U.S. Android Version of Google Maps Adds "Offers"

"Selling things" and "helping retailers sell things" have been the underlying rationale for location-based services for some time. Google Play Google Play now has a Google Maps  6.7 release that integrates "offers" into the app.

In the U.S. market, users can tap on “Maps” to open the dropdown menu and then tap on “Offers."  Google Maps also has added indoor walking directions in the U.S. and Japan, plus 360-degree interior photos of businesses.

In U.S, Market, Prepaid Pressure Grows

Most larger mobile service providers are not especially fond of prepaid retail plans, for the simple reason that postpaid average revenue per user is higher. On the other hand, many mobile service providers who have targeted cost-conscious customers, and most mobile virtual network operators, tend to rely on prepaid packaging.

In fact, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets President CEO Ralph de la Vega has said the growth opportunity in this country is in postpaid data, not in prepaid voice. AT&T's revenue growth of over $1.2 billion in 2010 for example, was more than twice the revenue growth for the entire U.S. prepaid industry. 

But consumer demand for prepaid continues to grow. In the U.S. wireless market, mobile service providers appear to have lost subscribers from contract-based plans for the first time in the first quarter of 2012.

That doesn't mean demand for mobile service is declining, only that demand is shifting towards prepaid plans.

The seven largest U.S. phone companies, representing more than 95 percent of the market, lost a combined 52,000 subscribers from contract-based plans in the January to March period, according to a tally by the Associated Press Associated Press.

According to The NPD Group, prepaid now is a major reason even smart phones are gaining traction.

Top U.S. Smartphone Manufacturers	Q1'12
Apple	29%
Samsung	24%
HTC	15%
Motorola	10%
LG	7%
RIM Blackberry	5%

The rise of the pre-paid market contributed to Samsung’s growth in the first quarter of 2012. Android devices accounted for 79 percent of the prepaid smartphone market in the first quarter of 2012, for example.

In Africa, Mobiles are Banks

A new survey of global financial habits by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and Gallup World Poll found 20 countries in which more than 10% of adults say they used mobile money at some point in 2011, the Economist reports.

Of those, 15 are African. In Kenya, Sudan and Gabon half or more of adults used mobile money.

In contrast, in countries with more developed financial systems, the share of adults who use mobile money is tiny, such as in Brazil and Argentina, where use of mobile money is only about one percent of adults.

Screen Size Seems to Dramatically Affect E-Commerce Behavior

Before the iPad came out, very few shoppers at OneKingsLane came from the iPhone or any mobile device, according to Doug Mack, CEO of OneKingsLane.

After the iPad came out, mobile sales shot up, he says, and now account for more than 20 percent of OneKingsLane's revenue.

The obvious question is "why" shopping volume changed. Some would argue that screen size is the big change, and then there is a follow-on or "halo" effect. The argument is that little e-commerce was mobile originated from mobiles because screens weren't big enough to navigate, and too small to allow the appealing visual presentation that drives interest.

The tablet changes all that. And since the iPad has been the dominant device in the tablet segment, and since it is likely most iPad owners also own iPhones, there likely has been a pull-through from the iPad to the iPhone. A reasonable theory, you might say.

Confusing Correlation with Causation

When conducting any type of analysis, it is important to distinguish between activities that are correlated, with activities that are causally related. For example, it remains difficult to say for certain whether widespread use of broadband access "causes" economic activity, or whether places where there is a lot of economic activity drive use of broadband.

That can matter quite a lot whenever businesses or policymakers have to allocate capital for the purposes of stimulating economic growth, for example.

ABI Research has found, for example, that mobile users who download a retailer-branded app said the app caused them to visit the store more (45.8 percent), buy more of the store/brand’s products and services (40.4 percent), tell a friend about their store shopping experience (35.8 percent), and encourage friends to visit the store (30.8 percent), according to ABI Research.

The issue is whether those respondents already were patrons of stores who provided an app. It might be that the greatest benefit of a particular retail app to a particular shopper is the fact that the shopper already was spending significant money at a retail outlet.

In that case, the app does not cause shopping behavior, but only increases engagement with a retailer that already had high significance for the user. But a reasonable conclusion would be that a mobile app can increase spending and engagement, under some conditions, when a relationship already exists.

When Should You Post on a Social Network?

Each major social network seems to have a distinct pattern where it comes to maximizing user traffi, an analysis by Bitly suggests. 


For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Eastern Time, Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.

The peak traffic times for Twitter are 9am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday, bitly suggests. 

Facebook has a different pattern. Links posted from 1pm to 4pm EST result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.

Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm. While traffic starts to increase around 9am, one would be wise to wait to post until 11am. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts at 8pm and 7pm, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.

Tumblr also shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.

How Big are the Opportunities in Mobile Payments?

Observers sometimes are not quite aware of why there now is so much activity and hype about mobile payments, mobile commerce or mobile wallets. As always, the reason for all that activity and speculation is that some rather-large revenue streams now are poised for potential disruption, precisely at the point that many large entities are casting about for brand-new fields to conquer, because their own legacy revenues are declining, or are about to decline.

Consider the revenue streams potentially in play. Interchange fees, the transaction fees paid by merchants to process a credit card or debit card transaction at a retail location, typically are in the range of tow percent of the transaction for credit cards, less for debit cards and a bit more for many new mobile payment services.

Typically paid by merchants, interchange amounts to tens of billions of dollars across purchase volume of nearly $2 trillion worldwide, according to Caribou Honig, QED Investors partner.

There also are fee elements. Credit card issuers essentially make $600 billion in loans. A mobile payment platform could capture some of the interest and fees currently charged by the credit card banks, though there is at present much less interest in this revenue stream, compared to interchange.  The reason is simply the risk of holding those payment obligations.

Google, of course, eschews any interest in interchange or the lending function, and clearly is interested in the advertising and loyalty business. Total ad spending in the U.S. market alone exceeds $150 billion.

Apple, on the other hand, will likely want to figure out how any mobile commerce, payment or wallet operations allow it to create big new device revenue streams.

In other regions of the world, transaction fees also are the primary revenue driver. Globally, for example,  the World Bank forecasts remittances in developing countries was about $349 billion in 2011. The issue for mobile operators and other application providers is how much of that could be shifted to mobile means. 

The reason that matters is the revenue associated with transaction fees to send money from one person to another, in country or across borders, using the mobile device.


In India, for example. remitting money using India Post costs five percent of the amount sent, and then many respondents reported another one percent in addition for bribes, tips and other indirect costs. Other remittance channels also represent out of pocket costs.