Incorporating eBay's popular digital payment product, PayPal, could help the eBay-Where.com union compete against an emerging list of location-based daily deals players.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
eBay Gets Into "Deal of the Day" Business'
eBay has purchased Where.com, which creates apps for listing merchants, restaurants, and bars while serving deals for such establishments based on user location. The deal gives eBay four million active users looking for deals from about 120,000 retailers.
Incorporating eBay's popular digital payment product, PayPal, could help the eBay-Where.com union compete against an emerging list of location-based daily deals players.
Incorporating eBay's popular digital payment product, PayPal, could help the eBay-Where.com union compete against an emerging list of location-based daily deals players.
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.
Online Now 8% of Home Video Spending
Consumers are still using DVDs and Blu-ray Disc to watch movies more than all other digital-video options combined, says the NPD Group. . Over the past three months, 77 percent of consumers reported watching a movie on a DVD or BD, unchanged from 2010. Those who viewed movies from physical discs reported watching an average of four hours per week, which is also unchanged from the prior year, as well.
By comparison 68 percent watched a movie on a TV or cable network channel, 49 percent at a theatre, and 21 percent used paid video on demand through their TVs, says NPD.
Consumers reported that 78 percent of their home video budgets went to the purchase and rental of DVD and BD, including online and in-store retail purchases and rentals, while 15 percent was spent on video subscription services like Netflix that offer a mix of physical and streaming rentals.
Consumers reported that 78 percent of their home video budgets went to the purchase and rental of DVD and BD, including online and in-store retail purchases and rentals, while 15 percent was spent on video subscription services like Netflix that offer a mix of physical and streaming rentals.
Digital video downloads, paid streaming, paid transactional video on demand (VOD), and pay per view (PPV) comprised the remaining eight percent. Overall per-capita spending on home video fell by two percent, though.
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.
60% of Consumers Have Cut Back on Driving
As the national average for a gallon of gas edges closer to $4-a-gallon, consumers have cut back on their driving, reports The NPD Group. That should come as no surprise. That's what consumers always do when fuel prices climb.
The number of gallons purchased are down 1.2 percent from a year ago, NPD says. In addition, a consumer survey conducted by NPD in January 2011 to gauge what price level would be required to cause consumers to drive less suggests that at today's gas prices (national average is $3.79-a-gallon) approximately 60 percent of consumers are cutting back on driving already.
The number of gallons purchased are down 1.2 percent from a year ago, NPD says. In addition, a consumer survey conducted by NPD in January 2011 to gauge what price level would be required to cause consumers to drive less suggests that at today's gas prices (national average is $3.79-a-gallon) approximately 60 percent of consumers are cutting back on driving already.
That should have implications for retailers of all sorts. Higher gas prices mean less discretionary income left for other purchases. What remains unclear is whether online retailers could benefit, if shoppers drive less to physical retail outlets.
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.
T-Mobile USA Provides Free Calls on Facebook
T-Mobile USA now provides Facebook users free VoIP calls between other uers. "Bobsled" by T-Mobile is a VoIP application integrated with Facebook that also provides voice mail service capable of pasting messages to the receiver's wall. The ability to call other people affiliated with a single network is not unusual these days.
What is a bit different is a direct move by a mobile service provider to enable such communications, which arguably compete with for-fee services. T-Mobile USA is expected to add the ability to call out to mobile and fixed networks in the near future, as well.
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.
iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go
Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where users go, and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.
The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program, researchers say.
For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.
The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program, researchers say.
For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.
As with just about everything else related to advanced technology, the features can provide user benefit as well as danger. Where a person is, has been, and likes to go can be an important part of the "social graph," the accumulated network of interconnections among people, groups and organizations in a social network. The term refers to both the social network itself and a diagram representing the network.
Individuals and organizations, called actors, are nodes on the graph. Interdependencies, called ties, can be multiple and diverse, including such characteristics or concepts as age, gender, race, genealogy, chain of command, ideas, financial transactions, trade relationships, political affiliations, club memberships, occupation, education and economic status.
As you can well imagine, a social graph can be highly useful to people, brands advertising things to those people, ethnographers and product and application designers. But there are dangers to privacy and illegal use of such information, as well.
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.
Telecom Services Market to Reach $1.4 Trillion by 2014
The global telecommunication services market shrank by 0.2 percent in 2009 to reach a value of $1.2 trillion, according to MarketResearch.com. Given the global economic unpleasantness of that year, the dip is not surprising.
In 2014, the global telecommunication services market is forecast to have a value of $1,4 trillion, an increase of 13.6 percent since 2009, driven in large part by growth of subscribers 25 percent globally, compared to 2009.
Wireless is the largest segment of the global telecommunication services market, accounting for 56.6 percent of the market's total value, and is particularly important in fast-growing developing regions.
Wireless is the largest segment of the global telecommunication services market, accounting for 56.6 percent of the market's total value, and is particularly important in fast-growing developing regions.
America accounts for 34.3 percent of the global telecommunication services market value, down from the situation several decades ago when the U.S. market accounted for nearly half of global telecom revenue. That statistic alone is evidence of the shift of growth to newer regions around the globe.
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.
Service Providers Do Not Rank High on Survey of "Top Customer Experience"
Video and telecommunications service providers do not tend to lead many, if any surveys of consumer satisfaction, for all sorts of reasons. (Click image for a larger view)Aside from some cases where companies just make strategic mistakes (some years ago Sprint under-invested in its customer service personnel, and Qwest cut back too much on service and technical support personnel), cable, telco and satellite companies operate huge businesses with sometimes cumbersome back office software, sub-systems that do not seamlessly move data back and forth easily, selling products at prices that arguably do not allow as much room for "service" as one might prefer.
http://www.temkinratings.com/wp-content/themes/Temkin/assets/pdf/2011TemkinExperienceRatings_CompanyRankings.pdf
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.
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