Friday, March 25, 2011

AT&T, T-Mobile USA Acquisition Document

Unless you are a regulatory attorney or a merger specialist, you will not enjoy reading this document, which outlines the terms for AT&T's proposed purchase of T-Mobile USA. But here it is.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/732717/000119312511072458/dex21.htm

Apple Will Be Bigger Than HP And IBM

Apple will pass IBM in terms of annual revenue in 2012, and will pass Hewlett-Packard in 2013, predicts George Colony, Forrester Research CEO.

“They’ll be bigger than IBM next year, and they’ll be bigger than HP the year after that,” says Colony, who predicted that Apple would eventually earn $200 billion in revenues, and post sales growth exceeding 50 percent through the next two years. Demand for the iPad and other Apple devices will fuel that expansion, Colony says.

Hewlett-Packard had sales of $126 billion in the year that ended in October and IBM’s revenue was $99.9 billion last year, making them the largest technology companies, respectively, by sales. Apple ranks number one by market capitalization.

We might argue about what all of that implies for "leadership" or "innovation" or any number of other dimensions. But technology watchers are on the lookout for leadership in the post-PC era of computing, for the simple reason that no firm has lead in more than one era.

Netflix, Redbox Face New Restrictions

Though online video revenues are growing, they still do not approach the revenues studios and content owners earn from sales of DVDs, Blu-ray disks and rentals of content using those physical media. In the interim, studios seem to be concluding they are better off protecting the declining DVD sales business, even to the extent of harming the volume of rental revenues.

Studios seem to be moving to delay availability to Redbox and Netflix more than they have in the past, allowing a greater period of time when consumers will have to buy discs to see new release material, for example.

That is especially true as studios have concluded that Netflix now has gotten too much power in the distribution business. By increasing the length of time new movie and TV series content is available for rental, the content owners hope to arrest the revenue decline in physical media sales, at least for a while.

The overall consumer video business seems to have been declining since about 2004. So far, video offered using pay per view or video on demand, plus online revenue, has not kept pace with the decline in sales of physical media products. See http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/03/over-top-video-complements-linear-at.html.

Studios are aware of what happened in the music business, where online has not arrested the decline of music sales revenue. See http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/02/will-video-follow-music.html.

Groupon Appears to Lose Market Share as Competition Grows

Living Social - GrouponGroupon appears to be losing market share in the social shopping market, with LivingSocial gaining enough share to pull even with Groupon, according to an analysis by yipit.

LivingSocial has more than 25 million members, meaning a growing portion of Groupon subscribers are now subscribed to at least one more deal service.

Users who had previously been members of services like DailyCandy, Thrillist, UrbanDaddy, Travelzoo or OpenTable have now started to receive Daily Deals from them as well, the yipit analysis suggests.

LivingSocial’s average revenue per offer is approximately $24,000, while Groupon’s is now $13,000.

Groupon might also be saturating a narrow demographic of young, single-oriented target audience where 68 percent of subscribers between the ages of 18 to 34, while 64 percent of LivingSocial’s is 34 and above. Groupon’s competitors may have a broader appeal as the Daily Deal universe expand beyond young singles, as well.

read more here

Twitter Founder Talks about Analytics, Commerce



"You have to instrument everything," says Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, and now CEO of Square. "For the first two years of Twitter's life, we were flying blind."

"We had no idea what was going on with the network," says Dorsey. "We had no idea what was going on with the system, with how people were using it. We were making guesses."

At Square, analytics is everything, given Dorsey's view that a next great wave of innovation will aim to affect the 94 percent of all consumer shopping activity that remains offline.

Decades of Turbulence Ahead, Says Paul Saffo

Futurist Paul Saffo predicts decades of turbulence, with huge upside for some firms able to harness the disruption.

For Google Mobile Payments is a Gateway

Google's "Google Checkout" users to pay for goods in the Android marketplace using their cellphones, and now users also can buy virtual and other goods from inside mobile apps as well. But Google is looking at mobile payments in a broader way, as well, not just as a way of buying digital goods inside apps, or buying merchandise online, but also supporting traditional retail payments.

For some in the market, transaction fees are the whole business. But that isn't likely to be the case for Google.

Google's main business is advertising, and that now includes mobile advertising and likely will extend to mobile promotion and social shopping. For Google, mobile payments could help it leverage the "searching" function that often occurs before a person becomes a "shopper." A direct tie to the "purchasing" function might allow Google to craft new advertising and promotion services, occurring before a sale, in the search phase, while shopping, while checking out, or after the sale.

Mobile payment data also could allow Google to tailor all of its targeted ad techniques with greater richness, and provide key signals about which targeted promotions should be offered to classes of shoppers or individual shoppers, assuming there is an opt-in program. If you know what a person buys, it is easy to figure out what sorts of coupons and loyalty programs should be offered to shoppers in general, or classes of shoppers.


Google plans a major test in New York, San Francisco, and possibly in plans to start testing a mobile-payment service at stores in New York and San Francisco. But some say Google also will be testing in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

As reported, VeriFone Systems will provide terminals in San Francisco and New York.  ViVOtech Inc. will provide terminals in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Directv-Dish Merger Fails

Directv’’s termination of its deal to merge with EchoStar, apparently because EchoStar bondholders did not approve, means EchoStar continue...