Marketing is Business Driver for Mobile Wallets

Possibly the most meaningful impact that Google Wallet will have is on the advertising and marketing communities. Google offers will be Google’s application for deals, coupons, and offers that will inform you of promotions based on your location.

In that sense, the business case for mobile wallet apps will be location based advertising, the ability to view and compare the deals of local vendors, and coupons that do not have to be cut out of magazines or newspapers.

Local-targeted advertising will sound like Living Social and Groupon, and that's essentially correct.

Google shows mobile "payment" is about marketing

Is Information Technology Like Railroads? If So, What Does That Mean?

For those of you who believe the Internet will be a transforming technology, it might also be helpful to keep in mind that such transformations can be hugely unsettling, and take quite a long time to become obvious.

Still, there is something out of character with job growth coming out of the last handful of recoveries from recessions.

What we historically expect to see is a sort of "shark fin" pattern of job growth. Since 2000, though the fin was almost non-existent after the early 2000s recession.

It is an inverse fin after the "recovery" from the 2008 recession. Does that relate to a broader economic transformation? If so, we are in for a jarring, unpleasant ride, in the medium term.

In 1850, a decade before the Civil War, the United States’ economy was small, in fact not much bigger than Italy’s. Forty years later, it was the largest economy in the world. What happened in-between was the railroads.

Deep changes like this are not unusual. Every so often—every 60 years or so—a body of technology comes along and over several decades, quietly, almost unnoticeably, transforms the economy and creates a different world for business. So the issue is whether mobility, applications and the Internet might be such a wave. The second economy

If so, the changes will take decades to play out.

If something that big is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet, a second economy is being built. But there will be casualties. When the shift of developed economies "from farm to factory" occurred, there was widespread dislocation. Think of the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s, "A Christmas Carol" and all that.

In the early 20th century, U.S. farm jobs became mechanized and there was less need for farm labor, and some decades later manufacturing jobs became mechanized and there was less need for factory labor.

Now business processes—many in the service sector—are becoming “mechanized” and fewer people are needed, and this is exerting systematic downward pressure on jobs. We don’t have paralegals in the numbers we used to. Or draftsmen, telephone operators, typists, or bookkeeping people.

A lot of that work is now done digitally. We do have police and teachers and doctors; where there’s a need for human judgment and human interaction, we still have that. But the primary cause of all of the downsizing we’ve had since the mid-1990s is that a lot of human jobs are disappearing into the second economy. Not to reappear.

Perhaps that is why recoveries from recessions starting in 2000 have been so different.

What Kindle Fire Means for Telcos

The Amazon Kindle Fire launch, with the simultaneous release of three new versions of the Kindle designed more as e-readers, likely illustrates a fundamental change in consumer electronics ecosystems, just as the application ecosystem also has changed around smart phones.

Needless to say, network access providers also face the need to create entirely new businesses based on partners of various types, all working within a larger context where devices, applications, commerce, advertising and cloud-based applications all are essential parts of the value consumers and businesses pay for.

The content and communications businesses these days are fundamentally different from those same businesses of 30 years ago in one fundamental way. Unlike the situation several decades ago, when value almost completely could be controlled by vertically-integrated providers, value now is derived from loosely coupled ecosystems.

In other words, where a telco in the past could control and vertically integrate every part of the “voice delivery” business, these days network-delivered applications with high value can be delivered to end users (both business and consumer) without any formal business relationship with an access provider. Razorsight | Corporate Blog

U.S. Consumers Not Convinced they Need Mobile Payments

A new survey finds that most U.S. consumers are not eagerly awaiting mobile payments. Lightspeed Research surveyed 10,000 credit card customers, including some 2,400 smartphone users, and found that half of those with smartphones described the ability to make mobile payments as "very unimportant" to them. Americans greet mobile payments with a yawn


Only 15 percent of those surveyed said mobile payment was very or somewhat important. The findings should come as no surprise. The payments process is not broken. Cash, check, credit and debit card payments are well understood, reliable, safe and easy to use.

On the other hand, there appear to be brighter prospects for new types of credit cards co-branded with daily deal sites. The Lightspeed research reveals that more than one quarter (27 percent) of Living Social customers would be interested in a Living Social-branded credit card, while more than one third (34 percent) of Groupon customers would be interested in a Groupon-branded card. 

Further, the research determined that daily deal customers’ creditworthiness and overall spending behaviors make them an attractive target from a credit product standpoint. Relative to the overall U.S. credit cardholder population, Groupon and Living Social customers are lucrative. Life for credit card

Users of the two leading daily deal services are about 50 percent more likely to have household incomes above $75,000, have higher credit scores, make three times as many credit card purchases and are about twice as likely to pay their monthly credit card balances in full. 

Steve Jobs Plans: How Far Do They Go?

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs reportedly left behind plans for four more years worth of Apple products when he died last week.

The Daily Mail reported over the weekend that Jobs worked for the last year of his life on a plan for more products to ensure his Cupertino company's success after his death.

The report cites unnamed Apple sources who said that while he knew his end was near, Jobs was outlining new versions of the iPad, iPhone, iPods and Macbooks, as well as working on iCloud, the automatic remote backup of photos, music and other files.

Apple does not pre-announce what it is working on, so those reports, though having the ring of authenticity, do not make clear whether Apple now has plans only to tweak its existing products, or whether there is some additional roadmap for products that could create whole new markets, something Steve Jobs uniquely was able to do.

That's the big issue for Apple. Its ability to manage its current business is not really in doubt. The issue is whether Apple in the future can create additional brand new markets without Steve Jobs. You might use the analogy of Disney. It has a profitable business long after its founder, Walt Disney, died. But you might also note that much of its recent success is due to ownership of the ABC network and its properties, such as ESPN.

It is harder to see how Disney, without Walt Disney, has "created" and "innovated" in quite the same way without Walt Disney.

Steve Jobs left plans for more from Apple

Intel "Ultrabooks": Not the Way Apple Would Approach a New Category

It remains to been seen whether Intel actually can create yet another segment in the mobile device category, but it is going to try with its new "ultrabook" approach to PCs. If ultrabooks fail, it won’t be for lack of research. Intel has long studied what people want in future computer chips and computing devices. 


In 2009 the company decided to take a different approach with a project focused on the idea of "performance." Some might think that is too much a focus on speeds and feeds. Intel will argue the idea of performance actually extends beyond "speeds and feeds."


The notable contrast is that although most executives would take comfort in extensive research, it is the diametrical opposite of what Apple traditionally has done, which is decide what people need, even when they cannot explain it to you, and then build products that address unarticulated needs.


Some will suggest that there is not enough here to create a new category of high-performance PCs. They might say it is just a "Macbook Air."


Why People Will Want Ultrabooks

Managed Services Spending Set To Boom

Small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) in the United States will be spending $7 billion on managed services in 2011, according to Techaisle. Growth will be in double digits over the next several years as well. At the moment, most of those services are related to IT infrastructure, rather than applications, but one would assume that will shift, over time. Managed Services Spending Set To Boom

The survey of 2000 SMBs and 600 channel partners in America also suggests that, as a percent of support and maintenance (known as break-fix), US-based SMB managed services’ spend will increase from 27 percent in 2011 to 40 percent in 2015. More than one in five small businesses (companies with 1-99 employees) use some type of managed services with greatest use observed among businesses with 50-99 employees.

Another percent of small businesses plan to use managed services suggesting robust opportunities for MSPs (managed services providers). Of the U.S. medium businesses (100-999 employees), 65 percent are using one or more managed services.


It also would be reasonable to expect some shifts in the IT services ecosystem, with MSPs displacing traditional "master distributors" to a greater or lesser extent. Ecosystem to shift