Many have good enough credit to be approved for taking credit cards, but many do not. “We are going after 26 million folks who are not merchants in a classic sense,” he says. "Nearly 60 percent of these wouldn’t qualify for the more traditional merchant payment solutions."
Monday, February 7, 2011
Square's Market Segment: 16 Million Non-Traditional Retailers
Square, which makes a card reader that plugs into the headphone socket of an iPhone, Android Phone or an iPad, is designed to allow anyone can accept credit card payments anywhere. And Square has a clear idea of its niche in the market, though it is a large "niche."
“Most of our competitors (including the likes of VeriFone and Intuit) focused on seven million merchants who have the ability to get merchant accounts from say Visa or MasterCard,” says Keith Rabois, Square COO.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Facebook Got 10% of U.S. Page Views in 2010
Users spent about 26 minutes a day on Faceook, comScore reports.
Click on image for a larger view.
In December, Facebook’s U.S. audience grew to 153.9 million, an increase of 38 percent from the same month in 2009, and the social network became the 4th most visited web property. The total time spent on Facebook in December 2010 vs December 2009 surged 79 percent to 49.4 billion minutes. Total page views grew 71 percent to 76.8 billion.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Groupon Pulls a "Go Daddy"
Groupon worked the same sort of approach and has gotten a serious bump in attention. One can argue about whether "negative" attention is a good thing or a bad thing, but there is an argument that even arguably "negative" attention is still valuable. Chitika data shows the spike in online traffic for Groupon and its ads.
If one measures success on the "branding" benefits, with traffic as a proxy, it worked.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
What Future Roles Could Netflix Play?
Cable operators and other multichannel video providers, as well as studios and networks, now are worried about Netflix. Some investors and analysts are worried about Netflix as an equity. One might say Netflix is a marketplace, like Amazon or eBay. That's basically another way of saying Netflix is a distributor, a middleman between sellers of content and buyers of content.
Some might argue there are other possible roles for Netflix that do not cause concern in other parts of the video ecosystem. If Netflix were part of the payments ecosystem, for example, would it be the retailer, the buyer's bank, the retailer's bank, a settlement bank or a settlements processor?
Right now, you'd probably say Netflix is the retailer, a distribution channel for content creators and packagers, and buyers of content. One might speculate that a better long-term model if for Netflix to become a settlements processor, getting out of the retailer role. In other words, Netflix would cease to be a retailer (not Best Buy or Amazon or eBay) and become Visa or MasterCard, a processing network that basically deals in messages that instruct issuing or acquiring banks where and how to settle payments, but not dealing with the actual payments themselves.
You can decide for yourself how difficult it would be for Netflix to change in that way, and how others in the video ecosystem would react.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
The Mobile Traffic Explosion
And if the predictions for tablet growth are anywhere near correct, demand is going to grow even more than projected for smartphones. In 2010, three million tablets were connected to the mobile network, each generating five times more traffic than the average smartphone.
Mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, as a result. In fact, there might be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015.
To be sure, bandwidth and cost-per-bit do not scale linearly. In the global backbone network, additional capacity can be purchased at lower prices "per-bit" of capacity. New fourth-generation networks are helpful in the access network, where most of the actual cost of end-to-end service lies. But it stands to reason that an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth consumption, with matching investment in facilities, must be accompanied by some increases in retail pricing, even if the increases are not linear.
The likely way such increases could be avoided or limited is if significant new revenue streams can be created that are not the result of end-user subscription fees.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Nearly 11 Percent of US Houses Empty
Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2010, 11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round.
That is bound to have a depressing effect on all services and products sold to "home dwellers," ranging from fixed-line voice and entertainment video to home furnishings, household goods, remodeling and so forth.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Brands See Mobile Social Channels Growing in Importance
Asked which social media efforts would have the greatest effect on their company, 17 percent said more usage of social media on mobile platforms and a further 12 percent cited uptake of mobile location-based social networking.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
One recurring issue with forecasts of multi-access edge computing is that it is easier to make predictions about cost than revenue and infra...
