Mobile payment challenges

Saw quite a bit of news on the mobile payment front the past couple of weeks. AT&T, VZN and TMO form a new venture called ISIS. According to a blogger for WSJ, there are still significant challenges.

Merchant fees paid on credit-, debit-, and charge card transaction totalled $62 billion last year. The bulk of that goes back to banks issuing credit and debit cards. Phone companies are not likely to take credit risk involved in issuing cards. So Visa and MasterCard are most vulnerable to competition. They both generated $7 billion in total US revenue last year. Adding NFC tags a $200 reader to the merchants according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's estimate.

4G opportunities

There are new application models will be emerged or enhanced with the 4G deployment. Noticeable is VZN and ATT's 700MHz deployment. In addition, 4G (LTE) has the following advantages: High Peak Rate, Low Latency, Spectral Efficiency (5Mhz to 20 Mhz).

source: link

Video cost per wireless technology

An interesting analysis of cost of delivering video technology over 3G vs 4G.

The journey of an app and its developer.

Source: link

Barcode scanning way up

According to this blog, ScanBuy published an very interesting usage report. Barcode scanning is up 700% from the beginning of this year. 1D and 2D split of all code scanned. Surprisingly, Android took the top OS (wonder if it is just their app has more download in the Android platform).

80% of the US smartphone users indicated that they like to scan barcodes.

Their report can be found here.

AdMob chief quits Google

Omar Hamoui started out to build a cell phone photo sharing social site. Then he realized the business had too high customer acquisition cost. He also realized that the advertising cost was the main factor. He then went out to create a solution to aggregate the ad for mobile. Within 3 years, adMob became a multi-million business and the eventual acquisition by Google. A good read and interview with the ex-CEO is here. In the article, he and another early employee shared some learn lessons during the process.

Giayee?

Found this chinese OEM/ODM through LinkedIn. Android handset experience. 80 engineers located in ShenZhen.

Wonder how many of this type of companies are there in China? The barrier to entry for making a handset like this is so low that a lot of them can easily create a device in less than 6 months with no more than 20-30 ppl. I believe the differentiators will be focused on software in the near term. How many of these will eventually survive the shape up.... time will tell.

Smartphone growth and network capacity

Smartphone continues to grow 50% year over year and 20% over Q1 of 2010. This is a tremendous growth amid the condition of the overall economy. One note about the growth is that the network capacity of various carriers continue to under heavy pressure. With LTE arriving, the technology is supposed to alleviate the network by utilizing the spectrum more efficiently. It is likely a 2011 and 2012 event even VZN is committed to the 38 market launch this year.

The smartphone growth is expected to slow down by 2011 to 25%, ABI anaylst Michael Morgan predicts after the carrier have already fulfilled the demand side.

Teens drive data usage

Teen data usage rose from 14MB Q2 last year to 62MB. Message is still considered the main revenue source. Male teens use 72MB while females use 53MB of data compared to just 11MB just last year.

source: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-teen-mobile-report-calling-yesterday-texting-today-using-apps-tomorrow/

Nielson - smartphone out grew feature phones

Male vs female smartphone users are 53% vs 47%. I think that is a very healthy spread in the industry. The purchasing habit of the two demographics will likely change over time. iSupply also claims that smartphone will grow to 500 million units by 2014. That is about half of what the current annual unit sold worldwide. So we should see the tipping point of mass market adoption by 2014 at least in the US.

Being Steve's boss & the history of Apple

What an interesting read on ex-CEO Sculley and Steve Job. This article covers the inside thinking of Steve Jobs, what it means to be a marketing company, how the core strength of a company means and bad decisions Sculley has made (with a self admission) before Steve turned it around.

article link.

Open cell access in burning

Link

Android Paid app

13 out of 46 countries where Android phones are being sold support paid app in Android Market. That means the rest only have free apps. In order for Android users in those countries to access the paid apps, they are forced to turn to piracy.

Google VP8 and WebM Project

Google announced the WebM Project at this year's Google I/O conference. The original license had the limitation that if legal actions brought against Google and the right would have terminated. Google has changed that by decoupling license and legal text.

http://webmproject.blogspot.com/

Wholesale Application Community

In an attempt to reduce the application fragmentation across platforms and operation, carriers are banding together in an attempt to provide more standard for developers.

The Wholesale Applications Community members include: AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Telefónica, Telenor Group, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. Together the operators in the group have about 3 billion subscribers, the GSMA said.

The standard won't be really ready toward the end of this year - or in a more realistic term 2011. Other standard bodies like JIL and BONDI are also trying to address this age old problem of market fragmentation.

Microsft & HTC get intimated

The companies announced today that they have reached a licensing agreement. HTC will pay MS for leveraging their advanced patent licenses in the mobile space. The fact that Apple's pending lawsuit against HTC which is really directly against Android is a good move for HTC. It is certainly a 3 way corporation to fight against the mobile giant Apple's dominance.

ArcTechnica and AdMob released data traffic for the US and worldwide. The iPhone is certainly still the big dominance in the US. But Android is sneaking up from below. Sadly the other OS are trailing behind with a pretty big margin. The overall data traffic for smartphone still garners a mere 17 percent of the overall traffic. Yet, it is a astonishing 400% growth last quarter. More on this story.

iPhone & network load.

One of the main reasons, other than too many people are overloading networks, that iPhone is causing such headache for operators (esp AT&T)is that the paging channel is not implemented. In order to save battery life, smartphones completely drop off from the connection when data is done and reconnect when data is needed. This requires the re-establishment to the network again and eating up the channel bandwidth rather than using the paging channel and using keep alive message.

Android Fragmentation

According to IMS Research, Number of Android based handsets is expected to be 20 million shipped by the end of the year. Certainly a big achievement for a hot OS. However, this comes with like everything else, growing pain - fragmentation. There are two types of fragmentation for this platform. First it is the OS itself and the second one is physical design.

The Android OS is now at version 2.1 which has few major revisions since its launch. Each revision comes with different features and interfaces that developer and applications may chuck on one device but works great on the other.

Screen size and physical design is also an issue for developers. Android is supposed to be able to handle different screen size - only the ones it supports and uses Android's own resources type. Like the Archos 5 Internet tablet is certainly not part of this category.

Developers need to be aware of this. Prepare your apps to handle this type of different resources. Or take your battle and choose only the platforms you think make most sense for your app.

Can NFC play an important role in small biz growth

It seems the NFC industry is like the interactive TV industry... we are here, now. (repeat that for 5 years).

With the increasingly smartphone adoption rate, this may change as people are relying more on their phone which is no longer a voice device.

Businessweek has an article recently about the overall contactless mobile payment. Certainly enterprise can generate extra revenue with this technology as soon as they can figure out the revenue model. what about small business? it is an largely untapped market that I think can help reduce operating cost with this kind of technology.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/europeinsight/archives/2010/03/alcatel-lucent_1.html