56% Say They Have Seen a Product Bar Code

“Mobile barcodes hold promise for marketers as a mechanism for activating other media and providing a bridge between the physical and digital worlds,” said Noah Elkin, eMarketer principal analyst.

In other words, they are an easy way to create an online experience from an offline source.

“But they also present challenges, including fragmentation between open and proprietary barcode formats and the requirement that consumers download a dedicated application to read the codes.”

Software incompatibilities can be a problem, though that is less a problem as time passes. The bigger issue is the value of the information the bar code triggers.

Among the more-interesting applications are ways to engage shoppers while they actually are in a store, shopping. But that means doing something more than pointing a user to a generic website.

Mobile Barcodes Can Be a Powerful Tool Provided Marketers Add Value - eMarketer

A Sampling of "Communications-Enabled Business Processes"

Lots of attention has been given over the last decade or so to the notion of "communications enabled business processes," the integration of various IP telephony features directly into line of business and other enterprise applications.

Some such applications developed in 2010 as part of the BroadSoft "Xtended Incubator Program" include the "InGenius Connector for Salesforce," an application that enables enterprise users to search, dial and view incoming callers when using Salesforce.com.

The "Mobiso Speech Assistant" is a speech enabled dialer. "RemoteOffice for iPhone" allows a user to leverage their mobile phone as an extension of their enterprise phone system.

"Mondago's Go Integrator" provides BroadSoft integration with over a dozen small and medium business personal information manager and customer relationship  packages such as ACT!, GoldMine, Microsoft Access, Lotus Notes, NetSuite, and Sage.

The "FonGenie" web-based IVR service acts as a web-enhanced virtual receptionist and sales representative for small businesses handling all incoming calls.

BroadSoft believes the Xtended Incubator Program enables global service providers to differentiate and more quickly monetize their communications offerings by leveraging BroadSoft's community of 4,500 developers and open APIs.

Isis Decides Not to Challenge Visa, MasterCard

In a major shift, Isis, the mobile payments venture headed by AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, which originally intended to compete with card issuers, now appears to have abandoned that tack, opting instead for a scaled-back effort that essentially amounts to data mining and revenues that might be built on sharing access to such data in some way.

The shift means an end to the "clash of giants" theme that had AT&T and Verizon challenging Visa and MasterCard directly as a payment processor. What new "story" might emerge remains unclear, for the moment, as Isis now will embark on a search for a new narrative.

Some will note that the shift in strategy solves one problem, but creates others. Isis no longer has to spend the time and capital to create a new retail payments brand, a prospect many had pointed out would be time-consuming and expensive. But the new model also must define and then create a viable new revenue model of some size and scope.

There are huge new uncertainties. Despite the obstacles, the original plan had the advantage of a clearly-defined source of revenue, primarily based on per-transaction fees. Now Isis has to search for both a sustainable role and viable revenue streams to match.

It still is possible that Visa and MasterCard might agree to share some part of transaction revenue with Isis, in exchange for support Isis might provide, but that remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen how significant a revenue stream that could provide.

The change also throws into question the future roles for original partners Barclays Bank and Discover Financial Services. Under the original plan, which would have required Isis to create its own functional equivalent of the branded credit or debit card, Barclays would have been an obvious brand to use. Likewise, Discover Financial would have provided the payments clearinghouse functions.

Under the new plan, it isn't clear what role Barclays or Discover Financial might play. The Wall Street Journal reports that Isis concluded that creating a new branded payment network would take too long, given the level of competition in the market. The Journal also reports that retailers were not keen on adding yet one more provider.

Perhaps intriguingly, the shift of Isis strategy means other players in the ecosystem, especially the many smaller providers plumbing some specific roles within the broader "payments" ecosystem, gain attention.

If Isis has to look for new roles and revenue streams, the many smaller providers of various solutions will become more valuable, at least potentially, if they can provide distinct features and revenue streams, either for the actual payments function, the venues where payment is required or helpful, or in related businesses related in some logical way to people shopping.

Isis isn't planning to launch its first payments trial until 2012, as a provider of mobile payment for transit services in Salt Lake City. What isn't so clear now is how relevant that experiment will be for Isis, long term. It still remains possible that Isis will get some small share of transaction revenue, but some will argue that never will be enough to justify Isis as a business proposition.

Lots of thinking now likely is going into ways mobile data and back office capabilities, such as billing, location and other details about devices, operating systems and so forth might be exposed to third parties. But that sort of thinking has been going on for years, and is not new.

Perhaps a key challenge for Isis now is to avoid exchanging one set of difficult competitors with another set of equally-talented competitors. And Isis will face plenty of those.

Wireless Carriers Scrap Plans for Their Own Mobile-Payment Network, Look to Big Credit Card Companies - WSJ.com

What Makes a Smart Phone Different From a PC?

It is common these days to hear it said that, for many people, the phone will be the computer they use. In many areas, that will mean the phone is the only device available to provide application support that might elsewhere be provided by a PC.

But smart phones increasingly are becoming "different" from PCs, as well. Smart phones are, in essence, sensors. Unlike PCs, smart phones can provide location information. Sometimes they can use the camera to identify and annotate the objects around a person. In other cases, the mobile device will be used to create pictures and video.

Increasingly, accelerometers are available to monitor changes in device orientation, speed and direction. By extension, that can provide telemetry about the person carrying the device, or the vehicle the person is inside.

So smart phones are starting to differentiate from PCs. Think of them as sensors, not just computers.

What will happen next, as we sort through the obvious privacy issues, is that application developers will start to think about all those millions of sensors moving about, and start creating apps that build on the sensor features.

And developers will not necessarily be restricted by the native sensor functions of smart phones, either. As long as there are USB ports, one can imagine peripherals that support various sensing modes not native to the smart phone, such as temperature, chemical composition of the air, wind velocity, humidity, air pressure and so forth.

Developers already have created plug-in peripherals that turn an iPhone into a cash register for purposes of swiping credit cards and accepting payments. The same sort of thing might be done when other sorts of sensors are required.

Thinking about what might be done requires starting from a different vantage point, though. One has to imagine first the hundreds of millions of general purpose computing devices in daily use, physically correlated with people in space and time, each with native communications capability. What sorts of problems can be solved if those capabilities are applied?

Will We Define or Limit the Future?

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Predicts 1 Gbps to the Home in 10 Years

Back when modems operated at 56 kbps, Netflix took a look at Moore's Law and plotted what that would mean for bandwidth, over time.

“We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits per second to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO.“If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home."

Of course, Moore's Law applies to a part of the access business, and not the bigger part of it. If the access business were primarily subject to Moore's Law, bandwidth would be doubling every 18 months, and most would say access bandwidth keeps growing, but not that fast.

Of course, Netflix also is betting its business on continued bandwidth growth, as is Google, and both businesses benefit directly if bandwidth grows fast, and stays highly affordable.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: In Ten Years, We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home

Social Media, Mobile Marketing Top Emerging Channels Used by Enterprise Marketers

Social media remains a key area of activity among enterprise marketing executives using emerging marketing channels, the latest survey of enterprise marketing execurtives by Unica has found.

About 53 percent of respondents are using social media now. But marketers’ enthusiasm is less intense than in 2010, suggesting that many have passed the peak of inflated expectations caused by the hype around social media, and that practitioners now are focused on finding the value that social channels can yield.

Mobile marketing is the other emerging channel.

Some 43 percent of respondents say they currently use the tactic, with another 23 percent planning to do so within a year.

Adoption of emerging channels increased over 2010, in large part because marketers are under intense pressure to accomplish more with less, and the new channels are viewed as lower cost ways to achieve objectives.

More importantly, when the emerging channels are backed with systems for capturing, managing and distributing crucial data regarding customer and prospect behavior, they become golden opportunities for personalizing marketing campaigns and reaching individual customers with more timely, more relevant messages.

The online and direct marketers who responded to the survey represent a wide range of industries, 60 percent from from North America and 40 percent from Europe.

The report is based on a survey of about 300 respondents All responding companies report more than $100 million in annual revenue; the largest block (54 percent) reporting $1 billion or more per year.

read the study here

68% of Global Organizations Will Use Cloud Computing

About 28 percent of respondents to a survey conducted by Axios Systems say that their organizations have already adopted a cloud strategy in one or more areas. Regarding future plans for cloud-based services, five percent of respondents have plans to implement cloud services in the next three months.

Another 16 percent also have short-term plans to adopt cloud strategies in three-to-six months. With an additional 20 percent of respondents planning to roll out cloud services in six months or beyond, the market shows very clear signs of wide-spread cloud adoption.

Only 32 percent expressed no current plans to adopt a cloud strategy.

Survey Reveals 68 Percent of Global Organizations Planning to Adopt Cloud Strategy