Consumers often engage in multichannel browsing, but on average do little or no e-commerce through mobile. In turn, retailers have spent surprisingly little investment to enter the mobile commerce sphere, and it’s difficult to say which fault comes first. But Multichannel Merchant’s Ted Hoy has deemed it "Time to Jump Into the M-commerce Ring," because this is where the growth can potentially occur at the highest levels, if given the proper encouragement.

M-commerce is in its infancy, Hoy continues. "While there are some benefits to learning from mobile commerce trendsetters, businesses serious about embracing new technology and attracting next generation consumers need to act now to diversify their multichannel sales strategies by testing the mobile commerce waters." Whether ready or not, companies will see that the market is becoming more ready to accept a robust mobile market: Four times as many mobile phones shipped worldwide as compared to the number of personal computers and mobile sales and usage are both increasing.

The disparity between potential demand and retailer action is not for lack of resources. If a business already has a Web site, often their e-commerce provider can implement a mobile version. As Hoy explains, "many Web providers are now introducing advanced mobile commerce systems that simply plug into existing online stores." These features determine if a customer is accessing the site from a mobile device, and only enable more relevant features on the site. This provides a consistent shopping experience and helps with company branding.

Key strategies include keeping mobile consistent with larger business goals and keeping abreast of developments such as augmented reality. For reaching a larger audience, Hoy recommends an m-commerce site over a brand smartphone application. For a more sophisticated shopping experience, he recommends developing the app, though by nature they reach a smaller group due to being platform specific.

Some people have a lot of stuff. Others don’t.

Rentalic gives each side the chance to profit from this, enabling people to rent their possessions or services to others.

Users can also request things that they need to use for a limited time. For example, right now a San Francisco user is trying to find a scanner to digitize bank statements and tax records, while a Los Angeles user is looking for a soldering iron they can rent on a daily or weekly basis.

Renters pay via PayPal and meet the owners to get the items.

Advantages of the service are that it reduces consumption – so it gets the green push – it also raises the value of possessions for owners and allows renters to find inexpensive items.

There are some big barriers to adoption, like trusting strangers with your possessions. As with most sites, Rentalic uses a reputation-based system to rate lenders and borrowers. Items are not insured, which can be prohibitive for some lenders. A security deposit can be placed upon items, though.

The selling point is that Rentalic is green, but what could cause the service to be big is that possessions are unevenly distributed, and a lot of spending (and manufacturing) power is wasted on one-off purchases. People buy tools they use for only one job or equipment for hobbies they never pursue. There is a potential mass economy in exchanging these items.

Last month, Rentalic won the PayPal X Developer Challenge at last month’s DEMO. It is currently in public beta.

On April 3, 2010, America penned a massive love letter to Steve Jobs. Or to magic and revolution, whichever you prefer.

How’s this for brand loyalty? 74 percent of Saturday’s iPad buyers in Minneapolis and New York were Mac users, and 66 percent owned an iPhone, according to Piper Jaffray. There hasn’t been this high a concentration of fanboys since the launch of the first iPhone in June 2007.

Ninety-two percent of the iPad buyers surveyed by Piper Jaffray owned an iPod. Of the 13 percent who owned Amazon Kindles, 58 planned on using the iPad as a replacement device.

Chitika came at the numbers a bit differently, measuring the traffic coming from iPads, but still had some interesting findings, like the fact that nearly one fifth of iPad users were in California. As of this writing, Chitika estimates that there had been 301,709 iPads sold. (At 3:00 p.m. PST, they were selling at the rate of 81 per minute.)

According to Apple, 300,000 iPads were sold on Saturday, and more than 1 million iPad apps were downloaded that day. An average of over three app downloads portends well for the future of tablet apps.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that the iPad is already outselling competitors . . . in the smartphone market. Apple has already sold more iPads than Palm sold Pres last quarter, which portends not well for Palm’s premiere smartphone. As does the fact that Apple’s tablet already has a much richer app ecosystem.

With e-commerce predicted to experience healthy growth this year, companies are trying to expand what consumers think to buy online. Domestic product marketplace Alice.com combines home essentials, automatic coupons and free shipping to members on their Web site and on a mobile application.

CEO Brian Wiegand aims to give people an opportunity to change the way that they shop for home staples while working with consumer packaged goods marketers. Since the site is a marketplace, not a retailer, the brands that are featured on the site sell directly to customers, not to Alice.com. In his interview with eMarketer, Wiegand explains that he believes that manufacturers should be directly connected to users.

The Internet has greatly opened up the middleman role in the traditional retail experience, Wiegand saud. Alice.com offers "an open, transparent system where the manufacturer is actually the seller of record and owns the consumer information. It’s the complete opposite of the retailer’s closed-loop system."

The site itself makes money through advertising and data. Instead of display ads, it uses coupons, which the site charges a fee to the brand for applying coupons to products, as well as for a manufacturer loyalty program. The traditional advertising revenue and site sponsorship is only a small piece of their total revenue - most monetization comes from these previous functionalities.

The loyalty program provides tools for the brand to build its own loyalty program to attract customers. Alice.com gives manufacturers real time data about who bought their product as well as what other items it was bought with.

This data can be used to target potential customers also - Glad could choose to target Hefty users with a coupon. The data is available in a non-personally available way for targeting. This data-targeted method is more effective than traditional "pray and spray" couponing that yields comparatively low return on investment, according to the interview.

Last stands are always poetic. In America, we think of Custer; in France, the Mur des Fédérés.

New to that list: Video on Demand.

Video on Demand is what the cable companies expect will put them back in the game to compete with Netflix and Hulu.

A group including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Sony Pictures, and Universal Pictures have announced a $30 million ad campaign to bring attention to VOD as an alternative to Netflix and web TV. The campaign is called “The Video Store Just Moved In,” which is strange because in reality the video store just closed down.

Netflix has already annihilated Blockbuster, which may be heading into bankruptcy after losing nearly $400 million this period. (In comparison, Netflix gained 1.1 million users in Q4 2009). And DVD sales fell 13 percent last year as broadband penetration continues to lay waste to disks of any sort.

Is this a ‘dying of the light’ situation. Not quite, but getting closer.

Cable companies like to forget that pretty much the only relevance they had was that they were once near-exclusive content providers. Outside of Netflix and piracy, Hulu and other like sites make the cable bill redundant.

Video on Demand meets a market demand for those who haven’t yet dropped cable for Netflix + Hulu, that is to say, a market growing slimmer every day.

Cable does have a few things still going for it. The post-Sopranos TV landscape has turned cable channels like HBO and Showtime into producers of some of the best original content out there. Hollywood’s backing doesn’t hurt, either.

The only real chance cable companies have is to lock up the content and make it more difficult and/or expensive to get it any other way, like back in the golden days of rental stores.

(Via: Cnet)

Google Wave Extensions Gallery was rolled out today, in hopes to make it easier for users to discover and utilize the extensions that developers have been building on the real-time based collaboration platform. Google Wave got serious attention when it was first released, but invite-only access and limited usability slowed the spread of usage quickly.

The gallery contains extension installers which are visualized as puzzle pieces on the Wave navigation bar. To use an extension, the user must first install it, and it then appears as an icon in the editing toolbar or adds a drop-down area to the “New Wave” menu.

At this writing there are eighteen available extensions, including Sudoku, a Yellow Highlighter, Goo-gly URL shortener, gadgets for entering images and polls, and lot of other little games and creativity encouragers/time-wasters.

This trails the release of Robots API v2, a part of the Google Wave API announced on Tuesday, that gives developers tools that can push information into waves without relying on a user’s action, such as when the weather changes or a stock price falls. The tools, or robots, as they are referred to in the Google Wave developer blog, can be also be deployed based on context, filtering, error-reporting or by proxy from another non-Wave system.

Google Wave has too limited a user base for any marketing strategy to exist in earnest. It is possible that it may never be a stand-alone platform in the manner that Twitter became. Whether it does or not, the usability that is currently being developed for it can definitely be useful for brands.

The Take-Out Gadget extension, for example, currently lets a group of people in an office, classroom or dorm plan an order together. It also has a timer so that people know how much longer they have to make up their mind. This extension could easily be connected to corporate Wave account holders, so that the group connects with a restaurant in a Wave, and know what items are sold out, or a daily special.

In technology as in culture, when the traditional players take a page from the innovators’ playbook, one of two things generally happens.

The traditional player’s adoption of innovation can be so successful that it co-opts or even bests the innovators (remember back when Google’s acquisition of Twitter was inevitable? Remember Google Buzz?).

Or the opposite can happen, and traditional actors become plot points on the way to the paradigm shift (see: AOL, MySpace).

We don’t know if either of these scenarios will play out with Visa’s entry into PayPal’s space with Rightcliq, but PayPal, debit cards, waning customer confidence, micropayments, new legislation and even Gen Y are certainly chipping away at the credit card industry.

Visa’s Rightcliq “is an online shopping tool targeted to consumers that assists online shoppers by offering the ability to browse multiple merchants and select items consumers are interested in looking at in one central location, making comparison shopping easier,” Joseph Saunders, Visa’s chairman and CEO, said in an October 2009 conference call.

Rightcliq is essentially a place to collect your payment and delivery information. It allows users to collate a “Wishspace” where they can bookmark their desired purchases, comparison shop and e-mail product images to friends. In essence, it’s an emulation of PayPal, which has 81 million active accounts and whose recent partnership with Facebook brings aboard more than 300 million potential customers.

Rightcliq is currently available in beta. Not many details are available right now from Visa, but analysts expect a more robust version to be available in Spring.

Analysts see the move as an attempt to take a share from PayPal, according to Internet Retailer.

“It’s too early to tell if Visa is going to be a challenger,” said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp . “They can get the consumer usage piece, but working with SMBs and the stored-balance piece remain to be seen.”

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton today broke the news that Facebook will be incorporating location-based updates into users’ news feeds beginning next month.

According to Bilton’s sources, the social networking site will debut the location-based service at next month’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

The battle of location-based services is supposed to be one of the highlights of next week’s South by Southwest (SXSW), where Foursquare famously got its first bit of major buzz last year. Now, along with duking it out among themselves, Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown will have to take on the major players in social networking.

While Facebook’s move could definitely affect traffic to the other services, Bilton’s sources say that Facebook’s move is aimed not at other location-based social networks, but at Google’s local ads.

As far as Facebook goes, most of its audience are not early adopters, but have proven eager in the past to try out features culled from other services. One-quarter of Facebook users are already using the site on their mobile phones, so the user base for location-based social networking is already there. And since people are already logging in on the go, so there’s no extra steps required on their part.

Also built in is the market for any Facebook games that could be built on top of the technology.

While they’ve been getting a lot of buzz in geekier circles, location-based services have not yet caught on with mainstream users. As with Twitter last year, it’s only a matter of time before they do, and Facebook is perfectly positioned to bring location-based services to critical mass.

One of Facebook’s main strengths is that it acts as a clearinghouse for new social-networking technologies, so expect location-based services to accelerate in adoption when users of the one of the most powerful sites in the world start to play around with them.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who spends time in Society: people get addicted to iPhones.

Such is the conclusion of Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, based on a survey of 200 undergrads.

Twenty-five percent replied that the phone was “was an extension of their brain and being,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. Ten percent said they were ‘fully addicted,’ and a further thirty-two percent expressed concern that they could become addicted one day.

“One of the most striking things we saw in the interviews was just how identified people were with their iPhone,” Luhrmann told the Mercury News.

“It was not so much with the object itself, but it had so much personal information that it became a kind of extension of the mind and a means to have a social life,” Luhrmann said. “It just kind of captured part of their identity.”

Seventy-five percent said that buying the iPhone made them feel cool.

According to Luhrmann, many of the respondents have received complaints from their friends about their iPhone usage, and 7 percent replied that a roommate or partner had said they’d felt abandoned for the phone.

More and more studies are being published that claim that internet addiction exists, that it sort of simulates real addiction in that the thought of using it activates the pleasure centers in users’ brains in anticipation of reward – rewards that come increasingly fast with real-time.

The thing about smartphones is those potential rewards are always with you.

“I think we have not begun to understand the cognitive impact and the social impact” of these devices, Luhrmann said.

(Via: TechNewsDaily)

Digital distribution platform Steam has been dropping hints that they will be expanding support to Macs. The Valve Corporation’s online game store is one part of a company made famous for such popular video games such as Half-Life and Portal, the latter’s sequel recently announced. Boing Boing’s prediction, while not irrefutably verified, is that the release of several images of Valve-themed Apple-advertisement parodies points fairly clearly to just such an expansion. With the Game Developers Conference looming, such a suspense-provoker would be an ideal build-up to the event.

The images include altered dancer-silhouette iPod posters, a Half-Life character inserted into the 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial, a Portal robot and a Team Fortress II turret in an "I’m a PC" tableau, etc.

Not only are gamers excited about such a possibility, its a positive move for Valve. With a consistently rising market share, Apple is not just the underdog anymore. At nearly eleven percent of US users, according to analytics from Quantcast via Ars Technica this week, Apple does best domestically. But MacWorld believes that there are other reasons to why now is a good time for Steam to come to OS X.

For certain, the move from the G-processors to the Intel chips that are now being used made compatibility a great deal simpler. As shown for Netflix streaming and anything using Microsoft Silverlight, support is best left for PCs and Intel-based Macs, not for anything older. Games are cheaper to port to Macs, which means that they are available quicker.

Additionally, game consoles have become more popular among casual and hardcore gamers alike, leaving less profitibility in the computer game category. If Valve acts now, says MacWorld, it has a chance to become the dominant source of Mac games. This would be a different market than those available on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch, potentially under-tapped.