The world’s largest retail trade association is the National Retail Federation (NRF) with members from the U.S. and more than 45 countries abroad.

With mobile commerce representing a major growth area for retail, with sales of $120 billion forecast for 2015, the NRF, through its Mobile Retail Initiative, has unveiled the first version of the Mobile Retailing Blueprint. The mobile blueprint was developed by NRF’s Mobile Blueprint Committee, chaired by Mr. Richard Mader, executive director of the Association for Retail Technology Standards at the NRF. More than 30 companies representing a diverse group of retailers, service providers and leading mobile association partners contributed to the blueprint.

“The plan should begin with simple methods to reach out you customers, normally marketing applications like couponing, GPS store location and progress to the end goal, which is your customer having a mobile wallet containing all payment and loyalty cards,” Mr. Mader said. “Principal issues to address in plan are security, authentication, privacy and integrating your existing application with the new mobile data.

“Another great recommendation is how to align your mobile program to deal with the many different mobile phones–RIM, Apple, Windows, Android—a retailer cannot offend customers by providing no service or poor service on a particular brand of smartphone.”

With the first version of the blueprint available to the industry, the Mobile Retail Initiative will launch a series of initiatives to continue its mission to help the industry adopt global standards in mobile commerce.

The blueprint can be downloaded from here: http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&op=viewlive&sp_id=1268

Richard Mader to present at 3rd Canadian Annual Mobile Payments and Marketing Thinktank

Mr. Mader will be sharing key highlights from the NRF’s mobile blueprint at the 3rd Canadian Mobile Payments and Marketing Thinktank hosted in Toronto and organized by Red Mobile Consulting.

The thinktank brings together 25 key thought leaders from across the payments value chain for two days of roundtable discussions. The thinktank is a grass roots initiative where executives invest their time in order to move the mobile payments ecosystem forward.

This year’s event is particularly exciting because of the convergence of four key industry dynamics: increasing capability of devices (from smartphones to tablets); the ecosystem evolving around these devices such as apps and in-app marketing; a greater acceptance of cloud services and computing; and lastly the increasing ability of wireless networks to support intelligent (location, presence, etc.) un-tethered high bandwidth access to anything.

This convergence and current trends suggest that Media will become a more significant part of the payments value-chain, which traditionally has retailers, banks, acquirers and the payment networks (credit/debit). This is opening up new revenue streams that can be of significant value for Media to participate in the overall retail experience.

In order to request registration for the event please visit http://redmobileco.com/key-initiatives/

The program can be found here:

With Red Mobile’s hypothesis-driven methodology and with our experience supporting previous clients, we are well-positioned to help your organization in order to deal with the disruptive changes discussed above.

Please contact us today for a complimentary consultation, please call: + 1 905 479 0080 x112 or  please click on the following.

Cisco announced that they are entering the tablet arena with an Android device named Cius, the device is mainly aimed at enterprise users and supports HD video streaming and multi-party conferencing, the device is set to be released in early 2011. This is Cisco’s latest offering to end consumers after the acquisition of HD camera designers Flip and the Moto development group. This latest news comes after an article in the WSJ on current efforts by RIM to develop a tablet toward the end of the year. Given RIM’s traditional strength in the enterprise, this latest news from Cisco looks like it could be an indicator of an intense competition to capture enterprise users in the near future. It also helps confirm the dominance of the Android platform which is on its way to becoming the biggest success story in telecom history.

The launch of the iPad represents the arrival of tablet devices. Surprisingly, The iPad achieved sales of 1 million devices in less than half the time it took for the iPhone to hit the same milestone, so there is definitely consumer interest. Tablets are riding the wave of exponential growth in sales of intelligent personal devices. For example, the burgeoning smartphone market is estimated to grow by 38 % in 2010 in North America and with some analysts predicting that smartphone sales will overtake PC sales as early as this year.

The introduction of the iPad has also heated up the OS wars, with smartphones and tablet devices sharing their platforms. We have already seen that HP acquired Palm in order to leverage the WebOS platform. One of the game changers is the availability of the open source Android OS which is predicted to be the largest gainer in the smartphone OS market. Many previously unknown vendors are rushing to cobble together tablets, for example, Taiwanese manufacturer VIA has just announced that it plans to ship a $ 100 tablet based on Android in the second half of this year with many more similar announcements being made on a  daily basis.  One of the main drivers is revenue from advertising, for example, Apple recently announced the iAD platform that is expected to deliver 1 Billion impressions per day.

The introduction of tablets will have a significant impact, we are witnessing a perfect storm of cloud computing, intelligent peripherals, and high-speed wireless networks. It affects how people will work, collaborate, and play.

One undeniable trend is that wireless data consumption will increase, this will also further contribute to the spectrum crunch which creates the need for innovative solutions. For example, companies are such as Google are prioritizing their mobile strategy, as their ‘mobile first’ approach was announced by CEO Eric Schmidt at MWC 2010. For more insight into Google’s mobile strategy please refer to our latest research reports.

Corporations and municipalities must re-consider their strategy for IT and connectivity. The pervasiveness of these intelligent hand-held devices along with the trend towards putting everything on the cloud, will have significant on IT policies within organizations including security. Our municipal and corporate clients have found that they need to support session persistence over different access technologies so that their employees can work anywhere and anytime.

With Red Mobile’s methodology-driven analysis techniques and with our experience supporting municipal and corporate clients, we are well-positioned to help position your organization in order to deal with the disruptive changes discussed above.

Please contact us today for a complimentary consultation, please call: + 1 905 479 0080 or  please click on the following.

- From the Google I/O keynote: HTML5 support will be more or less complete on all "modern" browsers.

- Google announced its new online web app store for Chrome browsers.

- Google announced the open-source VP8 -based WebM video codec with support from several chipset vendors in addition to Adobe and possibly Microsoft. The video format is expected to be efficient enough to run on low power devices.

According to Engadget:

- OnStar will give a sneak peek at new functionalities it’s developing for its version 2.0 Chevy Volt app with the help of Google.

- mSpot will launch their cloud-based music storage solution with an initial free storage capacity of 2 GB.

StatCounter Global Stats reports that Facebook is the primary source of traffic to global websites with almost half (48%) of Social Media hits followed by StumbleUpon with almost a quarter (25%).

In the following figure is a compilation of Facebook’s market share of social networking websites worldwide. Over the past year, Facebook has gained 14 % market share in Canada. By contrast, in the USA, it has lost 4 % mostly to StumbleUpon. In Asia it has gone up by an amazing 30% to almost 80 % while In Europe it has tripled to 75 %.

Mobile Access

According to ComScore, on the mobile front, in January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112 percent from the previous year. These figures do not include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million mobile phone owners who do so exclusively through mobile applications.

Facebook to compete with Google for Ad Revenue?

Several articles and blog postings over the past few weeks have started to outline the intensifying competition that is expected to emerge between Facebook and Google, this has been intensified by the inclusion of Facebook integration into third party websites, in addition to a ‘Like’ button. Facebook’s CEO estimated that they would be serving 1 Billion ‘likes’ every 24 hours! This position favors Facebook‘s capability to push selected advertising to compete with Google. If we also factor in the ‘iAD’ factor on the mobile front with an estimated one billion ad impressions per day, we find that competition for advertising competition is heating up and it will definitely create some interesting changes in the online advertising market.