Is Apple sniffing around m-payments with iTunes tweak?

It is certainly a happy day for those that set up MIG – I love the sound of money being trousered somewhere out there in telemedia land. I remember when the guys left O2 and set MIG up. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so it proved. Good enough for Velti to stump up the readies and build it in to its burgeoning portfolio.

And with the whiff of nostalgia swirling around me as MIG sort of leaves home, I turn my attention once again to mobile payments. Things really are hotting up and again NFC doesn’t figure. Last week I marveled at how Starbuck’s was doing 20million mobile transactions through its payment app over the pond. This week, I am drawn to look at a minor tweak Apple has made to iTunes that may yet be the beginnings of the company’s foray into mobile payments. And, love them or loathe them, what ever Apple does has the potential to reshape a market. Or even define it.

Its latest wheeze is this. As part of its upgrade to the Apple Store app, Apple introduced a new service called EasyPay. The service itself is simple enough: it lets a user photograph a barcode and then look up information about the product based on that barcode. It then lets a user charge that product to his iTunes account.

EasyPay is still a very limited service: it is currently only working in the US and only works for in-store purchases of “select accessories” sold in Apple’s own retail operation. That does not even include the purchase of big-ticket items like computers or phones. And according to this article in the New York Times, doesn’t look like it will add them in the future.

And yet, and yet… Apple has 225million iTunes account holders (as of June, and since then at the very least my wife as also signed up); it is a very powerful proposition getting them to use iTunes to start to buy things, even if it is with barcode scanning.

What I like about this is what I like about Starbucks’ approach: it is simple and effective and doesn’t involve too much fancy pants technology being retrofitted. It also fits in to what people already do.

The threat to the telemedia industry is that its billing tools get shut out of the loop, but Apple won’t run the mobile payment world – it may pioneer some interesting aspects of it, possibly even things we haven’t yet thought of – what this does do however is start to get people paying with mobile and, perhaps more importantly, getting brands and retailers thinking about how to use mobile payments and not be put off by all the guff about NFC.

The retail industry is still wrestling with how to use mobile and closing the circle with payments is a key to not just getting people shopping on mobile, but the retailers themselves thinking mobile. And once that happens then the opportunities for telemedia services and telemedia billing are enormous.

Starbucks bucks the m-payments trend – to the tune of 20million payments

As 2011 draws to a close – well there are only seven weeks until Christmas, eight until 2012 – I am already ready to dub this year the year of mobile payments. In reality, I should be calling it the year that everyone started seriously talking about mobile as a key payments channel for online, on mobile and retail payments as we are still waiting for many of the mobile payment tools launched this year to become mass market.

But while the world and his dog have been postulating how mobile payments will work, coffee giant Starbucks has quietly turned its app into a very successful mobile payment tool.

I wrote about this in this esteemed organ back in January when Buckies launched th payment app in the US and, to blow my own trumpet, I did say how significant it was. And so it has proven to be. As of the end of October, Starbucks has processed 20million payments through its mobile payments tool. That's pretty impressive.

While many people have been (over) excited by NFC as a payment enabler and while the arguments over how to power various kinds of mobile payment, Starbucks has snuck a simple barcode based system into its loyalty app and, latterly, it's ordinary app. And people have been using it with alacrity.

So what does this mean for the Telemedia space? Well, I think it offers a massive opportunity. For sure, eventually we will be using mobile as a means of paying direct from our bank accounts, probably over NFC, but for the short term at least, brands should be looking at how they can make their apps and m-web sites and mobile-based loyalty schemes transactional. Not transactional in the sense of being ale to by something from a site, but in using them to pay in stores.

Starbucks has the advantage that it's loyalty scheme works by storing up points on a card that can be used to get money off, so they sort of had the plan in place already. Even so, the coffee company has made a simple way to get its customers using mobile to pay - 20 million times in 10 months.

For Telemedia companies, the opportunity lies in convincing other brands -- particularly in the retail sector, but not exclusively -- that the kind of tools on offer around Payforit, pSMS, PRS and the many alternative billing tools available can sit behind apps that allow consumers to pay for things with mobile.

It is a stop gap, but it is potentially a huge one that is really where the mass market for Telemedia payments exists.

This Christmas will be a mobile one in the retail space, with customers researching what they want to buy, being marketed to by people wanting to sell them things, people comparing prices while in stores and, in my case, sitting on the sofa late at night, a glass of wine on the go, and actually doing the entire christmas shop via an iPad.

I will be using Amazon, where possible, so will be paying by one click (so a kind of mobile payment). Next year, assuming the collapse of the Eurozone leaves us with more than just some sticks and a cart full of manky turnips to eat, many people will be using their mobiles to pay for things. Many of them will have been using NFC enabled Droid phones running Google wallet for months by then, but there will still be a Telemedia opportunity, so go grab some of the action.

And I am doing my bit: my book -- M-commerce -- is aimed at explaining how mobile can change how all businesses operate, and payments is a big part of that. Buy it here in good old fashioned paperback or, if you are thoroughly modern, get the electronic version here – it'll make a great real or virtual stocking filler!

World Telemedia Amsterdam triumphant

Those of you who weren’t in Amsterdam between 12 and 14 October at WORLD TELEMEDIA missed a great event. The old vibe that makes an overseas telemedia event go with a swing and a bang was back in spades. Great venue, great exhibition and great conference – with some excellent speakers, thanks everyone – and, despite the mock-groaning, everyone was secretly glad to be back in Amsterdam. Even the Europub.

The show was particularly interesting as it offered the chance for the industry to come together not just to network and do deals, bit to also start making in roads into some of the key issues that are impacting on it.

Most notable was the upshot of the fraud seminar session on Wednesday 12 October, which not only saw a number of key industry players discuss the issues of fraud – and indeed of arbitrage, more of which anon – but also several of the leading companies in the industry decided at the World Telemedia meeting t form a group to start working to lobby the major networks around the world to start to do something about traffic hijacking.

Hijacking has long been a low-level problem for the industry, but in the past three years it has grown exponentially and is now taking up to 50% of revenues away from some services, according to estimates by the panellists.  The ad hoc grouping, which had its inaugural meeting at the show, is set to detail its modus operandi in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere at the event, we saw the usual round of lively parties and drinks receptions – though is it me or is everyone better behaved these days? – and a conference that brought in a host of telemedia favourites and some interesting newbies to debate everything from interactive services, to billing and m-payments, to marketing to chat and dating and telemedia essentials.

One of the most surprising upshots of  opening keynote from SKOPOS was that, while most male orientated mobile services are hung around sport, a study of male mobile users found that only 37% of them liked sport. SKOPOS’ research of consumers also found that the web and mobile web use was normalising risqué behaviour among adult users – which has to be good news for the telemedia sector.

The adult worlds of chat and dating – along with horoscope and psychic – are also blooming, our panel found, with users growing despite the recession. Hard times usually bring out the small spends, so traditionally telemedia services do well and this seems to be being borne out. According to AIME’s David Ashman’s presentation flirt, chat and dating has grown by 35% year on year to £37.4million in the UK in 2010. Tarot, psychic and astrology is up 23.1% to £21.4million in the same period.

According to Ashman, virtual gifts is the star player right now in premium rate, growing an eyewatering 438% to £8.1million in 2010 – with even more expected from 2011.

So from a purely telemedia point of view, there is much to be cheery about.

FOR FULL REPORT FROM WORLD TELEMEDIA SEE TELEMEDIA-MONTH OCTOBER ISSUE OUT ON 31 OCTOBER 

Cornering the m-payments market

Payments is very much the top of the agenda this week, with not only news that txtnation will be presenting Transactional SMS (TSMS) at World Telemedia Amsterdam (12-14 October), but that the world and his wife are all getting their mobile payments products lined up and ready for the build up towards Christmas.

Forget NFC and, I think, we can also try and forget the O2-Vodafone-Everything Everywhere tie up to develop cross platform payments and marketing offerings (we can forget that for now, unlike 3 UK which is trying to take the big three to court for leaving them out. Aww, bless). What we have on our hands is a radical rethink in payout rates on PSMS – dressed up as TSMS and direct operator billing – sweeping the US, Europe and Ireland (and coming to the UK real soon).

The move to put PSMS on a 90% payout rate and hide it behind a one click payment button is just what the world needs and will be the thing that makes mobile a mass market payment tool.

Direct operator billing is going to corner the market in mobile payments for digital goods, while TSMS is going to see PSMS essentially being used to buy real things like cans of drink from vending machines and tickets from ticket machines (which are then virtualised and put on the phone, but they are then used in the real world, which makes them tangible enough for me).

This is a magnificent step forward and I think places telemedia right at the heart of m-commerce, where it should be.

And that is reflected in the seminar programme for World Telmedia Amstedam, which while it seeks to uncover the best in interactive media, marketing and commerce, always circles back to payments. Mobile payments is going to be the cornerstone of the m-commerce and m-media worlds once it gets going as it encompasses everything that you want consumers to do.

Getting them to your site, store or service is essential, and this can be done by offering special offers and money of if they use mobile to pay. Once they are engaged with you, you can again get them to do things that require micropayments and you get them to use mobile to pay. While they are chatting, or on social networks or interacting, voting or doing anything else around TV you upsell them and use mobile to pay. If they are in a shop and want to buy something – use mobile to pay.

You see mobile payments is the core of m-commerce in all its forms, and the telemedia industry owns microbilling – you know that together these things are awesomely powerful. So get yourself along to World Telemedia Amsterdam and get the inside track on where m-payments is going.

Will my TV vote go to Facebook?

In a no-shit-Sherlock moment of clarity, MIG has proved that people want to interact with TV using mobile. And there was me thinking that is what they had built their business around – shows how much I know. Anyway, the findings of MIG’s study are interesting in that they show that much of this mobile interaction with TV will be carried out through social media portals (for which you can read Facebook).

MIG believes that interactive events run via Facebook will generate $51.7 million (£32.04 million) in the UK by 2012 and $2.9 billion globally by 2016. All very good and I am sure there is something in this. But the findings seem to be at odds with what is actually happening on the ground with businesses and social media.

Retailers – who I know are not TV companies, but I am sure there are parallels in terms of how a commercial business looks to using social media – are flailing and failing to leverage the power of social media right now. Research by One iota finds that of the top 100 UK retailers, only one – ASOS – offers a fully transactional facebook site. On mobile, the study finds that a third of retailers now do have a transactional mobile site.

This disparity between mobile and mobile social shows that there is still a very long way to go within businesses to create a proper social commerce eco-system.

Now you could argue that its because retailers just don’t get it and those stubbly, retro-spectacled ‘dudes’ in TV really understand social media. Or you could look at it that usually canny retailers are simply not embracing social media because they don’t need to and don’t see the point.

On the fifth birthday of microblogging social site Twitter last week a study by Virgin Business Media found that only 9% of the UK’s top 500 businesses had used Twitter in a business context.

Why not? Well there are many reasons: there is no real business case for using Twitter (and only a very limited one for Facebook, I believe – its just a website that hosts you); there is a distinct flattening off of Twitter, Facebook and other social network use amongst consumers; and there simply is no need to run things over these services. Yet.

To my mind, no one is using Facebook or Twitter commercially because there isn’t the need to: the consumers are there, but there are many other ways of buying – not least through transactional mobile sites and apps – and so social media is not there yet.

I think the same applies to TV interaction and events. However, they do lend themselves more to social interaction. If I am watching TV – mainly the news about News International’s slow unravelling – I like to shout at the TV and my family and friends. Facebook lets me do this both quietly and remotely. So I can see that there is a role for mobile social interaction around TV; I just don’t get how it will be monetised. And that is what will ultimately bring all this in to question. If its free and easy then great for consumers, but bad for everyone in the value chain. I am watching and waiting keenly to see how this pans out in second half of the year when the massive interactive shows return to out TV screens for their autumn runs. Will my vote go to Facebook?

We don't need such a smart world

So the sales of smartphones in the UK are slowing down? Can’t say I am surprised. When the iPhone launched it was a luxury item and penetration was – as every old skool mobile company wouldn’t stop telling me in 2007/8/9 and even 10 – tiny. But Android came along and made them cheaper. Nokia had a stab at smartening up and prices fell (and user experience) still further. Operators now bundle even the lesser-spotted white iPhone into £40 a month bundles.

But for many people, a £40 a month bundle is still too expensive and so, naturally, given the price point we are at, smartphone penetration has slowed and might even plateau – until of course iPhone 5 suddenly makes all other iPhones all but worthless.

This slowing in smartphone penetration is being trumpeted as being really bad news for m-commerce, as it means we are at the limit of users and so what we have now is what we will be stuck with in terms of m-commerce use and revenues.

Au contraire! You don't need widespread smartphone penetration for m-commerce to grow. All you need are the simple things such as text and voice shortcodes, some basic banner ads and Payforit and you have the perfect 100% m-commerce penetration rate.

As our lead story about Orca Digital points outs, voice shortcodes are a force to be reckoned with, offering a great alternative to 08 and 09 numbers on mobile – and giving consumers clear pricing – so that things can be sold and billed for via mobile without having to have web-enabled smartphones and tablets. And Orca should know: it leads the pack in revenues generated in telemedia from voice shortcodes.

Of course, as smartphones do slowly become the norm (the Nokia-Microsoft tie up is likely to create a raft of cheap smartphones) then perhaps other forms of mobile payments – which is really the essence of mobile commerce – will come to the fore, but for now you need nothing more than text and shortcodes to create a thriving marketplace that everyone can join in.

I think that, after something of a false start, we are going to start to see a lot more of Payforit across the spectrum of mobile devices as it becomes an easy to use payment tool. There is even research out there that the Payforit brand isn’t even that important – so long as people trust that the micropayment will be successfully completed. So am I bothered that smartphone penetration is stuck at 35%? Not really. Are you?

Selfridges charity network clears up a cloudy issue

News that Oxygen8 is helping to build a bespoke network in Selfridges so that consumers in the store can text charity donations to the store’s Project Ocean campaign is great news for the world’s fishes, plankton, sea cucumbers and whales. It is also good news for everyone smart enough to look at how to monetize in store mobile action.

While much attention has been focused on how mobile is a tool for retailers to sell stuff via transactional mobile sites and apps, the real benefit mobile technology brings to retailers is in what it can do in store. And what retailers manage to cook up around in store mobile services is also something that other organisations that have groups of people all in one place at the same time – shopping malls, sports arenas, airports, clubs, music festivals and even schools and colleges – can also look to turn to their commercial advantage.

Mobile’s real strength lies in the ability to bring the internet to where the mobile user is. It makes the web personal, rather than just mobile and that personal touch extends to where a person is and what they are doing.

The simple examples so far have been things such as bar code scanning in stores to get more information about products and services, see videos and read reviews. There are also examples of how, at sports events, users can find out more information about players, stats about the team, purchase merchandise and so on. At music festivals, there is a growing move to sell content over the air while bands are playing – rather smashing the ‘sticking it to the man’ ethos of Glasto, but there you go, that’s progress.

The more forward thinking out there see mobile as bringing all of this and much more to the bricks and mortar commercial world (and the muddy fields of the music festival circuit). Adding the idea of augmented reality and the like to all this – so that you can add the web to the real world to enhance one’s experience of it – means that many things are possible.

Each of these things adds huge potential commercial opportunities. Directly selling things using all this tech is just the tip of the iceberg. The potential to revolutionise marketing and the whole ‘consumer journey’ is huge. And it all hinges on the idea not of the mobile web, the web or any other hyperbole doing the rounds but on the personal web.

And that is all brilliant, but…. There is always a but and here it is a big one. Networks. Mobile networks – both those run by operators and public wifi – are, to be blunt, shot to shit. They are stuffed with traffic, poorly powered and frustratingly slow if you do manage to connect. Oh and they drop out half way through doing things. In short, they aren’t fit for purpose.

This is why the Oxygen8-Selfridges network is significant: while it is all being done for “charadee, mate” it is a proving ground for building in store networks and seeing how consumers use them. Taking this technology – and the inherent investment – forward will yield a much richer in store experience that will, in short, let retailers sell more. Rolling it out at other events will increase this personal web engagement and sell more stuff – which is good for us all.

Oh, and while we wait for iCloud and marvel at the new range of Google Chrome netbooks, only this sort of investment will make this cloud idea for consumers take flight. If any of you have tried cloud computing recently you will know what I mean.