Mobile Groove

What would the world be like without texting? We send about 20 billion texts a day and rely on these little messages to share, learn, amuse, vote and respond. 20 years ago, Neil Papworth an engineer with the Sema Group sent the first text to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone. After an estimated 40 trillion texts later, a world without texting would be less fun. The modern equivalent of morse code has expanded the opportunity to quickly and inexpensive share news, deals and sometime lifesaving information. A…

A hefty slice of the Thanksgiving holiday shopping pie came from smartphone-only mobile commerce, with an estimated increase of 221% over last year. This is according to Branding Brand, a mobile commerce platform that singles out smartphone-optimized website traffic. Looking at data from 66 mobile sites for retailers like Costco, Crate and Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods, Branding Brand found that Thanksgiving Day visits were up 103% – resulting in over 3 million visitors, nearly 3…

You say tomato, I say tomoto goes the old refrain. We are seeing similar disagreement among research firms over not only how to define “mobile payments” but also on the forecasted size of mobile payment transactions. For the past 10 years, “mobile commerce” was the most popular term that most people used to describe any transaction using their phones. Recently, this term has been overtaken by both “mobile payments” and “mobile shopping.” Another term is “mobile proximity pay…

eMarketer has forecasted the growth of the US mobile payments transactions over the next four years. They believe that the annual mobile payments transactions value will increase from approximately $640 million this year to a whopping $62 billion by 2016. That is an average increase of about 230 percent or total growth of 9,600 percent over the next four years. The number of mobile payment users will increase by 6x to 48 million while average annual spending per user will increase by 20x to $1,294. T…

Facebook has certainly been no stranger to public relations debacles over the past few years for their cavalier regard to their users’ privacy and permission. Recently, the FTC announced a settlement with Facebook that forces the social networking giant to undergo privacy audits for the next 20 years and being on a sort of “privacy probation.” Seeing the breadth violations in one list is stunning; from giving user information to advertisers and 3^rd party apps to saying that information th…

Smartphone penetration is fueling mobile ad budgets as brands grasp the opportunity to engage, interact and drive results further down in the purchase funnel. In the U.K., for example, where smartphone penetration is now nearly 60 percent, the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) reports that mobile advertising is on a “meteoric rise,” growing 132 percent to reach GBP 181.5 million in the first half of 2012. It now accounts for 7 percent of all digital ad spend.

This dovetails with new …