Category Mobile commerce

Why iOS 7 – The Latest iPhone Software – Is Both Safe And Risky At The Same Time

A business school professor of mine once did an entire class on companies that plan their product lines’ obsolescence. These firms proactively anticipate when their products will no longer remain competitive and therefore include a road map for phasing them out. Having an obsolescence plan can help a firm navigate the really tough decisions involving […]

Five Tips On How Traditional Media Can Survive In A Mobile Age

This past Friday, I learned that authorities had apprehended the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing via Boston.com’s Live Blog, which aggregated tweets and short updates from reporters, police, and citizens into a single, curated stream. Watching and waiting for the Live Blog to update every three to five minutes made me feel more […]

The App Developer’s “Home” Opportunity Is Android’s “Home” Dilemma

Count me among those who felt that Facebook could have gone the way of MySpace. Looks like that was as solid as most of my NCAA “March Madness” predictions. One of the company’s few mobile missteps was the introduction of Facebook Home. It’s an app that came preloaded on the HTC First handset. It delivers a […]

Wal-Mart Takes on Amazon

In my very first blog post, I recommended things brick-and-mortar stores could do to take on the rise of e-commerce companies like Amazon. I suggested that they press their advantages, including immediacy and the ablity to provide store visitors with digital experiences that enhance their shopping. You can find that post here. Well, it looks […]

What If Print Magazines Never Existed? Three Ways to Improve the Digital Reading Experience

In preparation for my appearance at this week’s SWIPE 2.0 conference, I read The Association of Magazine Media report on magazine readers and smartphones. You can view the report here. The data in this report suggests that the industry is doing a lot of things right in what is undeniably its early days. It also […]

What You Need To Know About the Return of (Fundamentally Flawed) “Do Not Track” Legislation

Some of you may have read this past week about Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-W.Va.) Do Not Track Online Act, which he has reintroduced this year after it failed to emerge from committee in 2011. Anyone who operates a website or mobile app should read the bill, which you can do here. The bill would force […]

The Video Game Industry is Dead – Long Live the Video Game Industry

The video game industry has enjoyed a multi-decade run of enormous economic success. It redefined the way consumers engage their televisions. It has given birth to a new breed of storytellers, ones that include programmers and designers who are capable of producing characters, narratives, and worlds on a par with the best Hollywood has to […]

Do I really need to build an app?

Intelligent people with lots of mobile industry experience still debate this topic aggressively, which is understandable given the stakes. All of us in the industry can see users surging toward mobile. The question is how best to serve those users: app or web (or both)? In this post, I’m not going to answer the question. […]

Quick hits: Yahoo and Facebook focus on mobile engagement, plus CES 2013 takeaways

Here are some quick hits on recent news from Facebook and Yahoo, as well as a post mortem on the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. Google vs. Facebook, Yahoo: Diverging approaches to growing the mobile advertising business I recently wrote about Google’s latest earnings announcement – you can read it here – and mentioned both the […]

Google’s “glass half-full” view of the mobile economy

Google’s earnings announcement on Wednesday, Jan. 22, prompted a spike in its stock price despite delivering some news that at first glance looked bad. What’s going on here? Like many companies that have built their businesses on attracting a digital audience to serve largely digital content, Google is confronting and managing a massive shift in […]