$16 Billion U.S. Small Business Voice Spending in 2015

By many estimates, U.S. businesses with five to 99 employees account for around half the U.S. gross domestic product and more than half the employment. So it is not surprising that In-Stat estimates, by 2015, small business spending on wireline voice services will approach $16 billion, which represents nearly 50 percent of all spending in the category.

“Wireline voice, although not growing in any significant way, is holding steady across all sizes of business,” says Greg Potter. It appears that access services will fare better than international long distance, though. “One service segment we see that could be vulnerable due to alternative technologies like VoIP, is international long distance services. Even though the total dollar spend remains high, we see negative growth over the forecast period.”

In small business, the hospitality and food vertical will spend the most on wireline voice services, reaching $2 billion by 2012. Total toll-free service expenditures will increase by $134 million over the five-year forecast period.

Enterprise spending in the government segment will reach $4.7 billion by 2015. Small offices and small offices also will spend $267 million on other services in 2015, which includes audio-conferencing services, outbound calling services, and pre-paid calling.

In-Stat

Mobile Auto Site Visits Up 465% Last 12 Months, Says Jumptap

While visitors to online auto sites are growing at 30 percent year over year, visitors to mobile auto sites have grown 463 percent, more than 15 times the rate of growth for online visitation, a new study by Jumptap has found.

The research showed that those visiting mobile auto content sites were more likely to own a tablet than the overall mobile population, and also much more likely to own a smart phone. A full 69 percent of visitors accessing mobile auto sites are using smart phones.

Jumptap Auto Research Shows Mobile Devices Growing 15 Times Faster Than Online

Do Mobiles Help Market Researchers, or Not?

Is mobile research, especially smart phone research, going to rescue market research and present us with a panoply of new options, or is it destined to be a niche player? Offering their views in this webinar are:

Michael Alioto, Vice President, Marketing Sciences, Gongos Research
Reg Baker, COO, Market Strategies International
Leonard Murphy, Editor-in-Chief, GreenBook Blog
Ray Poynter, author of the Handbook of Online & Social Media Research

Mobile Research

Twitter is all about real-time commerce?

"Twitter wants to be “the world in your pocket,” according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, but more than anything, it wants to be the engine of mobile and real-time commerce in your pocket. The company sees a future in “removing friction” from e-commerce and allowing companies to target their users directly in real time.

That needs a little "unpacking." When a social network talks about enabling e-commerce, it means use of the Twitter platform as a way of delivering offers to potential customers.

The Twitter CEO said that the company sees a number of opportunities when it comes to enabling — and taking a share of the revenue from — direct e-commerce with users via the service, because “we already see a tremendous amount of commerce taking place on the platform.”

As an example, Costolo talked about how Google tweeted a promotion code that people could use for tickets to its recent IO conference, and about 100 tickets sold in a little over 10 minutes. “That’s $55,000 with one tweet in 13 minutes,” said the Twitter CEO. In another example, the San Diego Chargers tweeted about tickets that were left for a game, and in a little over half an hour they were gone. The upshot of all of that, he said, is that “there’s a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of if we want.”

Twitter is all about real-time commerce, says CEO Dick Costolo

Mobile Web Performance Still Frustrating, Study Finds

Despite huge advances in mobile Web browsing, most users remain frustrated by the slow speed at which Web pages are delivered on their smart phones, a study by Compuware suggests. The 2011 survey of 4,014 global mobile web users found that 71 percent of users expect websites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone compared to the computer they use at home, up from 58 percent in 2009.

Some 57 percent of mobile web users had a problem in the past year when accessing a website and 47 percent had a problem accessing an app on their phone.

Nearly 60 percent of web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less, and 74 percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site. 50 percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less for an application to load before exiting.

If you remember browsing on a mobile phone several years ago, it was a fairly unpleasant experience. There was no effort to render a page the way it would display on a PC. In fact, the strategy was to strip out as much formatting as possible and render the text and basic images to allow the user to get the content of the page, but not the presentation.

That changed in 2007 with the iPhone. Web pages could be rendered very close to how the desktop did it and, with zooming, you could easily navigate the page and read the content. Mobile Web Performance Still Stinks, Users Say

Download the study here.

American Express Gets into Social Shopping

American Express is getting into the social shopping, or local commerce or daily deals space (depending on how you prefer to describe the business). American Express will be bringing personalized deals to Facebook through its "Link, Like, Love" platform.

American Express Gets into Social Shopping

Online payment company WePay targets small retailer e-commerce

Online payment startup WePay is launching WePay Stores, a new e-commerce solution for small businesses with zero tech prowess, one might argue.

It is billed as a simple solution for merchants without programming experience or technical ability. It takes a few minutes to start a store and retailers don’t need a merchant account.

WePay handles payments, hosting and shopping cart. There are no set up fees, contracts or monthly fees. Merchants sell items by uploading an image, adding a description and setting a price.

“Most merchants, including those that use PayPal, have to go figure out two different companies, one that offers payments and another that offers an online store,” says WePay CEO Bill Clerico. “It’s up to the merchant to get them to work together, and figure total cost. Instead, we hold your hand through the design and payment process."

WePay