Mobile Ad Trends 2011

Google Mobile Payments System Could Track Advertising Effectiveness As Well

Google's new Nexus S device is the first Google device to include built-in near field communications. Normally considered a way to support mobile payments, Google might also be angling for a new way of validating, measuring and quantifying the impact of mobile advertising. If Google's NFC system supports payments, as well as identity, location and payment, it might be able to better demonstrate to advertisers the effectiveness of advertising.

Sure, Google's mobile ad network can be used to deliver coupons and other offers to mobile devices. But the payment capability might be important for reasons other than "payment."

In mobile and local advertising, the last few feet between a consumer seeing an ad and stepping into a store to make a purchase is largely untraceable. But if the mobile ad or coupon could be linked to the payment through an NFC chip in your phone, then Google can begin to measure the full cycle of click-throughs to purchase.

In other words, Google might be able to document the link between advertising and offer and actual purchase behavior. Advertisers will like that.

Google Bought Stealthy Mobile Payments Startup Zetawire

The major wireless carriers came together in 2003 to create short codes to allow marketers to easily communicate with consumers. Since then text messaging has exploded in popularity. Short codes haven’t seen growth to match. Why?

A long, opaque and expensive setup process prevents all but the largest brands from marketing to their customers with text messages. Enter the long code, otherwise known as a "phone number." Long codes offer instant setup, affordable transparent pricing, and no one standing between your company and your customers, some argue.

Short codes were supposed to bring mobile marketing to the masses. Long codes, virtual mobile phone numbers that can send and receive text messages stand ready to finally fulfill that promise. Or at least some of the potential. Most of us would agree that short codes have their place.

Wireless service providers, and marketers, have an obvious stake in such matters. Mobile marketing potentially is a revenue source for carriers and marketers as well. But for many marketers, ease of use matters. Some think long codes can help.

The Death Of The Short Code at Text Message Marketing Blog

As Streaming Grows, Will Physical Media Be Important, or Not?

"Ultimately, it will be impossible for physical disc kiosks to compete with the in-home or in-store download-to-rent business model,” says Keith Nissen of In-Stat.

Broadly stated, it is hard to argue with the general thrust of the prediction.

In-Stat notes that the home-video market will shrink $4.6 billion from 2009 to 2014, which is consistent with other estimates of the revenue providers will make renting and selling DVDs, with the most-significant changes coming from DVD sales.

Meanwhile, revenue from broadband streaming and downloading is projected to climb by $4 billion over that same period.

One suspects most observers would be comfortable with changes of about that magnitude.

But it also is possible that the changes will be more complex than a simple substitution of streaming for DVD rental, for example. One might argue that Netflix is cannibalizing DVD sales; that Netflix is competing with HBO, Showtime and Starz; that gaming and web-based entertainment is competing with DVD rentals and sales or that users are shifting discretionary entertainment spending to devices, and away from movie rentals.

All of those trends likely are contributing. One might further hypothesize that Netflix and kiosk-based rental services such as Redbox also have changed consumer expectations about the value and price of a movie event, compared to buying or renting a DVD from a retail outlet.

"One dollar for one night" might simply have replaced "five dollars for one week" as the standard of value. To be sure, $6 for a pay-per-view viewing also seems to be a more-accepted part of the market.

Still, to a greater extent that we might believe, changes in consumer expectations about the "proper" price to view a movie in a catalog have changed. The important shift might be less a matter of technology or even convenience and more a matter of changing evaluations of "value."

With the caveat that the big change seems to be less appetite for "owning" movies, there probably is quite a lot more scope for distributing new releases and recent releases in a variety of formats, and physical media could well a role, and a substantial role, for quite some time.

That would especially be true if studios reevaluate the deals they are willing to entertain, with direct impact on the retail prices possible using any distribution format.

The installed base of devices able to easily display content on standard TV screens; possible emergence of new physical media methods and broadband pricing policies also will play important and key roles.

The easy call is "streaming wins." The harder call is determining where streaming wins, and where physical media still competes. Price always matters in the consumer market, and we are far from having exhausted all the ways value and price can be matched in the movie market.

Streaming As Kiosk Killer? Not So Fast | paidContent

Is IP Telephony Mostly About Non-Voice Apps?

One might wonder whether applications other than voice now are driving IP telephony interest by business customers, and whether integrating various communication modes across mobile and fixed networks might be the most-important unified communications feature.

Nearly 40 percent of companies surveyed Frost & Sullivan report they already have deployed IP telephony. Of those that have, instant messaging and videoconferencing get the highest usage scores, with just over 50 percent of companies saying employees use each of those features.

Approximately 50 percent of respondents use mobile extensions. Of those, 70 percent use them extensively across company, and use of mobile extensions are expected to grow over the next 12 months.

About 30 percent of 200 companies surveyed by Frost & Sullivan say they have already deployed unified communications; 28% are in process; four percent are planning or evaluating; and 18 percent have no plans to adopt, says Melanie Turek, Frost and Sullivan industry director.

Roughly 60 percent of respondents say audio, video, web and telepresence conferencing are "very" important to the organization.

Also, Two thirds of companies say they use social media "extensively" for business purposes. Traditionally, social media are not UC or IP telephony core features, and the significant use of such tools illustrates how the enterprise communications function has changed over the last decade.

read more here

Social Software for Meetings: Wellknown.as

Event social networking is one of those ideas that makes intuitive sense, as people go to events and meetings to meet people and learn things. I think many of us have not used such platforms so much in the past because of the overhead of notifying people that a tool is available, and then getting the issue of access (client distribution or just access) on mobile devices, with all that implies for ease of use.

Wellknown.as seems to be offering an application that answers the ease of use, notification and client issues. It works on iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerry. That would seem to cover the vast majority of users who go to the meetings I find I'm at. It is integrated with Eventbrite, so if you are using Eventbrite for ticketing it is pretty easy to set up.

People might prefer Twitter or other tools, of course. From an attendee standpoint, what's your preferred social mode?

4G Has Been a Technical Issue; Now it Becomes a Business Issue

Telco Opportunities in Cloud Computing

How Telcos Can Live with Google

Content, Distributor Relationships to Change in 2011

In the long debate over whether content, distribution or something else is "king" of the video ecosystem, it has remained clear that relative revenue shares within the ecosystem have been changing.

Those relationships will get another test in 2011 as Netflix and a few media companies renegotiate their carriage agreements. Netflix has to renegotiate its agreements with and Starz, which allows Netflix access to Sony and Disney movies.

The original deal from 2008, in which Netflix paid an estimated $25 million annually, is seen by some in the content business as a mistake, given the discrepancy between what cable, telco and satellite companies pay Starz for carriage rights. That means Netflix content acquisition costs are set to rise.

Over the long term, Netflix viability as a provider of streaming content will be shaped by those costs.

Time Warner Takes a Shot at Netflix - NYTimes.com

Tablet Solves Question of what a "Mobile Internet Device" Looks Like

As recently as a year ago, you could have heard quite a lot about the impact "netbooks" would have on the overall PC industry. Before that you'd have heard about "mobile Internet devices."

For most of 2010, all you've heard about is "tablets," especially the iPad, for good reasons. The hypothesized market for MIDs has surfaced, and though some believed the netbook could evolve into a mass market MID, it now appears the "tablet" PC is what much of the market considers a MID to be.

Not surprisingly, much talk now centers on how much cannibalization tablets will cause in the rest of the market. IDC now forecasts that worldwide mini notebook shipments will be 37.8 million units in 2010, up 10.3 percent from 2009.

Over the next four years, the compound annual growth rate for the worldwide mini notebook market will be 4.3 percent, topping out at 42.4 million units shipped in 2014.

IDC - Press Release - prUS22565510

$35 Billion Mobile App Revenue in 2014

Worldwide mobile apps revenues will surpass $35 billion in 2014, according to researchers at International Data Corporation. The number of downloaded apps also is expected to increase from 10.9 billion worldwide in 2010 to 76.9 billion in 2014.

Application developers have churned out more than 300,000 mobile apps in just over three years, and now are available for both tablets and smartphones. In 2011 and beyond, mobile apps will find their way into even more devices, including connected TVs and the connected home, IDC forecasts.

IDC - Press Release - prUS22617910

Procter & Gamble Sees Social Media as Mass Media

Procter & Gamble now believes social media is a replacement for at least some mass media advertising. Procter & Gamble, said to be the world's biggest advertiser, still buys individual commercials on daytime TV. But the dollar amount has shrunk. P&G won't say by how much.

"The digital media has pretty much exploded," marketing chief Marc Pritchard said in an interview. "It's become very integrated with how we operate, it's become part of the way we do marketing."

"Old Spice" commercials run by Procter & Gamble recently generated 1.8 billion impressions, 140 million YouTube impressions and an increase in Twitter followers for Old Spice of 2,700 percent.

Old Spice sales also are growing at double digits, taking more of the market for body washes and deodorant.

Procter & Gamble moves from soap operas to social media - USATODAY.com

Paul Ryan on Spurring Economic Growth

I admit to a bias in favor of rational economic analysis of difficult problems, which is to say that economists generally agree on quite a number of things, and that what they tend to agree about, where it comes to spurring long-term economic growth, productivity and the ability to provide the "greatest good for the greatest number" we ought to be sober and determined.

It's a bit of a "policy wonk" point of view, but such things have direct consequences for everybody. In my case, most especially for my Millennial children. This is an interesting discussion, along those lines. Growth normally is not the sort thing most people think about. But without growth, it is impossible to provide higher real incomes for the broadest number of "average" Americans.

Equity is a praise-worthy social concern. But real economic growth always is the foundation for sustainable growth in ability to support social equity. The link isn't always obvious, even if true. Growth is necessary, and for that reason inherently praise worthy.

FiOS Gains in Maryland and Virginia

It's just impressionistic, but at a recent dinner with friends not in the communications, Internet or software industries (just regular folks, in other words) who live in Maryland and northern Virginia, several mentioned that they just had switched to Verizon's FiOS service, and seemed quite happy with it.

One mentioned the new Netflix streaming capability, built in to the new HDTV the family had just bought.

The value proposition seemed pretty clear. The household normally rents four pay-per-view movies a month, at about $5 each. The unlimited, $10 a month Netflix streaming plan seemed like an obvious good deal.

It's just impressionistic, but illustrates the shifting state of the communications business at the moment. First, there was a shift of market share from cable provider to telco for video and broadband service. Second, there was a shift from pay per view to streaming Netflix. Third, though it doesn't seem to have been a key part of the buying decision, the video shift likely cements use of Verizon fixed-voice services as well.

Perhaps there is no immediate and obvious change in bandwidth consumption that would create "overage" charges. On a standard 3G or 4G mobile access plan, of course, the implications are quite clear. It is conceivable a wireless dongle user could blow through a month's usage by watching three movies a month.

3G, 4G Roaming is Not Seamless

Verizon Wireless says it can take up to two minutes for a fourth-generation network connection to switch over to a 3G radio when users move between cell zones.

"Hand-offs can take up to a couple minutes, but that was expected and a fix is in the works," Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said.

Users of Sprint Evo handsets might note a related problem, namely that when a 4G connection defaults back to 3G, it does not automatically reconnect to 4G when a 4G signal is available. It has to be manually restarted.

Those sorts of issues tend to get fixed over time.

Modem 'hand-off' from 3G to LTE can take two minutes, Verizon says - Computerworld

FCC Net Neutrality Effort All for Show?

Nobody has seen the secret draft of the upcoming Federal Communications Commission proposed rules on net neutrality. No doubt it will be crafted in as balanced a way as such a rule can be.

But it is not immediately clear how the jurisdictional argument can be overcome, namely that the courts already have ruled that the Commission does not have the authority to create a rule, even if it wants to.

No doubt some clever extension of common carrier and ancillary authority will be offered up. But it isn't clear how long the rules will be in force before the inevitable round of court challenges begin.

Having already once rejected the premise that the FCC can assert jurisdiction over networks that manage traffic by prioritizing some types of traffic over others.

No doubt a different basis for jurisdiction will be asserted, and then we'll have to see whether courts will agree. In the end, as sometimes happens in Washington, D.C., some things loudly get done, for political reasons, that even proponents realize will not stand, in the end.

There will be lots of noise, no doubt. Whether there will be rules that can withstand court challenge is among the key issues. Some doubt the rules will succeed in that respect.

Chairman Genachowski’s Next Net Neutrality Proposal: What to Watch For | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Smartphones Help and Hurt Retailers

Smartphones increasingly are seen as opportunities for retailers to enhance the in-store shopping experience. But smartphones also are used by shoppers in ways that make retailing more difficult.

Vodafone UK chief executive Guy Laurence, for example, says retailers have "lost control of their shoppers," meaning they are able, in real time, to compare prices at other outlets that might be carrying the same merchandise, or similar merchandise, as the retailer whose store they might currently be in, and can check reviews and user feedback on those items, while in the store.

Shoppers can now use their phone to receive coupons for the very stores they are walking past, with their screen presenting a virtual shopping mall with a list of the local discounts before they even get off the bus.

Research from Motorola found 51 percent of consumers are using their mobile phones for in-store research while 61 percent want to be able to scan barcodes to access information on other stores' prices.

Smartphones changing the way we shop | Technology | The Guardian

Are People Actually Using Enterprise UC?

Major shifts in enterprise technology, indeed much of business technology, can take a long time to begin delivering financial returns. Some of you might remember the experience of the 1980s, when enterprises embarked on a huge wave of information technology investment, but without any clear evidence that there were productivity gains, for the better part of a decade.

Only in the 1990s did the productivity gains begin to register in significant ways, and one might argue that it is because it took that long for the architecture and human behavior to reorient to a different way of doing things.

So far, one might argue something akin to that has been happening in many companies as unified communications have been deployed. Ignore for the moment the objection that "defining" UC is quite difficult, and that there are many levels of UC adoption, each of which might represent a different payback case.

Lots of people would argue that a measurement payback is quite difficult overall, with the easiest justifications coming from videoconferencing and other conferencing tools, where it can be claimed that travel costs are avoided.

Some believe unified communications has required initial investment that is simply too high, and the returns too slim.

Gartner analysts say, for example, that “thе adoption οf UC іn enterprises bу enterprises continues tο increase, but usage remains low. That's a problem, as getting thе workforce tο really υѕе UC tools іѕ essential іf companies аrе tο reap thе “soft” benefits οf increased collaboration аnԁ productivity аnԁ realize “hard” metrics such аѕ cost savings.

Unified communications is “the greatest scam since Ponzi," Nick Jones, a Gartner analyst, has said, in large part because nobody can agree on what UC entails. “I’ll give you the real definition: unified communications is the bundle of things a vendor wants to sell you."

Also, there is an argument that unified communications cannot compete with consumer-driven technology.Using the examples of Skype and Twitter, Jones argues that people have simply found other tools that provide most of the benefits UC once promised.

To a large extent, the need for UC has shifted from voice and email to social communications.

“Why would you want to trap young people with dinosaur communications when they’ve already got something better?,” Jones rhetorically asks. “Most unified communications systems can’t even show you tweets, let alone where they are coming from.”

UC, in that view, is more about micro-blogging services, and less integration of fixed and mobile communications, mailboxes and numbers.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/361114/technology_update_unified_communications_integrated_cloud/

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on Unified Communications: Enterprises are buying it but is anyone using it? | Open Source IP PBX

Will 4G Boost ARPU?

There would be little reason for a mobile service provider to launch a fourth-generation network if it did not expect a financial return, in the form of enhanced revenue, lower operating costs, reduced churn, better customer acquisition or some other combination of value with a clear financial impact.

But researchers at Ovum suggest that the immediate returns will come more from operating cost advantages than revenue lift. In part, that will be because the overwhelming number of customers and accounts will remain on the 3G networks for some time. By definition, it will take some time before the number of 4G customers and revenue sources are big enough to affect revenue and earnings, one way or the other.

As Verizon, T-Mobile USA and AT&T activate their own 4G networks to compete with the existing Sprint Nextel and Clearwire networks, pricing should be under pressure as well.

One might also speculate that tablet and other connected devices, such as PC dongles and mobile hotspot devices, might initially provide the bulk of subscription revenues for all of the 4G services. The issue is whether those revenue sources will remain dominant as more 4G smartphones become available.

Verizon's 4G advantage is coverage | Telecom Awards: