Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly – Week of January 10, 2011

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.

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Square, the mobile payment start up from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced today that it has raised a new round of funding that values the company at about $240 million.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/square-keith-rabois-mobile-payments.html

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Mopay Inc., a payment service provider for online merchants, forecasts considerable momentum and movement in the global mobile payments industry in 2011. The massive growth of the market in North America, increased consolidation and lower transaction costs are the top trends that will have a significant impact on the blossoming mobile payments industry in 2011

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/mobile-payments-industry-to-experience-monumental-growth-in-2011-mopay/

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Last year, only 4.1 percent of mobile phones shipped had near field communications capabilities. That number is expected triple to 13 percent in 2014, according to ISuppli.

Twitter and Tweet Convert - Kevin Benedict

Twitter Conversion

It's true.  I am but a recent convert to Twitter.  Since I typically write obnoxiously long articles, I had a difficult time understanding the value of a technology that limits itself to 140 characters.  I have now, however, seen the light and the light is an iPad app.

I use the iPad application Flipboard.  Flipboard and Paper.li are two applications that convert RSS feeds, tweets, Facebook and other content into online newspapers or magazines that are easy to read.  I am very impressed with Flipboard's ability to show the original tweet, and automatically open up the tiny URL link and display the content in the online newspaper format. 

I was simply too impatient to read through a list of tweets with enticing titles about world changing mobile technology, and not be able to see the content without waiting for the link to open in a browser and display the content.  In Flipboard it is a one step process.  All the tweet links are automatically opened and displayed in the newspaper.  BEAUTIFUL!

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Leapfactor's Lionel Carrasco

Leapfactor's Lionel Carrasco
and Luis Cabrera

I had the opportunity to spend some time on the phone with Leapfactor's founder and CEO, Lionel Carrasco, recently.  For readers not familiar with Leapfactor, they are an SAP partner that provides mobile solutions for the enterprise market.  Here are some short descriptions of their solutions:

• LeapApps, a set of cross-industry micro apps that deliver actionable information to white-collar workers in the field, including everything from approvals, alerts and business indicators to mobile intranets and collaboration tools.
• LeapShell, a proprietary Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows the platform to be wholly adopted by developers, partners and IT departments.
• LeapCentral, the cornerstone of Leapfactor’s infrastructure. Leapcentral is the device, user and application-management cloud-based infrastructure that enables Leapfactor to deliver a cost-effective and scalable mobile platform.
• LeapAgent, the interface with enterprise systems that acts as a Chinese wall separating IT systems from the services and content that Leapcentral accesses.

Lionel updated me on events at Leapfactor since I last saw them in May at Sapphire. Here are my notes from our conversation:

Kevin: Lionel, what is new at Leapfactor since May?
Lionel: We formally opened operations in Brazil this summer.  We hired an experienced SAP veteran to be our country manager.  Although 90 percent of our focus is in the USA, Brazil is an amazing market and has a big economy.  We also set up operations in Mexico.  We hired the former President of SAP Mexico to be our country manager.

Ninety Percent of IT Managers Planning New Mobility Applications

Yesterday Ian Thain from Sybase reported these findings from a recent Kelton Research survey:

• Ninety percent of IT Managers surveyed are planning to implement new mobile applications.
• Nearly one in two believe that successfully managing mobile applications will top their priority list.
• Twenty-one percent are looking to introduce 20+ mobile applications into their organizations.

This is BIG news!  Earlier this week in an interview with T.L. Neff from Pyxis Mobile, T.L. also reported that customers are planning multiple mobile application deployments.  What does this mean?  It means good news for companies that are in the EMM (enterprise mobility management) and MDM (mobile device management) market.  This information also matches up with the opinions and predictions that Bryan Whitmarsh from Sybase made in his recent interview.

Products like Sybase's Afaria, Syclo's Agentry Analytics (see short video) and B2M's mProdigy are set to play more important roles in 2011 than in any previous year.

Remember to follow me on Twitter @krbenedict!  I am using Twitter more and more to share interesting articles that I find on enterprise mobility.

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, 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.

Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly – Week of January 10, 2011

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile retailing applications and mobile marketing applications that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

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A flood of innovation involving smartphones, social media and local search will soon have a massive impact on what travelers do and how they spend their money while on vacation.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smart-phones-social-media-and-local-search-create-marketing-mojo-in-the-travel-industry-new-report-says-113262519.html

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Google's AdMob in-application ad network is seeing two billion ad requests each day, great growth for a platform Google had to fight the FTC to get. Thank Android and iPhone owners.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Google-AdMob-Serves-2B-Ads-Daily-on-Android-iPhone-399008/?kc=rss

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In November, 35 percent of smartphone users used their devices to access the mobile Internet, proving once again that marketers should advertise on the mobile Web. A whopping 61.5 million consumers in the United States owned a smartphone in November, illustrating the reach that marketers can achieve with a targeted mobile advertising campaign.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Pyxis Mobile's T.L. Neff

TL Neff

T.L. Neff, is an EVP at Pyxis Mobile in charge of customer services.  We met last year when we both spoke at the same conference.  T.L. lives in the Boston area and is an expert in mobility.  Last week we were able to schedule some time together for an interview.

Note:  These are not T.L.'s exact words, rather my notes from our interview.

Kevin: What mobile device(s) do you use and carry?

TL: BlackBerry Torch, iPhone 4, iPad and laptop.

Kevin: What are your favorite mobile applications?
TL: Mobile CRM from Pyxis, Movela Netflix Queue Manager (a Pyxis app), TagIn (GPS tracking - our kids use it a lot to tell us where they are  located), FaceBook (I use it for both family and business.  Some customers respond faster on FaceBook than on email) and Skype Mobile.

Kevin: What industries do you see adopting mobility today?
TL: Everybody is implementing now.  Even personal friends tell me their companies are looking at mobility. 

Kevin: Where are you seeing sales opportunities?
TL:  A lot of our big sales opportunities come from analyst referrals.  Oracle World was also great for us.  We also did well at the BlackBerry Developer conference.  Both Oracle World and the BlackBerry Developer conference used our solutions for their mobile conference app which gave us a lot of exposure. 

B2C Mobile App


Kevin: What business processes are you seeing companies mobilize?
TL: We deployed our first mobile applications in 2002.  Back then they were sales force automation.  Now, customers are coming to us with needs in their marketing departments.  Some start with internal projects, and now have advanced to consumer facing apps.  Interactive marketing teams are calling us today. Customers have asked for mobile HR apps.  People buy from Pyxis because they need multiple apps and want to use our development platform.  They buy servers from us, but we don't have a per user fee.  When companies want a lot of mobile users, our model is perfect for them.  We are getting a lot of interest from medical and pharmaceutical firms.  There is a lot of interest in tablets today.  However, developers must realize that iPads are shared devices and security is an issue.  By shared I mean they are often used by many people so security across users is an issue.

Kevin: What are some of the most surprising developments for you in enterprise mobility over the past year?
TL: How quickly enterprises adopted iPads.  I thought companies would like them, but I thought it would take years for them to be adopted in significant numbers.  Also, we sold a lot of solutions to SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises).  SME start-ups can't imagine having solutions without mobile apps.  Many of these SMEs start a website at the same time as a mobile app.

Kevin: What advice do you have for companies just starting down a path to enterprise mobility?
TL:  Think bigger.  Mobility is not a nice to have, or a fad.  It is here to stay.  It will be here for the rest of your career.  It is now a core component of your IT environment.

Kevin:  How important is MDM (mobile device management) and security?
TL: It is critical.  When personal and business mobile devices are mixed, they must be managed.  Pyxis chooses to secure the mobile applications, not the device.

Kevin: Where does your company fit in the mobile enterprise solutions mix?
TL: We have a mobile development and production platform.  Customers buy servers from Pyxis when they want to deploy more than one mobile application.  We have companies that want to deploy dozens of different mobile applications on our platform.  We provide our customers with a mobile SDK.  It is a visual application development environment called Application Studio. 

Mobility requires flexibility, fast change, rapid evolution of devices and apps.  We enable you to rapidly develop, edit, and grow apps.  Some of our customers release new versions of mobile apps monthly.  We allow for these rapid changes.  Most of our competitors require huge development projects to change apps.  We take pride in developing mobile applications in eight hours.

Kevin: What industries are you focusing on in 2011?
TL: That is a hard question since we have customers in all kinds of different industries.  Probably the best way to describe it is we target Fortune 2,500 and OEM partners.  Our partners purchase a development license and build mobile applications for their customers.

Kevin: Where do you see mobility going in 2011?
TL: Mobility is growing so broad.  Companies will be looking not for one mobile application, but for platforms that can support ten different ones.  Companies are looking to mobilize everything.

Kevin: Tell me about your business model.
TL:  We are a mobile platform company with servers and a mobile SDK.  We don't sell by the number of mobile users.  We sell by the number of servers a customer needs.  The number of servers is dependent on the kind of mobile applications they want.

I want to thank T.L. for sharing his thoughts and experiences with us.

To read more in the Mobile Expert Interview Series click here.

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, 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.


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Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Bryan Whitmarsh

Boise, Idaho

This morning I was able to catch up with SAP Mentor Bryan Whitmarsh for an interview.  I conducted a video interview with Bryan last year at Sapphire which you can watch here.  Bryan works for Sybase's product management team and reports to Tony Kueh, who I interviewed last week.  Bryan lives in Boise, Idaho (also my fair city), which he has called home since 1992, when he moved here from the Seattle area.

Note:  These are not Bryan's exact words, rather my notes from our interview.

Kevin: What is your role and area of responsibility at Sybase?
Bryan: My title is Mobility Product Management.  Last year I was focused on mobile email, but this year I am working with the platform team on SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform).  It is my job to interpret the market, meet with customers, communicate the road map, both internally and externally, define product requirements and help marketing communicate information about the products.



Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Tony Kueh

Sybase's Tony Kueh

I met Tony Kueh (pronounced Koo-ay) from Sybase's product management team at TechEd in Las Vegas this year.  He is a long time Seattle native, now residing in California.  This week he accepted my invitation to be interviewed.

Note:  These are not Tony's exact words, rather my notes from the interview.

Kevin: Tony, what is your role and areas of responsibilities at Sybase?
Tony: I am the product manager for enterprise mobility which includes SUP and Afaria.  I report to Raj Nathan, who is the interim head of the mobile applications group and EVP and CMO at Sybase.

Kevin: What mobile device(s) do you have and carry?
Tony: An iPhone, an iPad, a Droid and a MacBook Pro.

Kevin:  A Droid?
Tony:  Yes, for those occasions when I really don't want to be disconnected.

Kevin: Is that all?

Mobile Banking is Here!

Mobile Banking Apps

In the past couple of years, mobile banking has grown rapidly among smartphone users, and 2011 promises even faster growth.  During 2010, roughly 10 percent of households in the United States used mobile banking features on their smartphones.  Expect to see significant increases in those numbers in 2011.

During 2007 there were 10 million global users of smartphone banking.  By next year 150 million people will be checking their bank accounts on mobile devices, and by 2013 that number will increase to nearly 400 million. These figures are truly impressive.

With the rapid increase of mobile banking, financial institutions are realizing that customer satisfaction lies in mobile apps.  Approximately 1,000 U.S. banks now offer some type of mobile app for account management, but 29,000 more banks are expected to develop mobile banking applications within the next year.

Sybase's Strategy with John Chen - Version 2

John Chen
CEO Sybase, an SAP company

John Chen, CEO of Sybase Inc., an SAP company, wrote an interesting article that I read last week.  Here are three excerpts:

1. Until recently application platforms dominated the enterprise mobility story. Vendors like Sybase sold them and corporations bought them — to build mobile apps in-house.
2. Packaged mobile apps will soon replace custom-built ones as the predominant deployment model inside the enterprise. This will not only slash the cost and time needed for organizations to roll out mobile apps, but will also kick-start a new phase of rapid growth for enterprise mobility.
3. Sybase is out in front of this trend as it revolutionizes the mobile space.

I understand that John was making general comments, but as a veteran of the mobile industry I started pondering the challenges he will face.  I wondered how packaged mobile apps would be configured to work with customized SAP environments.  If I remember right, about 70 percent of SAP customers customize their systems.  Packaged mobile applications would need to be able to be customized quickly to "slash" the costs and time needed for organizations to roll out mobile apps. This means someone must be trained to customize mobile apps.  Who is that someone?  What do they need to know?  What SDK will they use?  Who should I call?
 
I also wondered, since Sybase has not traditionally been a mobile application company, how they could be "out in front" on this trend.  Many of us have been developing and deploying mobile applications for the past decade and have never recognized Sybase as a major player in that space.  Yet, a reader pointed out that most companies are barely starting their mobility projects, so packaged mobile apps would be a great start.
 
It also occured to me that many "outside-the-four-walls" business processes are not commonly supported by SAP today.  There are many field services, project management, inspections, asset tracking and other kinds of business processes that fall outside of SAP's umbrella. Will Sybase try to support these, or just those processes supported by SAP? 

SAP resells ClickSoftware's Workforce Scheduling and Optimization solution.  ClickSoftware has already developed mobile applications for the SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization solution.  This solution supports "intra-day dynamic mobile workforce scheduling."  This is not an area that SAP supports themselves.  Will Sybase develop mobile apps for SAP's partner solutions, or leave this up to the partner?
 
Syclo is SAP's co-innovation mobility partner for EAM (enterprise asset management).  Enterprise asset management is a big and high priority market for mobile applications.  In many cases Syclo's mobile clients may need to connect to both SAP and non-SAP EAM systems.  Will SAP simply excuse themselves from the EAM category in favor of their partner, or compete against them?
 
Many other mobile markets, such as retail, require support for features and processes not always covered by SAP's systems.  For example, large retailers looking to provide consumer focused mobile applications may work with retail experts like Smartsoft Mobile (an SAP services partner) to provide branded mobile applications that incorporate loyalty programs, location-based services, coupons, deals, catalogs, etc. 
 
Even SAP partners that focus on "inside the four walls" solutions like Open Text (an enterprise content management vendor) already have mobile solutions for SAP customers.  Open Text is the developer of SAP's Vendor Invoice Management systems, among other solutions.  They have developed a mobile solution called Open Text Everywhere that I wrote about here. 

Open Text is an example of a vendor developing their own mobile applications for their own enterprise solutions.  However, in Open Text's case, some of their ECM (enterprise content management) solutions are embedded in SAP.  As a result, the user must decide if they will use Open Text's packaged mobile application, build their own, or wait for Sybase to develop a mobile packaged application.

I don't think Sybase would try to mobilize SAP solutions and business processes that are provided by partners that have their own packaged mobile apps like Open Text or ClickSoftware.  At least they wouldn't seem like high priorities.

It appears that Sybase will focus first on extending simple SAP business processes and workflows out to mobile devices.  Second, develop mobile applications for the high priority business processes and include mobile SDK support for customizing these apps. Third, provide the mobility platform (not the mobile apps) for rich and complex mobile applications, that require deep industry knowledge, customization, support for field specific business processes, and integration with non-SAP backends, non-SAP business processes or multiple backend systems. This third area of applications will likely remain the competitive playground of the SAP enterprise mobility ecosystem vendors, not Sybase.

Do you agree or disagree?  Let me know what you think!

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, 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.