entry into the browser and mobile operating system businesses. Many wondered what benefit Google could reap.

Google needed its own web browser, some would say, simply as a means to provoke Microsoft, Apple, and other browser makers into reigniting innovation in what had become a rather-stodgy market. Everyone's efforts collectively improve the web as a whole, which is good for Google and its ad business.

Even if its rivals merely copied Chrome's advancements, Google believed it would still benefit. That same strategy might be said to underpin Google's Android effort, and the Chrome operating system effort, as well.

The financial payoff for Google does not come from licensing revenue or other direct monetization schemes. Instead, Google benefits because its ad business works better when the entire ecosystem being more capable.

That is a strategy an access provider cannot really match. Access providers invest only to make their access offerings better. But that helps Google. It's just one example of why so much of the new value and revenue in the broader Internet ecosystem flows to application providers, not access providers.

Google: The Quest

IP Telephony Adoption Does Not Accelerate PBX Refresh Cycle

One key question many have had over the last decade is what the unified communications adoption rate would look like, in an era where many solutions could be adopted as adjuncts to existing business communication systems, where hosted alternatives have made advanced features available to smaller entities, and where the new UC features were marketed as a major advance over legacy phone systems.

There is some evidence that, in fact, UC is being adopted at about the same rate enterprises typically upgrade or replace their phone systems.

"So far, the move to IP Telephony has not accelerated the replacement cycle of PBXs, which seems to remain at the historical 10-year average," says Marty Parker, UniComm Consulting principal. "So, on average, an enterprise user may wait five years for the upgrade of the PBX they are using to a version that will support the UC features."

You can take that as good news, or bad news. The good news might be that there is steady demand for UC solutions. The bad news is that UC does not seem to have changed the traditional enterprise replacement cycle for their business phone systems.

In some ways, IP telephony and UC seem to be viewed as the next generation of phone systems, but possibly not something revolutionary, which would then have resulted in a discontinuous rate of adoption.

Does Bundled Pricing Slow or Accelerate UC? - Unified Communications Strategies

13% Want Mobile Coupons

Perhaps 13 percent of online mobile consumers say that they would like to receive coupons to be used while shopping and 10 percent would like to be able to look up product information, Forrester Research reports. About 20 percent of online mobile consumers are open to receiving text messages from companies in return for promotions, discounts, or free downloads, and interest is about 33 percent among Millennials. 

The Data Digest: Consumer Interest In Mobile Marketing | Forrester Blogs

IPTV subs reach 45 million

Some 40 telcos launched IPTV services in 2010, bringing the number of IPTV providers globally to more than 200, says TeleGeography. The number of IPTV subscribers globally grew 38 percent in 2010, reaching 45 million.

Western Europe remains the largest IPTV market, accounting for 40 percent of global subscribers in 2010. The Asia Pacific region is the second largest IPTV market, accounting for 35 percent of subscribers. However, the number of IPTV subscribers in the Asia-Pac region is growing more than twice as rapidly as in Western Europe and will take the top slot before the end of 2011.

France remains the leading country for IPTV (23 percent of the global total), followed by China (16 percent), the United States (16 percent), South Korea (eight percent) and Japan (four percent).

IPTV subs reach 45 million as telcos achieve 10% penetration rate: CommsUpdate : TeleGeography Research:

Mobile Cloud-Based Music Streaming Services: 95% Growth Rate to 2016

“The number of subscribers to mobile music streaming services is expected to approach 5.9 million by the end of this year,” says Aapo Markkanen, ABI Research analyst. He believes there will be 161 million subscribers in 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of nearly 95 percent. Sometime in 2012 the Asia-Pacific area will become the largest regional market for mobile music streaming, he argues.

But he also says rewards might be unevenly distributed. The biggest winners from these developments are likely to be consumers and online distributors such as Rhapsody, Melon and Spotify.

Record labels, producers and other middlemen whose businesses have been shaken by content piracy also stand to gain from streaming services as they have an opportunity to monetize a lot of consumption that would otherwise take place outside their revenue base.

For musical artists, there are both positives and negatives: it will be more difficult to make a living by selling recorded music, but the barriers to wide product distribution will fall fast.

Those predictions show the complexity of evolving business ecosystems for content. In this case, distributors and some content owners might gain, almost across the board, but independent content producers might suffer. In other content segments, you might see different patterns.

Mobile Cloud-Based Music Streaming Services Will Be Mainstream by 2016 | Press Release | ABI Research

Apple iPhone 5 Might Have Near Field Communications

There have been conflicting rumors about whether the iPhone 5 will support near field communications or not, and how it might do so. But here's one vote for the iPhone 5 being shipped with NFC. read more here.

Google Launches "Application Stats" for Developers

Just about every consumer electronics product now includes software or content as key parts of the end user experience. For experience providers, it appears that information now also is becoming a key part of the product creation process.

Google has launched a new "Application Statistics" dashboard in the "Market Developer Console" that gives developers information (in aggregate) about who is buying a particular application from the Android Market.

The new dashboard provides charts and tables that summarize each app’s active installation trend over time, as well as its distribution across key dimensions such as Android platform versions, devices, user countries, and user languages.

The dashboard also shows the comparable aggregate distribution for all apps in theAndroid Market. Developers could use insights gleaned from actual activity to guide development of new apps.

Android Developers Blog: Application Stats on Android Market

"Work-Arounds" for iPad at Work

Walt Mossberg talks about ways to use office productivity apps on an iPad. It's not a way I'd want to work, but some will find the features helpful. Somehow, these apps, intended to remedy the inability to import apps and files using a USB port or other method, seem to defy the tablet's basic nature.

I wouldn't necessary call any PC "elegant," but doing the sorts of things these apps allow you to do on an iPad just suggests you should be using a different device. There are lots of things an iPad or tablet handles quite well, but standard office productivity apps don't strike me as being among those things.

My shovels, rakes, pitchforks and trowels aren't elegant, either. But they do precisely the job I need them to do.

3 Waves of Mobile Payments

What Banks Could Learn from Apple

Actually, most firms could learn a lot from Apple.

Social Networks Drive News Consumption

There's probably a very good reason the New York Times will allow virtually unrestricted access to readers who arrive at the online site from Facebook or Twitter. Some 75 percent of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52 percent say they share links to news with others using social networking sites and email.

Some 51 percent of Facebook users who are also online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people they follow. Another 23 percent follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites. See http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News/Summary-of-Findings.aspx.

As with most applications, some users are active than others. About 27 percent of users share 87 percent of the stories.

CNN's research says 27% of us share 87% of news links | Media | guardian.co.uk

Mobile Supplements Other Forms of News Consumption

With the caveat that tablet behavior might produce different results in the future, and that behavior might already have changed in the smartphone area, a study of news consumption suggests that smartphones mostly supplement, rather than displace, other forms of readership.

Smartphones are only used to read or watch news when people have time to kill during the day and other media (such as TV or newspapers) are not available. One caveat is that the study was conducted in 2007, and you know how much can change in four years.

Computers were the most common way for people to access the news, at 39 percent total, 24 percent on desktops and 15 percent on laptops.

TV came in second at 29 percent, and newspapers and radio tied at nine percent apiece. Only about seven percent of all media sessions happened on a mobile device. More than half (58 percent) of news consumption happened at the participants' residences, though 21.4 percent happened at work, and 10 percent happened while in a vehicle.

Mobile devices creating their own niche for news delivery

Apple's Mac App Store Sales 50% of iPad App Store Sales

Based on recent sales of the top-300 apps at the U.S. Mac, iPad, and iPhone app stores, Mac store sales are already half what you see on the iPad, app analytics company Distimo says.

The reason is that the average price of a top Mac app is much higher than the other platforms. Distimo says a top-300 Mac app sells for $11.21 on average, compared to $4.19 for iPad, and $1.57 for iPhone.

CHART OF THE DAY: Apple's Mac App Store Sales Already Half As Big As The iPad App Store