O'Reilly On The Killer Business Model of the Mobile World
February 17, 2010
E-commerce is the killer app of the phone world. Anyone whose business is now based on advertising had better be prepared to link payment and fulfillment directly to search, making buying anything in the world into a one-click purchase. Real time payment from the phone is in your future.
via The Convergence of Advertising and E-commerce – O’Reilly Radar.
What it means: Tim O’Reilly posits that the future killer business model of a mobile universe is e-commerce. I agree that a mobile device is much more conducive to “action” vs. branding. This means companies that have built solid businesses on directional advertising (coupons, Yellow Pages, Google Adwords, etc.) are better positioned to monetize mobile. Business models need to evolve in the direction of actual actions or transactions though. Pay-per-call, reservations, entering a store (via check-ins?), actual sales will rule the mobile world.
The Next Developer Land Grab: The Kindle?
January 22, 2010
Amongst rumors of the impending arrival of the Apple Tablet, Amazon announced this week that they’re opening the Kindle, their famous e-reader, to external application developers. Techcrunch is not impressed and says ”If you are going to try to steal Apple’s thunder just before its big Tablet announcement, you are going to have to do a little bit better than E-Ink Sudoku” but a lot of people are drinking the Apple kool-aid before even seeing a product…
As for the size of the installed base, Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet thinks Amazon has sold approximately 1.5 million Kindles so far.
What it means: I think it’s important news. When new “platforms” open up to developers, it’s the first ones in that get the biggest bang for their development efforts. I would suggest to everyone currently involved in mobile applications to sign up for the Kindle dev kit. There are probably interesting hybrid print/online applications that can be deployed on the Kindle (I’m looking at you directory publishers…). You can sign up for the development kit here.
Developer Creates Nokia N900 Mapping App Using Praized API
January 13, 2010
The nice thing about having a public API at Praized Media is that people are using it to do all sorts of great “local” projects. Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, a developer from Montreal (Canada) just launched the first version of a mapping application called “Map Buddy“ for the Nokia N900 device using the Praized API.
He writes about his experience building the application on his blog:
Well, I finally got my hands on a N900 (given as a Christmas gift by Collabora to Gabriel). This gave me the occasion to observe first hand that the Ovi Maps, while having a lot of features, is slow and that the Hildon Emerillon port is less than perfect. It is hard to use with fingers and feels alien to the platform.
To solve this, I created Map Buddy: a map application specifically designed for Maemo 5. It is quite simple to use and works out of the box (no configuration or selection of plug-ins required!). It also has something other apps don’t: it uses web-services to provide business search capabilities.
You can download the app here.
On a related note, the Ovi Store just went live on the N900.
Tombstones and Mobile Phones
January 8, 2010
This video shows an interesting use of mobile phones in Japan. By embedding a QR code in tombstones, visitors can use their mobile phone to access additional information about the deceased. These stones are made by Ishinokoe.
(sent to me by Pascal Cardinal)
What it means: mobile + physical objects can lead to interesting, think-out-of-the-box ideas. I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of future “local” innovation.
Osama Bedier from Paypal on E-Commerce, Money and Micropayments
December 10, 2009
Osama Bedier, Vice President of PayPal Platform and Emerging Technology, was interviewed by Om Malik on the second morning of the LeWeb conference to talk about the world of e-commerce, money and future Paypal projects.
- In the history of the world, there’s been five major shifts in the way we pay: barter, coins, paper, credit cards, digital.
- Removing friction has been the objective in that evolution.
- If the future of money is digital, it means it’s fully connected and personal.
- Paypal is the first method of payment that was born with the digital age.
- Paypal moves 70B$ worth of e-commerce (out of a total of $350B).
- As they look forward, Paypal wants to go after all the money that’s being spent today ($30 trillion).
- Paypal has recently launch Paypal X to open their payment platform to developers.
- Visa/Mastercard are partners, not competitors to Paypal. 50% of Paypal’s transactions go to credit cards. The enemy is paper money.
- Innovation will be increased flexibility in paying and micropayments
- On micropayments, they have a lot of plans for 2010. Bedier didn’t want to share too much but he suggested the following: Paypal has 200M accounts across the world. They know quite a bit about the credibility of these accounts. They’ve earned credibility. Paypal should allow them to do small payments. Details next year…
- They just signed a partnership with Philipps, the television manufacturer, to enable payments on your TV. Why? Because televisions are platforms.
- From a social network point of view, Paypal is seeing growth of 20% month over month in payments there. They think it’s a huge opportunity. A lot of of those payments are around gaming and some are for dating sites but it’s slowly making its way to commerce.
- Payments + social is the future and the line between online and offline commerce is blurring and it’s driven by smart phones.
Marissa Mayer On Recent Google Innovations and Newspapers
December 10, 2009
In the most-awaited session of the afternoon of Day 1 at LeWeb, Michael Arrington (from TechCrunch) sat down with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience at Google to discuss a series of hot topics like recent Google innovations, mobile and the newspaper industry.
On recent innovations:
- Mayer says Google is focused on future of search and they expect different modality of search, not just through keywords. That’s why they launched Google Goggles this week which is basically image recognition (you take a picture and Google tells you what it is). See this example. They also expanded voice search to Japanese and added the “What’s nearby” mobile functionality. Mayer thinks that people will eventually talk to their phone or take a picture to make a search. They also added real-time results (from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) to regular search results, which drastically increases the relevancy of Google search results.
- On Google Chrome, she mentioned the release of Chrome Extensions which allows anyone to add functionalities via plugins in the Chrome browser (like Firefox). She said there are “tens of millions of Chrome users”.
- On Google Wave, Arrington stated “there’s something there” but wondered if we needed more “training”. I think most people are unsure of the value of Wave today and that’s why the Techcrunch founder asked the question.
On mobile searches:
- Mayer says they’ve grown tremendously on smart phones. Asked by Arrington if their total share of mobile searches over total searches was in the 1 to 5% range, she answered “slightly higher than that”.
On newspapers:
- Arrington started by saying we all understand the dire situation of print media and mentioned Eric Schmidt recent vision piece in the Wall Street Journal. He then asked Mayer: “What’s your vision?”. The VP from Google answered with a question: “how do you get users more engaged with news online?” She continued by stating that if we could build a news site from scratch today, it would probably look very different than what we have today. She then mentioned The Living Stories experiment they’re doing with the New York Times and the Washington Post. “What if the story was alive? Not just the print version posted online.” She added that the Web ”puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. The article is the atomic unit.” She then suggested we could aggregate all news story on the same topic on one page, like Wikipedia, to help with discovery in Google.
- She closed that topic by suggesting “personalized stream of news”, probably on your mobile phone, would be interesting. The stream would be filtered according to your social circle, location, the news brands you like, the writers you like, and the important news you should know about (she called them “veggies”).
- Asked if newspapers will move fast enough, she thought so and mentioned the New York Times and Washington Post are very progressive partners and very interested on how they can reinvent themselves.
- On Murdoch, Mayer mentioned the partnership with MySpace. Asked if she thought News Corp would pull their content from Google, she answered ”I hope not” as it would impact comprehensiveness of their results set. She added ”we have to respect the content owners. We would respect his will.”
- Finally, Arrington asked if Google would consider paying for content, Marissa Mayer proposed that they already have programs for content monetization through Google Adsense and their display ads network.
See more on Techcrunch.
TellMeWhere: Europe's Foursquare?
December 8, 2009
This morning, I had the chance to sit down with Gilles Barbier, CEO and co-founder of TellMeWhere (Dismoiou in French), a Paris-based European social Yellow Pages service. As with any ratings/reviews service, people can find places (see Le Louvre profile page for example), read the basic information, see the map and pictures, rate/comment on the place, see what others have said and discover related places. So far, although well executed, it’s not very different feature-wise than a lot of ratings/reviews sites like Yelp or Qype.
Mobile as a differentiator
Where it gets really interesting is with their iPhone application (they also have an Android one). The beautifully designed (both from a user interface and user experience) app is where the rubber really hit the road for the young startup founded three years ago. Launched in July, the mobile version has been downloaded more than 400,000 times (on a total of 2 million iPhones in France).
Features include:
- Location-based business search
- Ability to rate/comment places and broadcast your comment on Twitter/Facebook
- See feedback from other users and your friends
- See recommendations based on your tastes
- Great integration of Facebook Connect with instant account creation based on your Facebook information
- Push of your activities to your friends’ phone and possibility for your friends to answer you back via SMS
- Integration with Google Maps
- Integration with the iPhone camera allowing users to take a picture and upload it right away to the place profile page
The release of their iPhone application has created a lot of user traction. Barbier asked me to pick a small town in France just to prove the breadth of usage. I chose Venasque, a small 1000-inhabitant village in Provence where I stayed last spring. I think there are only a dozen businesses in the village. TellMeWhere had two votes in their system. They even had a few activities in smaller towns in Canada. And now they’re on the verge of releasing version 2.0 of their mobile application of the iPhone and it will include check-in functionality (like Foursquare) and an activity stream of everything your friends are doing to enable real-time discovery. You can see a video of the new application here.
Barbier shared with me that they’ve now realized their mobile applications (built in-house) have become strategic for the small 7-employee company. The combination of mobile + local + social (utilizing an existing identity system like Facebook Connect) is a winning formula.
Mobile will be disruptive
And this is where, in the future of local search, mobile wins (as opposed to the Web). I finally see the light and now realizes that mobile will probably be the great disruptor it was always supposed to be. Why? Because, as Barbier said, mobile usage is real. It’s grounded in real life, with your day-to-day local usage and your social graph. That’s how you build usage. In web-based local search, it’s all about search engine optimization (SEO) these days as it’s very expensive to build new brands. It’s traffic coming from Google and other search engines from users with little loyalty. And with the Mountain View goliath hosting more and more content on their own site, I suspect that strategy will soon go off its rails.
Real-time business model
As for TellMeWhere’s business model, they’re monetizing using “special offers”. Merchants can claim their listing and submit deals/coupons/special offers (the best way to monetize real-time local as I’ve often said). It’s a pay-per-action model (or as Barbier coined it “pay-per-visit) where merchants only pay when the user displays the coupon on their phone on location. With geo-location, it’s easy to verify if the user was really on premise or not when he displayed the coupon. Barbier told me he can charge 4 euros to restaurants each time someone uses a coupon. Sounds like a good model.
I think TellMeWhere has everything to become Europe’s Foursquare. The application is beautifully executed and is easy to use. Current usage seems to show a very positive trend. They have traction in France and other francophone countries and want to go after the rest of Europe and the English-speaking world. You should definitely check out their iPhone application if you want to see a great social/local mobile app.
Update: Gilles Barbier tells me version 2.0 of his application has been approved by Apple and is now available for download.
TellMeWhere: Europe's Foursquare?
December 8, 2009
This morning, I had the chance to sit down with Gilles Barbier, CEO and co-founder of TellMeWhere (Dismoiou in French), a Paris-based European social Yellow Pages service. As with any ratings/reviews service, people can find places (see Le Louvre profile page for example), read the basic information, see the map and pictures, rate/comment on the place, see what others have said and discover related places. So far, although well executed, it’s not very different feature-wise than a lot of ratings/reviews sites like Yelp or Qype.
Mobile as a differentiator
Where it gets really interesting is with their iPhone application (they also have an Android one). The beautifully designed (both from a user interface and user experience) app is where the rubber really hit the road for the young startup founded three years ago. Launched in July, the mobile version has been downloaded more than 400,000 times (on a total of 2 million iPhones in France).
Features include:
- Location-based business search
- Ability to rate/comment places and broadcast your comment on Twitter/Facebook
- See feedback from other users and your friends
- See recommendations based on your tastes
- Great integration of Facebook Connect with instant account creation based on your Facebook information
- Push of your activities to your friends’ phone and possibility for your friends to answer you back via SMS
- Integration with Google Maps
- Integration with the iPhone camera allowing users to take a picture and upload it right away to the place profile page
The release of their iPhone application has created a lot of user traction. Barbier asked me to pick a small town in France just to prove the breadth of usage. I chose Venasque, a small 1000-inhabitant village in Provence where I stayed last spring. I think there are only a dozen businesses in the village. TellMeWhere had two votes in their system. They even had a few activities in smaller towns in Canada. And now they’re on the verge of releasing version 2.0 of their mobile application of the iPhone and it will include check-in functionality (like Foursquare) and an activity stream of everything your friends are doing to enable real-time discovery. You can see a video of the new application here.
Barbier shared with me that they’ve now realized their mobile applications (built in-house) have become strategic for the small 7-employee company. The combination of mobile + local + social (utilizing an existing identity system like Facebook Connect) is a winning formula.
Mobile will be disruptive
And this is where, in the future of local search, mobile wins (as opposed to the Web). I finally see the light and now realizes that mobile will probably be the great disruptor it was always supposed to be. Why? Because, as Barbier said, mobile usage is real. It’s grounded in real life, with your day-to-day local usage and your social graph. That’s how you build usage. In web-based local search, it’s all about search engine optimization (SEO) these days as it’s very expensive to build new brands. It’s traffic coming from Google and other search engines from users with little loyalty. And with the Mountain View goliath hosting more and more content on their own site, I suspect that strategy will soon go off its rails.
Real-time business model
As for TellMeWhere’s business model, they’re monetizing using “special offers”. Merchants can claim their listing and submit deals/coupons/special offers (the best way to monetize real-time local as I’ve often said). It’s a pay-per-action model (or as Barbier coined it “pay-per-visit) where merchants only pay when the user displays the coupon on their phone on location. With geo-location, it’s easy to verify if the user was really on premise or not when he displayed the coupon. Barbier told me he can charge 4 euros to restaurants each time someone uses a coupon. Sounds like a good model.
I think TellMeWhere has everything to become Europe’s Foursquare. The application is beautifully executed and is easy to use. Current usage seems to show a very positive trend. They have traction in France and other francophone countries and want to go after the rest of Europe and the English-speaking world. You should definitely check out their iPhone application if you want to see a great social/local mobile app.
Update: Gilles Barbier tells me version 2.0 of his application has been approved by Apple and is now available for download.
My guest post on the LeWeb conference’s blog has just been published. Titled “Why FourSquare Is Not The Next Twitter”, I explore the strengths and weaknesses of the new Silicon Valley darling that operates in the mobile local/social space. You can read it here.
