Mobile Commerce Seen as Biggest Transformation of Telecom Industry

Mobile commerce, mobile banking and mobile payments  will have more impact than converged services, next generation networks or Long Term Evolution, a survey of 137 global service provider executives suggests.

That might come as a surprise. Keep in mind the survey was largely of revenue assurance professionals, whose job roles and perspectives are different from those of marketing, operations or financial professionals, perhaps.


But the rankings might also reflect a clear recognition that new revenue sources from banking, payments and commerce will have new revenue leakage impact to account for.


Billing and security issues also will increase, and those also are issues revenue assurance personnel would be acutely aware of.

Will Google's New Tablet Store, and Tablet, Succeed?

The fact that Google is launching an online store to sell a new line of branded tablets is not as major a move as opening a line of retail stores, something Amazon apparently actively is considering. The bigger issue is whether Google can create a successful tablet.

Some might speculate that Google will have no more success than it did when it launched the Nexus smart phone, attempting to sell it essentially over the objections of the mobile service providers. Some would have suggested that would not work.

But selling PCs is different from selling mobile phones. Tablets are more like PCs, in terms of the "necessary" involvement of any third parties. PCs, tablets and other personal devices are bought at retail outlets, not just phone stores, where most mobile phones get sold. In principle, selling tablets online will not be as difficult as selling mobile phones online.

The bigger issue is whether the Google tablet has developed, or can develop, the app ecosystem and cachet of the iPad, or create some new identity and niche in the tablet market.

Users of the Kindle Fire might note that the Amazon "content store" is so rich with book and magazine content that the relative availability of other mobile apps, compared to the iPad,  is not a real problem. One might argue the Kindle gets used frequently for reading and other Amazon purchases,  so has a distinct niche in the market. The Kindle Fire acts as a portal to Amazon content, to a large degree.

Google will have to find some role of its own, one might argue.


Some might argue that there is, functionally, no way for any other firm to "compete" with the Apple iPad. Instead, other distinct niches have to be discovered. 

Google's Android Doesn't Generate Much Revenue for Google: Maybe it Isn't Supposed To

Multi-product firms tend to sell products with varying profit margins, and different gross revenue contributions. Google doesn't appear to be any different. Most of Google's revenue is generated from advertising, and some from software licenses.

It appears the open-source Android effort has generated less than $550 million in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011.

The figures also suggest that Apple devices such as the iPhone, which use products such as its Maps as well as Google Search in its Safari browser, generated more than four times as much revenue for Google as its own handsets in the same period.

If correct, those figures would not be terribly surprising. The whole point of Android was to create a widespread mobile ecosystem that is the foundation for the actual revenue-generating activities, not a terribly important revenue creator in its own right.

Is Multimedia Messaging Service a Success, or Not?

Is $30 billion worth of revenue, on a global basis, a big deal or not? In a business that generates $2 trillion annually, perhaps not.

Still, expectations often are crucial when assessing the relative success of any new communications service.

Multimedia Messaging Service, for example, was viewed through a text messaging lens. Compared to some other services, MMS contributes a meaningful amount of revenue, though not compared to text messaging.

Portio Research thinks MMS to generate over $180 billion for the five-year period 2012-2016.
Such a demonstrable pedigree over the years has made it all the more baffling as to why such a valuable service never shook-off the industry misconception that it was a failure.

Some would say MMS launched with the unrealistically high expectations that it would mirror the success of SMS. It hasn't.

Why Developers Write First for iTunes App Store, Later for Google Play

Money talks. The rich get richer. The big get bigger. All three rules of thumb apply to mobile app stores. Using revenue per app at Apple's App Store as an index, developers ought to favor iTunes, as they will tend to earn more than four times as much revenue as the same apps created for Google Play, the Android app store.



Amazon Appstore revenue is 89 percent of iTunes App Store revenue, and Google Play revenue is 23 percent of iTunes App Store revenue, according to Flurry.

Are "Bits" "Just Bits?" Almost Never

What is the difference between Comcast selling cable TV service and Comcast selling a IP-delivered video service? Answer: potentially only the regulatory regime each service operates under. There are, to be sure, many important business ramifications. But video services regulation now is as broken as voice regulation has become, as virtually all services and all networks use Internet Protocol.

For purposes of engineering, it often is true that "a bit is just a bit." For business and regulatory purposes, that almost never is the case. It matters who sold a bit, who bought a bit, where the seller is located, where the buyer is located, what equipment was used to receive and use the bits, what sort of network the bits moved over, and any number of other distinctions.

These days, in the video entertainment business, a key distinction exists between a "managed network and service," and the "un-managed Internet," as different rules apply to treatment of bits in each bucket. Basically, entertainment bits delivered over a virtual "managed network" are exempt from "Internet" rules, even when delivered over the same physical network.

The reasons are largely because in the past legacy services including voice, TV, newspapers and data services were regulated in distinct ways, and those distinctions remain in place, even if the technology used for delivery now has largely converged.

There are many practical implications, though. Comcast can use a managed approach to deliver hundreds of gigabits worth of data, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as "cable TV," without charging any of that usage against a customer's broadband access bandwidth allocation.

Data services purchased by business users likewise are exempt from the "Internet access rules."

But Comcast cannot, on its "high speed access" service, discriminate between different bits, meaning all services are "best effort" only. And usage of bits in that manner have a physical cap, each month.

So the reality is that some bits on Comcast's network are treated one way, other bits get treated differently, from a regulatory point of view. That means users are not "charged" usage for watching television bits sold as part of Comcast's Xfinity video service.

Users are charged for using any "Internet" apps, though. In the same way, Verizon's users are not charged for use of IP voice services as part of their high-speed-access services, even though, increasingly, every service Verizon delivers uses IP and flows over the same facilities.

PayPal, Gas Station Chain use GPS to Launch Mobile Payment

Regional gas station and convenience store chain Cumberland Farms has launched a new "SmartPay" mobile app that uses GPS to launch a PayPal account transaction and offers a five-cent-per-gallon discount for doing so.

The app can be launched at a supported Cumberland Farms location, and then GPS is used to determine where the user is. Once the user enters the pump number, the app automatically makes the payment and emails a receipt.

Some might argue that is perhaps a more-interesting use of "location-fixing" technology than near field communications.