Does this look like a reasonable alignment of value and price?

http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-of-the-week-the-new-york-times-delusional-digital-pricing-scheme-2011-3/the-real-reason-att-is-buying-t-mobile-2

Connected devices are one major reason mobile service providers need more spectrum

Some might argue it is T-Mobile USA's spectrum that is most important to AT&T, not the subscribers. Connected devices consume at least an order of magnitude more bandwidth than smartphones.
http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-of-the-week-the-new-york-times-delusional-digital-pricing-scheme-2011-3/did-groupon-have-a-terrible-february-3

SinglePlatform Auto-Updates Multiple Social Sites

Small business owners are busy people. Updating multiple social media and websites with new information takes time, considerable time if sites need to be updated frequently. SinglePlatform runs a publishing network that updates such sites without requiring discrete sign-ons and postings. Restaurants are a customer set that SinglePlatform seems to be getting traction with, providing an easy way for restaurants to easily menus and specials, for example.

Restaurants have a particularly difficult web presence environment, given the number of review sites, guide sites and travel sites where their information is relevant, and where restaurants would prefer to be visible. Identifying and then updating hundreds of such sites, in real time, obviously is a chore. A big chore. SinglePlatform aims to automate the updating of hundreds to thousands of such sites.

The service also features a built-in pay-per-call ability, which allows users to take action immediately, and thereby provides both a direct response vehicle and campaign or site tracking. SinglePlatform charges businesses a yearly fee to use the platform, as well as a flat-fee per call generated over a certain length. In return, they provide direct user metrics, including time on the site, pages viewed per visits and visits per user per month.

SinglePlatform provides hotels, restaurants, bars and PR firms a unified way to manage review sites, mobile applications, local guides, as well as social media pages, website, and mobile-optimized sites. The chief limitatiion would seem to be the actual social networks, hotels, search engines, local directories, city guides, newspapers, and mobile applications that have signed up to be part of the network.

SinglePlatform

Dwolla Launches FiSync, Cuts ACH Wait Times by 2 to 3 Days

 Dwolla is launching "FiSync," a mobile payments front end allowing FiSync will let members of partner financial institutions send and receive money by a number of methods, including phone, web, Twitter and Facebook as well as at retail locations.

Dwolla FiSync will eliminate as much as two to three days of delay when Automated Clearing House transactions occur, and will allow users to directly transfer cash from their bank accounts, without the need for a pre-loaded Dwolla account.

For consumers, Dwolla provides the ability to send, receive, and request funds from any other user, charging merchants and others receiving funds 25 cents per transaction. 

Investors Talk about Mobile Banking in Africa

 Hunter Newby, investor in Africxpress, and Eliot Samuels, PilotRock Capital, talk about mobile banking in Africa. 

How Important Can Twitter Become?

So far, Twitter has not achieved the broad usage or financial value Facebook has. But some think Twitter will achieve substantial success and leadership in the next era of Internet computing.

98% Smartphone Ownership at South by Southwest

A Google survey at South by Southwest found 98 percent of survey respondents have a smartphone. That's what you call serious adoption.

Google Witholds Honeycomb

Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple's iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones.

Unless you believe Google has suddenly decided Android isn't open source, you would tend to think Google isn't yet happy with Honeycomb in some significant ways, and doesn't think it is ready for general release, yet.

Google Holds Honeycomb Tight - BusinessWeek

AT&T, T-Mobile USA Acquisition Document

Unless you are a regulatory attorney or a merger specialist, you will not enjoy reading this document, which outlines the terms for AT&T's proposed purchase of T-Mobile USA. But here it is.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/732717/000119312511072458/dex21.htm

Apple Will Be Bigger Than HP And IBM

Apple will pass IBM in terms of annual revenue in 2012, and will pass Hewlett-Packard in 2013, predicts George Colony, Forrester Research CEO.

“They’ll be bigger than IBM next year, and they’ll be bigger than HP the year after that,” says Colony, who predicted that Apple would eventually earn $200 billion in revenues, and post sales growth exceeding 50 percent through the next two years. Demand for the iPad and other Apple devices will fuel that expansion, Colony says.

Hewlett-Packard had sales of $126 billion in the year that ended in October and IBM’s revenue was $99.9 billion last year, making them the largest technology companies, respectively, by sales. Apple ranks number one by market capitalization.

We might argue about what all of that implies for "leadership" or "innovation" or any number of other dimensions. But technology watchers are on the lookout for leadership in the post-PC era of computing, for the simple reason that no firm has lead in more than one era.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-24/apple-50-sales-growth-may-continue-through-2012-on-mobile-boom.html

Netflix, Redbox Face New Restrictions

Though online video revenues are growing, they still do not approach the revenues studios and content owners earn from sales of DVDs, Blu-ray disks and rentals of content using those physical media. In the interim, studios seem to be concluding they are better off protecting the declining DVD sales business, even to the extent of harming the volume of rental revenues.

Studios seem to be moving to delay availability to Redbox and Netflix more than they have in the past, allowing a greater period of time when consumers will have to buy discs to see new release material, for example.

That is especially true as studios have concluded that Netflix now has gotten too much power in the distribution business. By increasing the length of time new movie and TV series content is available for rental, the content owners hope to arrest the revenue decline in physical media sales, at least for a while.

The overall consumer video business seems to have been declining since about 2004. So far, video offered using pay per view or video on demand, plus online revenue, has not kept pace with the decline in sales of physical media products. See http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/03/over-top-video-complements-linear-at.html.

Studios are aware of what happened in the music business, where online has not arrested the decline of music sales revenue. See http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/02/will-video-follow-music.html.

Groupon Appears to Lose Market Share as Competition Grows

Groupon appears to be losing market share in the social shopping market, with LivingSocial gaining enough share to pull even with Groupon, according to an analysis by yipit.

LivingSocial has more than 25 million members, meaning a growing portion of Groupon subscribers are now subscribed to at least one more deal service.

Users who had previously been members of services like DailyCandy, Thrillist, UrbanDaddy, Travelzoo or OpenTable have now started to receive Daily Deals from them as well, the yipit analysis suggests.

LivingSocial’s average revenue per offer is approximately $24,000, while Groupon’s is now $13,000.

Groupon might also be saturating a narrow demographic of young, single-oriented target audience where 68 percent of subscribers between the ages of 18 to 34, while 64 percent of LivingSocial’s is 34 and above. Groupon’s competitors may have a broader appeal as the Daily Deal universe expand beyond young singles, as well.

read more here

Twitter Founder Talks about Analytics, Commerce

"You have to instrument everything," says Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, and now CEO of Square. "For the first two years of Twitter's life, we were flying blind."

"We had no idea what was going on with the network," says Dorsey. "We had no idea what was going on with the system, with how people were using it. We were making guesses."

At Square, analytics is everything, given Dorsey's view that a next great wave of innovation will aim to affect the 94 percent of all consumer shopping activity that remains offline.

Decades of Turbulence Ahead, Says Paul Saffo

Futurist Paul Saffo predicts decades of turbulence, with huge upside for some firms able to harness the disruption.

For Google Mobile Payments is a Gateway

Google's "Google Checkout" users to pay for goods in the Android marketplace using their cellphones, and now users also can buy virtual and other goods from inside mobile apps as well. But Google is looking at mobile payments in a broader way, as well, not just as a way of buying digital goods inside apps, or buying merchandise online, but also supporting traditional retail payments.

For some in the market, transaction fees are the whole business. But that isn't likely to be the case for Google.

Google's main business is advertising, and that now includes mobile advertising and likely will extend to mobile promotion and social shopping. For Google, mobile payments could help it leverage the "searching" function that often occurs before a person becomes a "shopper." A direct tie to the "purchasing" function might allow Google to craft new advertising and promotion services, occurring before a sale, in the search phase, while shopping, while checking out, or after the sale.

Mobile payment data also could allow Google to tailor all of its targeted ad techniques with greater richness, and provide key signals about which targeted promotions should be offered to classes of shoppers or individual shoppers, assuming there is an opt-in program. If you know what a person buys, it is easy to figure out what sorts of coupons and loyalty programs should be offered to shoppers in general, or classes of shoppers.

Google plans a major test in New York, San Francisco, and possibly in plans to start testing a mobile-payment service at stores in New York and San Francisco. But some say Google also will be testing in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

As reported, VeriFone Systems will provide terminals in San Francisco and New York.  ViVOtech Inc. will provide terminals in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Google's Mobile Payments Challenge - TheStreet