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Tim Tebow Interview

 In the first minute, he answers some questions about his touchdown celebration and pre-game routine. About a minute in, a bit of comedy.
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Financial Advisors Think Social Media Doesn't Work

Financial advisers in the United States are seeing fewer benefits from their use of social media, a survey by Aite Group suggests.

Out of the 437 advisers surveyed, only 19 percent said social media was useful for reaching new prospective clients, roughly half the number from two years ago, when it was considered a leading benefit.

"Social media has been over-hyped and the benefits just aren't there for a lot of advisers," said Aite senior analyst Ron Shevlin. Fewer leads?

In fact, there seem to be no benefits ranked more highly in 2011 than in 2010 by the surveyed respondents. 

The most frequently cited objective for using social media was to build brand awareness and differentiation. But the percentage of advisers who credit social media with helping them differentiate their practice from competitors dropped to nine percent this year, from 21 percent in 2009.

Are business social media users really becoming “fatigued,” have they simply reaped most of the rewards, or is there some other explanation for why “results” seem to be slipping, at least in this one survey?

One can think of all sorts of reasons why social media doesn't always "work."  Poor execution, inadequate resources, lack of executive support and fuzzy business objectives can cause issues, no doubt.

There also are lots of reasons why it would be difficult to measure success, even if social media did “work.” All the metrics measured by Aite Group are subjective. Also unknown is whether the same executives were interviewed in both years. It is conceivable that a new sample population held different views than the former sample. 

The one social media tool that saw an increase in advisers' professional use was LinkedIn, up 10 percent since 2009. Comparatively, professional use of Facebook fell 10 percent, Twitter dropped eight  percent and personal blogging declined nine percent.

There was a Time Before the Internet....

And who knows how people were able to get anything done at work, research and write their papers or communicate!

 

Some Retailers Use QR Codes; Others Might Ask Why

Quick response codes are used by retailers and others to turn an "offline" experience into an "online experience." Smart phone users can point their cameras at the codes and then be taken directly to a website.

According to new research by Nellymoser, 7.2 percent, or about 1 in 14 stores are using QR codes during the 2011 Christmas and holiday shopping season, with fashion retailers the heaviest users.

Nellymoser looked at more than 700 individual stores and 318 brands in the five largest shopping malls in the greater Boston area, including Best Buy, J.C. Penney, Macy, Neiman-Marcus, Nordstrom and Sears.

When it comes to placement, Nellymoser found a majority of the 23 chains using QR codes displayed them in their front store windows to lure shoppers with the prospect of a special deal or discount. Typically, the QR codes were applied in the form of a decal in the lower right or left corner of a window. Retailer use of QR codes

But QR codes failing to gain consumer acceptance or traction, some would say. In fact, most people probably don't even know what they are. It might be that the rapid adoption of smart phones is obviating the reason QR codes were thought to be an advantage.

There was a time when QR codes made some sense: feature phones without keyboards made typing universal resource locators quite difficult. So the QR code was supposed to allow users to go straight to a website without fumbling around typing.

As more users get smart phones with better browsers and keyboards, the need for the QR code as a shortcut is undercut.

To have gotten huge traction, one might argue, feature phones would have had to remain the staple of user mobile web access. But smart phones rapidly are becoming the devices of choice for most people, making the QR a rather less useful way of getting to a web page.

Web Pages Getting "Bigger"

Typical page size seems to be growing, according to data supplied by HTTP Archive.

Over the last year the typical web page seems to have grown from about 700 kilobytes of data to nearly 1 megabyte.

The data also suggests that, for any given amount of pages viewed by a typical web browsing consumer, total bytes consumed will keep climbing.

Less VC Investment, More Progress in Mobile

Though venture capitalists are investing far less money in mobile companies in 2011 than they did in 2000, most of the payoff from two decades of investments will come over the next decade.

In other words, though it is possible less money will be invested by VCs in start ups in 2010 to 2019 than was invested fromn 2000 to 2009, the economic and social impact will undoubtedly be greater in the latter period, than in the former period.

One major reason is simply that the essential background environment, including processor power, cost of memory, cost of application development and adoption of broadband is qualitatively different

In 2000, for example, the total number of U.S. broadband lines totalled 7.1 million, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In 2011, that number is about 86 million to 87 million. About 84 percent of U.S. homes using the Internet do so using broadband connections.

In 2000 there were about 97 million U.S. mobile accounts in service. In 2011 there were 323 million U.S. mobile accounts in service. More significantly, few mobile users had smart phones, or broadband data connections in 2000, and nobody had a faster 4G connection.

Those physical limitations of devices, access speeds and users mean that what was possible in 2000 was simply an order or magnitude, or two orders of magnitude, worse than what is possible in 2011.

In fact, looking only investment with only a five-year lens, investment levels are up. Over a longer 10-year period, though, investments are down sharply. So 2009 was not a turning point for venture capital in the mobile space, though it might appear so, looking only at the 2006 to 2010 period. 

 

Still, one might argue that much of the investment 10 years ago was “too early,” with much of the infrastructure required to support a huge mobile transformation of business, commerce, entertainment and content simply too undeveloped.

In 2000, the sum of equity invested in the wireless industry peaked at $3.79 billion, according to The MoneyTree Report by PwC and the National Venture Capital Association.

And 2011 investment is likely to be lower than 2010. The average amount invested between 2000 and 2010 was $1.18 billion a year. But not since 2007 has equity invested even passed $1 billion. Mobile investment up or down? 

Also, the rapid rise of the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices has fueled a mad rush of venture funding into consumer-facing mobile companies, rather than enterprise apps.

During the 2011 first half, according to Rutberg & Co., venture capitalists invested $3 billion into 358 mobile companies, with $960 million going to the “media and applications” sector, defined as social networks, mobile games, mobile advertising, app platforms, news aggregation, photo sharing and group messaging.

VC investment in enterprise mobile companies has been more tepid. According to Rutberg, VCs invested just $254 million into “enterprise IT” mobile companies over the same span. Consumer investments more popular

Keep in mind that venture capital is only one source of investment in mobile initiatives, with arguably more investment being made by established ecosystem participants, ranging from firms such as Google and Apple to RIM, Nokia, HTC and mobile service providers.

"We are in the beginning of a 10-year cycle in which mobile computing will reshape the way consumers live and businesses operate," wrote Rutberg researchers in their July 2011 mobile report. "PC Internet is a ‘dress rehearsal' for what will come with mobile, and the unforeseen applications in mobile computing will exceed those from the Internet thus far."
Mobile decade coming

Mobile commerce will be one expression of the change, as will the subsidiary mobile payment, mobile wallet, mobile remittance, mobile shopping, mobile promotion and mobile advertising businesses.