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5 Major Benefits Of Mobile Payments (American Express OPEN Forum)
Here are five ways offering a mobile payment to your customers will help you increase sales:
- Integrate and increase incentive programs
- Ability to offer credit card payments
- Track customer trends and inventory
- Increase speed of checking customers out
- Save money on credit card fees
Since mobile payment programs are relatively inexpensive and don’t require sophisticated technical knowledge to implement, small businesses should be quick to adopt the new technology.
Enterprise Mobility And The Art Of The Possible (Read Write Web)
The key to enterprise mobility is getting past the quagmire to the art of the possible. The three biggest hurdles that enterprises face in creating internal mobile solutions, include:
- How to secure devices and data
- How to create solutions across multiple smartphone platforms and operating systems
- How to connect everything (back-end systems, cellular connections etc.).
So what is the art of the possible? In this context, the possible is not the current landscape that enterprises find themselves but rather the next step where companies fully harness the capabilities that smartphones can offer. Most enterprises are just trying to catch up to the transformation that mobility has brought. The companies that can quickly iterate through the current obstacles and move onto creating dynamic new functions will be the ones that will reap the benefits.
Native Apps Vs. Web Apps: The Publisher Debate Continues (Read Write Web)
Here is the catch with apps: They are expensive to develop. But the mobile web is no picnic either and can be limiting. So publishers have to consider both. Engagement is the primary difference in how users will interact with brands between the mobile web and native apps. If users navigate to your publication through a mobile browser, they are likely looking for timely, topical information. People are on the go and are not consuming content in large doses as they would when sitting at a computer. Yet, if consumers become engaged and loyal to a brand, they are more likely to download (and possibly pay) for an app. The wrong choice when deciding on how to approach mobile content delivery is to try and force a traditional media strategy into the mobile environment.
HTML5 Vs. Apps: Why The Debate Matters, And Who Will Win (BI Intelligence)
A recent report from BI Intelligence explains the difference between HTML5 and apps and what that will look like for consumers, developers, and brands. Here's why the Apps-vs-HTML5 debate matters:
- Distribution
- Monetization
- Platform power and network effects
- Functionality
So, which will win? Native apps or HTML5? Access the full report here.
1 Billion People Still Don't Have Mobile Phones (ITU via Daily Mail)
According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), 6 billion people (or six out of seven of the world’s population) had a subscription to a mobile phone by the end of 2011, an increase of 600 million from 2010. That means that 1 billion others still do not. And about a third of the world’s population (or 2.3 billion) does not have access to the internet. Generally, there has been an increase in people using mobile phones worldwide as the number of people acquiring mobile phone subscriptions has risen sharply in recent years with developing countries seeing a double-digit growth in 2011. The use of mobile broadband grew by 78% in developing countries and 40% across the world. Bottom line: Mobile is a massive market.
Mobile Statistics 2011 (Pingdom via WriteMania)
In echoing the sentiment above, here are some more interesting mobile statistics prepared by Pingdom. The company relied on dozens of sources that came to 8 statistical rankings:
- 1.2 billion is the number of Mobile Broadband subscribers around the world
- 5.9 billion is the estimated number of mobile phone numbers subscriptions around the world
- 85% of the phones that are shipped around the world for the year 2011 have the application of the internet
- 88% is the percentage of internet data transfer, which was used by Apple’s iPad device compared to the rest of other tablet devices during last December
It's interesting to see that there are also more mobile phone subscribers than email subscribers.
Social And Mobile: Two Defining Trends (BI Intelligence)
Social and mobile transformed the Internet as we knew it. And the two trends are fast becoming inextricable. In BI Intelligence's Social and Mobile: Two Defining Trends, we look at:
- The continued shift of social networking to mobile.
- How smartphones compound the difficulties of advertising on social networks.
- The potential of social commerce and social discovery applications.
- The players who have the early lead in monetizing social-mobile media.
BI Intelligence's Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget presented this deck at our recent Social Media ROI event. The slides update our last report on mobility and social networks.
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