Marketing the Way We Do it These Days: Mobile is the New Online

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Mobile and Display Top Marketer Spending Priorities

At least some marketers are pushing for more display and mobile advertising time according to a recent survey by Bizo. The survey finds that most marketers believe display and mobile options are their best chance to engage and convert consumers. In fact, many will spend more on display ads in 2011 than they did in 2010.

Bizo-Online-Marketer-Survey

Mobile Apps Will Change the IT Market

According to a Forrester Research survey of over 2,100 North American and European software decision-makers, 41 percent say that increasing the number of mobile apps for both employees and customers was a high or critical software priority.

The development of this mobile “app Internet" will also open up new services opportunities around the creation and management of consumer and business applications, many would argue.

This second wave of innovation, building on mobile ubiquity, will leverage cloud-based services. Forrester believes that three service lines will grow significantly during the next 36 to 48 months. First, building initial apps is itself projected to be at $5.6 billion a year market globally by 2015.

Second, managing apps and devices is projected to be at $3.8 billion a year market globally by 2015. Third, re-inventing the business processes and back-end systems is projected to be at $7.6 billion business by 2015.

That likely is just the start. At least some observers might argue that cloud-based apps, accessible from mobile devices, might change the way businesses and consumers buy and use applications. Perhaps the biggest upside will be an increased ability to sell and provision applications about as easily as downloading an app from an app store. The changes should be seen in the software sales business, allowing many additional types of sales organizations to sell and support business software where it might have been burdensome in the past.

Forrester: Mobile Apps Will Change the IT Market and Drive Software Innovation

Mobile Banking and Payments: Value Beyond Payments

According to Doaud Fakhri, a retail banking analyst at the Datamonitor consultancy, the mobile channel could be the main channel to market for a number of different financial services in future years. Credit smart phones for driving mobile banking.

Accenture studied 10 banks involved in mobile financial services from across all regions of the world and concluded that when banks enable their customers to use a mobile device to check balances, transfer money, pay bills, apply for credit or use personal finance management apps, they can achieve large returns on investment.

One Middle East bank got a a 300 percent return on investment by educating its two million customers how to use new services to pay bills online using their mobiles. A European bank whose customers can check balances, initiate transfers and trade stock achieved a 60 percent growth in mobile banking consumers, while one in Asia got a return on investment of 230 percent by moving to interactive online services, away from text messages.

The point is that the business value of mobile payments, banking and person-to-person payments extends far beyond the transaction value that underpins some business models. In some cases, existing providers, such as banks, might find that operating efficiencies, customer growth and retention and revenues from traditional services can provide the return on investment.

Special Report: One world, one love, one banking device? | Banking Technology

Osborne 1, iPad 2: 30 Years of Device Evolution

You often hear it said these days that, for many users, the smartphone will be "the computer" people use. For others, it might be the case that a tablet becomes the PC. Compare the features of the Osborne 1, the first "transportable" personal computer, with an Apple iPad 2, for example.

Kind of an industrial-looking device, the Osborne was. read more here

U.S. Social Commerce: $14 Billion in 2015

Social commerce is a hard concept to grasp. In principle, though, it is the idea that people will influence what other people buy.

The new wrinkle is simply that social software, networks and recommendations are starting to play a significant role in the process, where it once was a word of mouth process.

The difference is that the magnitude of such online and social word of mouth is amplified.

Dish Buys Blockbuster

Dish Network Corp. has won a bankruptcy auction for Blockbuster, offering about $320.6 million for the movie-rental chain. Dish, unlike some of the other bidders, has said it would keep some of the stores open as retail locations to support sales of Dish services.

Some may question the wisdom of that move, but Apple also was highly criticized for opening its own retail stores. There now is recognition that the retail outlets now play a huge role in Apple's sales and support process, though. Likewise, mobile service providers have found retail locations to be crucial for selling mobile services.

Dish Network Corp. has won a bankruptcy auction for Blockbuster, offering about $320.6 million for the movie-rental chain. Dish, unlike some of the other bidders, has said it would keep some of the stores open as retail locations to support sales of Dish services.

Some may question the wisdom of that move, but Apple also was highly criticized for opening its own retail stores. There now is recognition that the retail outlets now play a huge role in Apple's sales and support process, though. Likewise, mobile service providers have found retail locations to be crucial for selling mobile services.

But Blockbuster also brings other assets that do mesh with the current Dish strategy, including the Blockbuster online and kiosk vending services. Dish also has been making other moves in the mobile and on-demand video business, though some analysts might claim they do not yet fully understand what the grand strategy is. Neither would Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, either, at this point. Rather, Ergen seems to understand that the TV business is changing, and that mobile and online services are part of that future.

The Blockbuster acquisition therefore would seem to complement a growing interest by Dish in alternative distribution channels and business models.

Dish also earlier acquired DBSD North America, Inc., a hybrid satellite and terrestrial communications company, for approximately $1 billion. DBSD has a license to operate in 8 MHz worth of spectrum.

Frontier Wireless, the wholly owned subsidiary of Dish, also owns 168 licenses in the 700 MHz range, covering about 76 percent of the U.S. population. The licenses represent 5 MHz worth of spectrum. There has been speculation about what Dish might plan to do with such spectrum, but the purchases of other assets supporting terrestrial mobile service with satellite backhaul suggest a possible move into a video service usable by mobile devices.

It is possible to use the same approach to deliver signals to fixed locations such as homes, but bandwidth constraints would make an on-demand service difficult. A more logical approach would be linear video or multicast services based on use of mobile devices.

Sister company Echostar, for its part, owns Slingbox and now Hughes Network Systems, which gives Echostar a new international business revenue stream, enterprise networks and an owned satellite network offering significant new wide-area distribution capability. Whether those assets might play a role in Dish strategy is not immediately clear.

What does seem logical is that a couple of the Dish assets could be used to create a mobile-focused video service. A technology known as TDtv supports mobile multicast content, delivering as many as 14 high-quality, 300 kbps video streams channels using only 5 MHz of unpaired spectrum. It contains a built-in uplink capability that will allow for some digital video recorder features as well.

For its part, Clearwire also has been talking to satellite concerns about creating some sort of mobile TV service as well, though nothing concrete seems to have emerged from those talks.

CEO Charlie Ergen has not been shy about suggesting that if an entrepreneur wanted to get into the TV distribution business today, that person might well take a "Netflix" style, over the top approach, rather than launch satellites or even build cable networks. Another analogy Ergen has used in the past is fixed and mobile voice service. Essentially, he has likened satellite-delivered TV to fixed-line voice, while online video is more like mobile voice. In other words, the original business was TV by satellite, but the future business will be online.

There might not yet be a clear grand strategy for how Dish uses all the new assets, but it is clear enough that Ergen wants to fashion a business model that is built more on mobile and online video, and less on satellite video delivered to fixed locations.


But Blockbuster also brings other assets that do mesh with the current Dish strategy, including the Blockbuster online and kiosk vending services. Dish also has been making other moves in the mobile and on-demand video business, though some analysts might claim they do not yet fully understand what the grand strategy is. Neither would Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, either, at this point. Rather, Ergen seems to understand that the TV business is changing, and that mobile and online services are part of that future.

The Blockbuster acquisition therefore would seem to complement a growing interest by Dish in alternative distribution channels and business models.

Dish also earlier acquired DBSD North America, Inc., a hybrid satellite and terrestrial communications company, for approximately $1 billion. DBSD has a license to operate in 8 MHz worth of spectrum.

Frontier Wireless, the wholly owned subsidiary of Dish, also owns 168 licenses in the 700 MHz range, covering about 76 percent of the U.S. population. The licenses represent 5 MHz worth of spectrum. There has been speculation about what Dish might plan to do with such spectrum, but the purchases of other assets supporting terrestrial mobile service with satellite backhaul suggest a possible move into a video service usable by mobile devices.

It is possible to use the same approach to deliver signals to fixed locations such as homes, but bandwidth constraints would make an on-demand service difficult. A more logical approach would be linear video or multicast services based on use of mobile devices.

Sister company Echostar, for its part, owns Slingbox and now Hughes Network Systems, which gives Echostar a new international business revenue stream, enterprise networks and an owned satellite network offering significant new wide-area distribution capability. Whether those assets might play a role in Dish strategy is not immediately clear.

What does seem logical is that a couple of the Dish assets could be used to create a mobile-focused video service. A technology known as TDtv supports mobile multicast content, delivering as many as 14 high-quality, 300 kbps video streams channels using only 5 MHz of unpaired spectrum. It contains a built-in uplink capability that will allow for some digital video recorder features as well.

For its part, Clearwire also has been talking to satellite concerns about creating some sort of mobile TV service as well, though nothing concrete seems to have emerged from those talks.

CEO Charlie Ergen has not been shy about suggesting that if an entrepreneur wanted to get into the TV distribution business today, that person might well take a "Netflix" style, over the top approach, rather than launch satellites or even build cable networks. Another analogy Ergen has used in the past is fixed and mobile voice service. Essentially, he has likened satellite-delivered TV to fixed-line voice, while online video is more like mobile voice. In other words, the original business was TV by satellite, but the future business will be online.

There might not yet be a clear grand strategy for how Dish uses all the new assets, but it is clear enough that Ergen wants to fashion a business model that is built more on mobile and online video, and less on satellite video delivered to fixed locations.