Exploring the Future with Kevin Benedict

Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly – December 28, 2010

Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile payments, mobile money, e-wallets, mobile banking and mobile security that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

********

2010 was a turning point for mobile shopping with 44 percent of smartphone users downloading shopping apps and m-commerce sales increasing to $3.4 billion from $1.4 billion in 2009.

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/12/23/best-of-2010-mobile-commerce/

********

To thrive in today's ultracompetitive and economically uncertain market, Wall Street firms need to adapt to the desires of bankers, traders, advisers and clients to always be connected while on the go.

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/it-infrastructure/228900082

********

The Royal Bank of Canada has become that country’s first bank to launch a mobile banking application for select smartphones — namely, BlackBerry devices and iPhones, iPod Touch and iPad.

http://www.mobile-financial.com/node/13311/Apple,-BlackBerry-Smartphones-Get-Mobile-Banking-Apps

********

Research published recently by Forrester shows that mobile banking provision in Europe is gathering pace. This refers to all three of the main mobile banking services – mobile web, mobile app and text-based services.

http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?id=4832

********

In an era of busy work days and short weekends, getting all the errands done has become more and more challenging. To help keep that to do list short, banks have begun launching applications that allow customers to deposit checks from their smart phones.

http://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/article_1c864842-b945-502e-9716-57da1cf95468.html

********

Ebay sees growth in mobile payments pushing its PayPal service toward the offline world, as merchants begin to allow consumers to pay for physical goods with a wave of their smartphone at the cash register.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10941154/1/ebay-sees-mobile-payment-growth-offline.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN

********

Visa is in a position to make a large profit from the payment processing of mobile transactions as this sector continues to grow in popularity.

http://www.pivotalpayments.com/ca/industry-news/visa-set-to-benefit-from-growing-mobile-payment-processing-800311152/

********

Last month, an unlikely partnership of Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile announced a new initiative called Isis that will create an NFC contactless payment network for the three companies’ combined 230 million customers.

http://mashable.com/2010/12/15/smartphone-wallet/

********

For many people, smartphones are almost as indispensable as wallets, and your smartphone could soon replace your wallet. A collection of the biggest wireless carriers, handset makers and software developers are putting their weight behind a technology called near field communication.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/122310dnbusdigitalwallet.3044eaf.html

*********

Of the top 100 financial institutions, nearly 40 percent offer access via mobile web, while 32 percent offer SMS banking and/or alerts and 32 percent offer apps.

http://www.firstannapolis.com/2010-Mobile-Banking-and-Payments-Study

*******

PayPal is announcing that its payments business is flourishing throughout the holiday shopping season, with a 300 percent increase in mobile payments from November 15 through December 15 compared to the same period last year.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/17/paypal-holiday-mobile-payments-up-300-percent/

********

Smartsoft Mobile empowers some of the world’s largest multi-national organizations to extend and improve business processes by providing mobile solutions to their employees and customers. Smartsoft has more than 700 experienced ERP/mobile consultants with over 5,000 man years of experience helping 400,000 plus mobile users achieve their business goals with powerful mobile B2B and B2C applications, designed and developed specifically for today’s popular consumer and industrial grade mobile devices. For more information please visit, http://www.smartsoftmobile.com/. This newsletter is sponsored in part by Smartsoft Mobile Solutions.

********

Google Android operating system 2.3, nicknamed Gingerbread, enables near-field communication as promised, but the final release only allows consumers to receive NFC transmissions, not send them. That makes it impossible for consumers to load payment data onto the handset and use that in lieu of credit card

http://www.creditnet.com/credit-news/latest-android-os-won-t-support-mobile-credit-card-payments-800280884.php

********

Cellphones functioning as "electronic wallets," shopping carts that provide recipes and a greater ability to command electronic devices with human gestures are some of the technological trends expected to emerge in the coming year and beyond.

http://www.timescolonist.com/life/Cellphones+will+become+wallets+2011+forecast/3979201/story.html

********

Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, mobile industry analyst and experienced mobile industry executive, offers both one and two day onsite workshops designed to educate and inform executives and management teams on enterprise mobility and mobile strategies for businesses. This workshop is designed to provide a complete overview of enterprise mobility and what it means to the business. The workshop is customized based upon the needs of participants. For more details visit http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/workshops.html.

Recent Articles by Kevin Benedict

MeLLmo the Maker of the RoamBI Mobile Application Closes More Funding
Leadership Change in SAP's Mobility Business Unit - Again
Which Mobile Application Company Will SAP Acquire Next?
QR Codes and Mobile Retailing Applications
eBay Mobile Commerce - Real Time Data from Six Global Markets
Changing Attitudes of Mobile Shoppers
Tablets, Mobile Applications and the Enterprise
Wall Street Analyst and SAP Enterprise Mobility
The Global Market for M2M Devices is HUGE!

********

You can follow me on Twitter @krbenedict and read my blog, Enterprise Mobility Strategies.

Also available are Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly and Kevin’s Mobility News Weekly.

********

I have added a feature to my blog site that supports email subscriptions. You can now receive all blog articles directly via email. If you are interested, click here.

*************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Global Market for M2M Devices is HUGE!

The global market for machine-to-machine (M2M) device connections will grow from 62 million devices in 2010 to 2.1 billion devices in 2020, according to a new report from Analysys Mason (London, UK). With a year-on-year growth rate of between 36 percent and 52 percent. M2M is predicted to be one of the fastest growing wireless connectivity sectors in the next decade.

Wireless M2M Sensors

Some of the biggest enterprise M2M markets are the following:

energy and utilities
security and surveillance
health care and acute disease tracking
in vehicle GPS and entertainment systems

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the above-listed markets are huge! M2M is another category of enterprise mobility that takes advantage of mobile technologies and miniaturized sensors and monitoring equipment to send and receive data wirelessly to and from a centralized server. On the server is management software that allows the human to understand what is going on in remote locations.

Happy Holidays
from Kevin Benedict!

I received an interesting call yesterday from a Wall Street analyst. He wanted my opinion on SAP's acquisition of Sybase. His premise was that there was not $5.8 billion worth of value in Sybase. I responded that I had no expertise in valuation so could not help him in that determination. However, I did have more than enough opinions on enterprise mobility to share.

I provided him the following list for his consideration during his valuation exercise:

1) Had he looked into the potential value of Sybase's 365? I said much of the world, and the fastest growing segments of the mobile market (LDC - less developed countries), are increasingly using SMS for mobile banking, money transfers, mobile payments, and many enterprise applications like field services, inventory, database queries, sales reports, etc. He had not considered this.

Mobile Shopping

Cameron Franks, area vice president of sales for the Americas at Sybase 365, an SAP Company, recently spoke about a survey they conducted with 1,000 consumers on mobile holiday shopping. The key finding of the survey was that 32 percent of consumers, if offered mobile-based deals, coupons or alerts, could be persuaded to make a purchase on their mobile device.

Another recent survey by mobile marketing agency Briabe Media and mobile-social networking company MocoSpace, they found that 30 percent of survey respondents said they expected to use mobile coupons during this holiday season. Also in the survey, 62 percent said they planned to use mobile phones as a shopping tool prior to entering a store; and 46 percent stated they would use their phones for store or product research.

Tablets, Mobile Applications and the Enterprise

I have been reading several articles lately that talk about how popular tablets are predicted to become in the enterprise market. Here is an excerpt from one article that I read this morning:

More than one in five Americans will own a tablet by 2014, and 37 percent of them will own them for business use, according to a recent survey.

Current business use of tablets:

Business correspondence (58%)
Online meetings/Web conferences (37%)
Marketing (34%)
Training (33%)
Finance/accounting (32%)
Sales (27%)
Graphic design (27%)
Inventory management (27%)
Customer support (24%)

Another article stated, "Apple could sell 21 million units of its iPad tablet next year as half of the largest and most prominent companies in the world begin testing or deploying the iPad for corporate use, according to an analyst with Wall Street firm Piper Jaffray."

Kevin’s Mobility News Weekly – December 23, 2010

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly
Also read Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly

Expectations for the tablet market in 2011 are positive, but to put things in context tablets will still be niche devices, maybe 15 percent of smartphone sales. We’ll see more supply than demand in 2011, and probably some vicious price competition because Apple will remain the leader in style, features and shipments.

http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_jones/2010/12/16/too-many-tablets-too-few-buyers/

Ben Lee over at Smartsoft Mobile Solutions recently directed me to the eBay Mobile Commerce site. On this site you can see mobile purchasing data from six global markets in near real time. Very interesting! I watched for some time the interesting data coming across their digital ticker tape along the bottom of their chart. Here is some of the data about eBay purchases via mobile devices:

Australians bought the most sporting goods via mobile devices in December 2010.
Auto parts were the top selling products via mobile devices on Cyber Monday in Germany.
The iPhone was the leading mobile platform for mobile sales on December 12, 2010.
Toys made up 8.6 percent of mobile sales in France on December 10-11, 2010.
December 12 was the busiest mobile shopping day so far in 2010.
In the USA auto parts made up 8.3 percent of mobile purchases in 2010.
In the USA cell phones and accessories made up 6.5 percent of mobile purchases in 2010.
In the USA vehicle sales made up 16.5 percent of mobile purchases in 2010.

Home Depot iPhone App

I was sitting in my office chair today reading mail. I received a magazine that had a QR code prominently displayed on a page. I grabbed my iPhone 4, opened my Red Laser application and snapped a photo of the QR code. A message instantly popped up asking if I approved - I said yes. Immediately, my browser launched and a person was talking to me about their product. I LOVED IT!

Think of the way companies can change their marketing and sales approach by having their very best sales and marketing spokesperson deliver key product messages to anyone with a smartphone and internet connection anywhere in the world. No longer do you have to ask the sixteen year old sales assistant complex questions. You can simply open a mobile application that supports QR codes, click on a sign or advertisement and learn about the product from an expert.

I was speaking with an SAP executive last month about SAP's partner strategy for enterprise mobility. The executive said that SAP ecosystem mobility partners would be well served to focus on building vertical industry specific business processes into their mobile applications, as SAP would be focusing more on horizontal business processes. The executive went on to say that SAP would seek to partner first for vertical expertise and then consider acquiring select companies that showed success and penetration in key SAP markets.

This conversation got me thinking. Which vertical industries would be the likely targets of mobile applications that SAP might want to acquire? Could it be one of the following?

Oil and Gas
Utilities
Retail (Location-Based Services, Coupons, Mobile Marketing)
Plant Maintenance
Chemicals
Mining
Transportation
Facilities Management
Enterprise asset management

Exploring the Future with Kevin Benedict

Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly – December 28, 2010

The Global Market for M2M Devices is HUGE!

Wall Street Analyst and SAP Enterprise Mobility

Changing Attitudes of Mobile Shoppers

Tablets, Mobile Applications and the Enterprise

Kevin’s Mobility News Weekly – December 23, 2010

eBay Mobile Commerce - Real Time Data from Six Global Markets

QR Codes and Mobile Retailing Applications

Which Mobile Application Company Will SAP Acquire Next?

Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly – December 23, 2010

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

Get new posts by email: