It’s become a cliché to say that your mobile phone is the “remote control for your life.” Push a button and you can buy anything, order any service, or simply change the temperature in your living room. New services spring up every day to take advantage of the fact that there are now billions of people walking around with mini-computers in their pockets.
At work, it’s a different story. While music playlists might sit alongside important emails or documents, what people actually do with mobile devices at work is pretty much the same: email and calendar. Some might use a couple of consumer apps that have crossed over to the workplace, like Dropbox* or Evernote*. But almost no one uses apps at work in the addictive way they do at home.
That’s about to change, creating a huge opportunity for developers of mobile business applications. It’s happening now because of a confluence of factors that are finally creating a critical mass of modern mobile devices in the enterprise. These include:
Blackberry’s implosion: The company’s latest troubles were the final straw for most customers. I’ve heard from banks and pharmaceutical companies with tens of thousands of Blackberry seats that they are now finally moving off the platform. In total, there are 18 million subscribers to the Blackberry Enterprise Server who will need to find a new home on iOS or Android.
BYOD is the new norm: Not long ago, companies discouraged employees from using personal devices at work. Today, according to a June poll of 424 companies by InformationWeek, 68% of companies have some “bring your own device (BYOD)” initiative, with an additional 20% developing a solution. Pretty soon, companies will no more buy their employees phones than they do the clothes they wear to work.
Tablets as laptop replacements: At Sequoia, we meet regularly with forward-thinking CIOs. In our recent roundtable discussions, we found that very few companies issue tablets to employees. That will change as tablets grow more powerful, data increasingly moves to the cloud, and core apps like Microsoft Office finally make their way onto the iPad. Laptops will be displaced at work as they are being at home.
All of this creates a massive opportunity to create new mobile-first enterprise apps, which take advantage of the fact that people use mobile devices differently from their laptops. The session times are shorter, the UI is vastly different, and the context in which they interact with devices is far more varied than sitting at a desk.
Mobile creeps into the crevices of life previously inaccessible to computers – it fills the “gap time” between meetings, waiting for something to print, or while standing in line to be served. Today, people use that time to browse Facebook, dismember fruit with Ninja weapons, or perhaps triage email. Tomorrow, they will use part of that time to get things done. Some obvious new use cases include capturing information quickly while on-the-go after a meeting, or submitting expense reports while waiting at a red-light. But there are many others which people have yet to imagine, as well as new data trails for individual workers and companies to analyze, so that they can become more productive.
As with any new area, there will be competition, not least from the incumbents. Companies like Salesforce and Workday have companion mobile apps to go with their browser-based products, and provide them to customers for free. If reviews in the AppStore are any guide, they will struggle to create compelling mobile experiences that are consistent with their core products – as one user (godD4ddy) wrote on October 2 in a review of Workday’s app, “I’ll stick to the desktop version”.
It’s early days, but there are signs of mobile-first enterprise apps starting to emerge. Young companies like Clari*, Cotap, and Kahuna are leading the way. Many opportunities remain untapped, with lots of scope to solve new pain points or reinvent existing core business applications. Take the HR review process, as an example. I’ve just gone through it at Sequoia, where I had to carve out time to sit at my desk and struggle to recall how people have done over the prior 12 months. How much better would my reviews have been if I had an app that made it easy for me to capture data in the moment, so that my feedback was grounded in a rich dataset collected over the prior year?
In many ways, mobile at work feels like the PC market before the Internet, or the web before social. Compared to existing yardsticks, it looks big and fast-growing; compared to what it will become, it’s small and just beginning to accelerate.
* Disclosure: Sequoia Capital is an investor in Clari, Dropbox, and Evernote.
(article by A.Hilaly)
Consumers on desktop computers and consumers on mobile digital devices demonstrate different behaviors, so why do companies insist on using Web analytics to measure mobile users?
The following infographic by Medio makes the case for using mobile analytics to effectively track mobile users and their movements. After all, what a consumer purchases from a tablet while at work often differs from what she buys at home from her desktop PC or from her mobile phone while out with friends.
Even within digital devices, major differences exist. One is in spending behaviors. The average order value from a tablet is $123 (as opposed to the $102 on a PC or $80 on a mobile). Web analytics platforms can’t effectively track those mobile users, though.
“Only mobile analytics can provide the detail insights you need to understand mobile user behaviors, engagements, and purchases across different devices and locations,” according to Medio.
Similarly, Web analytics can’t track consumers’ behaviors in apps and can’t get offline use metrics. Mobile analytics can.
(article by V.M.Jarski)
What is an App[mobile]?
App is a short form for application, a piece of software that runs on smart phones or tablets which provides a feature rich user experience.
Why do you need an App?
For your consumer to interact with your brand or product.
Which business needs an App?
Don’t build an App just to say you have one even though it’s tempting as developing a native app can be expensive. Following are some of the Apps which are emerging these days in Indian business.
What is the alternative to an App?
An alternative to an App is Mobile website.
How many types of Apps are there?
Can mobile apps run on every phone?
No. Apps run only on smart phones and tablets (iPad)
How many Smartphones are used across the globe?
297 million Smartphones are currently used
How many apps are downloaded worldwide?
24 Billion
Apps are developed for what platforms?
iOS (Apple), Android(Google), PalmOS, BlackBerry, Windows, Cross Platforms
What software is used to develop Apps?
iPhone Apps are written using : Objective -C, with comprehensive XCode (free) developer suite.
Android apps are written using: XML & Java using the SDK
What is the market size for Apps(mobile) in India ?
$227 million in 2012 and growing by 20%
How many apps are downloaded daily?
45 million apps are downloaded every day just from Apple iTunes
Name some popular Apps that have revolutionized in Social media era?
Instagram -A photo Sharing app that was bought by Facebook for 1 Billion dollars
What is the future business model of Apps?
Users will buy it on Subscription based model, get free updates and again pay for new release.
What Indian Software Companies can develop Apps for your business?
OpenXcell, CastleRock, Techjini, TechAhead, Appz Studio and many more.
Click on the link to download the PDF: The future of mobile experiences is context
Seven years into the retail payments game, search giant Google has struggled to find its footing in the retail payments game. The news that broke about ten days ago, as its Commerce reorg sent a huge signal about its plans to address this – at least for now. That announcement split Commerce into a couple of pieces and moved Google Wallet under Advertising, and longtime Google executive, Susan Wojciciki. In my mind sent a very strong message about its plans for the near and maybe not so near future, which is to stop trying to be a retail payments player for bricks-and-mortar stores.
Here’s a replay of the Google Payments movie for all you fans out there who want a bit more context as to why I came to the conclusion that I did. Sit back, relax and grab some popcorn!
Google Payments Scene One – Google Checkout
Google launched its online payment ambitions in June of 2006 as Google Checkout. Billed then as the “PayPal killer,” Google banked its payments and commerce ambitions on merchants wanting to put a Google Checkout button on their websites in exchange for free transaction processing and better search rankings triggered by product sales. One year and $60 million promotional dollars into that experiment, Google Checkout struggled to break through, racking up a mere one transaction to every 68 processed by PayPal, according to ComScore. By the end of 2011, it managed to secure ~13 percent market share in terms of acceptance by top internet retailers, but that was still less than half of what PayPal and Bill Me Later (a PayPal company) had at the time. On the consumer side, fewer than 10 percent of consumers had ever tried it, compared to PayPal’s 80-plus percent In the case of Google Checkout, 13 percent merchant acceptance didn’t seem to drive much consumer trial since there didn’t seem to be a strong value proposition for consumers to want to care (or many places for them to use it). This is the usual payments ignition failure—a sputtering failure resulting from merchants not being interested because consumers aren’t interested resulting in merchants being even less interested resulting in consumers being really a lot less interested ….
Google Payments Two – Google Wallet
Google Wallet launched in September of 2011 and was the beginning of the end for Google Checkout. In a go-to-market strategy that took Eric Ries’ Minimum Viable Product to a whole new (lower) level, Google Wallet’s first version was NFC, and available only on the Sprint Nexus S 4G using a Citi-MasterCard and/or the Google Prepaid Card loaded into that wallet. Any consumer who was even remotely interested in using the Google Wallet had to buy a new phone, live in one of the few areas with NFC density (Manhattan, for example) and either get or already have a Citi MasterCard – not just any MasterCard. Not surprisingly, adoption was slow. Just ask any Duane Reade clerk in Manhattan whether they had ever seen anyone use Google Checkout—they were one of the few merchants who took it. You will get a quizzical stare to maybe a “yeah, I saw a one person try to do that once.”
Four months later, in January 2012, Google announced what the media described at the time as one of its biggest reorgs to date. Google Checkout was folded into Google Wallet and Google Wallet would live in something called Commerce and Local. A bunch of top execs were shuffled around (and out). Seldom a sign of success.
Eight months later in August 2012, Google Wallet, still a NFC-based technology and still slogging away to get merchant and consumer acceptance, announced that it was open to all payment brands, leveraging the capabilities of its TxVia acquisition. But what solved one problem – a consumer’s ability to load any card into her Google Wallet – created another – the method by which those transactions were processed. Although consumers’ card accounts were stored on Google’s servers, purchases done in stores were via a virtual MasterCard card number that generated a Google Wallet Master ID linked to a consumer’s credit and debit account, and stored on the secure element in their NFC phones. This meant, for example, that Google Wallet transactions done on Visa cards were behind MasterCard’s front end – I can’t imagine that made for many happy campers up the road in Foster City, California.
And, merchants still didn’t seem to be happy campers either but for different reasons. They got pretty uptight about Google having access to (and monetizing) all of the juicy transaction data generated from transactions happening via the Google Wallet. Practically speaking, they didn’t have all that much to be worried about – with NFC technology still at the core, few handsets with NFC chips in them and few merchant acceptance outposts – there weren’t that many transactions being done. But still, the thought gave them pause and didn’t do much to get them interested in signing on.
Then, the much teased big “cloud” announcement anticipated in October 2012 never materialized, even though rumors of a PayPal-esque solution, a plastic Google card and strategy to gain offline merchant acceptance were swirling. By the end of 2012, it seemed that the only thing at Google Wallet that was getting traction were the rumors that its leader was jumping from the Google Wallet frying pan to the MCX fire to take on its CEO role.
Google Payments Take Three – Reset
So, that brings us to today.
On March 14, 2013 Google announced that it would split its Maps/Geo and Commerce group into two separate units. Jeff Huber, the SVP who was put in charge of Commerce during the last reorg, will move to Google X, the “startup lab” within Google that is doing, among other things, those totally practical experiments like devising self-driving cars and wearable computers (e.g. Google Glasses). Commerce will become part of Advertising, reporting to SVP Susan Wojcicki. Just to refresh your memory, Wojcicki is Google employee No. 16, and the person whose garage literally hatched Google in 1998. Her business unit drives 95 percent of Google’s revenue and she personally masterminded two of Google’s most critical deals – the Double Click and YouTube acquisitions. Further specifics on who will look after Google Wallet were not disclosed but it seems that person Page and Brin seem to trust most is now the person who will help them sort out its retail payments future.
How that future will look is anyone’s guess. My read is that Google has made a deliberate (and very sensible) decision to back away from retail payments in lieu of redirecting its payments use case towards something that more resembles the “iTunes equivalent” for Google Play and Adwords. Hardly an all out full blown payments strategy, this move will enable Google to provide an easy payment mechanism for consumers and businesses who want to buy online (and via the mobile device) with Google – digital goods and ads (for now at least).
After several hundred million consumers have done that, perhaps Google will be in a better position to consider its retail payments options. At that point, a lot of the uncertainty related to retail payments (technology, consumer and merchant value proposition, etc.) will likely be resolved. Of course, so will the competitive playing field, but at the moment, it’ really hard to see a plausible strategy for Google Wallet given what it is today and where it has placed its bets.
Will it be a while before we see Google Wallet as an offline or online consumer payment option at the places you like to shop? Well, let’s just say that I wouldn’t hold my breath. Are retail payments over for Google? I doubt it. As I mentioned during my opening at The Innovation Project 2013, the most exciting and disruptive thing about payments today is the blending of the on and offline worlds. Anyone with a great idea and a vision can give any offline encounter an online component and vice versa. Google has a ton of online experience and eyeballs, and a bunch of interesting assets to leverage, including all of the things that come with its Android platform and Motorola Mobility assets. Google could very well decide to turn it’s thinking about payments on its ear and approach the problem set and use cases in a very different way. Google’s free cash flow – which for Q4 2012 was about $3.7 billion dollars – could certainly fund a lot of creative thinking about just how to go about doing that.
(article by K.Webster)
Two weeks ago, we published the results from MMU 2012 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey. The fact that the industry continues to grow fast is very positive, and growth in number of deployments results in increased competition. In this blog post, we discuss the impacts of increasing competition on this industry.
Mobile money is becoming an increasingly competitive industry
As the number of mobile money services grows, the industry is becoming increasingly competitive. As you can see on the map below, there are many countries – 40 represented in red – where there are already more than one mobile money services. There were only 33 last year. 18 markets have more than 2, and 10 have more than 3.
The fact that there are over 100 planned mobile money services also suggests that the industry will continue to grow in the next few years and that an increasing number of markets will have several competing services.
Number of mobile money services for the unbanked per country (Source: MMU Deployment Tracker, December 2012)
Mobile money seems to be evolving from being a differentiator to becoming a commonplace.
Is this a risk or an opportunity? Much seems to point to that will be a good thing. With many services still struggling to reach scale, sharing costs on customer communication and building trust and awareness of mobile money can be beneficial for all players.
Several services can succeed in one market
The 2012 Adoption Survey also revealed that several services could succeed in one market. In fact, we identified 14 sprinters in 10 different countries, and we believe that the development of a successful mobile money deployment can create a positive dynamic for competition. Pakistan is a good example of that.
A couple of weeks ago at Mobile World Congress, UBL and Telenor Pakistan announced themselves a GSMA Mobile Money Sprinters. In an interview with the GSMA, Abrar Mir, head of branchless banking at UBL and Roar Bjaerum, Vice President of Financial Services at Telenor Pakistan shared their perspectives on competition. Roar Bjaerum: “It definitely helps to have a competitor… They established their service UBL Omni more coming from a disbursement perspective in the beginning. We’re coming more from the retail and bill payment and money transfer perspective. So we’ve been helping each other in growing that market form different kinds of perspectives… It always helps to have a strong competitor in terms of motivating your own team.”
Abrar Mir: “Having a competitor helped us a lot because Telenor launched a couple of months before we did, and they spent a lot of money in terms of the initial education and awareness of the customers… So thank you Telenor!”
In markets where other mobile money services are already available, MNOs will tend to launch mobile money not to differentiate themselves, but because they don’t want to lag behind their competitors and lose customers. However, the example of Pakistan shows that it is interesting to think about how mobile money services can differentiate themselves and complement each other by focusing on different aspects of the market.
Can competition increase the opportunity through interoperability?
As competition increases and some markets become more mature, interoperability becomes a hot topic. What positive network effects can interoperability have between these deployments and with other existing financial infrastructure? Can interoperability increase the market opportunity for mobile money in mature markets? MMU believes it can, provided the timing for it is right.
(article by GSMA MMU)
Despite having been around since 1994, the QR code has taken off in retail in an unprecedented way.
You can’t go anywhere without having a QR code squished into a poster, a bus stop advert, perplexingly on adverts on the subway and underground (where there’s no phone signal), magazine pages and now even clothing labels and stands themselves.
But why has the industry only now – nearly 20 years later – finally caught onto the QR code?
And honestly, is it even relevant any more?
Invented by the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota’s subsidiary Denso Wave, the Quick Response code was initially designed to track a vehicle’s manufacture – giving an instant response for where along its production route it was.
Fast forward 20 years and it’s now being used to push a consumer onto an online store of to show them a promotional video about a product they’re looking at or thinking of buying.
The allure is there, that’s for sure – but who’s really using them?
Having previously worked for a design studio, and also written for video game and technology publications, the feedback I’ve always had surrounding the implementation of QR codes has always been the same: don’t use them.
Designers think they’re dated, unwieldy, and generally bad practice to include technology that nobody’s really asking for. And tech-heads feel that there are far better, simpler and more streamlined alternatives available – and that there have been for years.
Even a quick twitter poll reveals that nobody really uses QR codes – due to lacking the desire to find out what’s beyond that square black and white barcode.
This hasn’t stopped retailers though as, according to marketing firm Nellymoser, QR codes in magazine ads rose by five per cent in 2011 – from 3.6 to 8.4 – with no sign of stopping.
Yet, retailers still tote it around as if it’s something that everyone should become excited about.
Attending this year’s Retail Week Live event at the Hilton, I saw Marks & Spencer’s Head of Store Design Teresa Clark, and Head of New Channels Benjy Meyer, speak about their technology rich flagship concept eco store at Cheshire Oaks.
It’s most definitely a sight to behold, melding new layout and retail ideas that merge together online and in-store experiences in some sort of omni-channel wet dream that only the likes of Burberry could compete with. Yet, it was all distinctly 2010 in nature, featuring touchscreens, iPads and more QR codes than the eye could see. They’re really betting on QR codes – so much so that they’re willing to invest time in teaching the public how to utilise them.
When asked how successful QR code uptake has been, Meyer responded by saying: “I would say QR codes have been slow in the market to take up [sic].
“We recently did an initiative in Westfield on Mothers Day with a number of customers who had never scanned a QR code before. We had a giant flower display, like a giant QR code made from flowers and it was really great to coach customers through that experience.
“And that’s our role as a retailer. We created that change, we’re betting on it, and we’ve got to take our customers on the journey. We can’t expect them to do it all on their own.”
Marks & Spencer weren’t the only ones toting around those square barcodes either. During a presentation by GDR Creative Intelligence’s CEO Kate Ancketill that focused around the future of retail, she used examples of ‘forward thinking’ from various companies that were rolling out this decrepit technology in new and unique shopping experiences.
The US jeans retailer Hointer has taken the QR code – along with a purpose built app – and effectively built their entire retail model around it. From the videos they show that it – unsurprisingly – all works rather well. But once again, the technology behind it is cripplingly old – placing you in the whims of your phone’s performance, signal strength and general connectivity.
Obviously, this is a little bit different as the entire store idea and customer experience revolves around this. Customers go to Hointer because it uses QR codes and apps to let them shop – not because they want to get jeans and that’s how they have to do it.
Another example comes courtesy of German grocer chain Emmas Enkel who also uses QR codes to let prospective shoppers place orders when its stores are closed. Scanning a code from a list of items displayed at the storefront means that their order will be ready in the morning for collection. Which seems a little silly when they could just order online instead.
Adidas’ German arm has also gone one step further with letting shoppers interact and purchase items online via an interactive store window. By scanning the dreaded QR code, or by just entering in a four-digit pin, a customer can download all the items looked at and place into a basket on the Adidas store for a simple purchase.
This may all be very novel, but it hinges far too much on how interested the consumer is in using QR technology – and seeing as it’s been commercially available to them for years and nobody has ever shouted from the rafters about how incredible it is, it seems that they largely don’t care.
A survey from Archrival showed that of the key demographic group who use smartphones and would be interested in such products promoting with QR codes, 75% answered “not likely” to scan a QR code when presented with one.
In the US just 9 per cent of adults said they had scanned a QR code. Of those, a survey from mobile payments company Mobio showed that of that 9 per cent, 60 per cent did so just once before abandoning the tech.
This is largely down to a fatigue in seeing the same old thing, over and over again. Dumping a QR code somewhere isn’t an incentive to scan it. Telling someone why they should scan it also isn’t an incentive. Consumers want to be drawn in and given a reason to scan a code, otherwise it’s just a box on a piece of paper or screen that isn’t that easy to capture.
Things would most definitely be easier if most devices had QR code readers built into them. The fact is, they don’t. Why not? Clearly manufacturers also don’t see any point in integrating compatibility for nearly 20 year old technology. It’d be like letting you fax items from your phone – nobody wants to use Fax anymore.
There are alternatives though.
Alternatives that not only engage your customer, but give them an entirely new experience altogether. Augmented Reality.
Most devices have some form of Augmented Reality tech already embedded within, just waiting to be captured – although if stores wish to develop their own apps that can be pushed onto devices as they enter a store, then that would work just as easily.
Here you could guide customers through a truly unique and magical shopping experience, doing away with the barrier of scanning and waiting for a web page to load as everything is subtly overlaid onto the world around them. No longer are they sat in a deck chair in Marks & Spencers, now they’re out in the garden, or looking out onto the beach while they browse the items around them.
It’s not surprising that China and Japan are pushing these technologies already, living up to the stereotype of being early adopters of future technologies.
China’s Yihaodian online retailer now has 1,000 stores across the country, but not a single one is physical. Every store is virtual and relies upon augmented reality for customers to peruse the aisles and buy online for it to be delivered straight to your door.
While this may not be the idea solution for the West, it’s clear that implementing it into stores would allow for retailers to carry their entire range by offering ‘pull out’ digital shelves for customers to order in stock. This would also give back data to the retailer about what products customers actually want to have displayed in the store.
It becomes even more of a reality when you imagine such a technology becoming integrated with Google Glasses – creating a seamless experience for all, doing away with the need to scan anything.
While my voice is only small in the crowded space of the internet, I implore retailers everywhere to do away with the QR code and think forward for once instead of backwards. Adopt AR tech now, rather than later, and then really wow your customers.
(article by Vaughn)
Fabrizio Minei "Official" Blog 