U.S. Smart Phone Preferences

A recent survey of smart phone buying intentions in the U.S. market by the Yankee Group shows 36 percent planning an Android purchase, while 33 percent of respondents said they'd buy an Apple device.

About 15 percent said BlackBerry would be their choice, while nine percent indicated a preference for a Windows device.

As has always been the case, Nokia does not register, scoring one percent interest, on a par with Palm.

Whether Nokia's switch to Windows for its operating system will have a positive impact on OS share remains to be seen, but many believe Windows will be the clear winner, overtaking BlackBerry.

Some Implications of the "Social" Web

Online video consumption and social networking are growth areas in terms of end user engagement, it is clear. When you exclude just Facebook from the rest of the Web, consumption in terms of minutes of use shrank by nearly nine percent between March 2010 and March 2011, according to data from comScore.

And, even when you include Facebook usage, total non-mobile Internet consumption still dropped three percent over the same period.

The important news is that Facebook usage does not seem to be adding to Internet engagement time. Facebook is displacing time spent with other Web apps.

As many will note, social media and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top 25 consumer news sites studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic.

Twitter barely registerd as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links. See http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same trends will hold for business-to-business content. One suspects search engines will still drive half or more of delivered visitors.

The Pew data on consumer news sites shows 60 percent to 65 percent of traffic is “direct.” In my experience that is not true of B2B traffic, where it can easily be the case that half or more of traffic comes from search engines.

Still, the overall comScore data suggests that people have changed the way they use Internet apps.

At a high level, one might say that the legacy “searchable Web” is either being replaced by, or augmented by, “the social Web.”  What’s the difference? Maybe something as simple as connections between pages being replaced by connections between people.

The implications for content publishers could be important. Up to this point, one of the requirements for online content has been its ability to be found. So digital media publishers create lots of content around top keywords, engineer for search engine optimization (SEO) and expand the surface area in search engines to reach more users.

Some might argue that SEO’s strategic value is quickly fading as Google’s growth slows and its prominence in distribution slides away. Some of us might argue that is a good thing. Too often, SEO techniques are applied in ways that actually make content less useful. Writing for an algorithm is not the same thing as writing for a person.

Links embedded as an SEO technique often do not add much, if any, value. And the need to repeat “keywords” in body copy runs counter to traditional good writing techniques, which call for varying terms so no one word is used too frequently. But SEO calls for repeating keywords often in body copy. So less emphasis on SEO would strike some of us as a welcome change.

Still, the point, some would argue, is that Facebook has become the hub of the connected Web, a new “home base” that might have been anchored by Google’s home page over the last decade.

Facebook began receiving as many visits as Google in March 2010, and already garners more than three times as many minutes as Google each month from users, according to comScore.

Looking ahead, the best projections of U.S. online reach indicate that Facebook will surpass Google on that metric in less than a year, too.

And with this change, the nature of the relationship between users and publishers is being altered. Search offers a utility relationship, connecting users to content for the briefest of transactions; typically, it provokes users to just one page view so they can find a piece of information, and then they move on.

Social discovery arguably can build a relationship. By definition, a bit of content or a site found using a social mechanism already has some “connection” operating, between one user and another, or between one user and a community.

At least in principle, social discovery had enhance a relationship more than a “search” function can. At least, that’s the theory. See http://allthingsd.com/20110623/the-web-is-shrinking-now-what/?refcat=voices.


Facebook’s new popularity doesn’t mean brands can dispense with content published on their own sites. Facebook, after all, is used as a way to point to the original source. But there is clear logic to create ways to automatically create Facebook posts when a new bit of content is published.

Mobile Money in Uganda: Several Use Cases

Domestic money transfers are the dominant application people make of mobile money services, with the mobile money services mainly used to support immediate family members, a study has found. That isn't all people do, though.

The respondents also used mobile money to buy airtime, pay television bills, school fees or tuition. While some of these services are new, they are perceived to offer important benefits to the users: speed (for 78 percent of the respondents), practicality (69 percent), and an affordable price (68 percent).

However, a few concerns were raised regarding agents’ liquidity (35 percent), the risk of losing a mobile phone and any mobile money associated with the device (31 percent) and long queues at agents’ location (29 percent).

In addition, while transferring domestic money is the most widely used service, the respondents highlighted three other services which they perceive to be more important: 1) airtime purchase or top-up 2) paying for transportation 3) Settling of hospital bills.

Exploring Usage of Mobile Money in Uganda Mobile Money for the Unbanked

"Send Money Home" Worked, "Banking" Did Not

Mobile payment and banking services are not different from other businesses in one important respect: sometimes a company has to refine its product and pitch when its original "go to market" strategy fails to resonate, and consumers say they want something else.

M-PESA launched in Kenya in 2007 and thought its customers would want the ability to transfer money to make loan payments. The company found out that what people wanted most was to "send money home." So M-PESA started emphasizing "Send Money Home" and found success.

Business Line : Features News : It's Africa calling for mobile operators

U.S. Consumer Spending: The Mobile Payments Opporunity

U.S. consumer spending is about $10 trillion to $11 trillion a year.

Food is about 13 percent of that spending. Apparel is about 3.5 percent.

Transportation is about 15.6 percent. Entertainment is about 5.5 percent.

Health care is about 6.4 percent. "Other" purchases are about 10.5 percent.

What that means is that some 48 percent or more of monthly retail spending involves "buying things" other than paying a mortgage or rent (assume for that analysis that zero percent of the health care spending is out of pocket by the consumer).

That means upwards of $4.8 trillion a year is spent by consumers buying things that require some sort of payment. Most of that is spent at retail locations.

And that's why many are intrigued by mobile payments.

$4 Billion in U./S. Mobile Ad Spending in 2015

Total U.S. mobile ad spending will grow from $790 million in 2010 to $4 billion in 2015. During the same period, BIA/Kelsey projects the local portion of that total to increase from $404 million to $2.8 billion. This makes locally targeted mobile ads 51 percent of overall U.S. mobile ad spending, growing to 70 percent by 2015. See http://www.biakelsey.com/Company/Press-Releases/110623-U.S.-Mobile-Local-Ad-Revenues-to-Grow-From-$404-Million-in-2010-to-$2.8-Billion-in-2015.asp.

There's a very good reason why Google is interested in what mobile devices can enable, in terms of advertising and promotion. There is a big, and growing local advertising business that typically has been dominated by phone book ads, direct mail and local media advertising. But mobile devices are widely seen as providing a better channel, in part because they are sensors, able to interact with other devices and servers, and in part because they can be used to deliver highly targeted messages, with instant interaction, in real time, in a way that other existing media simply cannot.

New recession begins next year, Shilling says

“I’m predicting another recession next year,” says Gary Shilling, economist. It won't be a "double dip," a faltering of the current recovery, but a brand new recession. Many Americans won't find the quibbling reassuring. If this is a recovery, who needs it?

Shilling's forecast is based in part on current economic conditions, and partly on history. We’re already two years from the end of the last recession and three years from the business cycle’s previous peak, in December 2007.

Historically, economic expansions last about three years, especially in long down cycles of the kind he thinks we’ve been in since 2000.

So, he’s looking for a brand new cyclical recession beginning in 2012.

New recession begins next year, Shilling says Howard Gold's No-Nonsense Investing - MarketWatch