Family of Amazon Android Devices?

Amazon is preparing an “entire family” of Android devices that will launch this holiday shopping season, according to Taylor Wemberly at Android and Me. A smartphone might be among the devices, expected to feature tablet devices of various form factors.

Amazon already has gotten into the Android applications market space and online video rentals, so the move is not far fetched. Amazon has been really good at providing excellent customer service and a well-designed recommendation engine, so you can imagine the possibilities, over time, as those skills are applied to the mobile location feature and the shopping experience.

And since Amazon lives and dies by the ease of "buying something," it might not be too hard to suggest that Amazon is thinking about ways to integrate payments into the mix as well.

PayPal "Most Trusted" Mobile Payments Brand

PayPal was the brand most likely to be trusted with personal financial data by consumers in nine major markets around the world, in a survey by GfK.


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Credit-card brands Visa and MasterCard were the next most likely global brands to be trusted, followed by Apple, Nokia and Samsung.

In a poll of 8603 people in nine countries, GfK found that financial services firms have the highest levels of trust, consideration and preference among consumers, with a score of 48 percent, when it comes to mobile payments, says Ryan Garner, GfK analyst. Within this category, banks come out on top.

Mobile and telecommunication brands receive significantly lower levels of trust when it comes to controlling financial transactions. Just 10 percent of respondents expressed high confidence and trust in mobile service providers, compared to some other ecosystem participants.

"Trust is the biggest driver of service preference and is most important at driving adoption of mobile payments," says Garner.

Overall, 62 percent of respondents find mobile payments appealing. This is higher among certain key groups, including: younger consumers aged 16-24 (75 percent), innovators (74 percent), and current smartphone owners (72 percent). Developing markets in China (82 percent) and Brazil (73 percent) find mobile payment services the most appealing. Consumers in the United States and Europe seem less interested, at about 50 percent.

Read more here

Enterprises Diversifying Mobile Choices

There was a time, not so long ago, when Research in Motion's BlackBerry simply dominated enterprise smart phone choices. That is changing, according to Intermedia, which says it is the world's largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider. By definition, Intermedia operates outside the RIM ecosystem, so its data does not necessarily indicate the extent to which preferences are shifting between RIM and other devices.

It is clear that Android and iOS devices are getting traction, though. Intermedia, which manages 320,000 hosted Exchange email accounts, says recent activations show that 61 percent were iPhones and 17 percent were Android devices

Looking at the installed base of activeSync-based smart phones, 61 percent are iPhone, while 22 percent on 'Other' platforms, primarily Windows, followed by Symbian and Palm. About 17 percent are Android devices.

Intermedia Finds Business Professionals Choosing iPhone Over Android:

Google, Others Hope to Tap Hyperlocal News

Hyper-local news sites, which some say are information sources covering a single city, part of a town or just a neighborhood, have not been the foundation for an entire business, or much of a business, so far. To the extent that an advertising and promotion market exists, it has been lead by direct mail, outdoor media and other ad channels such as flyers delivered by hand to homes. But most of the business has been too expensive for a truly neighborhood-based business to use.

Some ad channels work for local, and by extension for very-local businesses. Retailers and other very-local businesses have used the Yellow Pages, of course, but even where zoned editions are available, there is "wastage," from the standpoint of a neighborhood business.

But Google's new move to allow users to create zipcode-sized mobile news areas could be a breakthrough, allowing advertisers to reach a mobile and fixed access audience that is self-selected down to the level of a zip code.

Can Anyone Actually Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News? | Fast Company

Cisco, Microsoft CEOs Get Slammed, Is History Repeating?

It might be coincidence that stories about how both Microsoft and Cisco leadership have "failed" for the last decade appeared on nearly the same day.

CEO John Chambers is one of the most revered executives in the history of the technology industry, and Steve Ballmer's badge number at Microsoft is "30." Both have lead their firms for a long enough period of time for analysts and investors to make qualified judgments.

Since talking over as CEO of Cisco in 1995, Chambers has grown the company's revenue from $1 billion to more than $40 billion. For 15 years, he has been a soothing, straightforward presence in the industry, free of the bombast and arrogance that so often characterizes big-league CEOs.

But nobody who follows computing technology can be unaware that no company that has lead in one era of technology also has emerged as a leader in the following wave. That's literally "no company."

And it is possible that despite that recognition, both executives are simply finding that they cannot fight history.

Read more here and here.

How "Old People" Use Media

Google News Goes Local

Google now allows users to view location based news, localized by zip code.

Users who want to take advantage of the new feature can visit news.google.com on their smart phone and enable location sharing to see the “News near you” section at the bottom.

Google News Goes Local On Mobile: Introduces ‘News Near You’