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.

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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

Review of Toshiba "Thrive" Tablet

Facebook Worth $100 Billion?

Bubbles are fun on the way up; ugly on the way down. Lots of executives are going to grab financing while they can, knowing that in all likelihood a funding "nuclear winter" is coming.

State of the Internet 2011

If you thought that the Internet was just “really big,” you are sadly mistaken. The Internet is colossal, says Online Schools. This is an entertaining infographic.
Created by: Online Schools

State of the Internet 2011

PayPal Allows Androids to "Bump" to Transfer Money

PayPal has launched a peer-to-peer near field communications application that lets people pay and get paid in a matter of seconds by simply tapping together two Samsung Nexus S phones.

Read more here.

Google PageRank is Like the Richter Scale

As part of a well put together evergreen article discussing of Google's "PageRank" algorithms, important to all marketers who hope their online sites will get lots of traffic, Dharmesh Shah points out that the algorithm is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale, much as the Richter Scale, used to measure the intensity of earthquakes, is logarithmic.

The big difference between a linear scale and an algorithmic scale is the startling difference in magnitude. The difference between a page rank of one and two is an order of magnitude, or 10 times. as the difference between an earthquake described as four is 10 times the magnitude of an earthquake rated as a five.

The difference between a page ranking of one and three is two orders of magnitude, or at least 100 times different. What does that mean for search engine optimization? Simply that, no matter what you do, only a few "pages," out of all pages available on the Web, ever have the top ranks. On a scale of zero to six, the top sites, ranking "six," represent just 0.1 percent of all websites for example.

The practical impact is a bit like the notion of how many Twitter followers a person attracts. In practice, only a small number of celebrities have "millions of followers." On the web, only a relatively small number of sites, often large media companies, big brands or celebrities, actually have the top page ranks.

That doesn't mean content marketers should be careless about search engine optimization. It just means that such techniques only work, up to a point. "Order of magnitude" changes in page rank are quite difficult. See Read more here.

Sprint Unlimited Strategy Shows One Way "Disruption" Can Play Out

Facing larger and more powerful competitors, contestants in just about any market will cast about for strategies that allow them to survive, and hopefully narrow the gap with the dominant providers.

Attackers frequently employ the "same features, lower price" strategy. It's an easy thing for consumers to understand. Network services providers often try the "get more, pay less" strategy in ways that take advantage of unused capacity (evening hours and weekends for voice, for example). Service providers can offer "unlimited calling" at times when the network has ample surplus capacity, and the incremental cost of such operations is quite low.

Bandwidth providers, whether in the local access markets or in the global undersea business, often will instinctively offer "same features, lower price" products because they can. If your network is brand new, has lots of capacity but you have few customers, that is a rational strategy.

Not all disruption comes from smaller, attacking firms, though. As Apple has shown, sometimes disruption happens best when a strong, financially well-heeled firm decides to disrupt a market. Still, smaller firms in highly-competitive markets, who have lots of capacity but few or fewer paying customers, often can be expected to try the "get more for your money" strategies. Sprint is doing so.

Young Dominate "Cell Mostly" Web Use

Younger adults, minorities, and lower income earners who own smart phones are likeliest to mostly use them to access the Internet, according to a July 2011 survey from the Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project.

Some 42 percent of 18-to-29-year-old smart phone owners mostly use them for web access, double the 21 percent of 30-to-49-year-olds who do so and more than four times the 10 percent of smartphone owners 50 and older.

The obvious implication might be that users with less disposable income are likely to rely more heavily on mobile broadband, which they often must purchase in order to use the devices they prefer. The other possible explanation is that, for many users, mobile broadband is the most valuable and therefore the most-used form of access.

Young, Minorities Dominate ‘Cell Mostly’ Web Use

Microsoft's "can't lose" mobile strategy

Microsoft’s deal with Nokia should increase the company's position in the smart phone operating system market. The number of smart phones now being sold with Windows Mobile or the newer Windows Phone 7 is pretty small, perhaps less than five percent of all sales, representing licensing fees of perhaps $10 to $15 license fee per phone. Some argue Microsoft can make more money by licensing other parts of its intellectual property portfolio.

Microsoft is now seeking to get royalties from all Android handsets sold It is quite likely that Microsoft will be able to extract licensing fees (eventually) from all the manufacturers. And at $5 per handset produced, that is a substantial revenue stream.

No disrespect, as a business model is a good thing to have. At the same time, in a market seemingly driven by the likes of Apple and Google, one has to ask the question: when was that last time Microsoft actually did something "enchanting" in the mobile market?

Microsoft's "can't lose" mobile strategy

Google accounts for 92% of UK searches

Experian Hitwise data shows that Google in June 2011 had a 92 percent market share of all searches carried out by U.K. Web users, up 1.5 percent on the previous month and 0.2 percent higher than the same period in 2010.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask Sites accounted for seven percent of searches, with ‘Other’ accounting for the remaining one percent.

Google accounts for 92% of UK searches

Follow any Google+ Account using RSS

While Google is yet to provide an official application programming interface for Google+, "PlusFeed" is a service that provides an "real simple syndication" (RSS) feed of any Google user’s public posts. Simply find the unique number at the end of their profile URL, and then add it to the PlusFeeds URL. So, for example, the URL of The Next Web’s Google RSS feed is: http://plusfeed.appspot.com/103907806627406122152.

Follow any Google account using RSS

Price Transparency Causing More Brand Advertising?

Oddly enough, as knowledge about pricing rapidly shifts in favor of consumers equipped with smart phones, there's trouble ahead for retailers who cannot offer the lowest prices, but opportunity for a renaissance of brand advertising, argues Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman.

Advertising's role in this new world becomes not just a demand driver but also a counter-balancing force to price as the main determinant of consumer choice.

Ad spending trends support this conclusion, he argues. TV ad sales rose nine percent in the first quarter of 2011, while the Interactive Advertising Bureau just reported a 23 percent growth in online advertising. Tellingly, in 2010, display advertising grew faster than search, for the first time since the IAB began reporting its data, driven by a 35 percent increase in spending on video ads, Fulgoni says.

The numbers indicate a new-found focus on branding advertising at the expense of direct response or price or promotion communications, he argues. Others might not be quite so sure. Advertising is rebounding from rather deep reductions caused by the great recession of 2008.

Get Ready for a Renaissance in Advertising

87% of Google+ Users are Male