European Mobile Ops See Mobile Payments as Way to Avoid "Dumb Pipe"

European mobile operators, for better or worse, seem to think that now is the time to get into the mobile payments and mobile wallet businesses, before they are reduced to "dumb pipe" providers in one more application space.

Peter Van Leeuwen, strategy and business development manager for KPN, believes that mobile networks and banks are in danger of not gaining ownership of the m-commerce channel and being relegated to being "bit pipes" in the value chain. Watch a video here.

Whether that is a legitimate fear some will question. The larger question might be the extent to which mobile operators can establish key roles in developed markets, as compared to developing regions, where the business case and mobile operator role would seem to be much clearer.

The difference in market potential is simple. "Payments and banking" are not broken processes in the developed world. In the developing world, those functions are, in fact, quite undeveloped. To succeed in developed markets, mobile operators and others must create new value, not just displace existing payment systems.

In developing markets, the value is clear and obvious. No existing business has to be disrupted to succeed. The value there is not "a better way to pay," but "you can use a bank."

European operators dash for m-commerce involvement

Telenor Launches Mobile Payments Trial

Telenor has launched a 250-person mobile payments trial using near field communications with DnB NOR and MasterCard.

Each member of the 250-person test group is equipped with a Samsung mobile phone and a special SIM card. The SIM card contains information for the person’s MasterCard, issued by the Norwegian bank DnB NOR. By holding the phones up to a card reader in selected stores around the city, this group of testers can buy everything from shampoo to pizza slices using their phones alone.

Mobile payment becomes a reality in Oslo - News and Media - Telenor Group

2 Billiion Potential Mobile Banking Customers in Developing World

Mobile financial services may reduce the number of unbanked in Pakistan by 20 per cent by 2020, a study by Boston Consulting Group estimates.

In India the number of people with formal savings accounts could increase by 142 million. In Bangladesh it could increase tax revenues with US$500 million. And in Serbia it could lead to 23,000 new jobs being created.

In the developing world, more than 2.5 billion adults, or approximately 72 percent of the population, are unbanked, meaning they have no access to traditional financial services like banks. At the same time, nearly 2.5 billion people in these same emerging economies have mobile phones.

This means that there could be up to two billion mobile phone users who are currently unbanked that could be served through mobile financial services. Overall in the five countries covered in the study, mobile financial services has the potential to reduce financial exclusion by five to 20 percent through 2020 and increase GDP by up to five percent.

mobile financial services may improve the lives of two billionTelenor Group

Zynga Files for IPO, Bubble Building?

Zynga Inc., a company that sells imaginary tractors and other make-believe goods in online games, for real-world money, plans to go public in a deal that could value it as high as $20 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports. See Zynga Files for IPO - WSJ.com (subscription required).

Those sorts of eye-popping numbers should have the rational person thinking there might be another Internet investment bubble building. Others will make all sorts of arguments about why at least some of the valuations are justified.

Are we in another tech bubble? You will hear lots of people denying that thesis, but they were doing that the last time, and although the refrain last time was "things are different," this time people are saying "Internet assets are not over-valued; the firms have actual revenues" and so forth. What is harder to dispute is that growth expectations are quite high. How high is "too high" is the current question.

Keep in mind what happened in the last tech bubble, though. Lofty valuations crashed hard. From the bubble peak, sometime between 1999 and very early 2001, valuations plummeted to about 10 percent of peak. Valuations too rich by an order of magnitude was the rule. Some of us would say it remains a good rule.

Google, Among Others, Considering Bid for Hulu

Google apparently is among the companies that Hulu advisors have reached out to as they begin to hunt for a bidder, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Yahoo apparently also is interested in potentially bidding. Hulu's bankers were setting up meetings with a wide array of technology and media companies, though, and it remains unclear whether Hulu's owners would be interested in seeing Google, with its YouTube ambitions, get the asset. At the same time, some would argue that Hulu is essentially hobbled, strategically, because its media owners do not agree on strategy, and in any case remain profoundly "conflicted" about how aggressive they ought to be in encouraging online and over the top distribution.

What seems clear enough is that only an owner primarily interested in distribution alone could give Hulu the marketing push it might require. Right now, Hulu can't clearly push the service as hard as others might, because it would like to succeed, but not too much; wants to grow new channels and protect existing channels.

Google, Among Others, Considering Bid for Hulu - WSJ.com (subscription required)

The US Group Buying Universe

When it comes to social shopping, group buying or "deal of the day" services, there doubtless are doubters. "Just a fad," some will say. The argument for why social shopping is not a fad is that it actually might represent the next generation of the local advertising and local promotion business, functions that already exist, already are sizable and would seem to be poised for redefinition as mobile phones, location services and mobile payments become more popular.

As always, being "too early to market" can be fatal. Woot, founded in 2004, currently has over 1.4 million unique monthly visits. Groupon, founded in 2008, has 29.1 million unique monthly visits. . Mercata, another early mover, was shut down in 2001.

LivingSocial is around half the size of Groupon, at 14.3 million unique monthly visits, with 301 US cities to Groupon’s 182. Yeah that’s about five percent of the US population visiting the site monthly.

The US Group Buying Universe

"Owned" Media is Media

Content marketing is a bit like the television business. Any single person might have regular access to hundreds of channels, but most will watch only a handful, perhaps six to seven on a regular basis, and possibly a dozen, including those channels watched only occasionally. Most people never dwell at most of the hundreds of channels.

Keep in mind that “audience” creates the revenue opportunity. Viewers create the advertising opportunity, because viewers are potential customers. For most brands, the analogy is that paid, earned and owned media are attempts to get access to an audience that consists of potential buyers.

From an owned media perspective, the issue is how to become one of the few sites prospects turn to, daily, weekly or frequently, to get information about the issues, opportunities and context of the business they are in. In that sense, a content marketing effort has to try and operate like any entertainment video channel.

If your prospects are going to spend a limited amount of time with any content site in their business segment, you want your “channel” to be among the handful of places a prospect regularly goes to learn things. That doesn’t mean what those prospects typically want to learn about are the specifications for your latest product.

What they are most likely more interested in is the news flow that alerts them to opportunities and threats to their own business, not the brand’s opportunities.

"If you think about your online patterns, you have a tendency to only visit a couple of various websites every day,” says consultant Pat Miller. “While you may stray from these sites ever so often and look at other webpages while doing a search or aiming to waste time, for the most part your web content history is mostly focused around twelve or so pages which you visit religiously.”

“This isn’t a fluke, it is because of just one sound truth: you enjoy and depend on such sites,” he notes. Read more here. That’s as important a truth for brand content marketing as it is for traditional media outlets. People are busy and will create a habit of seeking out information from a relative handful of trusted sources on a regular basis. So the key is create a habit about returning to your own site.

“Folks stay with websites that they like,” Miller says. “They also follow websites they feel protected on,” in the sense of  not having to worry about phishing attacks or other dangers.

“Having said that, we have come to only rely on websites that have professional looking articles and a professional looking design,” Miller says. “That’s the basis behind web content marketing."