Mobile now accounts for over 10% of all sales on eBay UK

More than 10 percent of all purchases on eBay UK now take place through a mobile device. And the UK is leading the way for mobile commerce, with more people buying and selling goods via mobile on eBay than in any other European country.

On eBay UK an item is sold via mobile on average every second, more than 85,000 each day. In August 2011 alone, over two million items were bought through mobile, including twice as many men as women.

Mobile now accounts for over 10% of all sales on eBay UK

Twollars: A Virtual Currency for Twitter

Twollars are a new virtual currency for Twitter apps.

Virtual currency for carbon futures

Virtual currencies are not used only in social games. The virtual currency Ven, traded among a closed online community of individuals and businesses, hopes to have 80 million in circulation by this time next year, up from about eight million today. It is backed by a basket of commodities, currencies and carbon futures.

The currency exchange now has 25,000 members, up from 22,000 members in the spring of 2011.

One Ven was trading for $9.35, or €13.35 in September 2011. However, users can’t exchange Ven to other currencies at present, because of the regulatory issues this could cause, according to Stalnaker, and the risk of money laundering. Instead, the currency can be used to pay for goods and services.

There are two lines of thinking about "virtual currency." One line of thinking is that tokens, points and credits used exclusively within social games and environments should be used carefully, in ways that do not invoke the regulation that applies to "currency" transactions. In other words, "real money" can come in, but cannot come out of the game.

Others want to create virtual currencies where real money can be used to buy credits, points or tokens within a social game, but also can be exported out of those settings and exchanged for value in other settings, up to and including use as a prepaid instrument in the real world of shopping or commerce. In other words, money can go in, be converted to some social value store, but then also come out of a social game as a real currency again, or as a store of value that can be used in other settings, whether online or offline.

That is a more-challenging notion precisely because many regulations and rules related to banking, payments and prepaid instruments likely will have to be followed. But as online and offline commerce begins to fuse in new ways, the issue of virtual currency will have to be addressed.

Virtual currency, part backed by carbon

Gmail is Now a Viable Enterprise Email Provider, Gartner Says

After being in the market for five years, Google's enterprise Gmail is building momentum with commercial organizations with more than 5,000 seats, and it now presents a viable alternative to Microsoft Exchange Online and other cloud email services, according to Gartner analysts.

"The road to its enterprise enlightenment has been long and bumpy, but Gmail should now be considered a mainstream cloud email supplier," said Matthew Cain, research vice president at Gartner. "While Gmail's enterprise email market share currently hovers around one percent, it has close to half of the market for enterprise cloud email.

"While cloud email is still in its infancy, at three percent to four percent of the overall enterprise email market, we expect it to be a growth industry, reaching 20 percent of the market by year-end 2016, and 55 percent by year-end 2020," Cain says.

Other than Microsoft Exchange, Google Gmail is the only email system that has prospered in the enterprise space over the past several years, Cain says. Other enterprise email providers — Novell GroupWise and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino — have lost market momentum, Cisco closed its cloud email effort and VMware's Zimbra is only now refocusing on the enterprise space, he says.

Gmail is Now a Viable Option in Enterprise Email Market

NetBlazr Trying to Disrupt Enterprise Broadband Business

Brough Turner's "NetBlazr" service in Boston illustrates one potential way change can come in a market. As Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen notes, market disruption often occurs when new providers introduce services that are significantly lower in price, but also significantly lower in functionality, than the market-leading services they seek to disrupt. About netBlazr

In other words, the upstarts provide products that are good enough to solve a real problem, if not "good enough" to directly displace the leading services. NetBlazr suggests that its customers use netBlazr as a supplementary service to a primary broadband connection, as no single provider can guarantee 100-percent reliability.

Over time, though, functionality increases to the point that the upstarts are able to directly challenge the market leaders. Those of you with long memories will remember that this is precisely what MCI did when it challenged AT&T in enterprise voice services. It is Skype and other VoIP services, and is what netBlazr is attempting as well.


The company offers free symmetrical 3 Mbps service, symmetrical 50 Mbps service for $60 a month on a shared basis, or dedicates service at a range of speeds from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps for prices ranging from $50 a month up to $200 a month.

The basic idea is bandwidth at prices roughly an order of magnitude lower than commercial services available in Boston. That's a classic "disruptor" strategy.

Why Netflix Prices Will Climb Further

Though Netflix seems to be expecting a loss of perhaps a million subscribers as a result of its recent price changes, it is virtually certain that retail prices will grow in the future. The reason is simple: Netflix content licensing costs are certain to grow dramatically.

Up to this point, Netflix costs have hinged principally on the cost of acquiring the DVDs it rents, as well as postage costs and the normal overhead a business requires. Netflix already is signaling that its future business will be defined by TV programming, not movies. That means the licensing cost profile will change, even if Netflix does not continue to invest in original or exclusive programming. And Netflix certainly will do that.

Put simply, Netflix now will have to bid for content in the same way that programming networks do, and that will be expensive. And those costs necessarily will be passed along to customers. In fact, Netflix executives seem to signaling that the movie rental business, especially in the form of DVD rentals, will be a thing of the past.

Some will fault Netflix for making a risky pricing move. Others might say the move is a bold signal that Netflix is about to get into a new business, not simply based on streaming instead of DVDs, but a change of business from "movie rentals" to "television."

Netflix is betting it can primarily become a provider of streamed TV content, instead of a provider of movie content. Some might say the difference is that where Netflix used to compete with Blockbuster Video, in the future it will compete with Hulu. At a secondary level, where Netflix used to compete with premium cable TV networks such as HBO, in the future it might start to compete with cable TV.

Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos says the company ran into trouble with its forecasts for streaming video and DVD rental subscriptions because it’s still adjusting to the decision in July to turn them into separate products. “Being able to precisely forecast and predict the behavior of that many people on a fairly radical change is something we’ll get better at all the time.” Forecast miss

The key point is that Netflix is about to embark on a business model change much more substantial than simply "how" movie content gets delivered to its customers. Netflix now will try to become a substantial provider of TV content. Some would argue that is the real challenge.

Although “the DVD business has a long life in middle America,” Sarandos says “it’s just not part of our future.” That's a clear signal.

France Telecom to Shift to "Orange" as Retail Brand

France Telecom is finally poised to become plain "Orange," a brand which could gain increasingly broad global recognition as the telco pushes into emerging markets.

The move illustrates one facet of how the global telecom business has changed in recent decades, with most "national" telecom companies being compelled to look for growth outside their original service territories.

At a more local level, the same process has affected small rural telcos and competitive local exchange carriers, all of whom have had to consider growing footprint outside original service areas to fuel growth.

France Telecom aims to transition all its businesses to the Orange brand, currently used for its mobile and triple play activities, within the next 12 months.

France Telecom becomes just 'Orange'