Alliance Blog Reviews

The move to trying to save more money online should come as no surprise to anyone for all the obvious reasons. With those reasons being so obvious we won’t belabor the point here (btw, for those wondering, the economy still kinda sucks). What is happening though, is the shift from the printed coupon to the online coupon is very real and is creating the same commotion in the heated online v. offline world as the news debate is. After all, many papers are clinging to the fact that their Sunday circulations remain OK because of the perceived savings offered by the coupons. NCH Marketing Services, a subsidiary of Valassis Communications is reporting an increase of 30% use in traditional coupons with an additional $600 million in savings by consumers. Unfortunately, we often measure just how hot an industry is by how many lawsuits it generates. Yahoo Finance reports : This past summer, Valassis won a $300 million verdict against News America Marketing (NAM), a subsidiary of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp. It accused the coupon powerhouse of trying to monopolize supermarket advertising. In July, following the verdict in Michigan’s Wayne County Circuit Court, NAM president Chris Mixson said the decision “rewards a company that turned to litigation as its business strategy rather than compete.” He said evidence barred by the court would have made a case that Valassis tried “to induce collusion when it announced its new pricing policy in a public investor call.” So as with most things, the offline world is busy navel-gazing in court while the online business is preparing to move in take control. While those two titans of paper coupons duke it out, another battleground is emerging. Although a study by Experian Marketing Services, a global information services company, assessed that 70% of households still clip coupons from newspapers, beleaguered print media companies are starting to lose their once tight grip on the market to online competitors. NCH says online coupon distribution rose 41% during the first 9 months of 2009 and RedPlum.com saw coupon prints from the site jump 51% so far this year. At year-end 2008, online coupons represented 4.8% of all coupons redeemed in the U.S., compared to 6.3% by mid-year 2009. I am still amazed at how slow and plodding the offline world is in most sectors when it comes to seeing the competitive threat that online services is. Hey, all of you folks in the printed coupon business here’s your wake up call. Google purchased AdMob to get into this business. And to prove they are serious Google has begun issuing 100,000 window stickers to businesses in more than 9,000 cities and towns. Each window decal has a unique bar code that can be scanned with the camera feature of most mobile devices. The code will then immediately load the browser with information about the business and allow access to related coupons and offers. You don’t need a printed coupon for that to work.

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Coupons Fast Becoming Online Faves

One of the things that bugged me about Google’s iPhone app was that clicking on a search result opened the page up in Safari. If my Twitter app can show me a web page within its own browser, why couldn’t Google figure it? Well, it finally did! The new Google Mobile App for iPhone just hit the iTunes App Store : You can also change the colors of your iPhone app, turn on improved voice searching, and, get this, the new app supports Australians! Huh? Yeah, apparently… …you can now choose your spoken language or accent. For example, if you’re Australian but live in London, you can improve the recognition accuracy by selecting Australian in the Voice Search settings. And now both Mandarin and Japanese are supported languages as well. I wonder if there’s a setting for Brits living in North Carolina–cos you all know how strange that accent sounds!

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Have a Strange Accent? There’s a Google iPhone App for That!

Google sure knows how to make an announcement. In the past 48 hours or so there have been updates to how personalization of search occurs, the unveiling of several new real-time / social / mobile features but that isn’t all the Google has decided to unleash on the market. Yesterday’s event at the Computer History Museum was the site of the real-time search announcement that pretty much took the wind out of the sails (and sales?) of other competitors’ efforts to beat Google to the real-time punch. Honestly that would have been enough to have everyone reminded of who the big dog is in the search marketing house but Google didn’t stop there. ReadWriteWeb covered the event and tells us of 5 more areas that Google announced innovations including some Android specific apps that are pretty cool. Looks like everyone including Apple has been put on warning. Near Instant Voice Recognition – Need a quick translation from English to Spanish? A new product prototype offers the ability through your mobile phone via the cloud. Look for most major language translations by the end of 2010. Customized Suggest Based on Location – When you start typing a search on your mobile application would be helpful if your location would be used to make the right suggestions? Of course. A demo of this service during the event yesterday demonstrated on one phone that believed it was in Boston and one that believed it was in San Francisco. Upon typing the letters “RE” the Boston phone suggested searches for Red Sox, the local baseball team. The San Francisco phone suggested a search for REI, the outdoor gear outfitter. Google Product Search Tied to Local Inventory – Just like it reads. Mobile product search will tell you location of a product and its availability. Near Me Now – Google.com on mobile, starting today on Android phones, will offer top-level search categories like restaurants or stores on the front page. Click that button and you’ll see the closest-by search results ranked by user rating. Google Goggles – This is pretty spectacular and I suggest you go check out the quick video here. Essentially, you may use an Android phone to conduct a search based on a picture you have taken. You can even point your phone’s camera at a store and get the name etc etc. Really cool. Of course, this is one of the more experimental products right now so there are limitations but the talk is to be able to one day take a picture of a leave and be told what tree it comes from. Neat. So what else does Google have up its sleeve? Who knows but anyone who thought that they have been sitting back watching the world go by and waiting for the search wars to begin has been mistaken.

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Even More Google Updates

I admit, I am coming at this one a little uneducated. You see I never used the Twitter mobile site until today when I even considered that it existed. With the third party apps available I just don’t think about Twitter as the place to ‘micro-blog’ but rather the act of ‘micro-blogging’. I suspect that will make sense to some and for those who get it maybe you should be just a little worried. Back to the important news at hand. The new Twitter mobile site preview was touted today on the Twitter blog . Leland of Twitter tells us Our new mobile web site is previewing today, just point your phone’s browser to http://mobile.twitter.com. Its got a great new look, and has some great new touches that will make your mobile experience on Twitter a bit more fun and a lot more helpful. Let us know if you agree and especially tell us how we can make it better. Here’s a look see. For someone like myself who is pretty committed to Tweet Deck as my third party Twittercation of choice this redesign will have little impact. I suppose it would be good to ask how many readers use the mobile Twitter site regularly. Is there anybody out there? Leland talks about the soon to be replaced version of the mobile Twitter experience as ‘m’ and seems to be trying to break the news to ‘it’ as nicely as possible. What may be a less known fact is: Lots of people access Twitter on their phones via our good ol’ mobile website, and trusty ‘m’ has been delivering tweets faithfully. However, ‘m’ doesn’t fully feel like Twitter, and could probably do a bit more things for you. ‘M’ should also be fantastically innovative — naturally the best way to do that is use our own APIs. So, the mobile team here built a brand new mobile web client from scratch, using only Twitter APIs, and we’d like to share the results with you. So it looks like ‘m’ is going to be kicked to the curb. Tossed away like so much rubbish despite the loyal and faithful work it has done in the past. So ‘m’. when your days are over I shall remember you fondly which mean much more if I had ever used you before writing this post. Anyway, good luck ol’ boy. You’re not the only one being put out of work these days.

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Twitter Mobile Gets a New Look

Is it hip to be square again? Maybe according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. His new startup, called Square , is a mobile payments (credit card processing) system that appeals to small businesses. But is he targeting the right customers? I think we’ve all heard rumors of a credit card reader for the iPhone—and this is it. A small, white plastic cube plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone or laptop (with software planned for Blackberry and Android). It scans the card, geotags the transaction and emails a receipt to the buyer. And just to be clear, Square is an app for merchants , not a way for individuals to electronically zap their bucks into the nearest Starbucks to pay for their latte. And that may be the problem, too—because the product isn’t designed for big retailers like Starbucks. Its users will be smaller vendors, “who don’t qualify for accounts with traditional credit card processors because the would be deemed ‘high risk’ by these companies,” as Read Write Web puts it. According to the CEO of competitor Billing Revolution, Andy Kleitsch, that’s not going to be enough of a market, and bigger vendors just aren’t going to be interested in the product. RWW also notes the potential for fraud: Square will also have to deal with potential fraud. While we don’t know the exact details about how Square will operate, chances are that the company will have to keep a large reserve in an escrow account with the credit card processing companies that power Square’s back-end. Anybody who sits on a pile of stolen credit cards, Kleitsch pointed out, could use Square to run up charges on these accounts. Once the defrauded credit card owners dispute these charges, Square could be left with a large bill to pay. However, one would hope they’ve taken precautions against this. While Square’s website contends that processing card payments is “difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience,” Kleitsch says that a payment terminal is typically free, with $20/month + 2% of all transactions as the monthly fee for the service. (While Square’s service is free, last time I checked, an iPhone runs $200, plus Square’s hardware investment, plus a monthly fee—AT&T’s$60 data fee. Ouch—unless you truly already need the iPhone for your business.) Although one of their examples is of a local coffeeshop (of which Dorsey is a part owner), Dorsey appears to be targeting vendors even smaller than coffeeshops as well—vendors that may or may not have brick-and-mortar establishments, like artists or flower carts (another of the examples on their site). What do you think? Does Square have the potential to take off—and if so, with small businesses or just micro ones?

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Twitter Founder Turns Square (with Mobile Payments)

It seems that it’s not just search that we see such disparity between Yahoo and Google–there’s a huge chasm between them in the mobile space too! Google, emboldened by the early success of Droid, is moving forward with plans to build its own phone. While its Android platform is powering new cell phones–such as the Droid–Google doesn’t design the actual hardware. That’s going to change early next year. TechCrunch doesn’t have any more details that what we reported a month back , but there’s plenty of speculation and rumor to share: We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung. Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google…We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January. Man, there are going to be a lot of deflated Droid owners come January, if this all comes true. Which makes me wonder if Android is so new, that users will hold back from buying a phone, until they see what new hardware is on the horizon–effectively creating a catch 22 situation. Meanwhile, back at the Yahoo batcave, Yahoo Go is being shuttered : Dear Yahoo! Go user, Yahoo! Go will be discontinued on January 12, 2010, at 12:00 a.m. PST, so that we may focus on simplifying and enhancing your future mobile Web experiences. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Yahoo! Go 2.0 or 3.0 from your mobile phone. We encourage you to visit the new mobile homepage from your mobile browser to access an even richer, more personalized Yahoo! experience. We appreciate your support and thank you for using Yahoo! Mobile services. For more information and customer support, please visit the help center from your PC. The Yahoo! Mobile team I wonder how much of a role the iPhone played in its failure. With thousands of iPhone apps available, mobile users simply don’t want a "one size fits all" approach to mobile applications. The recently launched Yahoo Mobile for Web will apparently live on.

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Google Phone is a “Go” for Launch; Yahoo Go Isn’t

We talk and think a lot about mobile marketing. But frankly, only a small proportion of cell phone users have devices that are equipped for any substantial web interfacing. But that may soon change—Nielsen predicts that smartphones will make up the majority of the cell phone market in two years. MediaPost reports that by mid-2011, half of cell phone subscribers, about 150M people, will be using smart devices. Smartphones are already showing a marked increase— Nielsen predicts that Q4 of this year will show that 40% of new phones sold are smart devices (as opposed to the Q309, slowest quarter in recent memory with smart devices accounting for only 25% of new phones). I think that smartphone adoption will be crucial to mobile marketing finally taking off in the US. The fact that most phones today are still incapable of real web browsing has contributed to the slow start to mobile marketing. I’ve been saying for years that a better web browsing experience, like that of a smartphone, is crucial to the success of mobile marketing. And Nielsen agrees: Nielsen also anticipates more users paying for video and premium content on their phones. What do you think? Will smartphones reach this much of the market in another 18 months? Will 2011 be the year of the mobile?

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Smartphones: Taking Over the World in 2011