Quick snippets on Google+

I've restarted reading the feeds I used to and like before, I come across a lot of interesting short nuggets (like this).

I don't want to clutter this blog, so if you're interested, follow my Google+ roll (it's the easiest tool I know of for now..).

What makes a successful, monetizable mobile app?

Recently there's been a interesting movements in the mobile payments space. For example, Amazon-Bango mobile payments for Fire, Mastercards' $18M investment in mFoundry and Square's recent $100M D-round (with a rumored valuation of $1B!).

The interesting topic, IMO, is, if I'm a marketer/retailer, what's the best strategy to A- define a realistic mobile success criteria, B- execute, measure and improve. Of course, that's a very broad topic: success criteria could mean uniques, visit depth, cross-channel transactions, bottom line etc. I hope everyone agrees, defining a success criteria is critical to the success of your mobile strategy.
Let's not diverge: I wanted to write about monetizing mobile strategies.

Devin Coldewey has an interesting TechCrunch post on Starbucks mobile revenues as % of total. To summarize (please read the article to get the complete message), the question is: well, mobile Starbucks card reloading in FY11 accounts for $110.5M vs a total  of $2.4M global Starbucks card transactions (Source), that's "nice". But minuscule (in his view). Will Starbucks continue using a lone-wolf payment solution or align itself with a more universal payment system like Google Wallet?


Tricky. Starbucks, as I'll discuss shortly, has the means to be very successful in the short term. Does that place them on an island (mobile payment method-wise)? not necessarily. They can add or replace the payment method once one becomes prevalent.

I argue that consolidation and unification of mobile payment solutions is coming, however not tomorrow and not 1-2 years from now. As you can see above: Mastercard believes in NFC. Square believes in their tiny HW add-on. Ebay predicts $5Bn revenues from their mobile shopping app in 2011. Back in my barcode scanning days I witnessed first hand how everyone in the service chain wants a hand on the users and revenues, and can't agree on the %. Dejavu: Verizon just decided to block Google wallet. I rest my case.

So who can make it happen?

• Strategically, those who control large pieces of the service chain. Take Google for example: they control devices, have a mobile payment solution, figured out relations with businesses etc. Heck, they could even have their own spectrum. They have the name and $ to do it. They haven't done that so far even though they could (!). Further, IMO Android is still perceived as the less secure platform to do "serious business" on.
• Tactically, there are plenty of businesses who control just enough pieces of the chain. They can take ownership of the user and monetize nicely in the short term. That's my main interest in this post.

Back to Starbucks. Love their app, and have been visiting their stores more frequently because the whole experience is so smooth. What drives 26M mobile transactions in 2011 and growing 3M monthly?

• Slick experience: controlling the point of sale (PoS) and the application allows incredibly smooth 'checkout' process.
• Loyalty program: Combining the loyalty card with freebies etc.
• Trusted micro payment solution: The Starbucks card isn't an independent payment solution (like a Sears credit card is, for example) but you can load it once a while (that too is dead simple and slick) and make coffee micro payment. Trusted, slick, awesome.
• Brand loyalty: coffee is a great example for brand strength and it's impact on loyalty.
• The need to come into a store when you want a sip. Unlike online+physical retailers, Starbucks transactions happen in the store, when you're not in front of your computer. So it's either your wallet or your phone. For Amazon, Sears,..it's a combination. When you're at home, you'll use your PC, not your phone (that's a generalization, but assuming you'd do product search on a PC..). 

So now take any number of similar businesses: Panera, any fast-food restaurant with a drive-thru, Larger retailers like Sears (who even have their own credit card). The above principles apply. Mobile monetization made simple.

What does a business like Panera need to do to get to the same level like the Starbucks app:

• Loyalty card: check. Already exists, need to drive more awareness. Also, drive adoption via freebies.
• Payments: allow loading funds into the card and payments via scanners at the PoS, or right from the app as I'll discuss a little later.
• "My food": allow users to define their favorite plates so ordering is made incredibly easy.
• Skip the line: That's the one I want to emphasize: You already know I'm in the store. Let me order straight from the app, pay, get a number and go sit. Let me know when my order is ready. Done. 

Hope this post is interesting and helpful. As always, interested in feedback and views. Looking forward to see more of these apps, and skip the line! ;)

What's next? Cross-channel monetization

Hello blog. It's been a while. back for a quick visit, let's see how long this lasts..

Anyway, I'm reading this morning an insightful survey from Limelight. Mobile shoppers expectations, experiences etc. All the good stuff.
What caught my eye and has been on my mind is quantifying the cross-channel revenues topic. according to Limelight:

• 76% (shoppers) have purchased a product at the store after they have researched the product on their Internet-connected mobile device but did not purchase it on that device
• 72% have purchased a product on the retailer website on the computer after they have researched the product on their Internet-connected mobile device but did not purchase it on that device

Further, 71% of respondents report using their Internet-connected mobile device to research products while they are physically in the store.

Clearly, mobile has a significant contribution to the overall bottom line in a way that's never been measured before. Most of it, indirect. Why is this critical? in an early ecosystem, many people 'get' the need to have a mobile strategy and are executing on it. But in the lack of clear, quantifiable success metric, your mobile strategy is nothing other than cute.
Perhaps one way to address this is to isolate those online revenues for which the search was 'short' (whatever that means..). That seem far from being accurate.
Figuring this metric out in a way that is transparent to the shopper will help, I believe, many retailers to measure success and further invest in their mobile strategy.

Interested in your thoughts. Maybe I'm behind and someone already figured it out, I'd love to learn about it.

Take Control over your destiny

I really enjoy reading Bijan's posts. They are very insightful, and, since there are mutual interests (consumer-facing tech, music and mobile) many times the advice or view given in his posts applies directly to me.

This morning's post is a good example: Take Control over your destiny. To summarize (I recommend reading the original post), try to control your dependencies on operators and OEMs on direct consumer plays, as much as you can.

Here's my thoughts on the topic:
I couldn't agree more, wouldn't that be terrific. However in some cases, the operators and OEMs control a critical piece to be worked around. I'm not suggesting employing a full-time BD guy to be in front of operators and OEMs, but you better be able to leverage the assets they own well. Let me give two examples: Mobile Payments and Mobile Enabling Technologies (from barcodes to speech-driven 'activities').

In the case of Mobile payments, the operators *own* the critical bits that allow for acceptable user experience. At least as it comes to mobile web (mobile apps are different). I hate to admit, but the Paypal/Amazon/Google checkout are simply not as friendly as the 1-click WAP checkout button that results in an on-bill transaction, that's been deployed and heavily used in the UK for years now. The UK operators realized the need and potential, and gathered to create a solution called PayForIt. I believe that every startup that wants to see mobile commerce on mobile web has a real problem exactly because of that.

Similarly, mobile enabling technologies have been proven to drive revenues through increased usage, device and plan sales. Enabling technologies, IMO, aren't best positioned on the device as a silo application. They really should be preloaded as an infrastructure background service with APIs to any application: then, let the user search the web using speech browser, play games and dictate. Use barcodes (or google goggles) to scan a real-world item and embed as recommendation to a friend in your FB app. Things like that. Getting preloaded, or embedded as infrastructure layer, as we know, is a pretty complex OEM play.

In some mobile consumer app plays you can provide a good service without heavy dependency on operators and OEMs, but not all. My 2 cents.

What's Square mean to you?

Image Attribute: Square

In the past few days there's been a lot of buzz about Square, the new mobile-phone credit card swiping solution. Point of Sale to the people, so-to-speak. Few peeps asked me of my thoughts, and how does it affect Adva Mobile, so here it is.
I think Square is a terrific little gadget that, more than it's own independent value to the world, the buzz it brings with it drives more awareness to the things one could do using their mobile phone. The more we can see from that, the better, IMO.
I admire their approach: I think that of the mobile payment solutions, they win on simplicity (to the end user) and reach. (almost) all other mobile payment solutions require pre-registration, which is a killer for the ad-hoc shoppers.
On it's own, I have my healthy skepticism how many people will end up owning and using the device. Requiring extra hardware? We've seen what happened to Zeemote. It will be interesting to find the payout rates, the installation process and other factors. Of those long-tail merchants, you need to find people with the right phone and plan, willing to pay for the gadget, and share their revenues with another party. For those people, Square complements the cash-only sales with cash and credit. I'm trying to think who those people are: Street artist selling paintings? Active musician next to the merch table? Do they really need this? time will tell.
Now if you contrast paying using Square and on a mobile website (with, say, PayPal), then I'd say it's hard to determine how many of the fans would rather use one or the other. Square wins in the consumer side, Paypal (I think) wins on the merchant side.

As far as Adva Mobile is concerned, again, the buzz that Square brings is a blessing. We'd like to see less and less "I didn't know I could do that". As mentioned, Square complements well the financial processing for products that entertainers would like to sell, say, on their merch table. It is important to note, Adva Mobile is a Mobile Marketing Service for entertainers. There are mobile sales tools that come with it, that entertainers can leverage, but our focus has always been helping entertainers acquire new fans and keep them engaged, coming to shows and participating in the "community" you're building.

Overall, Square is certainly an interesting solution that will stir things up for a while. It certainly brings a lot of buzz with it, which is great. I'm looking forward to see what will happen with it as time goes by.

Real World Connection: Finally in the US?

For the longest time I've been a fan of, working in, and following various attempts at Real World Location technologies. Whether Mobile Barcode Scanning (Nextcode, NeoMedia, Scanbuy and others), real 'things' picture analyzed (mobot, Pongr and others), there were many attempts at getting it right.
No doubt, with the current possibilities through image recognition technologies, a lot can be achieved.

The question, IMO, has always been one of two:

• Who has enough power in the marketplace (exp. in the US) to bring together all the players, commercial and customers, to agree on one "Standard" or "Scanning Form" that translates from a real-world "Thing" to digital content, AND
• Who has enough images and sufficient search, image recognition power to beef up an end-user acceptable performance

The answer, of course, is Google. For a long time I've been anticipating it, and now it's here: Google Goggles. Watch and enjoy. Good luck to all other players in this market, I think the market just got swept away from under your feet.

"Tell A Friend", Mobile web version OR reverse mobile carrier lookup

One of the key components to enable word-of-mouth spreading of a good service, is the ability for one user to share the experience with their friend. Duh.
In mobile, how can you enable that? SMS your friend, Email your friend, Twitter, maybe others. Facebook connect has been anticipated for ages on mobile web, but they seem to like only iphone apps, for now.
Trying not to force a behavior change or forcing someone to type in a full email address on their phone, I was looking for a simple, and free way for users to "tell their friends" over SMS.
If you have a service that uses SMS, then you're working with an SMS aggregation, and, for the most part, they need to know the carrier as well as the phone number you're sending the SMS to. But, what if you don't know the carrier?? I mean, the user of the service may know the phone number of their friend, but is it realistic to expect them to know the carrier? No, it's not.
So, you turn to the aggregation and ask them about reverse carrier lookup.
News flash: On top of the $.03 the resulting SMS will cost, the lookup will be additional $.02-$.03 and some 2-3 digit monthly minimum. Right, the US carriers are starving and need to make more money.
Alright, Google search takes you into this terrific FREE White pages feature. You can reverse lookup mobile carriers by phone numbers, and, from my experiments, they have it right!
Next step: sign up for their API. But: the API returns completely different, incorrect results!

I asked their API people for their thoughts on this, and here's what I got back:
"The carrier information available through our free, developer API is the same information we display in our search results on WhitePages. So, in terms of search results for a reverse phone query, the information is the same. However, on WhitePages, we offer an exclusive “Mobile Carrier Lookup” feature. We do not plan on including the mobile carrier information available through the “Mobile Carrier Lookup” feature on WhitePages via the free, developer API."

I'm speechless. This is really valuable information that's available one place and not in the API. Easily fixable, but they don't seem to see the value. ugh.

To DYI or not DYI. That is the question!

Yesterday at MusicHackDay, I was listening to the "Starting a Music Business" panel, and two topics ran in my head:

• DYI vs. centralized management service for artists: A discussion started about the value, and load that new 'DYI' tools provide for entertainers. Derek Sivers (whose truly an awesome dude) had a really great way of putting it: "DYI? great! and now there's this tool? oh great, and now 'more information'? oh boy...". He's spot-on, I think.
  We at Adva Mobile definitely see how artists check us out and some stay, some move on. There's just so many tools. That's why integrated serices like ArtistData are the right way to go, IMO.
  There's just way too many different offerings for artists right now, and consolidation of the really good ones is bound to happen, hopefully soon (Hopefully Adva Mobile will be one of them). The flip side, though, is that many artists who would never get heard or make any money (to make art) would never have been heard by anyone without those DYI tools. So definitely the DYI tools is not for those who aren't prepared to invest in the promotion bit to be successful, and it also depends on how big you are. Hopefully, those issues are handed over to a band manager of sorts when you grow big enough.
• The other topic in my head (that was not discussed) was triggered by the inevitable "Now's a great time to start a business in the music space". Sure, Duh. But seriously, without going pessimistic about it, what do you make of the recent iLike and iMeem fire sales? Or Spiral frog shutdown or Qtrax needing add'l $50MM? I mean, these are all players who've been alive for sometime and have been trying to figure "it" out. If iMeem is worth $1MM, I'm asking myself what are we worth? A Grand latte? 

Reblogged: Music as the ideal virtual good

This weekend I was fortunate to attend MusicHackDay organized at Microsoft NERD. I was even more fortunate to ask Nabeel Hyatt about recruiting talent in the music space who will help us geeks find that moonlight on the bridge between technology and entertainment. Anyway..
Nabeels' post "Music as the ideal virtual good" is one to pay attention to, whatever your involvement in the entertainment space is. His illustration of the "music business state of affairs", if you will. is excellent. I recommend walking through his deck. I think the point is, for the creative community as well as the technology, there is a place to make money. It just needs to be found in places it wasn't there before. For Nabeel, it's music inside social games:
"While virtual goods are usually confined to conversations about pixelated clothing and weapons, music is by far the highest grossing digital good. A look at what makes music sell as a virtual good."

My take? If you're an artist, think through your revenue stream. Some of it always will come from straight music sales, no doubt. But people today are much more about the live experience in shows followed by the memorabilia that comes with the experience (that's another way to name your CDs or T-shirt). Of course music creation is the driver for all of it, but on it's own, perhaps is not what's going to get you money.

Chart Courtesy: Nabeel Hyatt

Geeky wishes...

I wish...

• There was a free way to do mobile carrier lookup from a mobile number. That way I could enable people on mobile web pages to share their favorite sites with their friends in a rifle mode (the shotgun approach is easily supported via Twitter). It cost way too much to do a carrier lookup and then send the SMS. Operators should want this more than me, because when I'll send that SMS, I will pay to send it, and the receiver will pay ~$.10 to receive it.
• There was a way to find location on mobile web pages for all phone types, not restricted to whether those devices have GPS or not (cellid or wifi router mac address is better than nothing). OEMs should want this more than me, because it opens a sea of marketing opportunities for them.
• There was a simple, easy way to bill people off-deck, from an app or mobile web pages. The current on and off-deck billing solutions in the US are unusable. Every time I hear news from the UK about PayForIt I become green with envy. If there's such a successful model, why can't the US replicate it?! *everyone* in the mobile space should want this. This morning GoPayforit announced that it lets vendors set up a payment service for their site by inserting one line of code.

If I got any of the above wrong, feel free to educate me!