Visa Says Mobile Payments Unveiling is Coming Next Week | Tricia Duryee | eMoney | AllThingsD

Visa is planning to provide details next week about its mobile payments strategy. In recent months Visa has invested in Square, which provides an accessory allowing an iPhone to accept credit card payments.

Earlier in 2011 Visa acquired PlaySpan, which handles transactions for virtual goods in online games, digital media and social networks.

Visa also recently has launched a partnership with Gap, which is using Visa’s platform to alert customers by text message to discounts on jeans and other apparel when they are in the vicinity of a store. Visa is also opening up that platform to other retailers.

All of those elements suggest a strategy that includes the ability to send discount offers based on location, support smaller and independent retailers and also support online payments for virtual goods.

Those elements alone suggest support for small business retail payments, online digital goods as well as location-based advertising and promotion.

Visa Says Mobile Payments Unveiling is Coming Next Week

Dish Network to launch wireline broadband in Colorado

Dish Network Corp. is about a month away from starting to offer its own wireline broadband in service bundles sold in Colorado.

The Douglas County-based satellite broadcaster said Friday it will start making broadband services available in the state next month, five months after it bought Denver-based Liberty Bell telecom to start experimenting with a triple-play video, voice and Internet bundle.

Dish Network to launch wireline broadband soon | Denver Business Journal:

European Mobile Customers Are Willing to Pay for New Services

Among the fears communication service provider executives sometimes have is that customers will not pay for better service or new features. A new survey of 2,500 mobile subscribers by Amdocs, including mobile consumers in five European nations suggests subscribers are willing to pay for an improved customer experience and new services.

Fully 90 percent of Russian subscribers indicated they are willing to pay higher premiums to receive the products and services they want.

Only 30 percent of subscribers from all of the surveyed countries said they would be unwilling to pay for additional services.

Connectivity and the ability to make mobile payments were cited by European consumers as the top reasons they would increase their mobile usage. Subscribers also expressed a willingness to pay a
premium for the ability to consume all services from any device and for a single data bundle option.

Forty-three percent of respondents from all five European countries viewed connectivity as the most important industry development of the next decade.

Fifty-two percent of surveyed Russians and more than half of the Germans felt connectivity and synchronization between all devices would be the most important development of the next 10 years, and
almost 50 percent of German end users felt that the connected world would encourage them to increase their mobile usage.

In the U.K., more than 70 percent of respondents cited connection to other devices as the first or second most influential factor in increasing their mobile consumption.

European respondents chose improved network quality as the service they would be most likely to pay a premium for and 46 percent said this is the aspect they would most like to change or improve about their current mobile reality.

Users in the United Kingdom are most likely to pay a premium for increased network quality (39 percent) and 50 percent of surveyed consumers in the United Kingdom cited network improvements as their top concern, reflecting a growing reliance on access to mobile communication and information wherever they are.

The survey also included subscribers in France, Germany and Sweden.

As with all such surveys, there often is a difference between what consumers ay they will do, and the ways they actually behave.

Still, as with any product, the notion that customers will not buy new features, products or applications can be wrong. Whether they will, or will not, depends on the value of the innovations and the cost of using those new innovations.

Nobody seems to think "paying" is an issue with iPhones, iPads or virtual goods used in online games. What service providers must do is what all suppliers must do: create more compelling products.

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Google's Local Strategy: Social and Location are Key

Tablet Usage Affecting Other Devices

Around half of all tablet owners reported being the only ones in their household using their particular tablet, while 43 percent said they shared the tablet with others, according to Nielsen. Eight percent said that while they own a tablet used by other household members, they do not use it themselves.

When asked whether they used other connected devices more often or less often since purchasing a tablet, 35 percent of tablet owners who also owned a desktop computer reported using their desktop less often or not at all, while 32 percent of those who also owned laptops, said they used their laptop less often or never since acquiring a tablet, Nielsen says.

Twenty-seven percent of those who also own eReaders said they use their eReader less often or not at all, the same percentage as those who also own portable media players. One-in-four tablet owners who own portable games consoles are using those devices less often, if at all, since purchasing a tablet.

Are New Tablets Taking a Bite out of Apple's iPad? Not Yet

Mobile as a New Medium

I don't know of an instance where a new medium was not initially seen through the lens of the old. Among the perhaps obvious examples is the tendency of early movies to be "filmed stage performances." So to the extent that the "mobile web" is a new medium, and not merely a small-screen version of a PC, one would expect that the medium still is developing, and that we do not yet realize the potential.

For that reason, some speculate that the mobile web will ultimately become a different medium from the PC web.

"Where we are headed (or should be headed), I think, in developing a mobile web that is actually distinct from the web as we have known it," says Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor at Media Industry Newsletter.

If you want to know why mobile payments, mobile banking, local mobile advertising, social shopping and location services are getting so much attention, the reason is that the particularly unique "mobile media" is seen as converging or extending digital and offline experiences, so that both parts of a new experience.

In many cases, that means melding things people do in the offline "real" world with mobile capabilities. Consider shopping, which is driving much interest in mobile advertising, social shopping and location-based and "real time" offers.

But the notion that the mobile phone can be a digital extension of product - that a phone can complement the actual utility of a physical object a marketer offers - is where we get mobile closer to its ultimate promise. But some would argue we will start to approach the medium in its unique form when we start to see mobiles as a digital activation of physical world activities.

In that view, mobile does not extend the web, or offer a mobile marketing opportunity, in a narrow sense. In other words, we will understand the specific attributes of the medium as we learn to make the mobile-provided digital experience an actual extension of physical goods, services and products. It is a digital activation of the physical world.

Think of it as an extension of the notion that much of the value of any physical product is the software associated with it. PCs are nothing but platforms for software, for example. Music is a part of the MP-3 player product, or the Apple App Store as a key part of the iPhone experience.

In other cases, Amazon's service, support and recommendations are an intrinsic part of the product, which is the shopping experience, not so much the specific items purchased by the consumer.

Mobile is Not Your Older Brother's World Wide Web

Google Voice CEO Craig Walker Launches Firespotter

When Google Voice (previously GrandCentral) co-founder and CEO Craig Walker is starting an incubator, with initial funding from Google Ventures of $3 million. GrandCentral itself was nurtured in an incubator, one might note. Most recently, Walker had been working at Google Ventures as entrepreneur in residence.

At Google Ventures, Walker has had a chance to see hundreds to thousands of startup pitches, likely of varying quality or novelty. Walker likely also has found that many of the pitches are in similar market spaces, and knows from experience that it is difficult to separate ultimate leaders from laggards, even in the same space, at inception.

An incubator provides a business model where Firespotter will be able to spread its bets, essentially, without having to make judgments upfront about which teams and ideas are most worthy.

Walker is working with former Google Voice engineers Brian Peterson, John Rector and Alex Cornell) at Firespotter Labs.

Google Voice CEO Craig Walker Launches Firespotter, A Google Ventures Funded Incubator