July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mick Jagger can’t get no satisfaction, but apparently a lot of 14-year-old boys can. So too, fortunately, can Apple, Amazon, QVC, and NewEgg clients.

While Amazon took top honors in customer experience firm ForeSee’s latest mobile shopping satisfaction index and Apple came in second, the big surprise was Victoria’s Secret. The hot lingerie retailer took a top-five position for the first time. (See the full list of the top 25, below.)

So is lingerie shopping on-the-go the new new thing, I asked ForeSee chief executive Larry Freed?

“Either that or there’s a lot of 14-year-old boys on mobile devices,” he joked. ”Actually, though, we see a lot of people in-store taking pictures and sending them to a friend for an opinion, or checking size and color availability.”

Amazon also leads in online retail satisfaction, and perennially does well. Apple put in a strong showing after sliding in last quarter’s online retail numbers, and home shopping giant QVC, electronics retailer NewEgg, and — of course — Victoria’s Secret rounded out the top five.

The secret of Amazon’s success, it turns out, is fairly simple.

“Both in the web and mobile they do a great job of being focused on the customer,” Freed says. “They offer great selection with competitive — not the best, but competitive — prices.”

There’s a lesson in that for other m-commerce retailers. While overall customer satisfaction with mobile stores is getting better, retailers who want to improve their stores need to focus on four key areas: price, merchandise, functionality, and content. Price needs to be reasonable, sure, but scope of merchandise available is also an opportunity to delight customers, as too many retailers present too few of their product selection on their mobile sites. Functionality and features of your mobile store also matter (more is better, as long as usability is maintained), and accessibility to content about the products is also critically important.

[Editor's Note: Mobile commerce, and how to be more successful at it, is one of the themes of our upcoming Mobile Summit in Sausalio. Find out more here.]

And your mobile site needs to work with and be integrated into all your other channels.

“A lot of times customers are starting on the web,” Freed says. “But sometimes it’s the store. It’s worth remembering that today’s consumer is not only multi-channel but also multi-device … moving from a work computer to a home PC to a mobile phone to a tablet … and consumers expect that to be seamless.”

That’s a tough job for retailers, particularly for non-logged-in users. But as fast as mobile commerce is growing — and it does have significant amounts of growing to do — the expectations are rising even quicker, Freed says.

And what about every bricks-and-mortar retail’s favorite bugaboo, showrooming?

“It’s a glass half full, glass half empty syndrome,” says Freed. “Consumers are using a phone to get more information more often while in a store. But the challenge is to embrace showrooming … to offer a great experience in-store and a great experience on mobile so that they can negate the risk and maybe even turn showrooming into a positive.”

The top mobile retailers by customer experience, according to ForeSee:

photo credit: Ed Yourdon via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

That fancy new app the marketing department wants so you can sell more paperweights may not be your best investment. In fact, unless you’re lucky or really, really good, the app might just end up being the digital equivalent of a paperweight itself.

A new report from Research 2 Guidance says that in 2012, most online stores made less than 5 percent of their revenue via a mobile app. Fewer than a fifth made a significant percentage of their revenue from mobile — only 19 percent of companies realized more than a quarter of their revenue via their mobile shopping apps.

However, the market has some optimism that things are improving.

Of the more than 600 mobile-commerce companies surveyed, Research 2 Guidance says that almost a third of companies expect to see more than a quarter of their revenue from mobile within the next five years. And 15 percent of them plan to bring in a full half of their revenue via mobile apps.

Some very successful mobile apps generate significant revenue,  Research 2 Guidance said, but that’s not the story for most.

“Successful [mobile] commerce apps achieved download numbers of more than 2 million, but the long tale with apps that make only a few thousands downloads is long,” a company representative told me via email.

So, what is working?

Not shockingly, stores that sell virtual goods are doing well. A slice of the market makes most — if not all — of its revenue via mobile apps (see the graph above with the two short bars near the right side). Companies like Kabam or Rovio, which almost exclusively make mobile apps — generally games — and sell upgrades and virtual goods inside them, are notable exceptions to the rule.

photo credit: Stephen Poff via photopin cc

But there’s a dirty little secret that mobile commerce has been keeping. It’s slow — deadly slow.

Site monitoring and testing company Keynote tracks the speed and reliability of top U.S. e-commerce sites, and over the weekend things slowed down dramatically. Especially today, on Cyber Monday.

“The average page load time for a mobile retail site … on Cyber Monday is now slower than 18 seconds, or roughly twice as slow as normal,” Aaron Rudger, a mobile manager at Keynote, said in a statement.

Source: Keynote

Fastest mobile sites

That’s almost nine times slower than the average time on top e-commerce companies’ desktop sites: 2.27 seconds. And it’s an eternity while you’re standing there staring at your tiny screen. It’s something I’ve noticed personally even when it’s not Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and even when using fast LTE networks with an iPhone 5 or a Google/Samsung Nexus.

But there’s mobile, and there’s mobile.

Of that 16.3 percent of Black Friday commerce that came in over mobile, the lion’s share — 10 of those 16 percentage points — were purchases made on iPads. Only about a quarter of iPads are sold with cellular connectivity — most are Wi-Fi models. And only a very small fraction, about six percent, of iPad browsing sessions come over cellular networks.

All of which means that iPad numbers are very different from what we typically imagine when we think of “mobile commerce.” iPad-facilitated traffic and sales data gets lumped in with smartphones under the big tent of “mobile,” but the tablet experience of a large screen, beefy processor, and fast local Wi-Fi is very different from a tiny screen, over sometimes-jammed cellular networks, and a generally slower processor.

What that means is: mobile shopping on a phone isn’t exactly the best — or speediest — experience.

“This is quite detrimental and will certainly impact a customer’s experience negatively and can easily motivate a shopper to abandon a site altogether or go to a competitor’s mobile shopping site,” Rudger said.

The solution, according to Keynote, is better sites and better testing, especially testing under load.

Source: Keynote

Slowest mobile sites

photo credit: Michael W. May via photopin cc

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last week Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shocked the web with news that its subsidiaries Taobao (like a Chinese eBay) and T-mall (like Amazon) sold a massive $3.06 billion in product in a single 24-hour period.

Three billion dollars is almost triple the entire 2011 Black Friday sales of e-commerce sites in the United States, and this is a testament to both the growing maturity of the Chinese online market and the central position Alibaba holds in China.

So how do you do $3 billion in sales in a single day? I interviewed an Alibaba spokesperson, who preferred to remain unnamed, to find out.

Almost as many users as Twitter

First of all, it helps to have users — lots of them.

The two sites, Taobao.com and Tmall.com, share a combined user base of half a billion registered users. That’s only about 30 percent of the total Chinese population, which means that Alibaba has a long runway for continued growth as the Chinese middle class continues to grow — and suggesting that a $10 billion day is not out of the realm of possibility in years to come.

Some of the goods for sale on Taobao.

(It also means, by the way, that it might be crazy for Yahoo to sell its stake in Alibaba now. Yahoo still owns 23 percent of the Chinese e-commerce giant after pocketing $7.6 billion U.S from selling almost half its original stake. Down the road, however, it might be like owning a 23 percent of Google, or Facebook … times 10.)

Both Taobao.com and Tmall process payments via Alipay, Alibaba’s payments processor. Alipay has over 700 million user accounts, presumably all with credit card payment information, as of mid-2012.

A cultural sea change

When you’re looking to scale quickly, it helps to be a high-growth company in a high-growth industry in a high-growth country.

But while a huge number of users is necessary, it’s insufficient to generate such massive cash flow. Just as important is a change in Chinese consumer behavior toward e-commerce “increasingly becoming a primary shopping channel,” according to Alibaba. The entire industry has had double-digit growth year-over-year — since 2010 e-commerce in China has enjoyed an average 10 percent quarter to quarter growth rate — and Alibaba is outpacing the industry.

In addition to a general acceptance of e-commerce as perhaps the first option for shopping, Chinese consumers have been increasingly prone to spend big on “double sticks day,” 11/11. Also referred to as “singles’ day,” Nov. 11 has taken on a rough similarity to our Valentine’s Day. Singles try hard to not be single, couples celebrate that they are couples, and probably many more people are simply happy to dogpile any opportunity to shop big and save big, much like Black Friday in the U.S.

Stores galore

Users and demand are great, but you need supply. That is not a problem for Alibaba, as the representative said that Tmall hosts e-commerce operations for 50,000 companies, while Taobao manages online sales and payments and “several million,” most of whom are likely individuals buying and selling much as we see on eBay here.

Of those stores, 10,000 took part in the 11/11 festivities with special sales and promotions. That’s five times the number that participated just last year, which gave Chinese shoppers “access to an even wider range of products.”

Promotion helped too, Alibaba says:

“We also offered new functions, activities and games via the event landing page beginning mid-October and noticed that many online shoppers were visiting the site and browsing through participating stores and available products as well as adding products to their shopping carts.”

Let’s get technical

While I generally like to ask companies for technical details about their server setup, Alibaba was anxious not

to share too much information that might be construed as proprietary, saying only that Alibaba Cloud Computing manages all Taobao and Tmall’s infrastructure from three data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou and California.

It also preferred not to disclose what kind of servers it runs, including operating system and webserver details, but a quick search reveals that Alibaba uses Tengine for webserving, which is a 100 percent compatible fork from the increasingly popular Nginx server, and that Alibaba runs, as expected, on Linux.

Mobile buyers figured prominently in Alibaba’s monster day, with one in four Taobao users accessing the site from a smartphone or a tablet. That compares to one in six last year.

Summing up

A $3 billion day doesn’t happen all the time, even in the world’s most populous country. And it’s a huge proportion of Alibaba’s annual goal for Taobao and Tmall, which was one trillion RMB in 2012. That’s closing in on $15 billion U.S., which is serious money.

Given Alibaba’s trajectory and China’s growth, it would seem that a $4 billion or $5 billion day would not be out of the question in 2013.

photo credit: dcmaster via photopin cc, Autorun！ via photopin cc

Tomorrow, the Paris-based company that built MasterCard’s PayPass SDK and counts McDonald’s and Reebok among its mobile commerce clients will release the Airtag Kit, a full collection of everything developers need to start building mobile payment apps.

MasterCard’s PayPass technology already enables swipeless credit card use: tap the card on the reader and go. Now the credit card giant, with the help of Airtag, is extending the same technology to NFC-enabled phones.

“The Airtag kit is the second part of our partnership with MasterCard, and contains all of the hardware and software needed to build and test PayPass apps, including resources for the developer community,” Airtag chief executive Jérémie Leroyer, who has moved to the company’s New York offices, told me this morning.

The hardware in the Airtag Kit includes a Samsung Galaxy S III, a USB contactless card reader which simulates an NFC point-of-sale terminal, five SIM cards (UICCs) that include EMV chips similar to those in secure PIN-enabled credit cards, and two demo sales tags to simulate NFC-enabled merchandise. In addition, tutorials, manuals, and forums are available to help developers get started.

Source: Airtag

The Airtag mobile payments developer kit

The kit retails for $4,550, which includes one year of access to the developer program. The developer program alone is $3,250, which suggests the hardware is valued at around $1,300.

With the kit, a developer will be able to create apps for mobile payments incorporating NFC technologies, such as the capability to order online and pick-up in-store without having to use a credit card, or simply payment at point of sale. But at those prices, not every startup will be able to afford one — certainly not on Y Combinator-type money.

Whenever NFC comes up, the inevitable question also arises: What about the iPhone?

“It’s very difficult to guess what is going to be in a new version of the iPhone,” Leroyer said, accurately. “But we didn’t expect NFC in the iPhone 5 … usually what Apple does is let others go into the market, see what they’re doing, and then bring out a version of the technology a year later.”

However, Airtag likes what Apple is doing with Passbook — especially the geofencing — and uses it in the Go McDo product the company built for McDonald’s. NFC does enable better security, Leroyer told me, and the company does expect Apple to add NFC capability in iPhone’s next major iteration.

And he welcomes Apple’s entry into the market:

“NFC is very powerful, but very complex. We need players like Apple to simplify the ecosystem, and simply NFC development. That’s where we want to go, and we share this ambition with MasterCard.”

Some, including Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR and mobile payments company LevelUp, might say be careful what you wish for.

photo credit: 401(K) 2012 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For shopaholics, it’s easy to pile up credit card debt, and lose track of how much you’re actually spending. ShopVibe, a Silicon Valley-based startup launching today, was founded by two serial entrepreneurs who needed a better way to help their wives’ track their purchases.

Cofounders Ken Leeder and Sandeep Nawathe left their previous companies to build the technology that bridges machine learning and e-commerce. ”Despite consumers’ hyper-connectivity, their shopping experience is still very disconnected,” said Leeder in an interview with VentureBeat.

To make it easier for shoppers to track online and offline shopping, ShopVibe is launching with four core features: a bookmarklet to track potential purchases from any online retailer, a product card to keep a visual record of the products you buy, a QR-code enabled scanning technology for mobile, and a social feature to share favorite items with friends.

ShopVibe has positioned itself in the murky middle-ground between mobile commerce tools, social discovery sites, and bookmarklets like Wantworthy, a startup which recently pulled in funding from Google Ventures. It’s taking on an army of competitors, but the founders claim that their solution combines aspects of all these sites.

For instance, certain features are highly reminiscent of Pinterest and the Fancy. These features are designed for people who like to organize their favorites and list their aspirational purchases. On the homepage, users share items that they’re “vibing,” which is not dissimilar to “pinning” your favorites on Pinterest. ShopVibe integrates with Facebook, so you can ask friends’ for feedback.

But why “vibe” when you can “pin”? Where it gets a bit more interesting is that the founders have developed a proprietary machine-learning technology that automatically hunts for bargains when you “vibe” an item. On the backend, they are building a product database that enables ShopVibe to crawl the web for lower prices on any product while people shop and recommend similar items. Leeder said that building this smart database was their greatest technical challenge.

With this technology, ShopVibe is taking on mobile commerce darling ShopSavvy, a barcode scanning tool for in-store comparison shopping. ShopSavvy opened the playing field by convincing thousands of retailers to give up their pricing and inventory data. For this reason, ShopVibe was able to partner with 100 retail outlets in its alpha phase. While ShopSavvy focusses on the in-store experience, ShopVibe’s founders told me that mobile is not their singular focus.

ShopVibe has raised $300,000 in angel investment, and is looking to raise a seed round of funding in the coming weeks.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Physical retailers need to stop being afraid of the mobile shopping revolution and play to their strengths instead, a panel of executives told the audience at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit today.

VentureBeat brought together Google’s head of mobile Jason Spero, PayPal’s mobile head Hill Ferguson, and the founder of NeuAer Dave Mathews to discuss the current state of mobile shopping. The big takeaway for brick and mortar retailers? You may not be able to beat online stores when it comes to price, but there’s a lot more that you can offer with a physical presence.

The panelists pointed to high-end retail store experiences like the Apple Store, which offers knowledgeable sales people, the chance to try out products, and (more recently) the ability to check out directly from your phone. Google’s Jason Spero pointed out how a local store could offer additional services to make its consumers overlook higher prices, such as installation for complicated products like grills.

“I think that the definition of a retailer has to change,” Spero said.

But while bigger retailers quake in their boots over the concept of mobile shopping, the execs pointed out how smaller businesses can take advantage of newer payments technologies.

“We’re starting to see small businesses get access to technology and capabilities that are a whole generation ahead of bigger companies,” PayPal’s Hill Ferguson said.

Ferguson pointed out how mobile payments can help to attract sales in commodity products like gas. A new deal between PayPal and the gas station chain Cumberland Farms, for example, will allow customers to pay for gas from their phone. That could be a bonus for consumers during cold winter months.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Consumers shopping from mobile devices over the holidays played a significant role in record online sales. But which retailers won these mobile shoppers over with the best experiences?

Consumers were most satisfied with the shopping experiences on Apple and Amazon mobile sites or apps, according to new data released by market research firm ForeSee.

ForeSee collected data on the top 40 U.S. retailers’ websites and was able to produce statistically reliable satisfaction scores — on a 100-point scale — for 16 of the retailers’ mobile experiences. The scores are based on responses from more than 3,000 visitors to apps and mobile sites. The average satisfaction across these sites was 76 out of 100.

Apple placed first with a score of 85, and Amazon came in a close second with an 84 out 100 satisfaction score. eBay and Best Buy pulled in average scores of 77 and 76, respectively. Target, Walmart and Sears occupied the bottom rung with consumer mobile satisfaction grades teetering just above the D mark.

On the whole, consumers graded their mobile retail experiences as inferior to the experiences they have on the web.

The lesser-quality offering, however, isn’t preventing them from shopping via their mobile devices. Thirty-four percent of online shoppers used their cell phones to research products and 15 percent made a purchase directly from their device, according to ForeSee, which counts that purchase stat as an 11 percent jump from last year. The data backs up previous reports from eBay, PayPal (an eBay company) and Amazon, all of which talked up their holiday 2011 mobile sales.

But satisfaction does matter. Highly satisfied mobile shoppers said they were 54 percent more likely to consider the same company for a future similar purchase, according to the survey. They are also twice as likely to buy from the retailer’s mobile app or store again.

“The smartphone is a powerful shopping tool and a double-edged sword. Consumers will use it to research products and check a retailer’s own site while they’re in the store, but they’ll also use it to compare prices and check out the competition,” ForeSee president and CEO Larry Freed said. “The gap between mobile experience and web experience is an opportunity for retailers as much as it is a liability. We know consumer expectations will only continue to grow, and right now Amazon and Apple are setting a very high bar.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If the name “Cyber Monday” makes you think of your shameful AIM exploits in the late ’90s, a new trend may make your day.

According to data from eBay, PayPal, IBM and GSI Commerce, mobile activity spiked yesterday as early holiday shopping took off.

Traditionally, the Monday after Thanksgiving has been a heyday for online retailers. But with more and more consumers accessing the web from smartphones and tablets, a fair amount of Cyber Monday shopping is going down via mobile channels.

Today, eBay Mobile stated U.S. shoppers spent two and a half times more on the online auction and shopping site’s mobile channel than they did on Cyber Monday last year.

According to data from IBM, Cyber Monday saw an 10.8 percent in mobile visitors to ecommerce sites, up from 3.9 percent in 2010. And it wasn’t just empty traffic; mobile sales were up, too, from 2.3 percent last year to 6.6 percent yesterday.

Also, PayPal Mobile said it saw a 552 percent year-over-year increase in global mobile payment volume for Cyber Monday activity. PayPal also saw global mobile payment volume more than double (a 154 percent increase) compared to activity on an average Monday and a 17 percent increase over Black Friday 2011 activity.

And ecommerce firm GSI Commerce said its clients saw a 374 percent increase in U.S. mobile sales between Cyber Monday 2010 and yesterday.

An eBay spokesperson said the company “expects that mobile shopping will remain popular with shoppers throughout this holiday season.

“As we are apt to say, both consumers and retailers are set to benefit from the convenience provided by shopping via mobile anytime, anywhere.”

Overall, Cyber Monday sales were expected to reach a record $1.2 billion, this year, with mobile sales doubling year over year. The number of mobile shoppers rose from 3.6 million consumers in 2009 to 7.3 million in 2010 and an estimated 17.8 million this year.

“A new retail is emerging where online and offline shopping have merged due in large part to mobile technology and its continued growth,” said Steve Yankovich, eBay’s vice president for mobile, in a statement today.

“eBay… is enabling this new commerce landscape by helping holiday consumers shop anytime, anywhere, and by being the partner of choice for retailers and sellers of all sizes.”

The most popular Cyber Monday categories on eBay Mobile were Clothing, Shoes & Accessories; Computers & Networking; Jewelry & Watches; Collectibles; Toys & Hobbies; Cell Phones & PDAS; and Sporting Goods.

eBay Mobile and PayPal Mobile shoppers hailed predominantly from LA, New York, Houston, Chicago, Miami, and Athens, Georgia.

And since we know y’all want to know the Android/iOS split, here’s the skinny from IBM: The iPhone and iPad were number one and number two for driving mobile retail traffic. iPhones accounted for 4.1 percent of traffic and iPads served up 3.3 percent. Android delivered 3.2 percent.

Also, iPad shoppers, said IBM, “continued to drive more retail purchases than any other device, with conversion rates reaching 5.2 percent compared to 4.6 percent.”

Image courtesy of joshb.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile commerce in the United States will reach $31 billion by 2016, Forrester Research estimates in its latest report. But while that represents significant growth for mobile commerce, it will still remain just a tiny portion of overall ecommerce sales in 2016 and an even smaller portion of total retail sales.

Forrester says that only 2 percent of web sales (itself a tiny sliver of total retail sales) will take place on mobile devices this year, and that number will climb to just 7 percent by 2016. So, yes, mobile commerce will technically grow by 40 percent over the next five years, but it’s still far from being a leading sales driver.

What’s holding mobile commerce back? Forrester says that it doesn’t count tablet-based commerce in its mobile commerce figures, and it notes that this may be the “single biggest inhibitor” to mobile commerce growth. A future report from the company will show that most tablet owners also own smartphones, and not surprisingly, they gravitate towards their larger screened devices to shop. Forrester also notes that shopping on the Web generally ranks below activities like reading the news, and we can expect it to be even less prevalent on mobile devices.

When consumers do use their phones to shop, it’s more often to look up information for products in retail stores, or to research a purchase that will eventually be made on a computer.

While there’s plenty keeping mobile commerce down, Forrester expects it to have a big impact on retail over the next few years. “Mobile commerce will transform retail, both because the transparency of pricing will force big box stores to be much better merchants or die, and because store associates armed with mobile devices can now do everything from save lost sales, to carry a POS device in their hand,” writes Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. The best retailers, she adds, will have shoppers using their own devices to better their in-store experience.

Photo via Ed Yourdon

The Groupon Juggernaut Will Slow Down
Groupon is quickly becoming the Sarah Palin of the technology world. It has its haters (Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru), doubters (Flybridge Capital’s Jeff Bussgang) and fans (FM’s John Battelle) like the former vice presidential candidate. Everyone seems to have an opinion of Groupon, whether through their own personal experiences or spurred by a coffee talk at Coupa Café in Palo Alto. Being from Chicago, where the company is based, I wanted to be a fan, but I have strong doubts on the sustainability of its business model. It will remain successful, but will it be the next Amazon or “Google of e-commerce” as many people predict? I just don’t see it. Maybe its critical mass and huge funding rounds will sustain its market share for a couple years, but the competitive barriers of entry are too low, so I predict its revenue growth will begin to slow towards the end of 2011. A few years from now, this darling of the ecommerce space will be a fading memory.

Virtual Reality Will Be Hot Again … Thanks to Kinect
If Microsoft’s Kinect was only around during the hype of Second Life, it could have helped the struggling virtual world become a mass market player. As Kinect rockets past 8 million sold after two months, I agree with Jaron Lanier’s view that it brings us closer to a true avatar experience, which he discussed at the November 16th, 2010 TEDxSF event. The possibilities are exciting when you consider an early hack of Kinect for World of Warcraft and the variety of games we’ll see once Kinect comes to the PC.

Kinect won’t just make virtual reality hot again in 2011, but a permanent fixture in the technology landscape. Moving beyond dance and sports games, Kinect will allow for more immersive virtual worlds that were previously limited to keyboard strokes. Interactive virtual learning environments? Virtual tours of The Coliseum? With Dora the Explorer? Kids will go crazy. Virtual gladiator games? Imagine virtual dating through Kinect. Maybe go on an initial date from the safety or comfort of your home? We might be a few decades closer to a Star Trek Holodeck or X-Men Danger Room than you think.

Tablet Market Explodes
The tablet market’s already on fire, but it will continue its explosive growth. Apple’s iPad really created this market, but now everyone and their grandmother wants a tablet. Dell, Viewsonic, NEC, Toshiba … probably even Wal-mart, Disney, and McDonald’s will be coming out with their own tablets (just kidding).    The features and services will only continue to get better, whether through Apple or Google’s Android (disclosure: my wife works on the Android team; nothing related to this article was discussed with her). It will be interesting to see tablets targeting certain verticals, such as children or NFL coaches.

Mobile Commerce Poised for Takeoff in the U.S.
As a frequent visitor to Korea, I’ve been waiting for this moment in the U.S. For a few years now, South Koreans have conducted mobile commerce through USIM embedded RF (radio frequency) services on subways, taxis, fast food restaurants, and other locations. Credit card companies have over 120,000 merchant terminals (RF readers) throughout Korea. This has led to almost 60% of mobile subscribers using mobile payment services, nearly 15% conducting mobile banking, and 8% substituting it for their credit cards. The next stage is the deployment of dual USIM and NFC (Near Field Communications) chips in mobile devices, which will allow for two-way communications versus one-way. While Korea has led the way, mobile commerce is present in Japan and some European countries, but the U.S. has lagged behind.

2011 is the year the U.S. steps into the arena. Google’s Nexus S handsets all came with a NFC chip, and we can expect Apple to have NFC chips in its next-generation iPhones along with some big retail partnership announcements. RIM and others will be hot on their tails, but all this really depends on the number of merchants and big retail chains signing up for these payment services. Lastly, an x-factor and potential catalyst is the continued growth of location-based services and their convergence with commerce. Facebook, Foursquare, Booyah, and others can be huge drivers for mobile commerce’s growth in the U.S.

What are some of your predictions for 2011?  Please feel free to share them in the comment section below.

Bernard Moon is co-founder & CEO of XS Groupe, an online private sale startup. He blogs at Silicon Moon.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

[Update: Corrected to reflect exact wording of Andreessen's quote]

Marc Andreessen, partner of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is sick of carrying his wallet around. What, is all that money he made founding Netscape and Opsware and investing in startups weighing him down?

He’s waiting for the day that everything just happens through his phone, he told PayPal X Innovate 2010 attendees in San Francisco today.

The way to achieve that is to bring everything into the cloud — and PayPal, one of Andreessen’s investments, is one way to achieve that. By bringing payments to his phone, he said he hopes to finally abandon the credit card and completely shift to the cloud.

“Mobile is just the wallet you will be using,” he said. “Whether it’s a credit card, cash, PayPal, Facebook credits, whatever. It’ll be a more versatile wallet.”

Cloud computing allows mobile devices to ship all the resource-intensive data crunching off to beefy remote servers run by companies like Rackspace and Amazon to handle all the heavy-duty computing. Cloud evangelists from Andreessen to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt have led the charge to bring cloud computing usage to mobile phones.

And there’s already a big move to the cloud — he called out Spotify, an international music streaming service that isn’t available in the U.S. quite yet.

Tools from facial recognition to collaboration software like Yammer and Huddle are also making a move to cloud computing, he said. Users can thank the emergence of powerful mobile operating systems for that, he said.

“Now that phones can find out where you are, the core of the browser experience is an expectation of unlimited resources without a download process,” he said. “When I invented [the] Mosaic [Web browser], I didn’t imagine the Internet would look like this — there are no download processes and people expect phones to do everything but read their minds.”

There are still a number of companies trying to innovate outside of the mobile space — Dynamics, a VentureBeat DEMO graduate, is for example trying to bring a new spin on credit cards. Andreessen said that’s a product of having to innovate in the sector that each startup is working in. Whether products like Card 2.0 would fade away with the emergence of mobile payments wasn’t immediately clear, he said.

“Everybody has to innovate from where they sit in the value chain, card companies that want to innovate on the card are doing that,” he said. “But if you look at research, buying and paying, nowadays that often involves a couple different devices — that’s where we’re moving away from.”

With the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets, consumers will likely find themselves using those platforms more to make purchases in the future — that’s where MobiCart comes in. The UK startup is unveiling technology at the DEMO conference today to let anyone create and manage their own Web store for the iPhone, iPad, and Android. Best of all? It’s free.

MobiCart stores work as standalone applications even if you don’t have a website. If you do have a site already, you can use MobiCart’s application programming interface, or API, to update your MobiCart store from your existing site. The API allows third-party developers to extend MobiCart’s platform, and the company says it will have a marketplace available for users to find such extensions.

It’s competing most directly with the e-commerce platform Magento, but that company’s mobile offering only works with Magento-powered stores. MobiCart is more flexible since it can be used by people who don’t have websites. Magento Mobile also costs users $799, plus a $699 annual maintenance charge. MobiCart is determined to keep its app free for users, and is currently working on open-source revenue models to make money. It didn’t get into specifics, but open-source companies typically charge for maintenance and support contracts and also offer consulting and integration services, allowing them to profit from software that’s given away.

MobiCart doesn’t have any investors yet, and is currently funded by an $80,000 private loan.

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