Dunkin Donuts Launches Own Mobile Payment App

Dunkin’ Donuts has launched its first-ever mobile application for payment and gifting for iPhone, iPod touch and Android smartphones. With the new Dunkin’ App, paying for food, beverages, and merchandise at Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants throughout the U.S. is as simple and speedy as scanning a smart phone using a mobile Dunkin' Donuts Card in-store or at the drive-through, according to Mobile Commerce. 

The "mGift" feature also allows users to send virtual gift cards using text message, email, and Facebook Connect.

Consumers Not So Hot on Network Connected Tablets, Apparently

According to Engadget, AT&T has ended its subsidies for tablets sold with mobile data plans. You can make your own decisions about why the program is ending, but there might be a parallel with the earlier carrier experiments with subsidized netbooks. 

You might argue the value-price relationship is not perceived as adequate. You might argue that with pervasive Wi-Fi, people don't quite so often "need" a network-provided data plan. You might argue people prefer devices other than the ones AT&T had been offering. 

You can argue all of those could be reasons for lukewarm customer interest. You might also argue that AT&T doesn't want to incur the financing cost. 

Whatever your choice of reasons, there still does not seem to be a big move by consumers to pay for tablet mobile connections, even though some predict that will happen. Wi-Fi-only devices typically outsell units equipped for 3G access, for example. 

The ratio of Wi-Fi-only tablets tablet sales with carrier network connections, for example, is highly skewed to Wi-Fi-only devices. 

Consumers appear to avoid getting tablet mobile service plans, preferring to run tablets on Wi-Fi networks. 

With nearly 50 million tablets in the U.S. market, carrier-networked devices constitute roughly eight percent of the total. 

Barclays Expands ‘Pingit’ Service to Africa

Barclays has launched an international version of its "Pingit" mobile person to person payments system  in Kenya.

Barclays launched Pingit in February 2012 for its 11.9 million current account customers, who download the bank's Pingit app to their smart phone and can make instant money transfers to anyone with a U.K.-based mobile phone and a current account with any U.K. bank.

In the U.K. market, the app works on Apple iPhones, Blackberry and Android devices. Users call the recipient's mobile number using the Pingit app, key in an amount between £1 and £300 and hit send. The money is moved between the two current accounts using the Faster Payments service, and takes as little as 30 seconds.

Barclays plans to launch launch the mobile-to-mobile service in Kenya, adding service to a number of other African countries, including South Africa, later in 2012. 

Barclays also will launch in Spain, Italy, Portugal and France in 2013.

The bank estimates the service, which will be available to customers and non-customers, will reduce the cost of sending money to Africa by at least half. 

Barclays will charge a commission on the currency exchange but no fee to use the service. 

That suggests a £100 transfer will cost less than £3. Traditional money transfer providers typically charge both a fee and a spread on currency, which could mean a £5-£10 charge on a £100 transfer.

FaceTime Now a Reason to Buy AT&T "Mobile Share"

The large mobile service providers are not without significant persuasive tools where it comes to inducing customers to buy important new service plans that protect legacy voice and messaging revenues while tying mobile bandwidth consumption to retail prices.

One of those tools is use of Apple's FaceTime video calling feature. AT&T has announced it will limit how iPhone users can use FaceTime over AT&T's 3G and 4G networks when Apple's new iOS 6 software launches.

Users will not be able to use FaceTime over 3G or 4G unless they sign up for one of AT&T's new shared data plans. Users with an individual data plan will only be able to use FaceTime over Wi-Fi.

One suspects both Verizon and AT&T will have to do much more before usage of the new plans really becomes the norm. Right now the actual savings for switching to the new plans are fairly subtle, and therefore not so compelling.

More value will be needed, ultimately, and that probably will include a much clearer value-price relationship. Right now, a rational consumer would be hard pressed to identify significant savings or clear additional value.

Telco Reinvention Trend Requires Enough Capital to Buy Way Into New Markets

Telco and cable revenue trends in the U.S. market continue to  illustrate a fundamental principle some of us believe is foundational for both telcos and cable companies working in developed markets.

And that fundamental reality is that any service provider in a developed market must plan for a business environment where perhaps half of all current revenue has to be replaced by new sources over about a 10-year period. The corollary is that that rate of adaptation might have to be conducted more than once.

That might sound like a radical assumption, but it is precisely what happened in the U.S. service provider market when long distance revenues, which had driven industry profit, began a long descent. In 1997, long distance still represented about half of all industry revenues. But a decade later, mobile revenue had taken the place once held by long distance, representing in 2007 nearly half of U.S. communications service provider revenues.

Keep in mind that this “rule” applies most directly to service providers in developed markets. In developing regions, where service uptake still is growing, those challenges will take longer to develop.

The most-recent quarterly earnings report from Comcast shows the same sort of trend in the U.S. cable industry, where video revenues have shrunk to about 52 percent of total Comcast “cable operations” revenue , while other services now contribute 48 percent, and are growing.

In fact, including the NBC Universal contributions, it already is true that Comcast earns less than half its total revenue from cable TV distribution. In fact, cable TV video distribution operations now account for only 33 percent of total Comcast revenue.

That’s an example of the same process: the need for suppliers in competitive and mature markets to replace large amounts of revenue from lost legacy revenues.

Telcos already have been through one such transformation, as overall revenue now has shifted from “long distance” to wireless, at least for the tier one U.S. providers. The next set of transitions will see the revenue contributions from mobile voice and text messaging dwindle in favor of new sources.

There is an important caveat: it is much easier for a large service provider to make these sorts of transitions, than for a small provider to make such a fundamental transition.

There are examples of former “rural” telcos repositioning them as business service providers. Windstream and Frontier Communications provide obvious examples.

Warwick Valley Telephone Company, for example, calls itself a “cloud communications” company.  It might be more accurate to say “unified communications” revenues, but cloud or unified communications revenues were $3.3 million in the second quarter of 2012, an increase of 169 percent from $1.2 million in prior year period, against total revenues of $6.9 million, WVT says. In other words, “cloud computing” revenues now were about 47 percent of total revenues, in the second quarter.

The increase in revenues of over $1 million is primarily attributable to the consolidation of financial results for the acquisition of Alteva and organic unified communications services revenue growth, partially offset by a decline of nearly $1 million in “telephone segment” revenues, the company says.

That’s important because the results were achieved by a major acquisition. “As a percentage of consolidated revenue, the UC segment contributed 47 percent of revenues in the second quarter as compared with 21 percent in the same period of the prior year and 46 percent in the first quarter of 2012,” WVT says.

The “Telephone” segment contributed 53 percent of revenues in the second quarter of 2012 as compared with 79 percent in the second quarter of 2011 and 54 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

The point is that some service providers will be able to dramatically recast themselves by making strategic acquisitions.

Tier one service providers are moving away from primary reliance on voice services, towards wireless data, video and other services and products. Cable operators are shifting to business voice and data services, and away from entertainment video. And smaller rural telcos are becoming business services specialists.

Hard to Calculate Total Cost of Ownership, Return on Agility

"In the many meetings with customers in which I have done a deep dive on their architecture and applications to help them create an accurate cost picture, I have observed two common patterns: 1) It is hard for customers to come to an accurate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)  calculation of an on-premise installation and 2) they struggle with how to account for the “Return on Agility”; the fact that they are now able to pursue business opportunities much faster at much lower costs points than before," says Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO.

Amazon's TCO white paper attempts to quantify the return.

Capacity vs. Usage Comparison

 

Can Mobile Banking Hit 25% of U.S. Homes by 2017?

Is it plausible that there could be 109 million mobile banking users in 2017? Yes, using some optimistic assumptions.

Is it possible 25 percent of all households could be using mobile banking in 2017? Yes, using some perhaps optimistic assumptions.

If you assume there are about 135 million households in existence and that adoption mirrors the adoption of online banking, then 25 percent household adoption is possible.

If adopted as fast as online bill paying was, though it is likely mobile banking adoption will be lower than 25 percent in 2017.

Mobile banking adoption is highly driven by the number of younger consumers, the number of bank accounts they might use and the percentage that will choose to use at least one mobile banking feature, such as checking a balance or transferring funds.


If you assume 90 percent of consumers have bank accounts, and that 80 percent of Millennials, 60 percent of Gen X consumers, 40 percent of Baby Boomers and 20 percent of all others use mobile banking, then some 109 million consumers could be using some form of mobile banking.  According to netbanker, 25 percent of U.S. households will use mobile bank access by about 2018, based on the adoption curve for online banking from 1995 to 2005.


source: netbanker

                      Mobile adoption
         Est. pop       2012 2017   Banked  Total Mobile Bankers
Gen Y    75,000,000      39%  80%     90%    54,000,000
Gen X    40,000,000      28%  60%     90%    21,600,000
Boomer   75,000,000      15%  40%     90%    27,000,000
Senior   35,000,000      8%   20%     90%     6,300,000
        225,000,000                         108,900,000

source: http://snarketing2dot0.com