Best Buy » mobilegroove

In brief: Regular columnist and contributor Jim Levey looks at the battle brewing in the living room. Cable companies, telcos or Internet giants – who will control (and monetize) our content experiences? Look for companies that successfully wield personalization and recommendation technologies to deliver content we appreciate and advertising we accept to be in the winner's circle. Imagine a living room where a large flat screen wirelessly attached to a set top box hangs from the wall. You enter a personal code into the set top box that recognizes your profile; the screen welcomes you to a portal where there are no channels only menus with links to personalized content and apps that range from social networking to commerce to premium content and entertainment. A blinking icon reminds to you to record Wimbledon while an ad from Wilson invites you to view their latest rackets. As you click the record button, you slide out the keypad on your remote and navigate to the Wilson site where you purchase a new tennis racket. Payment for the racket is included in your monthly cable invoice. Sounds like science fiction? Hardly. We are on the cusp of next generation iTV (interactive television), services that will elevate our viewing experience. Advertising will also be transformed, paving the way for two-way communications that enable brands to target households according to key demographics and other information collected by the set top box (STBs). Mobile devices, widely regarded to be the remote control of our digital lives, will surely play an important role in this scenario. (Mobile already has a central spot if we consider how people reach to their phones to cast their vote for talent shows, follow sports and read the gossip during soap operas.) The promise of being able to access the wide open Internet and everything in between on your TV may be a while away, but the battle for the living room, the one that will decide who monetizes our content consumption and who cashes in on the commercial messages we consume, is being fought now. Best positioned in my view are the cable companies, who have the trump because they own the signal into the home and have a trusted relationship with subscribers. They also benefit from established business partnerships with broadcast and cable network programmers, that receive billion-dollar fees for entertainment content. But there are other players lining up to stake their turf.

ARPU FIGURES DON’T GIVE AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF INDIVIDUAL SPENDING, says a new report from Wireless Intelligence, because of the proliferation of multiple connections per user. For instance, in North America, the reported penetration rate is 92 percent, but when you take out multiple connections with the same user, the real rate is just 71 percent. Consequently, spending per user is $64 per month, rather than the reported $51. In Western Europe, the per user figure is €33 per month, while the per connection rate is €23. Source The bottom line: The ARPU metric has been under fire for some time, not least because it only looks at revenues, and says nothing about profitability. Consumers having multiple connections is a trend that will proliferate, as more users get 3G dongles, e-book readers and other types of connected devices. This trend could accelerate the move towards another key metric in the industry. *** MOBILE MAPPING GROWING, BUT PC SITES STILL RULE, according to ABI Research. The firm says that internet mapping sites will get 440 million monthly visitors next year. ABI has also noted that while big names like Google, Mapquest, Sohu and Baidu currently dominate the mapping space, more and more players, such as navigation vendors like TomTom and NAVTEQ, and even mobile companies like Nokia, are launching their own navigation sites. Source The bottom line: Expect mobile use to fuel the next stage of growth in mapping services, as more and more devices get GPS functionality, making maps so much easier to use, and mobile mapping applications improve. PC mapping isn’t going anywhere, but mapping on the mobile makes much more sense in many scenarios. This calls into question the need for standalone GPS units – which is why GPS vendors are pushing hard into the mobile space.