By Eelco van de Wiel

The latest version of the Android SDK has full support for NFC functionalities.
NFC means Near Field Communication and allows mobile phones to communicate to nearby objects. Chances are that if you buy a smartphone towards the end of this year, and most certainly in 2012, it will be equipped with a NFC chip. This technological advancement introduces a new era in mobile communication as it allows mobile payments, location based mobile advertising and communication with local objects to launch a URL, call a number, open a map to a location or launch an  application. 

The NFC chip will replace all of the cards in your wallet and is expected to be the future payment medium. Google focussed their API on mobile payments and is working with MasterCard and Citigroup on a near field communication (NFC) based mobile payments system. 

Even though the technology has been around for a long time it’s only now that the large scale introduction is announced. The long delay has been a result of the economic crisis in combination with the large shifts in the operators - software - hardware powerfield. Now one of the major players, Google, included the NFC technology the technological shift finally takes place.

As happened with all previous technological developments it will take a long time for the leading design to emerge. The next period will be dominated by a power struggle among the big players in the ecommerce and payment playing field to gain the largest market share. As it took almost a decade to introduce the new PIN card in the Netherlands, it might also take as long for mobile payment to be fully supported. 

The image below shows a possible solution that uses RFID: 

ComScore has revelead the Digital Year in review edition 2010 this week. This online reading shows the most importance online trends of 2010. It is interesting to see that the time spend on Facebook became more than the time spend on sites of Google. There are more women among the 153 billion unique visitors of Facebook in 2010. Also the decline of webbased e-mail usage is a notable development. Younger consumers start using social network sites instead of e-mail.

Nevertheless, in our business the developments in mobile are the most interesting. As comScore states: “2010 was a year of undeniable progress in the mobile arena”. In the US 47% of the mobile subscribers were connected to the internet and 36,4 percent of the US subscribers used their mobile browser. The smartphone market grew to a share of 27% of all US mobile subscribers. The leading manufacturer in the U.S.A. stayed RIM (the developer of Blackberry), closely followed by Google and Apple. Especially interesting is the progress of Google’s OS Android. They gained 23,5 percentage points of market share in the last year (!).

The conclusion of comScore gives some insight in the future of retailing:

“As an advertising medium, the online channel also continues to be an important driver of offline buying, so marketers in all industries must not only have an online presence but understand how it drives both online and in-store purchase behavior” (comScore, 2011)

“One can expect to see continued growth in the use of mobile devices to obtain real-time price and product information in support of an intended in-store buying decision and the likelihood that information in support of an intended in-store buying decision and the likelihood that the information obtained will drive some of that buying activity to actually occur online” (comScore, 2011).

This clearly gives an overview of the development currently being researched by Bizzsms. Soon the findings of this research will be posted to this blog.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_US_Digital_Year_in_Review

By Eelco van de Wiel

Two mayor players in online retail have initiated a mobile application for price comparison. In November 2010 Amazon launched a new price comparison app for mobile phones (Business week, 2010). Before also Ebay noted the importance of mobile price comparison as a future growth strategy and bought the price comparison app RedLaser (ZDnet, 2010).

Business week wrote: “The idea is to boost sales by making it easier for consumers to compare prices, read product reviews and make impulse purchases wherever they are - even in a rival’s store” (Business Week, 2010b).

“Mobile represents an enormous opportunity for retailers (…..) If you’re a pure-play e-commerce company, you want people to go to these stores and pull out their app and get a better price,” said Dave Sikora, chief executive officer at Digby.

The first results from a research of Eelco van de Wiel (Bizzsms) of Tilburg University about the effects of mobile price comparison apps on offline retailers shine a differentlight on this case. The research was conducted among over 125 people from the Netherlands using an experimental research design. The participants were asked to buy a TV and were currently visiting a store where the TV was available. The research had three steps in which the participants were presented: 1) Just the price, 2) A mobile app (simulation) with only price comparisons, 3) A mobile app (simulation) with mobile price comparison and retailer service quality indicators based on reviews. Five Local retailers were listed in the mobile app in four conditions, 1) Low price, Low quality 2) High price, low quality, 3) Low price high quality and 4) High price, low quality. Low quality or low price had rank 2/5 and high quality or high price had rank 4/5.

The main findings of the research:

• People with the mobile app available search more for prices and are therefore more price sensitive 
• When the price is high the purchase intention is lower (also with high service quality) than without the application 
• When people use the mobile app with only the price comparison there is less purchase intention in the specific store for both the low and the high price condition 
• There is a significant difference between the purchase intention with service quality indication in comparison to the condition without service quality indication. 
• The purchase intention is significantly lower when the service quality is low in comparison to a high service quality.  
• Service quality of the retailer has a bigger influence on purchase intention than price has in this hypothetical situation
• Al conditions except for the high quality, low price condition give a lower purchase intention. The high quality, low price condition gives no significant result. Possibly with more data the purchase intention will appear higher than with no service quality indication.

 Based on this research the implications of mobile price comparison applications on offline retailers might be huge. As the results indicate only the purchase intention of the very best option will not decrease. The price sensitivity of offline shoppers will increase tremendously bottom line resulting in only a few winners: the ones that deliver the highest quality for the lowest price . More price and quality transparency may therefore result in even more upscaling of both offline and online retailers.

Retailers should focus on delivering service quality and making that service quality publicly available using social media. Also retailers should make agreements with producers to get differentiated products for their company so people are not able to compare prices anymore. Another strategy can be to focus on less products for creating higher per product volume and deliver them at the lowest price.

It appears that now the web is evolving more and more the Long Tail paradigm, which once was a leading view that also small retailers could create an online business, is replaced by the emergence of online superpowers like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Ebay which become larger and larger and take over or defeat their smaller competitors as a result of scale economies.

Business Week (2010) Amazon.com Targets In-Store Buyers With Price-Comparison Tools. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-22/amazon-com-targets-in-store-buyers-with-price-comparison-tools.html Business Week (2010b)

Best Buy, Amazon.com Try to Reach Shoppers Through Their Phones. Business week news. 2 December 2010 Bloomberg. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-02/best-buy-amazon-com-try-to-reach-shoppers-through-their-phones.html

ZDNet (2010) eBay acquires barcode scanning app for iPhone. 23 Juni 2010. Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ebay-acquires-barcode-scanning-app-for-iphone/36235 

The beta version of the mobile website of Safmarine was launched. During the last months Bizzsms has worked closely together with Safmarine and IT company IBM to create the mobile website. During Januari the broad customer base of Safmarine can test the webapplications available at the mobile website. 

The mobile website is available at http://m.safmarine.com

Even though this talk is not directly in the field of mobile communications and mobile marketing, it gives a clear view of the future of the internet of things. Very inspiring and interesting! 

The talk is about the convergence between technology and biology posing possibilities to program cells and use them as future computers. 

Google earns over 1 billion dollars from mobile platforms in 2010.

“Mobile is on an annualized run rate of over $1 billion. This means the people who are accessing our products and services through their mobile phones are adding a $1 billion annually to our existing revenue streams. Clearly, this is the future of search in the Internet, more people in more countries coming online from these smartphones. Our mobile search queries have grown five times over the past couple of years. And of course, a lot more of those queries are now coming from Android phones.”

According to a Gartner research Android will have a market share of 30% (currently 18%) at the end of 2014 and becomes market leader. 

Data from a new consumer adoption survey sponsored by ScanBuy indicates mobile barcode scanning is up a whopping 700% in 2010 in the USA.Though still a concept that’s mostly reserved for early adopters, mobile barcodes are beginning to make their way into the mainstream.

In Japan barcodes are already mainstream: 86% of consumers scan four or more times a month, 81% of consumers scan for discounts and coupons, 67% scan to navigate to a website rather than typing the URL, 52% scan ads seeking more information and 39% scan to win prizes.

QR codes have an error correction included in the code. This gives the possibility to change the QR code without ruining the contents. For one customer, Bizzsms created this QR Code which has a pepper included in the image. This QR code draws even more attention from the viewer!

Canadian Nuevo Watches offers virtual tryvertising to home shoppers using their mobile phone.

Compatible with the iPhone and the 4th generation iPod touch, the Nuevo app lets users try on and select watches in the Neuvo watch collection without physically touching them. 

This is a simple and effective example of  augmented reality and a nice way of integrating mobile apps in marketing strategy. How about a virtual fitting room for large fashion houses?