Mobile commerce in the U.S. continues to grow, with Amazon leading the way. “But when it comes to mobile, Amazon’s ambitions are anything but limited to ecommerce,” reports Business Insider.
Amazon’s mobile ambitions include tablet and smartphone sales, software sales, media sales and mobile ads.
The company’s new Kindle Fire will compete with the Nexus and iPad mini while the Amazon Appstore continues to do well and will likely expand as more devices are released and apps are created for them.
As the Kindle Fire continues to expand its user base, media sales are likely to climb as well, with growing sales of ebooks, MP3s, movies and TV shows.
“Amazon continues to push forward with the makings of a smartphone platform… the beginnings of a platform strategy are coming together: a recent purchase of 3D mapping startup UpNext, last year’s acquisition of voice recognition software creator Yap, and the launch of a prepaid wireless service in Japan,” notes the article.
And as many companies are struggling to figure out monetizing mobile ads, Amazon is likely to be at the forefront.
According to a new study from Forrester, e-commerce businesses should consider focusing less on social media. Fewer than one percent of 77,000 online transactions could be traced back to popular social media networks like Facebook and Pinterest.
“E-commerce websites still convert more highly than any other channel, accounting for 30 percent of transactions. Thus it’s smart for retailers to promote their domain names as much as possible,” writes Mashable.
After direct visits, organic search and paid search are the two largest drivers of new customer purchases, accounting for 39 percent of such transactions.
The Web is still a useful tool for “spear fishers” — people who know exactly what they want and search for that item alone. “For repeat shoppers, e-mail is the most effective sales influencer: Nearly a third of purchases from repeat customers initiated with an e-mail,” explains the post.
“Social media’s potential as a shopping portal has yet to be realized,” suggests Mashable. “Less than 1 percent of transactions from both new and repeat shoppers could be linked to social networks, Forrester found.”
“The researcher believes social media can still be a powerful marketing tool, and that social media’s influence on purchase behavior likely can’t be measured in the 30-day attribution window the report examined.” It’s worth noting that small businesses, not included in the study, may have better results with social media as a sales driver.
If Microsoft succeeds in convincing the browser industry that its “Do Not Track” is the right way to go, “Facebook’s new FBX ad exchange could be ‘marginalized dramatically’ — and the web ad exchange business generally could be destroyed,” reports Business Insider.
“Real-time bidding on ad exchanges that target people via cookies is currently a $2 billion business, according to Bloomberg,” explains the article. And Facbook, through its FBX, is expected to capture a full $1 billion of that market in time.
But not all think it will work out that way for Facebook. “Eric Wheeler, CEO of social ad targeting company 33Across, and Jason Bier, chief privacy officer of ValueClick, both told me they regard IE10 and its default DNT position as a fundamental threat to FBX and the online ad business generally,” notes Business Insider.
If that same sort of default DNT position were to be adopted within Firefox and/or Chrome, “then any company that relied on cookies serving data collected from other websites — so called ‘third-party data’ — could go out of business,” the article explains.
Ad exchanges are used more frequently by small businesses than by large media publishers, which prefer to sell directly to clients. “I’m quite scared for small businesses out there,” says Bier. “They’re going to get destroyed. Facebook will survive this. Small businesses won’t.”
New technology called WebRTC — also known as RTCWEB (Real Time Communication on the Web) — “is poised to send a virtual tsunami through the mobile communications industry, likely changing the landscape for a good long time,” writes Erik Lagerway for GigaOM.
The premise behind WebRTC is to put voice and video services technology inside browsers and devices so that “when a developer wants to enable voice or video calling, they can use the code that is already there,” explains Lagerway. “The only way to do that on a mobile device today is with a stand alone app, which is not easy.”
Lagerway, who co-founded Hookflash and calls himself a “serial Voice-over-IP entrepreneur,” has worked with teams that have developed voice and video apps.
He believes that “WebRTC could take a great deal of heavy lifting out of the equation for developers and end up becoming the common denominator in the new mobile network.”
“The WebRTC open standards project has been in progress for more than a year now, and there are plenty of early demos of WebRTC already,” he writes.
“I think we will likely see some production deployments of WebRTC in the next six to nine months, when Firefox and Chrome for Android support it in a production version of their browsers. And Google seems primed to deploy it to their large user base on Hangouts.”
In a sign of the shifting entertainment landscape, an online-video series funded by YouTube is being turned into a syndicated TV show to run on ABC stations.
The healthy-cooking series “Recipe Rehab” was launched on YouTube in April on Everyday Health Inc.’s YouTube channel. It will now produce 30-minute episodes to appear on “nearly all stations affiliated with Walt Disney Co.’s ABC,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
This is not the first time a successful YouTube program has made the jump to TV. The character “Annoying Orange” first appeared on YouTube and then made its way to the Cartoon Network.
“But ‘Recipe Rehab’ is the first program from a YouTube-funded channel to air on broadcast TV, a sign that the Google site is attracting professional-grade content,” writes WSJ.
For YouTube, this is an example of its business model at work. The site has “showered dozens of video creators, including Everyday Health, with more than $150 million in cash advances to spur high-quality content for the site, to lure more viewers and bigger advertisers,” explains the article.
It is YouTube’s hope that these moves will challenge the traditional supremacy of TV and cable in the eyes of advertisers.
Kevin C. Tofel, writing for GigaOM, highlights several themes that emerged during the recent Mobilize 2012 event.
“Don’t count out HTML5 just yet,” he writes. Although going with HTML5 didn’t work out for Facebook, it could still have an impact.
“The ‘point of sale’ is now everywhere.” Tofel notes near-field communication (NFC) payment methods and successful companies like Square, which touts mobile payments made by 35 million unique American users.
“Video is becoming a primary mobile activity.” Tofel writes that “the granddaddy of all video sites, Google’s YouTube, is now delivering 25 percent of its content to mobile devices and the figure is likely to rise in tandem with mobile broadband subscriptions.”
“Connected homes will only appeal if the solutions are simple and add value.” Improvements are likely to be made, enabling easier, more centralized home connections.
“Developers needs to consider the broadband their software needs.” Of this, he writes: “Third party apps that eat through gobs of mobile broadband could be passed over for similar apps that use less data.”
According to new research from NPD Group, a la carte movie rentals (or iVOD) are very popular on cable VOD, which added up to nearly half of all such transactions in the first half of 2012.
“Apple’s digital storefront managed 8 percent share — less than Comcast (23 percent), DirecTV (14 percent) and Time Warner Cable (9 percent) drew individually,” reports Variety.
“Verizon finished just behind iTunes with 7 percent, but telco iVOD is growing faster year-over-year than the entire category, 24 percent to 15 percent,” notes the post.
The NPD research does not include subscription VOD services like Netflix or electronic sell-through.
“When it comes to paying for on-demand movies on an a la carte basis, cable companies are by far the primary conduit, due in large part to their widespread penetration and usage in Americans’ homes,” says Russ Crupnick, senior VP of industry analysis for NPD Group. “Even as iVOD, and VOD from satellite-media companies and telcos grow in popularity, cable companies continue to dominate the VOD movie rental market.”
Even as people in the U.S. struggle to find jobs in the tough economy, some employers can’t fill positions that require technical skills.
“There is a serious skills gap in the country. Not enough students are majoring in STEM fields — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “As a result, their skills don’t match those needed for the jobs that are most in demand.”
The article summarizes the thoughts of MIT professor Richard Larson, who thinks that widespread literacy in STEM is “as important to our 21st century information economy as basic reading-writing literacy has been to the industrial economy of the past two centuries,” notes the article.
“The ‘engineering mentality’ and approach are needed in virtually all aspects of society,” says Larson. “This is good news for both men and women whose career goals are more towards societal improvement than techno-gadget creation.”
“We all need STEM thinking skills,” suggests Larson. “But perhaps the most important reason for everyone to become STEM literate is to build a more informed citizenry. In that way we individually and collectively become better decision makers about all the options that our world and we face. STEM is not only for Ph.D. researchers. It’s for all of us!”
Many U.S. food companies are advertising to children in a new, interactive way — by creating product-infused games for smartphones and tablets.
“The mobile games demonstrate how new technology is changing U.S. commerce, drawing tighter bonds between marketers and young consumers,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
Games like “SuperPretzel Factory” and “Icee Maker” are selling successfully in the Apple App Store.
“Kids are our No. 1 consumer,” says Susan Woods, Icee’s marketing chief. “The fact that they may think about getting an Icee next time they see an Icee machine is a lot more likely if they’ve engaged themselves with something to do with Icee.”
“Makers of snacks, sweet drinks and candy have long been under government and public pressure to limit advertising to minors on TV and the Web,” notes the article. “They are now finding the unregulated medium of mobile devices an effective substitute to trigger demand and cinch brand loyalty.”
While the FCC regulates commercial time during weekend cartoons to 10.5 minutes per hour and prohibits product placement, there are no such rules in place on the Internet.
This upcoming holiday season will see more tablets for the “older-than-toddlers but not-quite-teenagers” demographic. The market was formally dominated by learning-based tablets aimed at toddlers.
Tablets like Lexibook, Kurio and Meep “are educational and entertainment devices, and they are targeting the 6-to-12-year-old demographic,” writes Forbes.
But will these youngsters want these tablets, or would they rather just have the real thing, like an iPad?
According to a Forrester Research survey of 4,750 U.S. adults, “29 percent of tablet users say they let their children older than six use their tablet.”
While Apple indisputably dominates the tablet market, the Toys”R”Us strategy is based on differentiating itself by being kid-specific. Toys”R”Us will sell a number of $149 Android tablets featuring seven-inch screens and wireless access — including its own Tabeo (pictured here).
“In the Forrester survey, 26 percent of parents said they’re concerned about their children accessing inappropriate content on their tablet,” explains the article. “On all of the kids’ tablets, however, parents can control the content children can access with a one-time setup and set limits on how long they can use it, something they can’t do on the iPad or Kindle.”
The kids’ tablets are also less delicate, built to withstand damage. But as Forbes points out, that won’t mean much unless the kids want them.
“The future of Microsoft’s Xbox appears to be moving briskly toward interactive TV, based on a high-profile hire of CBS Entertainment’s former television chief and the launch of two interactive TV ‘programs’ that tap into Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral,” reports ReadWriteWeb.
Former CBS executive Nancy Tellem will run a dedicated Xbox content studio under her new position as president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Digital Media.
“According to analyst Richard Doherty, Tellem will be responsible for luring new content to the Microsoft Xbox platform, competing with Google’s YouTube and Netflix in what he characterized as a bidding war,” notes the article. “She also will be tasked with working with content providers to help develop content like the two new Kinect programs, ‘Kinect Sesame Street TV’ and ‘Kinect Nat Geo TV.'”
Tellem knows content. According to the article, she greenlit CBS hits such as “CSI,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “The King of Queens” — and helped create “Friends” and “ER.”
The Xbox has evolved from a gaming console to an all-inclusive entertainment hub. “Tellem’s role appears to be designed to make sense of this combination of original programming, interactive television and interactivity,” suggests ReadWriteWeb.
Apple’s new iPhone 5 could potentially cause challenges for carriers as millions of new customers jump onto the faster 4G LTE networks.
“The question now is whether the networks can handle the demand,” writes Technology Review.
Carriers are preparing. “Stung by the 3G congestion debacles consumers faced in recent years, they’ve spent billions of dollars to expand networks. At the same time, they instituted tiered pricing based on how much data consumers use, which has the effect of tamping down runaway demand,” notes the article.
As of today, there are 12.7 million LTE users in the U.S. Millions more will come with the iPhone 5 and problems could come with that rush, according to Bill Moore, the CEO of Rootmetrics.
“Whatever happens in the short term, demand is expected to explode in the next few years. Bell Labs has estimated that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 25 by 2016; Cisco says it will grow 18-fold over that time period,” writes Technology Review.
Roku will release its anticipated flash drive-sized Streaming Stick for $99 next month.
“Priced the same as as the Roku 2 XS set-top box, it brings the same feature set but in a smaller package designed to work directly with your HDTV, thanks to power, remote control and data signals fed through an MHL-compatible HDMI port,” explains Engadget.
“If you pick up an otherwise dumb flat-panel with the stick bundled along with it the price is set by that manufacturer, but the standalone plan means buyers’ savings are focused on the two cables they won’t be needing, and simplified remote capability since their TV remote can talk to the Stick directly. Like the Roku 2 XS, the Streaming Stick also includes the motion control capable game remote.”
In more good news for Roku customers, the Walmart-owned Vudu service launched on the platform yesterday.
“You will need a Roku HD (2500), LT or Roku 2 box (or the Streaming Stick, once it launches) to take advantage of the Vudu app and its streams that bring quality of up to 1080p and 7.1 surround sound,” notes the post.
“Can a media platform really survive without flooding its audience with advertising?” asks The Atlantic.
Vimeo has long attempted to take this route, even while its competition at Facebook and YouTube have relied heavily on advertising.
But Vimeo has marketed itself differently. “With its clean interface and cuddly community vibe, Vimeo has carved out a niche as the videomaker’s video platform,” explains the article.
On Thursday, the video sharing site announced two new tools that will further enhance its ad-less business model. The tools will allow videomakers to generate their own revenue.
Videomakers can utilize the new “tip jar” and keep 85 percent of profits earned. “The second and more exciting feature is a ‘pay-to-view’ setup, which will allow users to charge viewers for access to content, customizing the parameters to suit their needs,” details The Atlantic.
Vimeo will roll out its pay-to-view this fall, with a full launch in early 2013.
“It goes back to the core of Vimeo as a platform,” says Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor of the new tools. “Vimeo has been quite successful in terms of distinguishing itself as the quality platform for creative people. Enabling those people to start to build businesses and generate revenue around their work really feels like the next logical step.”
Many successful tech innovators are putting their earned money into new start-ups.
“Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin, a company that builds spaceships. Elon Musk has Tesla, an electric-car company, and SpaceX, another rocket-ship company. Bill Gates took on big challenges in the developing world — combating malaria, HIV, and poverty,” according to Technology Review.
Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, explains why he’s involved with TerraPower — a company built to “commercialize a promising new kind of nuclear reactor.”
He writes that “in the next few decades, we need more technology leaders to reach for some very big advances. If 20 of us were to try to solve energy problems — with carbon capture and storage, or perhaps some other crazy idea — maybe one or two of us would actually succeed. If nobody tries, we’ll all certainly fail.”
He sees a focus on nuclear energy as imperative to the future.
“In the U.S., more than 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium — the by-product of enrichment — sits in storage. TerraPower’s technology is designed to use that depleted uranium as fuel, turning the cheap by-product of today’s reactors into enough electricity to power every home in America for 1,000 years,” Myhrvold explains.
Those with established money can likely help the cause. “Our challenge now, especially for those of us whose financial success is the greatest, is to think big,” he writes.
