29% of Smart Phone Owners Use Devices for Shopping

New research from Nielsen reveals that 29 percent of smart phone owners use their phone for shopping-related activities. 

And one big difference between how smart phones get used, compared to PCs, is that people use their mobile devices while they are in stores, in the process of shopping.

Retailers might not always appreciate that face, since users often are comparing prices at online or other physical locations. 

But people also appear to be checking product review while in stores. 

Top activities among mobile shoppers include in-store price comparisons (38 percent  of mobile shoppers), browsing products through their mobile Web or apps (38 percent h) and reading online product reviews (32 percent). 

Apps, which account for the majority of mobile phone time in the U.S., may be the key to shifting consumers from browsing products on their phone to making purchases on the spot. 

Although only nine percent of mobile shoppers have used their phone to pay at the register, the desire to do so is apparent, says Nielsen.

Some 71 percent of app downloaders would be interested in an app that allows them to use their phone as a credit card. 

Apple iPhone users are more interested in this option than Android users, with over a third (39 percent) saying they would be extremely or very interested in an app with this ability.

3 Outcomes for Mobile Commerce: 2 are Negative

It never has been terribly easy to describe the mobile payment ecosystem and it arguably has gotten more complicated now that so much focus is going to mobile wallet and mobile commerce functions.

Mobile payments originally might have been more centrally involved with transforming payment and banking operations and experience. But a broader emphasis on mobile commerce now promises to potentially change “shopping” in a broad sense, with a potential blurring of online and offline shopping experiences.

In fact, you might now consider “mobile payments” to be one segment of the broader “mobile commerce” business, including mobile payments at retail locations, mobile wallets for consumer identity and loyalty functions, personal finance and banking, money transfer and then marketing and incentive operations for advertisers and retailers.

At the very least, there is potential for rearranging value and hence participant revenue within all the existing legacy businesses in the retailing, banking, payments and marketing industries. The larger question is whether value, and industry revenue, grows or possibly shrinks, whether new roles are added and new industry segments are created.

If mobile commerce and payments do not grow the business, in terms of revenue for existing and new participants, then participant welfare will, in many cases, be worse than before. In other words, mobile commerce will wring revenue and profits out of the participating businesses, as the Internet has tended to do in other businesses it has transformed.

On the other hand, mobile commerce, particularly in the marketing and advertising arenas, has potential to shift revenue into mobile venues from other online or offline channels. In this scenario, participant revenues could grow, allowing new participants and roles to be created, while virtually all contestants potentially gain.

The third possibility is that aggregate participant revenue neither grows nor shrinks dramatically, strictly because of a shift to mobile commerce and payments, meaning most contestants simply “run in place.” In other words, most participants might find themselves spending money to keep what they now have, rather than growing.

Put simply, for the entire commerce ecosystem, there are basically three revenue outcomes, and two of those outcomes are negative. Since a mere shift to mobile forms of commerce does not change aggregate consumer disposable income, one has to assume that mobile commerce offers the potential to shift participant revenues, or possibly reduce friction in the shopping process.

But there is one obvious exception to that “rule.” It is entirely possible, and even likely, that revenue will shift from offline and online marketing and advertising channels into mobile marketing and promotion.
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Deutsche Telekom Invests in Pinger

T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, has made a  $7.5 million  investment round in free messaging provider Pinger.

Pinger isn't the first over the top application or service Deutsche Telekom has invested in. In 2007 Deutsche Telekom lead a round of investment in Jajah, a significant provider of over the top voice services. 


Telefonica now owns Jajah. 


Those investments in over the top messaging and voice are not as odd as one might think. It certainly is true that such over the top apps increasingly are competing with, and displacing, traditional mobile service provider voice and messaging services.


On the other hand, even though over the top services cannibalize legacy revenue, such apps also allow firms such as Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom to make revenue and get customers outside their traditional service territories. 


Much as firms acquire other firms in new areas to gain the additional customer base and revenue, so over the top apps, even when cannibalizing some amount of in-territory revenue, also create the foundation for new revenues outside a traditional service territory. 

Google Selling Clearwire Stake

Google is selling its stake in Clearwire, amounting to 29.4 million shares of ClassA common stock, at $1.60 per share. The sale ends one Google experiment aimed at spurring broadband deployment, much as Google has experimented with municipal Wi-Fi networks, is testing a 1-Gbps local access network in Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo.. and has given support to white spaces initiatives. 


It has been a while since Internet service provider executives seriously wondered whether Google had aspirations to become a service provider itself, either in the mobile or fixed realms. Google arguably has the money and complementary assets to do so. 


To be sure, Google has been investing in long haul facilities since at least 2005, but that is similar to Google investing in its own data centers. Both are core supports for many of Google's businesses. That doesn't mean Google wants to be in the local access business, really. 


Of course, Google did announce that it was prepared to bid as much as $4.6 billion for wireless spectrum in 2008, but the company did so to trigger "open access" provisions. Google didn't want to become a wireless service provider.

Mobility Has Reached Tipping Point for Businesses

Symantec’s “2012 State of Mobility” report suggests business use of mobile devices now has reached a tipping point. Most organizations are making line-of-business application available. Some 59 percent of respondents reported this to be the case.

Also, 71 percent of businesses are now looking at implementing a corporate “store” for mobile applications.

The survey was conducted by Applied Research and involving 6,275 organizations of all sizes in 43 countries.

Security remains a key issue, though. Small and large businesses have suffered a variety of losses, measured by direct financial expenses, loss of data, and damage to the brand
or loss of customer trust.

Within the last 12 months, the average cost of these losses was $247,000 overall. Small businesses averaged $126,000 of loss, while enterprises averaged $429,000. In the end, however, most organizations feel that mobility is worth the challenges. About 71 percent of respondents say they at least break even on the risks versus rewards.

Google Nexus Tablet for Sale in April 2012?

Kindle Fire

Google says it will formally adopt a hardware strategy featuring a range of devices that will compete with Apple products. 


A new Google Nexus tablet might be on the market in April 2012, and would represent one of the products Google plans to launch and support. 


According to Richard Slim, an analyst with DisplaySearch, Google is working on a tablet with a seven-inch display and 1280 by 800 pixels of resolution. 


Slim believes the device will retail for $199, in line with the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook . Google Nexus tablet




Of course, Google also already markets three tablet devices in other form factors, by virtue of its ownership of Motorola Mobility. Those include the  10.1-inch Xoom, the 10.1-inch Xyboard (Xoom 2), and the 8.2-inch Xyboard. 

You might well argue that the seven-inch segment is big enough to require a presence. 

Amazon shipped 5.3 million Fires in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to DisplaySearch's numbers. 

Is "Spectrum Crunch" Real?

Two "debates" seem primed to rage over the next couple of years. First, there will be an argument about whether the mobile "spectrum crunch" is real or not.

Second, there will be a sharp debate about how to allocate a huge block of "refarmed" former TV broadcast spectrum for mobile purposes.

The first argument includes both doubters who suspect bandwidth issues are not as pronounced as most in the industry believe, as well as proponents of alternative approaches, such as allocating large amounts of new unlicensed spectrum.

Of course, many argue that the spectrum needs are real, noting that smartphone traffic in 2015 will be 47 times greater than it is in early 2012.  New devices such as tablets also use 120 times as much bandwidth as smart phones.  Expect lots of sparring over spectrum issues over the next couple of years, for obvious business reasons. Without spectrum, a mobile service provider has no business at all. And many would argue more benefits will accrue to businesses and consumers if lots of unlicensed spectrum is made available.