Verizon LTE: Another Outage?

There are reports of another Verizon LTE network on the morning of May 21, 2011, though the outages appear to be regional in scope. HTC Thunderbolt and Samsung Droid Charge users might be stuck using 3G for a while.

The upside is that users will appreciate their 4G connection even more after they've had to live with 3G for a bit. It's amazing how painful it feels.

Verizon LTE on the fritz again

78% of Tablets to Ship with 3G or 4G in 2015?

By 2015, about 78 percent of tablets will ship to retailers with an embedded 3G or 4G modem, according to In-Stat. That doesn't mean consumers will activate the connections, of course, but does suggest the potential for access subscriptions.

In-Stat - Press Releases

Best Buy to Support "Shopkick" Location Based Service

Starting May 22nd, 2011, Best Buy customers using the "Shopkick" mobile app on their Androids or iPhones will be rewarded with "kicks" currency when they walk into any of the almost 1,300 Best Buy stores.

Shopkick is a rewards program and place-based marketing service that automatically rewards users for entering stores such as Target, Best Buy, Macy's, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Crate&Barrel, West Elm and Wet Seal, in 80 major markets, or for eating at restaurants, for example.

Retail partners get a promotion vehicle, as offers and promotions are supplied to each user depending on where they are. Users get extra "kicks" by scanning barcodes of featured products, for example.

The Shopkick app works in combination with a supplementary signal shopkick broadcasts within the store, that is more accurate than either cell phone radio signals or even GPS. The inaudible sound verifys that a user is in the store, and rewards him or her with Shopkicks currency.



https://market.android.com/details?id=com.shopkick.app&feature=search_result

Email Leads to Most Shopping Cart Purchases

At the shopping cart, email represents more than half of the traffic (57 percent), while direct traffic contributes 18 percent and display advertising is a meager 1.7 percent, says SeeWhy. Given those numbers, it is not surprising that 67 percent of conversions came from email and 24 percent direct to the website.

Those findings came from a study of 60,000 completed e-commerce transactions across multiple sites in February 2011. You might wonder why those results are found, given the wide range of existing channels. 

SeeWhy says that customers that are familiar with the brand, having previously purchased or signed up for emails, are the best source of traffic for conversions when you email them. Direct traffic conversions might be explained by the suggestion that customers that enter the site directly already have done all their shopping research, and are about to make a purchase.The other caveat is that attributing a sale to the last channel used can be misleading, as one doesn't know all the preceding contacts a prospect has had with a brand.

Is Your Website a Bucket or a Sieve?

Verizon: No 3G Handoff for 4G Calls

Verizon Wireless does not plan to let voice calls placed over its LTE network roam on to its CDMA network when it introduces voice over LTE (VoLTE) smartphones next year. "VoLTE will not hand down to 1X," Verizon Wireless product development executive Marjorie Hsu said. 1X is Verizon's 3G network air interface.

That limitation will be a negative for some potential LTE users, at least up to about 2013, when Verizon expects to have its LTE footprint identical in coverage to its current 3G footprint by then.

But the decision does point out the issues of making a transition from one air interface to another. Verizon could handle the handoffs, but only at the cost of increased complexity.

Verizon: No 3G Handoff for VoLTE Calls | Wireless Week

3 Tablet Games for Cats

Nestle Purina's pet nutrition brand Friskies launched three HTML5- based web games for cats this week, designed for use on tablets and other touchscreen devices.

According to Friskies, the games, called Cat Fishing, Tasty Treasures Hunt, and Party Mix-Up, have been researched and tested to appeal to cats' presumably discerning taste in mobile entertainment. Accessible at Gameforcats.com, the games involve the player tapping moving objects as they maneuver about the screen, including fish and other animals, as well as Friskies products. Cats that use Facebook are also prompted to join discussion around the brand there. Indeed, there's a Facebook call-to-action on the home screen for all three games.

Though the demos of the games on the Friskies site all appear on iPad devices, the experiences are built entirely in HTML5, making them functional on almost any device or browser that supports the technology, such as Android tablets and smartphones.

http://www.friskies.com/Today-We-Play

Line of Business Execs Frequently Buy SaaS Services in Enterprise

A Forrester Research survey of 1,000 firms in North America and Europe recently found that 23 percent of firms use software as a service, with 11 percent of these respondents indicating that they are expanding usage. An additional eight percent planned to implement SaaS within a year’s time frame.

The greatest SaaS usage is in horizontal business process areas, such as customer relationship management or human relations, says Liz Herbert, Forrester Research analyst. But sales automation, customer support, recruiting and performance management in the cloud also are being used in a SaaS mode.