Google Now Launches

Real-time and personalized information, essentially streamed automatically, is the value.

MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom to Launch Payments

MasterCard Worldwide and Germany-based Deutsche Telekom group have signed a partnership agreement that will help the telco launch a prepaid PayPass application for its planned NFC mobile wallet.

The deal likely will be similar to a mobile-payments partnership announced by U.K.-based Vodafone Group and Visa, which uses a prepaid mechanism to load cash onto a user mobile device.

7-Eleven Stores to Sell PayPal Prepaid Cards

The PayPal Prepaid MasterCard card will be available at roughly 5,500 7-Eleven 7-Eleven stores nationwide once its rollout is completed this year.

Customers will be able to reload cash onto their cards at these locations, prepaid card marketer NetSpend Holdings says.

Here's the tie to mobile payments and banking. As with the M-Pesa service, retail agents are often the places users load cash and receive cash, even if the mobile device supplies the messaging function. Also, the way cash will be loaded onto many mobile payment accounts is by linking to an offline prepaid account of some kind, as with the Starbucks mobile app.

Research in Motion Has 3.6% U.S. Device Share, Down from 41%

For Research in Motion, it has been a tough four years, as U.S. device market share dropped from 41 percent to 3.6 percent.

A Third of Kenya's GDP Now Passes Through M-Pesa

If you were to nominate one mobile money service, today, as the most-successful on the planet, it would hard to propose any company but M-Pesa. By some accounts, about a third of Kenya’ gross domestic product passes through M-PESA and Safaricom earns more money from M-PESA than it does from text messaging, in part because SMS tends to be bundled, free of charge, in the payments system.

In August 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported Vodafone earned $21 million through its Kenyan subsidiary, with $15.6 million coming from M-Pesa in license fees. As of November 2011 M-Pesa had over 14 million subscribers (out of a population of about 40.5 million, according to the World Bank) and more than 28,000 agents across the country versus around 600 ATMs

M-Pesa is operator-centric, working through a SIM toolkit application that sits on all Safaricom SIM cards.

To put money on your phone, you walk into an authorized agent, hand over your money, then receive an SMS saying that the money has arrived on your phone. To send money to someone, you go to the pay menu on the phone, look for the person in your phonebook, or add their details, then send them the amount. They get a message saying, in effect, “If you have an M-PESA account, you now have 50 shillings [say] on your phone. If you are not an M-PESA account holder, go to any agent and they will give you the money.”

Mobile TV is a Feature, not a Product, Yet

At the moment, services such as "TV Everywhere" that allow users to view some of the video they purchased as part of their subscription video services on a smart phone or tablet remain a "feature," and are not yet envisioned as revenue-generating "products."

That would not be an unusual pattern. Service provider Wi-Fi hotspot access has become a feature of a broadband subscription, whether provided by a fixed or mobile network. That seems to be the developing pattern for mobile TV services tied to another subscription.

Smartphone or tablet apps that are tied in to a cable TV show are definitely about "discovery and engagement," not advertising revenue, said Tammy Franklin, Scripps Networks Interactive senior vice president of affiliate sales and new media distribution.

For Verizon Wireless customers, unlimited U.S. domestic voice and texting essentially now are features of a mobile service, not discrete products. The basic connection fee includes both voice and texting.

House Hearing on Video Market Shows Growing Pressure within the Ecosystem

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing on whether existing communication laws address the demands of new technology. Such hearings do not, in and of themselves, mean much. But it is just one more sign that pressure is building within the video ecosystem.

Many speakers noted that regulations currently in place are outdated and stem from a time when cable companies controlled a much larger portion of the subscription video market.