Google's Top Priorities are in Mobile

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says all of the company's top initiatives center on mobile. See Top Post | Mobile Marketing and Technology, for example. Aside from getting more devices into the hands of developing world consumers, fostering faster mobile networks and applications, Google sees "mobile money" as among the top-three areas for attention.

Google says it is activating 300,000 Android devices each day, or nine million per month. All of that helps grow Google's mobile search and ad business. Searches on Android grew tenfold by the end of 2010 over the year prior.

But those handsets also better position Google for all sorts of mobile commerce opportunities as well. "When people complete transactions on devices, it becomes more track-able and significantly more valuable,' says Jonathan Rosenberg, Google senior VP.

Light Reading Mobile - Broadband - OS Watch: Google Sees Dollar Signs in Mobile

Google Revising Search Algorithms to Deal with "Spam"

The problem with much "search engine optimization" is that it essentially consists of mechanical "tricks." SEO professionals will argue, rightly, that SEO is not necessarily limited to such techniques, but I suspect most people are familiar with some of the "dumber" techniques.

Google, for example, has recently been accused of allowing too much trickery to seep into search results, and Google seems to be working on making that sort of thing harder. Google itself says that, according to the evaluation metrics it has refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.

"However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality," Google says.

None of that will stop some people, and some sites, from continuing to boost rankings in ways that some might view as the equivalent of "spamming." That's one reason why it is a good thing that Google constantly revises its algorithms.

Official Google Blog: Google search and search engine spam

Mobile Shopping and the Just-in-Time Consumer:

U.S. consumers are changing the way they shop, and one has to wonder what role mobile shopping applications could have in the future, based on those changes. It isn't just that people can use, and do use, their mobiles for product research and evaluations. There is a physical dimension as well.

A study by Nielsen finds that consumers are making more small trips to the store, even as they also increase trips to big-box supercenters and club retail channels for larger purchases. Both behaviors are typical of the most-affluent shoppers, not just the rest.

Trips with a smaller sales volume are of greater importance to the grocery, drug, convenience, gas and dollar channels, but trips resulting in larger purchase voluems are gaining ground. Here too there are differences across income classification, providing opportunities for retailer/store-specific and consumer segment trip-type solutions.

Shopping trips are segmented into four types, according to Nielsen. "Immediate" trips tend to be conducted for low-value products for which there is an immediate need, and tend to average sales of $15 per trip. "Fill-In" trips feature slightly higher value baskets averaging $51 per trip.

"Routine" trips are weekly, high-value shopping trips averaging $98 per trip while "Stock-up" trips average $242 per trip.

By household income, affluent households ($100,000 or more) ncreased the percentage of smaller trips within supercenters and club stores, and drove more frequent and larger trips in smaller formats such as drug, convenience and dollar stores.

The $70,000 to $99,000 income households reduced larger trips across most channels, but increased smaller trips within supercenters and club stores. Stock-up trips were generally off among these households.

$50k – $69.9k – Middle income households ($50,000 to $69,900) shopped less frequently overall while increasing their trips to value-centric supercenters and dollar stores.

Households in the $40,000 to $49.900 income range decreased trips across most channels, but these households increased their immediate, fill-in and routine trips to club stores, with smaller and stock-up trips to dollar stores also up.

Households in the $30,000 to $39,900 income range increased the number of small trips and supercenter trips, but stock-up trips declined by 10 percent in that channel.

Households in the $20,000 to $29.900 range slightly increased trips to smaller supercenter and club trips, while stock-up trips declined by 10 percent. Dollar stores are performing well among this income group that retailers are targeting.

Households with income less than $20,000 made drastic cutbacks on small grocery trips, while increasing larger grocery and club trips. This may be indicative of pay period buying behavior. This income group shows big drops in larger supercenter trips and softness in dollar store trips.

One might argue that mobile marketers should focus on the fewer trips with higher volume. Those trips tend to be for "repeat" purchase items where a chance to switch brand preference could have long-lasting impact. But one might also argue that there are truly few products, even those bought on "immediate" trips, that do not have brand preference angles. In fact, even before a shopper has a chance to choose between brands on the shelves, a prior decision has been made to visit a particular retail outlet.

The issue is the role mobile marketing can play in shifting locational preference before a shopper is physically in aisles, and then to shift brand preference while shoppers are in the store, shopping. Obviously, mobile marketers will, by default, wind up focusing more on higher-income households to a large extent, because those are the homes with smartphones. But that is going to change over time, as the smartphone becomes the standard device.

The Just-in-Time Consumer: How Shopping Trips Align with Economic Woes | Nielsen Wire

Hughes Apparently for Sale

Hughes Communications, which operates the HughesNet consumer broadband service and global enterprise satellite networks, is up for sale, according to a Reuters report.

Hughes now is majority owned by private equity firm Apollo, has hired Barclays Capital to advise on a sale of the company, Reuters reports.

Broadband satellite services company Hughes, in which Apollo has a 57 percent stake, has received a first round of bids and drawn interest mostly from other private equity firms and several satellite firms. A second round of bids is expected for early February.

If past history applies, Hughes would face the most internal change if another satellite company acquired it, and less if another private equity firm won the bidding. The reason is simply that there has been remarkable consistency and stability at Hughes as the DirecTV business was spun off and the company has gone private.

In addition to those changes, the company, which historically had been focused exclusively on enterprise networks, now finds its growth lead by consumer broadband services. That is a huge change.

Reporting its third quarter 2010 results, the compancy noted that "We continue to deliver strong performance in the consumer business; our largest and fastest growing business group, which generated record revenues of $122.2 million in the third quarter of 2010, 15.1 million or 14 percent above the same quarter of last year." The company recently received a $59 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to subsidize broadband services for rural and isolated households.

The North American enterprise business had revenues of $68.4 million, an increase of 1.3 million or two percent above the third quarter of 2009. The international broadband segments revenue of 51.8 million were $4.3 million or nine percent above the third quarter of 2009.

Headquartered in Germantown, Maryland, Hughes is one of the world's largest providers of broadband satellite services. Perhaps just as important, it is a company that historically has made its money in enterprise networks, and now finds its growth lead by consumer broadband.

Hughes Communications up for sale-sources | Reuters

Firefox Blocking the Skype Toolbar

No, this is not a "network neutrality" violation, but Firefox finds the "Skype Toolbar for Firefox," an extension that detects phone numbers in web pages and re-renders them as a clickable button that can be used to dial the number using the Skype desktop application, causes browser crashes.

The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week, Mozilla says.

This extension is bundled with the Skype application, and is installed into Firefox by default when Skype is installed or, in some circumstances, updated. As a result, a large number of Firefox users who have installed Skype have also installed the Skype Toolbar, knowingly or unknowingly.

Loosely-coupled networks drive innovation. But innovation of that sort also can lead to unexpected conflicts and problems.

Blocking the Skype Toolbar in Firefox: Mozilla Blog

Starbucks' Mobile Payment System Focuses on Simplicity

If simplicity, low cost and consumer behavior are crucial for mobile payment success, Starbucks has eliminated many adoption hurdles.

The only new in-store, customer-facing technology is a barcode scanner. The mobile payment app displays a barcode on the phone's screen. The customer then holds the phone in front of the scanner, which reads the barcode and processes the sale against his or her prepaid Starbucks account.

Research suggests that people are most likely to easily adopt new products or services if they don't have to significantly modify their behavior to take advantage of them.

Why Starbucks' mobile-payment system might work - CNN.com

PayPal, mobile drive eBay Results

PayPal and mobile commerce drive eBay results. Mobile commerce activity nearly tripled to nearly $2 billion. The company expects mobile merchandise value sold to double to $4 billion in 2011.

"Mobile is clearly becoming a new way people shop, and eBay is helping to lead the way with innovative apps across multiple platforms, including the iPad," said John Donahoe, eBay president and CEO.

eBay CEO Discusses Q4 2010 Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha