Group Gift Buying Illustrates Trend

The importance of group shopping, group payment or group gifting applications can be easy to miss. Mobile coupons, mobile bill splitting and shopping can seem relatively trivial applications.

Companies like the Gifts Project and Friendfund are working to integrate into retail sites either through widgets or white label services, giving businesses an easy way to enable group gifting.

EBay in November launched its Group Gifts service in November, which is powered by the Gifts Project.

The importance is that such applications are part of a broader trend to use online and mobile tools to enable doing things in the real and physical world where most economic activity occurs.

Is Group Gift Buying Poised for Take-Off?

Set-Top Transition is a Business Issue

Cable operators are moving to support streaming subscription video services to IP-connected iPads and TVs, and also looking at ways to replace the traditional set-top box with the tablet and smart phone. That's a double-edged sword.

Though the capital investment has been a significant issue, along with the "truck rolls," the decoder also provides the conditional access that protects and enables the service and revenues. In dispensing with the decoder hardware, cable still has to preserve the access control function.

Once users become accustomed to the idea that the smart phone and tablet are the remote controls, and represent the conditional access gateway, it is going to be logical that they start wondering what other alternatives are available.

Bridging Cable's Tablet Gap

Sprint LTE Announcement Possibly in the Summer of 2011

Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse says the company will provide more details about its fourth generation network plans in the middle of 2011. Most observers think that announcement will involve a move into Long Term Evolution, one way or the other.

Hesse: Sprint has talked to Clearwire about hosting network traffic

Apple Wants Smaller SIMs

Apple has proposed an even-tinier Subscriber Information Module format to the European standards body ETSI. If adopted it will mean the SIM taking up less space in the phone. But Apple also wants less operator control.

Apple's iPad and iPhone 4 both already use micro SIMs, which lose a lot of the plastic from the traditional SIM. But a newer format might help Apple move gradually away from operator-controlled SIMs altogether, allowing iTunes to become the data loading gatekeeper.

This is not just a struggle over real estate, it is a fight for control of the customer.

Apple proposes even tinier SIMs for future iPhones, iPad

Chrome Web Store Will Give Developers 95% of App Revenue

One tool device manufacturers can use to boost interest in their associated app stores is to change the share of revenue given to developers. Google has decided to give developers of apps sold in its Chrome Web Store 95 percent of sales revenue, not 70 percent as is common at other app stores.

In-app purchases will be supported, allowing developers to sell products inside their apps. The store will also launch in 41 new languages and will be available to the entire Chrome installed user base.

Chrome OS

Sprint: LTE in iDEN Spectrum?

Few observers think Sprint will not adopt Long Term Evolution as one of its fourth generation network strategies, though most expect it also will continue to use Clearwire's WiMAX as well. If Sprint decides to switch to LTE, the company must find spectrum to do so.

"There is a high likelihood that LTE is in our future in one flavor or another," said Geoff Martin, who heads up the U.S. operator's M2M collaboration center. http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=464629

The logical candidate is the 14 MHz of 800 MHz spectrum now used to support the iDEN network and Nextel devices. Sprint has announced plans to decommission iDEN in 2013.

Sprint switching to LTE

Parks Associates forecasts over two billion people worldwide will own at least one smart phone in 2015, with unit sales growing over 175 percent from 2010. Smart phone shipments grew 70 percent in 2010, with approximately 500 million users.