Google Voice Now Integrated with Sprint Mobile Devices and Features

Sprint customers soon will be able to use their existing Sprint mobile number as their Google Voice number and have it ring multiple other phones simultaneously, Google says. Calls to your Sprint mobile number can easily be answered from your office or your home phone, or through Gmail viewed on a desktop PC. Calls from Gmail and text messages sent from google.com/voice will also display a user's Sprint number. The new capability basically gives Sprint customers all the benefits of Google Voice without the need to change or port their number.



Alternatively, Google Voice users can choose to replace their Sprint number with their Google Voice number when placing calls or sending text messages from their Sprint handset. This feature works on all Sprint phones and gives Sprint users all the benefits of Google Voice without the need for an app.

In both cases, Google Voice replaces Sprint voicemail, giving Sprint customers transcribed voicemail messages available online and sent via email and/or text message. International calls made from Google Voice users’ Sprint phones will be connected by Google Voice at our very low rates, and Sprint customers will also have access to the rest of Google Voice’s features, like creating personalized voicemail greetings based on who’s calling, call recording, blocking unwanted callers, and more.

The feature will be available soon to Sprint customers in the United States. Once it is launched, it will be rolled out gradually to all Google Voice users, and can be enabled through the Google Voice website. If you want to be notified about when the feature is available, leave your email address at google.com/voice/sprint and Google will notify you as soon as the feature is available.

AT&T Buys T-Mobile USA

AT&T Inc. has agreed to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG for $39 billion in cash and stock, in a deal that would create an industry giant by combining the second-largest and fourth-largest U.S. wireless carriers.

It isn't clear whether regulators will allow the transaction, one might argue. It might be so much that the deal would reduce the number of leading national providers from four to three, but that it allows one of the top-two to become so much larger.

Should the deal be approved, however, AT&T would vault to the leading position, becoming 33 percent larger than Verizon Wireless, today the leader in terms of market share. Should the deal be approved, and should no rival bid emerge, Sprint would retain its third-place rank, but without any hope of a rapid way to level the playing field. There has been speculation that Sprint and T-Mobile USA might merge, thereby creating three roughly equivalent-sized players in the U.S. market.

By some estimates, the merged AT&T and T-Mobile USA would have about 43 percent market share in the U.S. wireless market. Of course, even before the deal gets final regulator clearance, there always is some chance of a rival bid emerging.

Also, Verizon Wireless might respond with an acquisition of its own. Were Verizon to buy Sprint, it would again retake the number-one spot in the wireless market, and give two carriers control of about 91 percent of the U.S. mobile market.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110320005040/en/ATT-Acquire-T-Mobile-USA-Deutsche-Telekom

Newspapers will Live or Die in Print

Current estimates for U.K. newspapers, from analyst Jim Chisholm, show that only 7.4 percent of revenue will come from digital sources in 2011, rising to 13.9 percent by 2017.

In the U.S. market, 9.3 percent of newspaper revenues now come from digital sources, growing to 14.6 percent in six years.

The health and survival of the newspaper industry for the foreseeable future still rests on the physical product known as the "newspaper," one might argue.

That is not reassuring, in many ways. The hope has been that newspapers could survive, if not thrive, by shifting to digital delivery and preserving existing gross revenue and margins. If that isn't the case, difficult times lie ahead.

Or course, the newspapers are not the only industry that possibly could face similar dilemmas. Telecom service providers and video entertainment providers have been facing similar questions as services and applications move from legacy platforms to new IP-based platforms. So far, the answers are not so reassuring. Gross revenue and margin seems to be lower when users switch to digital products.

Paywall or no paywall, print is still what pays | Media | The Observer

Facebook Buys "Apps for Feature Phones" Firm

Snaptu, which develops mobile applications that can be run on feature phones, is being acquired by Facebook. Snaptu had launched a Facebook mobile app in early 2011. Snaptu provides a solution for developing, deploying and maintaining online services, particularly on mobile phones. Aside from acquiring talented personnel, the deal gives Facebook more control over the ways its features and apps can be used by people who are using feature phones, not smart phones.

We’ve agreed to be acquired by Facebook

Online Local Advertising Will Be Bigger than Newspaper Local Advertising in 2015

Here's just one more look at how revenues have shifted, and are shifting, in the local advertising business in the United States.

Newspapers traditionally have been the single-biggest provider. But online has grown enormously since 1995, when the online local advertising business did not even exist.

By 2015, Borrell Associates predicts, Internet advertising, including both online and mobile, will be bigger than newspaper local advertising.

Google Updates "Blogger"

Mobile Marketing Will Cannibalize Online Marketing

If Borrell Associates is correct, "online" marketing (not just advertising, but also including promotions) is going to cannibalize online marketing between now and 2015.

http://www.borrellassociates.com/reports?page=shop.product_details&flypage=garden_flypage.tpl&product_id=864

Promotion is Disrupting Advertising

“Promotions now are disrupting advertising, according to Gordon Borrell Associates. About 60 percent (59.7 percent) of all marketing dollars spent today are spent on promotion, rather than advertising. See http://www.borrellassociates.com/wordpress/. That has obvious implications for the health of general-purpose media, as advertising drives the business model for general-purpose media.

"In case you haven’t noticed, media companies have changed their strategy of charging for advertising," says Gordon Borrell, head of his namesake firm. "If it continues, the business model for media might change forever."

Promotion will be key for developing new applications and user experiences in a "local" sense. Ben Wood, Google executive notes that "local is at the heart of user search." About 20 percent of all searches have local intent and a third of mobile searches have local intent. In other words, people are searching for something they want to do, where they are now, or are going. It should therefore come as no surprise that Google and just about everybody else in the "marketing spend" business is looking hard at local promotions.

Groupon, and other "social shopping" applications that serve up promotions and coupons, are the first fruit of that shift to mobile-driven local promotion. What Groupon represents is yet another example of entrepreneurs taking a look at older markets and figuring out better, more useful ways to meet existing demand. Craigslist disrupted the newspaper classified ad business. Now social shopping services are going to disrupt the "coupon" business.

None of that seems like good news for the newspaper business model, going forward.

The Groupon phenomenon: beautiful deconstruction of an old media model

The State of Legacy Media

Not far from true, is it?

Mobile Advertising to Eclipse TV Advertising?

Brand ad dollars spent on mobile will exceed those spent on TV a decade, says Dane Holewinski director of marketing at Greystripe. That is a significant prediction, given that TV advertising now dominates ad spending.
According to Drake Direct, http://drakedirect.blogspot.com/ TV ad spending was half of all U.S. ad spending in 2008.

4 Reasons Why Mobile Advertising Will Be Bigger Than TV Advertising In The Next Decade

Mobile Payments for Medical Care

M-PESA now is providing on-the-ground mobile banking services that directly improve health care for women in Kenya, Tanzania and Afghanistan. Basically, M-PESA provides the quick cash people need for transportation to clinics and hospitals.
If a rural family without access to a bank needs cash to pay for transportation, M-PESA works with the Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania to transfer money quickly and directly to transportation companies by means of a mobile phone text message. The families then pay back the small transportation loan later.

In similar fashion, M-PESA is used to support the Changamka Medical Smartcard, allowing women in Kenya who have little access to money to pay for maternity care.

New mobile tech saves lives and women’s health Africa - WNN | Women News Network

Will iPad Market Develop on iPod or iPhone Model?

It matters a great deal, at least for device manufacturers and the application ecosystems that grow up around devices, whether the tablet market develops on the model of what happened with MP3 players, or whether it develops on the model of smartphones. In the former case, one manufacturer, Apple, simply wound up with complete domination. In the latter market, robust competition remains the case.

One might argue, despite the early going, that the iPad market will develop more along the lines of the iPhone business, and the earlier PC business, than that of the MP-3 device market. As important as the MP-3 player is, it is a niche product. The tablet, though, points to the future of computing, at least in part. It is a multi-function device, not a single-purpose device, as are MP-3 players.

Multi-function devices arguably are more important, to more industry interests and segments, precisely because they are platforms for many applications and services, from gaming and video entertainment to web surfing and communications. There is, in other words, a strategic interest on the part of the content and application side of the business to avoid monopoly control by a single manufacturer or platform provider. That almost ensures a determined effort by other ecosystem players to cultivate and support a strong rival to Apple in the tablet arena.

The alternatives have be more than functional. The alternatives must offer an experience to match the iPad in most respects. But any important multi-function device will be important to many powerful interests that will have no interest in bending to control by any other single firm. For that reason, assuming the rest of the ecosystem continues to innovate rapidly, the tablet market should develop more on the pattern of the smartphone market, not the MP-3 market.

Why The iPad Won’t Be Like The iPod | mocoNews

Mobile, Social, Local: The Emerging New Meaning

A developing "shorthand" way of describing where "Internet" technology is headed is to say that something new will emerge, in the next era of computing, from "mobile, social, local" underpinnings.

Some might wonder “what’s new here?” Don’t we already know mobility, global networks, new applications and devices are important?

But that is not what is meant in the new context. Instead, what "mobility" means is that people can augment real-world experiences with digital experiences anyplace they happen to be.

The implication is that such a blurring of offline with online, in a broadband, rich media context, for example, sets the stage for a different set of experiences, innovation and business opportunity than "people can talk on phones where they are."

Mobile, Social, Local: The Emerging New Meaning - Thoughts on Carrier Evolution - Carrier Evolution

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