Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Allot MobileTrends Report, H2 2010 - Allot

http://www.allot.com/MobileTrends_Report_H2_2010.html

Third French Bank Joins Mobile Payment Test in Nice

Credit Agricole has joined the pre-commercial trial of near field communications services in the French city of Nice.

Credit Agricole joins Credit Mutuel-CIC and BNP Paribas in launching mobile payment for the Nice project. The two other banks had launched services during the latter part of 2010.

About 3,000 users can tap to pay at a limited number of merchant outlets in Nice, along with paying fares on buses and trams and tapping NFC tags in posters for information.

Scoial CRM 8% of Total in 2012

By 2013, spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes will exceed $1 billion worldwide, out of a total of about $12 billion in spending for all CRM, according to Gartner. Social CRM will represent approximately eight percent of all CRM spending in 2012, up from approximately four percent in 2010.

By 2015, a third of spending on new CRM software will be delivered using software as a service, and hosted in the cloud.
In 2009, 24 percent of the CRM software market was delivered by SaaS, and this rose to more than 26 percent in 2010, up from virtually zero in 1999. By 2015, Gartner forecasts that 32 percent of the CRM software market will be delivered by SaaS.

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.

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."

Facebook Got 10% of U.S. Page Views in 2010

Facebook accounted for 10 percent of U.S. page views in 2010, while three out of every ten Internet sessions included a visit to the site.

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.

Groupon Pulls a "Go Daddy"

Go Daddy now makes a practice of proposing Super Bowl ads racy enough to be rejected, then runs the acceptable ads on TV, with the "rejected" versions online and gets lots of incremental viewership and attention.

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.

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.

Will We Break Traditional Computing Era Leadership Paradigm?

What are the odds that the next Google, Meta or Amazon--big new leaders of new markets--will be one of the leaders of the present market,  b...