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.”

Earlier this month, Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executive Networking Group released a report (view here) conducted in January, 2010 on members’ marketing plans for this year. Two-thirds of executives are more optimistic about business opportunity than in 2009.

• More likely to increase market budget - planned increases rose from eleven percent in 2009 to 24 percent in 2010
• Less likely to reduce staff and more likely to hire incremental staff - keeping current staff reached 44 percent this year from 34 percent last year
• More likely to increase spending on innovation and R&D - 36 percent of executives in 2010, compared to 21 percent in 2009

The most important marketing concept for this year was “Marketing ROI,” which MENG members selected 58 percent of the time. This surpassed “Customer Satisfaction” at 49 percent and “Customer Retention” at 53 percent. These two concepts were the top two placed in both the 2009 and 2008 report, while Marketing ROI was number three last year and number six in 2008.

“Social Media” made the top ten list for the first time this year, selected by 42 percent of respondents.

Social Media is accepted as even more important now than ever, but is one of the buzz terms that marketers are most tired of hearing (placed number one at 29.1 percent). More specific frustrations with Web 2.0 terms focused more on social media, especially Twitter at number 2 (14.8 percent).

Other most oversaturated industry buzz words were Social networking (7.9 percent) and Web 2.0/3.0 (3.9 percent). “Web 2.0″ seems to be losing traction from its previous two years as number one term, giving way to the less vague Social Internet terms.

As for strategy, marketer budget still favors traditional marketing over online 55 percent versus 45 percent, with smaller companies edging more towards an even split in their budgets. Seventy percent of marketers are planning new social media initiatives in 2010.

Target shoppers can now receive coupons directly sent to their mobile phones via an opt-in service. Smartphones have been able to provide this service for quite some time, but the first national chain to exploit them has announced their plan.

To receive the service from Target, savings-enthusiasts can either go to http://m.target.com or text COUPONS to 827438. Once a member, the shopper receives a text message consisting of a link to a mobile web page that contains multiple offers, all accessible from a single barcode. This barcode is single-use and expires on an indicated date.

The strategy takes advantage of two trends - coupon use is on the rise since our economy took a dive, and the uses of mobile phones is expanding into more categories than ever. But this is the first time that a national chain store has committed to such a program, and is currently the only one that can scan these codes at the register.

Every month, new coupons will be made available on Target’s mobile site as old ones expire. The savings can be used at any Target retail store, but CNET reports that they cannot be used at Target.com. While there is no explanation for this service omission on the press release, the general intention of the program is to make mobile coupons a seamless experience. “At Target, we know that mobile phones are an integral part of our guests’ lives, and mobile coupons are just another way we’re providing convenient, on-the-go shopping solutions,” said Steve Eastman, president of Target.com.

CNET mentions also that J.C. Penny is currently testing a similar program.

Brad Gilligan of NPR’s blog sighs with relief at the idea of no longer having to clip magazines to get savings. In addition to the mobile coupons, Target is expanding its mobile support to include gift card access, product viewing and availability, gift registry and other functions.

Challenge: Chat Roulette. "Going Where No Manly Man Has Gone Before."

So reads the prompt from Manifesto, the menswear blog from UK clothing line French Connection for a contest in which participants are asked to document their online flirting. Initially restricted to men, the opportunity to win 250 pounds for captured evidence of success or fail was opened up to women as well.

The first marketing ploy to use this popular but chaotic Web site, FCUK’s efforts could easily go awry or be well rewarded. Chatroulette’s simple design of pairing two strangers in video chat has made it extremely popular for the past few weeks since it made appearances in a number of US news sources, such as Good Morning America, New York Magazine, and The Daily Show. A button labeled "next" lets either user change the channel on whomever they have been paired with, a proto-Circuit from Logan’s Run.

The pairing seems very appropriate - as ReadWriteWeb reports, Chatroulette’s visitors are typically 71 percent male, 15 percent female, and 14 percent pervert. With a blog that defines its readers’ manliness by how much meat they eat and how little gel they put in their hair, there is much potential user overlap between the two sites.

Realistically, associating with such a site - where the odds of meeting someone strange or seeing something disturbing are quite high - could be risky, but FCUK could be trying for just such a distinction. Since Chatroulette’s inception in November 2009, much of the press as mentioned above has mainly covered that seedy, deer-head-wearing demographic of its user base.

As interviewed by the New York Times’ Bits Blog, 17 year old Andrey Ternovskiy from Moscow says he created Chatroulette for himself and his friends. Tired of talking to each other on Skype, his idea to connect randomly with strangers manifested itself in the current phenomenon.

Apple has not only the best tech support, it also has the best customer loyalty engagement, according to independent reports by Consumer Reports and BrandKeys that each place Apple at the top of the list.

According to cnet’s Jim Dalrymple, Consumer Reports rated Apple’s laptop support 86 out of a possible 100, twenty-three points higher than the next best, Lenovo.

Apple scored an 87 for desktop support. The separation between the Cupertino-based company and followers in this category was even wider: the next best was Dell, with 55 points.

Apple was also tops in brand loyalty for several categories on Brandkey’s 2010 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Apple was named the top brand in laptops and smartphones, and the Apple Air was ranked seventh in the netbook category.

The iPhone was BrandKey’s Customer Loyalty Leader in 2009, topping a list of 440 brands. In 2008, the leader was Google, whose brand has become a few shades darker in the past two years.

Obviously, topping Brandkeys and Consumer Reports’ lists is interrelated. Apple has long been lauded for its tech support, and while Apple’s reliability might not be as important part of the brand’s image as it was in the pre-iPod/iPhone days, it is still one of the core drivers of brand engagement.

A survey by Guardian Analytics and the Ponemon Institute of over 500 U.S. executives and business owners from small and medium businesses (SMBs) finds that banks are failing to protect this segment from online fraud.

“The survey data proves that financial institutions are failing to protect the small and medium businesses that are at the heart of our economic recovery,” said Terry Austin, CEO, Guardian Analytics.

Guardian Analytics sells fraud-protection software, so the numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. But they’re still an interesting benchmark of small-businesses’ level of confidence in online banking.

Fifty-five percent of respondents experienced fraud attacks in the last 12 months, and 58 percent of those were due to online banking. In 87 percent of the fraud cases, banks were not able to fully recover the funds.

In 57 percent of the cases, small businesses were not fully compensated for their losses, and 26 percent of the time they weren’t compensated at all. In 80 percent of the cases, banks were not able to identify the fraud until after the funds had left the bank.

These numbers need to be improved to retain small-business customers, forty percent of whom change banking institutions after a fraud incident.

“MBs are fed up with the banks that are leaving them vulnerable to fraud and not reimbursing them when they are attacked,” Austin said. “Banks that do not improve their fraud prevention practices will lose customers and hurt their own recovery.”

The study also says that banks are not being transparent enough with their small-business customers about their security policies.

“Ultimately the data points to the need for banks to evolve their definition of reasonable security and proactively invest in process and technology to better protect their online banking customers,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute.

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.

Apple has patented technology to make the iPhone unlock doors. The iKey.

To unlock a door with the iKey, users would enter a PIN code and then wave the phone in front of an NFC reader installed next to the door. As an additional security layer, the phone itself would be used to identify the users.

According to the Telegraph, the technology will be included in the next generation of iPhones.

The iKey could be great way down the line, but as with anything NFC, there needs to be sufficient readers in the ecosystem to make something like this really work. With an ecosystem in place, though the iKey would be a wonderful convenience.

But until there’s any sort of ubiquity, one would imagine that users would have to have their keys with them anyway. Who wants to get locked out their house if their phone or battery dies?

The bigger news is that the patent gives clear-cut ideas of how Apple is incorporating NFC into its devices. Apple’s entry into the sector could really speed up adoption of the technology.

The facts that adoption is needed on both consumer and service ends, and that two components are required — enabled devices and dedicated readers –  pose the biggest challenge to the industry. So the fact that Apple is planning to incorporate it should be great news to NFC companies. Apple has a proven track record in changing ecosystems, and only one or two popular apps could be enough to accelerate consumer demand for NFC (or in fact create it).

The iKey patent also shows the iPhone communicating with computers, which is exciting to a lot of consumers, as streamlining the process of intra-device communication could definitely be streamlined.

In other Apple news, FBR Capital chip analyst Craig Berger has predicted that the Cupertino-based company will build 5 million iPads in the first half of 2010, saying that the rumored production delays were “a false alarm.”

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)

U.S. e-commerce will reach nearly $249 billion in revenue by 2014 at an annual compound annual growth rate of 10 percent, Forrester predicts.

2009’s U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $130 billion. Analysts predict between 8 and 15 percent growth for 2010.

Forrester predicts that, while has e-commerce matured, it will continue to drive overall retail growth.

“Much of the overall retail sector’s growth in both the US and the EU over the next five years will come from the Internet,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

“To maximize that growth, eBusiness professionals will have to help enable a multichannel strategy that responds to consumers’ increased desire to hop between the offline and online worlds and their increasing mobile and social behaviors. The retail innovators over the next five years will demonstrate customer enablement across all touchpoints, not just via a PC-based Web browser.”

The top categories for U.S. online retail, accounting for 40 percent of total sales, are apparel, footwear, and accessories; consumer electronics; and consumer hardware, software, and peripherals.

Forrester predicts that e-commerce will account for 8 percent of overall retail sales by 2014, and that 53 percent of all retail sales will be influenced by online research.

What would be interesting to see is the difference in growth between mobile and PC-based e-commerce. While consumers are slowly adopting mobile shopping, many are taking advantage of smartphones to comparison shop within brick-and-mortar stores. Forrester notes that shoppers who begin shopping online and finish in the store are less satisfied than those who do both in the store. Wonder how smartphones play into that equation?