Apple In-App Purchase Policy Has Business Model Implications

On one hand, Apple's policy on in-app purchasing gives developers a new way to create revenue, by selling things inside the app. On the other hand, Apple's 30-percent share of the revenue will be high enough to discourage some sales altogether.

The policy does create the ability to sell subscriptions, and in some cases will make it easier for developers to create sales opportunities inside their apps. But the policy is not "all upside" for all participants in the ecosystem. Some developers might find the 30-percent revenue share for in-app purchases greater than the entire profit margin for some products.

Apple obviously wants to keep in-app sales channeled through its own payment processes. App suppliers sometimes will benefit, sometimes will be hurt. But the policies are consequential.

Apple In-App Purchase Policy Has Consequences

Importance of Mobile Payments: It Blurs the Line Between Online, Offline

With the arrival of mobile payments, the mobile ecosystem becomes more than just content and apps in a digital world. "By integrating offline purchase data into this ecosystem, the line between digital behaviors and purchases in the physical world begins to blur, especially when core smartphone services such as location are integrated with purchase data," says Ryan Garner, GfK associate director.

In a broad sense, it is "a quick response code on steroids."

http://www.gfknop.com/imperia/md/content/gfk_nop/newsandpressinformation/global_mobile_payments_report_110511_final.pdf

Tigo Rwanda launches mobile money payment service

Tigo Rwanda, a telecom brand owned by Millicom Cellular International, has launched mobile money services in Rwanda, targeted at subscribers with limited or no access to banking services. Tigo has similar services in Ghana and Tanzania.

Tigo Rwanda is the second mobile company to launch such a service after South Africa-based MTN's local unit launched its mobile money product in February 2010, acquiring about 260,000 subscribers by March this year.

Rwanda's rural areas have limited access to financial services, with the central bank saying only 1.7 million deposit accounts had been registered by December 2010 out of a population of 9 million.

With about 3.3 million mobile subscribers shared between MTN and Tigo as of January this year, Rwandan mobile users can utilise the technology to deposit and withdraw money and can pay electricity bills and school fees via text messages.

Tigo Rwanda launches mobile money payment service | Reuters

More NFC Options, Still Much Confusion

Visa's recent investment in mobile payments enabler Square, coupled with the recent Isis decision to back off creating a brand-new retail payments infrastructure, suggests the market is moving faster now, so much faster than Isis cannot afford to spend years, and lots of money, to create a new mass market payments brand.

Square also suggests the ways much mobile payments innovation will happen: extending payments functionality into retail segments where it has been difficult and expensive to take the existing approaches.

Charge Anywhere has taking a similar tack, supporting payments using iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices to process credit card payments with their phones and a dedicated reader to swipe the cards.

But the latest version to the software can turn a near field communications device into a full mobile payment terminal without the use of an external dongle. The solution requires an existing merchant payment account.

The new capability allows NFC-equipped credit or debit cards to communicate directly with the Charge Anywhere-equipped mobile device without any need to "swipe" a card.

The larger issue, though, is whether the NFC payments infrastructure can grow fast enough to take market share before other communication methods get traction. Square seems to be doing just fine using the old "swipe" method.

App turns Google Nexus phone into payment tool | Android Atlas - CNET Reviews

Family of Amazon Android Devices?

Amazon is preparing an “entire family” of Android devices that will launch this holiday shopping season, according to Taylor Wemberly at Android and Me. A smartphone might be among the devices, expected to feature tablet devices of various form factors.

Amazon already has gotten into the Android applications market space and online video rentals, so the move is not far fetched. Amazon has been really good at providing excellent customer service and a well-designed recommendation engine, so you can imagine the possibilities, over time, as those skills are applied to the mobile location feature and the shopping experience.

And since Amazon lives and dies by the ease of "buying something," it might not be too hard to suggest that Amazon is thinking about ways to integrate payments into the mix as well.

PayPal "Most Trusted" Mobile Payments Brand

PayPal was the brand most likely to be trusted with personal financial data by consumers in nine major markets around the world, in a survey by GfK.


(click image for a larger view)


Credit-card brands Visa and MasterCard were the next most likely global brands to be trusted, followed by Apple, Nokia and Samsung.

In a poll of 8603 people in nine countries, GfK found that financial services firms have the highest levels of trust, consideration and preference among consumers, with a score of 48 percent, when it comes to mobile payments, says Ryan Garner, GfK analyst. Within this category, banks come out on top.

Mobile and telecommunication brands receive significantly lower levels of trust when it comes to controlling financial transactions. Just 10 percent of respondents expressed high confidence and trust in mobile service providers, compared to some other ecosystem participants.

"Trust is the biggest driver of service preference and is most important at driving adoption of mobile payments," says Garner.

Overall, 62 percent of respondents find mobile payments appealing. This is higher among certain key groups, including: younger consumers aged 16-24 (75 percent), innovators (74 percent), and current smartphone owners (72 percent). Developing markets in China (82 percent) and Brazil (73 percent) find mobile payment services the most appealing. Consumers in the United States and Europe seem less interested, at about 50 percent.

Read more here

Enterprises Diversifying Mobile Choices

There was a time, not so long ago, when Research in Motion's BlackBerry simply dominated enterprise smart phone choices. That is changing, according to Intermedia, which says it is the world's largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider. By definition, Intermedia operates outside the RIM ecosystem, so its data does not necessarily indicate the extent to which preferences are shifting between RIM and other devices.

It is clear that Android and iOS devices are getting traction, though. Intermedia, which manages 320,000 hosted Exchange email accounts, says recent activations show that 61 percent were iPhones and 17 percent were Android devices

Looking at the installed base of activeSync-based smart phones, 61 percent are iPhone, while 22 percent on 'Other' platforms, primarily Windows, followed by Symbian and Palm. About 17 percent are Android devices.

Intermedia Finds Business Professionals Choosing iPhone Over Android:

Google, Others Hope to Tap Hyperlocal News

Hyper-local news sites, which some say are information sources covering a single city, part of a town or just a neighborhood, have not been the foundation for an entire business, or much of a business, so far. To the extent that an advertising and promotion market exists, it has been lead by direct mail, outdoor media and other ad channels such as flyers delivered by hand to homes. But most of the business has been too expensive for a truly neighborhood-based business to use.

Some ad channels work for local, and by extension for very-local businesses. Retailers and other very-local businesses have used the Yellow Pages, of course, but even where zoned editions are available, there is "wastage," from the standpoint of a neighborhood business.

But Google's new move to allow users to create zipcode-sized mobile news areas could be a breakthrough, allowing advertisers to reach a mobile and fixed access audience that is self-selected down to the level of a zip code.

Can Anyone Actually Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News? | Fast Company

Cisco, Microsoft CEOs Get Slammed, Is History Repeating?

It might be coincidence that stories about how both Microsoft and Cisco leadership have "failed" for the last decade appeared on nearly the same day.

CEO John Chambers is one of the most revered executives in the history of the technology industry, and Steve Ballmer's badge number at Microsoft is "30." Both have lead their firms for a long enough period of time for analysts and investors to make qualified judgments.

Since talking over as CEO of Cisco in 1995, Chambers has grown the company's revenue from $1 billion to more than $40 billion. For 15 years, he has been a soothing, straightforward presence in the industry, free of the bombast and arrogance that so often characterizes big-league CEOs.

But nobody who follows computing technology can be unaware that no company that has lead in one era of technology also has emerged as a leader in the following wave. That's literally "no company."

And it is possible that despite that recognition, both executives are simply finding that they cannot fight history.

Read more here and here.

How "Old People" Use Media

Google News Goes Local

Google now allows users to view location based news, localized by zip code.

Users who want to take advantage of the new feature can visit news.google.com on their smart phone and enable location sharing to see the “News near you” section at the bottom.

Google News Goes Local On Mobile: Introduces ‘News Near You’

Google Studies Smart Phone Behavior

Smart phone behavior is important for any number of reasons, in particular to the extent that the behavior itself creates the opportunity for all sorts of innovations that can lead to new businesses being created.

For example, 71 percent of smart phone users search because of an ad they’ve seen either online or offline.

About 82 percent of smart phone users notice mobile ads. Some 74 percent of smart phone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping. Also, 88 percent of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day.

Blogger Outage Caused by "Data Corruption"

Google's Blogger service was restored on April 13, 2011, after a global outage that lasted at least 20.5 hours.

"During scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior," the company says on the Blogger blog. "Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages."

A small subset of Blogger users (Google estimates 0.16 percent) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts.

All day April 12, 2011, Google put Blogger in read-only mode while restoring content. As part of the repair process, Blogger rolled back to a Wednesday May 11th version, leading to deletion of material on a temporarily basis.

In the afternoon of April 13, Twitter is reporting service disruptions as well.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger is back

Now Twitter is "Having Stability Issues"

Experiencing site stability issues 1 hour ago

We are currently experiencing site stability issues. There may be intermittent issues loading twitter.com and Twitter clients.  We’re working to fix it as soon as possible.

   
Google "Blogger" has just been restored, after a global outage that lasted more than 24 hours. Now Twitter says it has an outage.

How "Open" is Android?

Engineering always involves tradeoffs. Smaller size might be an advantage, but smaller size limits input and output options. Bigger smart phone screens are a plus, but at the cost of battery life. More features can enhance user experience, but means more complexity. "Open" systems encourage innovation, at the cost of standardization and interoperability.

Observers have faulted Android for its fragmentation, over the last year, for example, a somewhat inevitable result of allowing choices. But Android seems to realize it has to limit the amount of freedom developers have, in order to ensure that users and customers can be sure "Android" apps and devices actually work on the devices they buy.

As it turns out, Android code is made available without charge to device manufacturers, but those manufacturers must adhere to a “compatibility” standard determined by Google. Some will complain about the threat to "openness." Others will cheer the consumer interface advantages, among them the assurance that software and hardware actually works.

Skyhook Wireless v. Google Case Yields E-Mail Insight - NYTimes.com