Sony’s Android Tablets Aren't "Slates"

Sony is betting you’ll buy one of its upcoming tablets for one big reason: They look like nothing you’ve seen before, especially the clamshell S2.


Codenamed the “S1″ and “S2″ for now, Sony’s two unreleased Android tablets depart from the usual square, flat slabs we’ve seen so far in 2011. Instead, the S2 design comes as a dual-screen, clamshell device, while the S1 is similar to many current tablets with one significant deviation — its funky, wedge-shaped form factor, which tapers from one end to the other.

“It looks like a magazine with the cover folded backwards,” a Sony spokesman said at a Wednesday event in San Francisco. “And the tablet’s center of gravity rests on the wider end with the hand holding the device.”

Forget Slates: Sony’s Android Tablets Come in Funky Shapes | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Google+ reaches 10 Million Users in 2 Weeks

Only two weeks after launch, Google boasts 10 million users, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks ever. Additionally, people are using Google to share content over one billion times a day, Google reported during its earnings call. Here's the transcript of the conference call, published in record time, I'd say: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106189723444098348646/posts/dRtqKJCbpZ7

Google reaches 10M users after just two weeks

"It's 1999," Says Stephanie Tilenius, Google Commerce VP

About "80 percent of commerce is offline and local,” Tilenius said. "Stephanie Tilenius, Google commerce VP. As for where the market is, she likens it to 1999, in terms of e-commerce development with eBay and Amazon. "We’re at the beginning of 10 years of innovation and competition,” she said.

Google’s plan for mobile and online payments

Customer Experience Is Personal, But Difficult, For That Reason

Forrester Research analyst Harley Manning points out that "customer experience is personal. It comes down to a pilot who holds a plane, a phone agent who makes a problem just go away, or a barista who anticipates a customer’s order."

He's right, of course. But any executive, product manager or operations manager knows that even good advice has to be qualified when put into practice. "Personal" activities do not scale very well, by definition. They are "one-to-one" events. So the problem for many providers of goods and services is how much money and time the organization can afford to spend to really "personalize" a product or experience.

In many cases, in fact, organizations really cannot afford to do much of anything without destroying their profit margins. That might explain why some businesses routinely get lowish markets for "customer experience," "satisfaction" or "customer service." And there are times when a firm has to invest more heavily in such interactions or risk market failure. Most mobile services firms, and Sprint in particular, have discovered that truism in recent years.

But lots of firms probably struggle with the margin implications of "personalized" experience, except for providers of digital goods, where software can be used to highly customize and personalize many aspects of experience, with the end user actually doing the tailoring. Experiences built around physical products are a harder problem, by far.

But even there, as the saying goes, more of the value and experience of most products these days is embodied in software. And some of us would include the content wrap-around to a product as a "software" enhancement. You might include "frequently asked questions" and user forums, blogs about "how to get more value from your product" and so forth as part of the value wrap-around that, if not completely "personal," create a more-personal, more human, "higher touch" feel about a product.

In that sense, content marketing is about more than lead generation or branding. Content marketing can be part of the way a product that is hard to support in a genuinely "high touch" personal way, can be made "more personal."

Customer Experience Is Personal

Twitter Could be Driving 4 Times More Traffic Than You Think

Twitter might be driving 400 percent more traffic to your content site than you believe, despite what your analytics packages are telling you. Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics. Read more here.

These were good packages in the pre-social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic.
Today they’re wrong. Terribly wrong, argues venture capitalist Mark Suster.

Since figuring out which channels or sources are referring traffic is a very important part of determining how a brand allocates its marketing, content creation and other budgets, the answers about referring traffic matter.. It is almost certain that Twitter is driving much more of your referrals than you think.

Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers, say execs at awe.sm, which creates and sells analytics apps.

Today’s web is built around social streams and other APIs that are consumed by desktop clients, mobile apps, and even other web services, all of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism.

awe.sm was built for the modern Web, a network of people, not pages, to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities, no matter what path they follow.

The awe.sm app was built to know with certainty where each link was originally shared, in addition to all the places where it was ultimately clicked (referrers). This approach gives us a unique set of data that demonstrates just how misleading referrer information can be.

The referral traffic one sees from Twitter.com is less than 25 percent of the traffic actually driven by Twitter.
"We looked at awe.sm data from the first six months of 2011 spanning links to over 33,000 sites, and the numbers were surprising," the company says.

Some 24 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer. About 63 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all, and would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics.

Some 13 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (Facebook.com or Linkedin.com).

Twitter is the quintessential modern web service. All the ways to consume Twitter, even Twitter.com, are just clients for the Twitter API, so the failure to effectively track it using such an outmoded methodology as referrer analysis should come as little surprise, awe.sm says.

When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket.

The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is. If a visit didn’t come from another webpage (no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.

If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile. And since 66 percent of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.

Google hastens Google+ Corporate Account Efforts

Google is accelerating a test of corporate accounts on Google after "thousands upon thousands" of businesses applied for a place in the program, a Google executive said. So far, Ford appears to be the only brand that already has gotten an account.

The company plans next week to choose who'll get into the test and announce their names soon afterward, Christian Oestlien, a Google product manager, said in a Google post last night.

But if you want your company, brand name, school, or celebrity pet to have a place on Google sooner rather than later, you'd better act fast. Google is closing down its applications form on Friday, he said. Read more here.

Brands can apply to be a part of this test until July 15, 2011.  Google says it will close the applications process on Friday (July 15th) at 6pm PST.Apply here, if you can get through. Demand seems to be crashing the server.

Google hastens Google corporate account launch

Spotify Music Streaming Service Launches in U.S. Market

Sometimes Being Second Can Help

2008 was a Mobile Device Inflection Point, Apparently

It appears as though 2008 was noteworthy in several respects. It was the year the global "Great Recession" hit. It also seems to have been the year for big changes in the global mobile phone business.

Notably, it seems to have been the year that the iPhone began to stamp its leadership on the device market. It also seems to have been the year that prior successful feature phone strategies began to unravel.

Read more here

83% of Execs Predict Wide Mobile Payments Adoption in 4 Years

About 83 percent of 1,000 executives surveyed by KPMG in the financial services, technology, telecommunications, and retail industries believe that mobile payment will be widely accepted by consumers within four years, compared to only nine percent who see them as mainstream today. In fact, 46 percent believe mobile payments will be mainstream within two years.

Approximately 72 percent of the executives predict mobile payment to be reasonably important in the future, with specialist online systems building on its leading position as a payment method, and mobile banking and near field communication (NFC) gaining significantly greater traction than today. In addition, 58 percent said they a mobile payment strategy is already in place.

One should typically treat all such forecasts with a bit of skepticism. There is a tendency for observers, no matter how well informed, to overestimate impact in the early part of a new business development of this magnitude. But it suggests a rather broad consensus that something important is growing.

But the results also indicate how much the new ecosystem is bringing formerly disparate industries into cooperation and competition. Typically, disruption occurs when some online service or application threatens to displace only one existing business and set of providers. Mobile payments, and the wider mobile commerce business, has leaders and attackers in multiple industries, perhaps in  five or so distinct fields, having to protect or grow their existing profiles. That will lead to a chaotic and complex adoption path.

The other unknown is whether the business, obviously a scale game, will result in just a few large ecosystems, or whether a common core of platforms will allow many niche providers to become established.

The survey took place in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia/Africa, and Asia Pacific, involving 970 business people, including 250 in the U.S., in primarily the financial services, technology, telecommunications and retail industries.

Read more here.

Mobile "Payments" are About Integrating Online, Real World Shopping

"The objective of next generation payment isn’t merely wireless payments," some would argue.

"As cool as it is, it is not a drastic improvement to the shopping experience." Instead, the broader goal is to integrate and enhance the physical shopping experience with Internet apps and capabilities.

Though some think it is a rather trivial development, Groupon and other social shopping apps are more than "coupons delivered a different way."

Over the longer term, the issue will be the way mobile devices are used to create a platform for all sorts of enhanced commerce operations. Payment is a tool, just as location, cameras, social circles, shopping history, advertising and offers are part of the broader "shopping" experience.

Mobile payments are about integrating online with physical shopping

Streaming Video Could Help Access Providers, Really

Growing bandwidth demand is a genuine "problem" for access providers in one clear sense. If all access providers can sell is best effort, unlimited access, growing access is a problem, as costs grow, but revenues do not. Streaming video is the big driver of bandwidth consumption for most users, which is why everybody is hearing so much talk about the end of "unlimited access."

What also is obvious is that the problem actually is an opportunity for access providers, so long as access providers are able to charge for usage in some logical way. Absolute "metering," as with electricity or water, never has been popular with end users, and arguably depresses application usage.

Such notions are not reassuring for some other participants in the ecosystem, of course. Users will not want to pay more. Application providers understandably are worried about whether they will wind up paying access providers in some way, either for quality of service mechanisms or some other form of access tolls. Perhaps the bigger issue is potential abuse of market power, rather than pricing that is linked in some logical way to consumption.

But usage traditionally has been an important input for communications service pricing and packaging. Some might argue that the simplest, most logical way for access providers to participate in application system revenue growth is to simply tie retail access pricing in some way to expected growth of bandwidth usage.

Circles is a Winner, Reviewer Says

"At first, Google looks like a shameless Facebook duplicate," says David Pogue at the New York Times. "There’s a place for you to make posts (your thoughts and news, like Facebook’s Wall); there’s a stream (an endless scrolling page of your friends’ posts, like Facebook’s News Feed); and even a little "1" button (a clone of Facebook’s Like button)."

"But there’s one towering, brilliant difference: Circles." Virtually every review I've seen has said Circles is the big innovation, as it deals with some "privacy" issues Facebook has not been designed to address. Some of us might say the better term is "relevance" problem. Some items, posts, pictures and recommendations are not relevant for all of one's Facebook Followers.

If you are my children, many of them should absolutely not be shared. Circles solves that basic problem.

Google Gets a Leg Up on Facebook - NYTimes.com

Netflix Hikes Prices To Shift Distribution Model

For those of us who can remember Netflix saying that online delivery of movie and other content was coming, but not so soon, and that, in any case, Netflix would adapt, it is a bit startling to see Netflix taking steps to push its customer base towards streaming delivery.

Many have noted that the new price plans, for customers who want both unlimited DVD rentals and unlimited streaming, are increasing 60 percent. In fairness, 60 percent of a smallish number is still a smallish number.

But some would argue that Netflix operating costs will be lower, and its customers can pay less, if they shift to streaming only. The price plan changes are what one calls a "tipping point," or "inflection point."

Netflix Hikes Prices To Kill DVDs

Amazon to Launch Tablet in October 2011