New Mobile Retail Initiatives

Mobile provides huge opportunities for retailers. It is great to see that the NRF (National Retail Federation) is looking to encourage mobile services with its member retailers. For more information about the Mobile Retail Initiative, visit www.nrf.com/mobile

Morgan Stanley's Data Dump on Mobile Internet

Morgan Stanley has recently completed a comprehensive report on the Mobile Internet. They have done an impressively exhaustive analysis of various aspects of the market, technologies and vendors. Unlike most of the reports that are done by research firms, you can actually get your hands on much of the information for free. Here is link http://bit.ly/70JtbM to their 92 page summary of the findings. If you have the inclination one can also download a more exhaustive presentation with over 600 slides.

There are some good stats and useful forecasts, especially if you are concocting a business plan for VCs. No doubt these figures will be used to drive many optimistic forecasts for the mobile internet market. Given these projections, one can understand the thinking behind the $275 million paid to Quatro Wireless by Apple or the $600 Google is shelling out for AdMob. Hope this will drive lots more investment in good ideas in the space.

Optimizing Mobile Retail Sites

Gomez Advisers provides their perspective on how retailers need to optimize evaluate the performance of their mobile sites in the recent Mobile Marketer. Gomez is very experienced in the field of analysis of web site performance and relates many of the traditional evaluation criteria to the mobile web. http://bit.ly/589QFt

I agree that these criteria are important. However, the first step is getting retailers to actually create mobile sites that provide value to consumers, engage them and get them to return. Further, for those retailers that actually have mobile web properties, where is the promotion? Do customers know they exist? What is the clear use case for consumers to go to those sites.

Just translating existing web to mobile is not enough. We hear great examples like eBay. Other retailers need to invest the time and energy to find their benefits to consumers. Focusing on page load times and other quantitative measures are only relevant when we know what that information value is to consumers. First focus on making the experience and information useful.

NY Times Picks up on Mobile in Retail

Want to make your local department store nervous. Just pull out your phone while in the shopping isle. Using cell phones to do price comparison is not new but it is notable that the NY Times has added their ink to the other media channels. http://bit.ly/7UuwTw

Saving money shopping is a compelling mobile use case. Mobile applications like ShopSavvy are allowing consumers to dis-intermediate retailers right in their own stores. Shoppers are going to increasingly seek information via their mobile. The only question is, what sources are they going to use to get the information? Retailers should be looking for ways to better support shoppers than letting them turn to pure price comparison tool. Thus, it is critical for retailers to provide the mobile tools to support consumers so that they can gain control within their own stores.

We are starting to see retailers adopt their online stores to mobile phones. While a step in the right direction, there are more innovative ways to leverage the capabilities of the phone and consumers' shopping behavior. Case in point check out Sears new mobile application. http://promomagazine.com/news/sears-products-search-app-1217/

Android Fragmentation, Android was supposed to solve this!

When Android was ceremoniously announced in 2007 it was presented as a solution to the fragmentation of mobile operating systems that plagues developers, drives up deployment costs and seriously reduces potential reach of applications. At the time I viewed this claim with some skepticism. After all, who was going to leave the game? Would for example, Microsoft, Symbian, or Java bow out due to Android. We are seeing some shift in this direction, for example vendors such as Motorola are embracing Android in lieu of other O/S they used to push. Thank god in the case of Motorola, given that in my experience they had done an exceedingly poor job with Symbian UIQ on the ROKR, and had a weak J2ME implementation. Their phones always looked cool but often at the expense of a platform that could support good applications. The Droid seems to show a direction that will hopefully turn the company's handset futures around.

On the other hand, the launch of Android did not stop Palm from introducing their new phone with a proprietary O/S or Samsung's recent announcement of Bada. What is a developer to do?
In many cases the approach is to retreat to the smart phones and focus just on iPhone and Adroid. Apple has done a great job of not fragmenting their own O/S efforts thus keeping the market easy for developers to reach.

Look at this news from Android about the current fragmentation of the Android O/S, http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/12/knowing-is-half-battle.html . On the surface it might seem hypocritical given that Google claimed that they would solve this problem across the market with Android, and they are having some trouble keeping their own house in order. However, Google is taking a far more open and developer friendly approach than would be experienced developing across multiple revs of Symbian, or J2ME. As more devices come to the market, it will be telling to see how the open source approach of Android, and the inherent ability for handset manufacturers to customize the O/S serves developers. Will Android, Google's self described savior of mobile developers prove to be that or will we see additional fragmentation that brings even more headaches.