Smartphones to Overtake Feature Phones in U.S. by 2011 | Nielsen Wire | RealtyGo_blog

The iPhone, Blackberry, Droid and smartphones in general dominate the buzz in the mobile market, but only 21% of American wireless subscribers are using a smartphone as of the fourth quarter 2009 compared to 19% in Q3 2009 and 14% at the end of 2008. We are just at the beginning of a new wireless era where smartphones will become the standard device consumers will use to connect to  friends, the internet and the world at large. The share of smartphones as a proportion of overall device sales has increased to 29% for phone purchasers in the last six months and 45% of respondents to a Nielsen survey indicated that their next device will be a smartphone. If we combine these intentional data points with falling prices and increasing capabilities of these devices along with a explosion of applications for devices, we are seeing the beginning of a groundswell. This increase will be so rapid, that by the end of 2011, Nielsen expects more smartphones in the U.S. market than feature phones.

The Smartphone User

Slightly more males than females are getting smartphones (53% versus 47%) which is what we would expect for technical early adopter products. In terms of demographics, Hispanic Americans and Asians are slightly more likely to have a smartphone than what their share of population would indicate, which is a trend we see in the adoption of other mobile data services. While smartphones started out in the business segment, two-third of today’s buyers of smartphones are personal users.

Loyalty

In the last six months, roughly 77% of new smartphone buyers remained loyal to their wireless operator, while 18% switched to a new provider to get their new smartphone with the remaining percentage made up of first-time smartphone buyers. Interestingly enough, the percentage of people who switched carriers and got a new smartphone is not higher than that of the average wireless subscriber.

This indicates that the portfolio of the wireless carriers in general is robust enough to prevent any wide-spread smartphone flight from one carrier to the other, with very few exceptions. The added bonus for wireless carriers is that smartphone owners are significantly more satisfied (81%) with their device than feature phone owners (66%).

Features, features, features

Smartphones show higher application usage than feature phones even at the basic built-in application level. During Nielsen’s Mobile Insights survey we asked the respondents about features they’ve used in the last 30 days. The good news for the smartphone market is that people are actually taking advantage of the device capabilities.

The percentage of people who use their phone for only voice communications drops from 14% among new feature phone owners to 3% of smartphone owners. The use of the built-in camera and video capability jumps by almost 20% for both categories, due to the generally better quality and user friendliness of the features. Smartphones also often have a better speaker which translates into more frequent usage from about half of feature phone owners to about two-thirds of smartphone owners. Not surprisingly the use of Wi-Fi increases 10-fold from 5% for feature phone owners to 50% for smartphone users to satisfy the need for fast downloads.

RealtyGo supports both QR Code real estate information retrievel and SMS/MMS Text Messaging.

via Smartphones to Overtake Feature Phones in U.S. by 2011 | Nielsen Wire.

Adobe Is Watching Every Click | LinkedIn | RealtyGo blog

Adobe Systems ( ADBE – news – people ) Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen is counting big numbers: 4.9 trillion Web display ads will be shown this year, he says. In the last quarter of 2010, 100 million smartphones were sold worldwide. This year there’ll be 17.7 billion downloads of mobile applications, creating a paid-apps market worth $15.1 billion.

Almost every ad and app out there, along with most of the business and consumer-oriented content on the Web, is going to be tracked and responsive to some entity’s remote control. That entity, he hopes, will be Adobe.

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“Everything is changing!” says Narayen during an interview at his hotel suite in Salt Lake City during a break between meetings with some of the 700 companies here for the annual customer summit run by his subsidiary, Omniture (OMTR – news – people ). Adobe bought Omniture for $1.8 billion in 2009 because the Orem, Utah software firm makes the Web’s most successful tracking tools. Its annual conference gathers people who spend 30% of all Internet ad dollars.

Narayen got blasted for paying 24% over Omniture’s share price, but it looks like a good move. Omniture’s revenue is growing 20% a year while sales of Adobe’s better-known creativity programs like Photoshop and Illustrator were repeatedly hit in the recession. Adobe’s Flash software, the standard for rendering graphics and video online, is taking a p.r. beating by Apple ( AAPL – news – people ), which refuses to use it in its phones and tablets. Yet Adobe’s stock has kept pace with Apple so far this year. Earlier this year Narayen picked up another audience-tracking tech firm, called Demdex, to further entrench his position among companies that manage, analyze and act upon what people do on the Web, particularly around selling stuff.

Narayen is building into Adobe’s content-creation tools the planning, tagging and tracking software, plus newer technology that plumbs Twitter and Facebook for information about how people, ads and products are seen. With the right analytics built in, an ad can get automatically tweaked to improve response, or maybe a new app is created because someone raved on Twitter. “It’s a huge opportunity for us, if we can step up to it.”

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Adobe does not break it out, but about $1 billion of its $3.8 billion in revenue last year came from big corporate sales, the kind that would combine creative tools with some analytics. The rest of its revenue is from sales of individual software. In the near term Narayen thinks this new market is worth more than $10 billion. He envisions, further out, selling services around these insights. “We can be the mission-critical company for digital experiences and not just a products company,” he says.

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Virgin America, which gets 70% of its revenue from its website, uses Adobe software to track where its passengers click to offsite so it can craft the right mix of search and display ads. Hearst uses Omniture to test how its readers click on Web stories. It tested “royal” stories and “celebrity weddings” stories, and found people were obsessing on so-called storybook weddings more than on storybook royalty. The editors ordered up more celebrity wedding stories.

Narayen could get bought or beaten along the way. IBM ( IBM– news – people ) just announced it will deploy 1,000 consultants and 1,200 salesmen into its “smarter commerce” initiative, dedicated to helping advertisers figure out the real costs and effectiveness of their online marketing. Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ – news – people )’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, used his first public appearance to talk about the growing importance of data-analysis software to HP.

Google ( GOOG – news – people ) gives away a somewhat more primitive service than Omniture’s called Google Analytics, but Google retains its own file of the data people plug into it. If Google Analytics is taking business from Omniture, there is no evidence of it from the outside. The market is still growing fast.

Adobe Is Watching Every Click | LinkedIn.

Facebook Unites Mobile Web Development Efforts using WURFL and HTML5 | RealtyGo_blog

Facebook has launched a new version of its mobile Web site that it says is much simpler and should work with the capabilities of thousands of different phones.

The leading social network has 250 million monthly active mobile users, and the majority of them access the site through the mobile Web, said Erick Tseng, Facebook’s head of mobile.

The new site, at m.facebook.com, replaces an existing site at that address for feature phones and a separate site at touch.facebook.com for smartphones (where development had recently lagged behind other versions). The new version uses an extended implementation of WURFL, a database that helps map the way the site is displayed to the capabilities of each device. Also known as browser identification look up.

Facebook said it should be able to “delete thousands of lines of old mobile site code” after the release, which is set to roll out to all users over the next couple weeks.

 

 

The company has said that in order to be maximally accessible it will favor mobile Web development over native app development. “We are internalizing our own strategies around HTML5 to prove out that this emphasis on the mobile Web can actually work,” Tseng said.

“Yes, there is going to be a day when the majority of folks have something that looks more like an Android,” Tseng said, “but I don’t believe that’s going to happen in the next year, probably not the next two years.”

Tseng was previously lead product manager for Android before he joined Facebook last May.

RealtyGo uses the same type of browser ID check to efficiently push the proper dedicated page view to the correct mobile device. You will notice when you Scan a QR Code or Text in to receive more information about a real estate listings, your mobile device, wether it be a Smartphone, iPad, Tablet or even on a desk top, the images and data wil reconfigure auto fitting your device.

RealtyGo – Your Real Estate Listings Best Friend!

RealtyGo offers Mobile Real Estate Listings for Best SEO search using MobileURL’s and advanced Web TAG technology.

RealtyGo - Mobile Real Estate Listing on Your iPad

RealtyGo provides an easy to use service for everyone listing any type of real estate, connecting with end users via their mobile devices, infusing the latest technology and business practices for advanced web to mobile communication and search engine optimization. By connecting all your professional information properly and tagging it, your real estate listings and online business practices will dramatically increase and work efficiently for you within the world wide web, increasing relevancy and helping drive more end users and new customers to you, while searching for real estate.

Our Service allows listers to deliver listing information on any property directly to potential buyers through a custom mobile application software that is functional on any Internet-capable mobile device as well as any text message-capable mobile phone.

“The challenge most ‘big box’ real estate company’s face by offering a mobile solution to promote and list real estate is how to instantly reach current clients with the information they need, using the device in which they want to use (mobile, Web, Phone) and how to generate new leads by providing better tools than the competition.  RealtyGo accomplishes all this by user friendly software applications that can be accessed by anyone on any Mobile device. There is no download necessary or modification, our services and your real estate listings are accessible from any mobile device right out of the box.

You can link your mobile real estate listings from RealtyGo to other social networking sites, like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, your blog or professional website, etc.. . RealtyGo acts like a bridge from your website presence to any mobile device, while providing the end user a friendly and easy to use experience. You can be sure that what ever the latest trend or most efficient way of communication is, RealtyGo will provide it for free as part of your MobileURL and Mobile real estate listing(s). We are constantly making upgrades and changes, and will always offer the most current and easy to use methodology for accessing real estate from anywhere with any type of device.

Buyers can leave personal notes about properties,  Auto Schedule an appointment to preview the your listing(s) – which automatically notifying you with the buyer’s name, phone number, email, etc.. , and the property their interested in previewing.

This turns ‘lookie loos’ into leads, creating stickiness, because once a user is able to contact you through the channel they are most comfortable with, they will almost certainly use the same method of contact down the way when needing immediate listing information from a viable and trusted source. Since RealtyGo offers you your Unique MobileURL consumers can find you fast and easily by simple remembering your Unique name or MobileURL you assigned to a property or listing. In the event you sell the listing, your MobileURL is still active and becomes your online Resume, that everyone uses and remembers in order to contact you in regards to your Real Estate profession.

The target demographic for Mobile Real Estate listings is any potential homebuyer, new customer or other business professional with the capability to surf the mobile Web.

Prospects may be young first-time buyer or the middle-aged executive whose BlackBerry has made him/her accustomed to having information at their fingertips at all times, The market is as broad as the mobile market, which is to say is very large and growing. Offer your real estate listings on every channel and cover all the basis, let the end user decide how and when they want to Auto Schedule an appointment to preview a listing, or simple click your phone number or email address to get ahold of you.

Prospective sellers are attracted to technology as well, as it communicates willingness to use new tools and available modern day methodology to market and promote properties making for a more attractive choice for a seller.

Help educate other agents in using RealtyGo for an easy way to show off the technological side of your business. Agents/Brokers can use RealtyGo’s robust analytics to download and either print or email to new customers and even prospective banks you would like to receive listings from. When you can provide actual analytics, which is how potential buyers are getting in touch with you, the area of your listings and up to date reporting on the ins and outs of your listings, banks are going to look at you as a up-to-date, trusted and valuable resource in the real estate business

RealtyGo assigns a MobileURL to each of your listings which allows end users to search for you using an advanced type of search, giving buyers the ability to find ALL your real estate listings, photos, pricing, virtual tours, business website, social networking sites, professional contact information fast and efficiently. End users can searching within major search engines (google, yahoo, bing) or from withing RealtyGo using one easy to remember Unique MobileURL you have selected to represent your mobile real estate business.

 

RealtyGo updates and offers All listing content to major search engines for Best SEO (search engine optimization) in regards to your real estate business. This includes pictures, listing changes, edits and updates, automatically formatted for optimal viewing on any mobile device.

Buyers are able to view all the standard and customized listing information, including photos and Google Mobile map location links, as well as the agent’s e-mail address and click-to-call phone number. Buyers can also easily forward your mobile listing(s) via e-mail or text message to other mobile devices like Smartphones, Flip phones, iPads, Tablets, etc.. .

Beyond MLS listings, RealtyGo also allows users to upload and manage their properties through a Web-based content management system, the same way you would create a craigslist ad promotion, and taking it a step further, giving you the ability to promote your properties within other real estate listing services with our Mobile Listing TAG, ensuring that end users are getting all the content you want them to have and not just the content many services only allow you to share.

RealtyGo works on any Text ready mobile phone or Internet-capable mobile device, including Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry, Google Android, Palm and Motorola flip phones, and do not require any downloads to use or manage.

Try RealtyGo today, and own your own listings and decide what you want the end user to see. Customize your Mobile listings any way you like and edit them at any time. RealtyGo will make sure that all of your most current information is updated and being used efficiently to promote your online real estate business as much as your off line presence. Don’t hesitate, simple visit our World Wide Website and follow the easy automated system that walk your through selecting your MobileURL’s and setting up your real estate listings and professional business information. We have designed our system to be fun and work freely within all other applications for promoting and marketing your real estate profession as a whole. Give the end user what they want, a choice in how they communicate with you in your real estate profession.

RealtyGo – Your Real Estate Listings Best Friend!

Text Message marketing Vs Email Marketing | RealtyGo | MobileURL’s | QR Codes | GPS | zuzu

Text Message marketing Vs Email Marketing | RealtyGo | zuzurealestate | MobileURL’s | QR Codes | GPS

iPad - RealtyGo - Mobile Real Estate listings

 

RealtyGo offers end users 4 modalities for current and immediate real estate listing information; QR Code, GPS, Call, SMS/MMS mobile gateway technology.

Mobile Real Estate Listings

The Mobile URL in the image  is the word “DEMO”

In many ways text message marketing and email marketing are very similar. With multiple forms of marketing available you should offer them all and let the consumer decide which avenue they are comfortable using. Overall you are asking your customers to give you their contact information so you may update and market to them directly.

Building an email phone and text message marketing list of your best customers is a way not to waste money on advertising by casting a wide net and hoping your customers see it. RealtyGo analytics enable you to form a current and relevant  list, you can use efficiently to market to those customers who want to receive offers from you, have already spent money with you or requested information and in most cases are most likely to respond positively to your offers.

There are quite a few vast differences that effect the redemption rates, ability to bring instant sales, and ‘read’ rates in any type of consumer ‘opt in’ marketing.

Fewer than 20% of email messages are opened. Within 15 minutes of sending a text blast, over 95% of your subscribers will have read the message. Think to yourself, every time your mobile phone beeps, how long does it take you to read the text message?

With RealtyGo’s automated software, any time you make a change to your listing(s) a auto message is sent to ‘end users’ that have requested information about your listing(s), for example; if you change the price of a listing or the seller decides to offer their listing for lease and for sale. These are important things a potential buyer or interested party need to know. RealtyGo automatically updates previous consumers that solicited  listing information, any time you make a change, by sending a friendly text message alert.

Customers contact information is automatically captured and displayed in your login area under the specific MobileURL and real estate listing the QR Code and SMS text messages are affiliated with. The mobile call to action is easily integrated into print, radio, television, in store signage and online applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Google Local Search. They simply text your MobileURL or Scan the QR Code and all your professional business real estate information is provided. With email signups customers have to be on your website and enter their email address or fill out a form in your business.  With consumer trends rapidly moving toward the mobile communication channel for faster and more efficient communication using text messaging and QR codes; You need to give the consumer what they want when they want it and with the tool they use most frequently and feel most comfortable with, Their mobile device(s). By offering multiple contact modalities like Text messaging, GPS and QR Codes you enable consumers an easier and faster way to get the immediate information they want, most importantly the way the consumer wants to get it. More options or ways a consumer can contact you  enables you to build your marketing list much faster, and consumers will continue to utilize your services, due to the fact they know they will receive current and relevant information pertaining to their original interests in your real estate business.

Text Message Marketing Vs Email Marketing.

With text message marketing, you have the ability to increase sales the same day your message is sent. Often new sales can be in your door in under an hour or even market to customers already in your business. New text messages are read in an average of 14 minutes while the average time for someone to read an email is 6.4 hours. In addition, unless your customers have web-enabled phones, which only 14% do, they will have to wait until they are in front of a computer to read it, then print out the offer to bring it in to redeem it. With text marketing, the customer just has to show the text to the business to redeem. These same principals apply with information. Consumers can access immediate information about your real estate listing(s) and Auto Schedule an appointment to meet with the listing Agent or owner based on the listers pre set schedule. The Auto Scheduler allows Agents/Brokers to use their time more efficiently, social networking, continuing education, create new marketing campaigns and meeting with potential buyer.

Typically the benefit of email vs text messaging is cost. There are email marketing providers for small businesses that charge $20 a month. This is for unlimited email blasts. The redemption rates are often low, only averaging 5%, and only offering one modality for consumer contact.

RealtyGo offers all 4 current modalities for contact and much more, for half that price and at a 90% better ROI return-on-investment.

Get more, do less – RealtyGo

via zuzurealestate | Just another WordPress.com site. RealtyGo blog

Sony Ericsson makes Xperia Play official with Super Bowl ad – RealtyGo

Sony Ericsson is no longer being coy about its intentions to launch a gaming-focused smartphone running Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform. The company unveiled an advertisement for the Xperia Play, which has been dubbed the “PlayStation phone,” during last night’s Super Bowl.

In the minute-long ad, Sony Ericsson took the wraps off the phone, which it said will be formally announced Feb. 13.  The commercial shows Google’s Android robot being given fingers for gameplay. There also are images of the smartphone, which appears to have a slide-out controller panel.

The Xperia Play is expected to be the first smartphone that meets the standard’s of Sony’s PlayStation Certified license program for hardware manufacturers. That certification promises software development support and logo licensing to guarantee quality gameplay experiences across the Android device ecosystem.

Sony Ericsson has long hinted it will debut the Xperia Play and numerous leaked images and videos of the smartphone have flooded the web in recent months.

But Sony Ericsson was not the only wireless company taking advantage of the high-profile Super Bowl advertising time.  Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) touted its forthcoming launch of Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 4 with a slight dig at AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) in a commercial that highlights Verizon’s call quality with its “Can you hear me now?” spokesman. AT&T suffered numerous public relations setbacks due to iPhone users’ perception that the carrier had poor network quality in some areas. AT&T shot back with its own Super Bowl ad that highlighted its ability to make simultaneous voice calls and surf the web on the iPhone, which users cannot do on Verizon’s CDMA network.

Additionally, Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) took jab at Apple’s iPad with a teaser ad for its forthcoming Xoom tablet, which runs on version 3.0, or Honeycomb, of Android. The tablet, which will initially launch on Verizon’s EVDO network, will require a monthly rate plan, the ad noted: 1 GB of data for $20; 3GB for $35; 5 GB for $50 and 10 GB for $80. A Motorola spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

via Sony Ericsson makes Xperia Play official with Super Bowl ad – FierceWireless– RealtyGo blog.

QR Code’s are Powerful… but only if you use them within a well structured system – RealtyGo

QR Code’s are Powerful and allows your Business information to dynamically update, while using the same QR Code in Print or any type of advertising campaign, even after the promotion is over or the real estate listing status has changed; ie- Sold, TOM, AWC, Pending etc.. !

Each time you list a property for sale, often times the next step is advertising. Your Client expects  you to advertise their real estate for sale and do so in a reasonable time frame.

Mobile Real Estate done right!

With RealtyGo you can list your real estate property and use our advanced software technology to promote and sell real estate while saving you money and repetitive/duplicate work load. If you typically print full color flyers, or even black and white flyers for your listings, it can become expensive, especially if a majority of the people taking the flyers are nosy neighbors or lookie loos that are just curious. There is also the inconvenience of monitoring flyers each day or several times a week to ensure they are fully stocked. If you have multiple listings, this can become quite a chore, much like baby sitting your listings. With RealtyGo we offer the ability for end users like Potential buyers, New Customers, Lookie loos, and other Real Estate Professionals to access your listing while standing right in front of them; or when seeing the listing advertised in a print ad (like the image above) or even from a digital TAG, advertised on the internet (like Criagslist,Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow, etc.. ), not to mention all your other real estate listings as well, using Mobile technology. Now end users can use their Mobile phone or iPad, etc.. , and Scan or Text to get all your real estate listings and current listing information; photos, your professional contact info, your professional website and more, via any mobile device.

Digital TAG

Lets say a Client wants to change their listing price, or has new professional photos they would like to add to a listing. If you have already run a print ad or sent out mailer/flyers in regards to the property, they may be irrelevant and out of date by the time a potential buyer or new customer contacts you about the listing. This could be detrimental in the sale of the listing and creates drop off or abandonment rate from consumers, even outrage in some cases if the change of information works against the prospective buyers agenda.

With Mobile Real Estate Listings and RealtyGo, you simply update your listing information within an easy to use log in area at RealtyGo.co and anytime a potential buyer, new customer or  business professional access your listing(s), they will receive the most current information every time. This will reduce your printing costs and the worry work of potential ads running in magazines or newspapers that may not be up to date or as relevant as they should be, based on a change in the real estate listing information, etc.. . You can continue to use the same Mobile listing TAG even after a listing has sold. Simply reassign the Mobile URL within your login area to one of your “Other” real estate listing, enabling your Mobile real estate listings to always be working and relevant in regards to your professional real estate business, saving you valuable time and keeping operating cost low, maximizing return on investment.

Mobile Listing TAG

RealtyGo enables you to run print ads and advertise your listings with a dynamic TAG called a Mobile Listing TAG, which can be placed everywhere, and will always bring back the most current and relevant information from all your real estate listings, by scanning the QR Code “Smart Code” or sending a Text Message for listing information. Once a potential buyer accesses any of your listings, any time you edit or make a change to the listing thereafter, an alert automatically goes out to the potential buyer, notifying them that a change has occurred to the real estate listing they requested information from, for instance a price reduction or offering the listing for lease vs for sale or vice versa.

Once the end user has the Mobile real estate listing(s) on their hand held mobile device, they can easily forward the listing(s) by text message or email, which gives your listing the ability to travel and be seen on all Unified Channels giving it the viral effect. A Husband can quickly access a listing, see photos, pricing, your contact information, then send it to his wife or an investor all in a few moments, displaying your listing efficiently and in a well organized professional fashion with all you contact info and professional business information. Potential buyers and other real estate professionals can even auto schedule an appointment to meet with your from within the listing, right from their mobile device, freeing up valuable time that you can use to network, focus on day to day activities and your real estate business.

Your Mobile Real Estate Listing on a Mobile Phone;

Mobile Real Estate Listings... from RealtyGo

Starbucks expands mobile payments to all sites – USATODAY.com – RealtyGo blog

Starbucks Goes Mobile Pay!

Now you can pay for that latte with cash, credit card or mobile phone.

Starbucks (SBUX) , which tested mobile payments in select stores and Target outlets in the past year, expanded the program nationally to all its 6,800 company-owned stores starting Wednesday.

There are a handful of mobile payment experiments in operation now, including Bling Nation in Palo Alto, Calif., and Mocapay in Denver. But this is the biggest rollout to date for mobile payments, says Gwenn Bézard, analyst with the Aite Group, who follows mobile payments. Tech analysts expect substantial growth in mobile payments in coming years as more of us lead our daily lives on our phone.

 

TALKING TECH VIDEO: How Starbucks’ pay-by-mobile app works

CORPORATE PULSE: Executive Suite front page

 

“This is a more convenient way to pay,” says Starbucks Vice President Brady Brewer. “Your wallet or purse isn’t always with you, but the mobile phone is.” Customers pay using apps available on their iPhones or BlackBerrys. Download the app, and fund it with your credit card. When you reach the barista at the counter, hit the “pay” button, show the bar code, and scan it to complete the transaction. Starbucks says it’s working on an app for Android phones.

“Starbucks is using an interim technology that’s available today,” Bezard says. But he thinks the future of mobile payments will be based on a technology called near-field communications (NFC), which embeds a payment chip inside the phone.

NFC is popular in Asia, where many phones already have built-in chips, and retailers to support them. Juniper Research says $200 billion will be spent worldwide via mobile payments by 2012, up from $100 billion in 2010.Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile recently announced plans for a joint venture, Isis, to offer NFC purchasing via phones. Testing is scheduled to begin next year.

The success of its gift card sparked Starbucks’ interest in mobile payments. “Customers liked the speed of the card,” Brewer says. About one in five retail transactions are done with the card, and customers have loaded more than $1.5 billion onto them, Starbucks says.

Starbucks began testing mobile payments in 2009. To expand nationally, it had to retrofit older scanners with new ones that could accept the bar code from the apps. “We’re going to see big adoption,” Brewer says. He wouldn’t say how much the changeover cost the company.

If anyone has information at the estimated costs for starbucks to integrate this modality and upgrade their hardware and Scanners, please share. Thank You!

Starbucks expands mobile payments to all sites – USATODAY.com RealtyGo.co

T-Mobile eyes cheaper smartphones – RealtyGo.co

T-Mobile USA is going to push its smartphone prices down in a bid to attract more first-time smartphone users to postpaid plans, the company’s CEO said.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm said the carrier plans to sell a number of devices running on Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform that retail for $100 or less. “We are working with our vendors on this one to drive the price of smartphones down,” Humm said, adding that not all customers want an expensive, high-end device.

Affordable Smartphones by T-Mobile go Viral / RealtyGo - Mobile Real Estate Listings

The push by T-Mobile, the nation’s No. 4 carrier, highlights the efforts that all operators have made recently to push smartphone prices down and change their pricing plans to attract more first-time smartphone buyers. Subsidies by carriers have helped bring the price of some Android phones to well below $100. T-Mobile itself offers several such deals, including for phones like the LG Optimus T and the Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) Charm.  Sprint (NYSE:S) just announced that it will launch the HTC  Evo Shift Jan. 9 for $149.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate on a new, two-year contract. Additionally, flat-rate carriers are offering cheap Android phones even without a subsidy. MetroPCS (NASDAQ:PCS) offers the Huawei Ascend for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and Leap Wireless (NASDAQ:LEAP) offers the phone for $140.

Aside from handset pricing, carriers are also working to lower the cost of smartphone data plans. AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) rolled out tiered, usage-based data pricing last year, charging $15 for 200 MB and $25 for 2 GB of data. Both T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) have followed AT&T’s lead with similar data pricing options.

T-Mobile does not plan to gear its entire lineup toward to the low end of the market though, and will still offer high-end devices. However, the company has struggled to attract postpaid subscribers. T-Mobile lost 60,000 postpaid subscribers in the third quarter, an improvement from 140,000 net postpaid losses in the year-ago period but a sharp drop from 106,000 net postpaid additions in the second quarter.

via T-Mobile eyes cheaper smartphones – RealtyGo.co

Verizon to pair iPhone with unlimited data plan – RealtyGo.co

Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) plans to sell a CDMA-capable iPhone from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) with unlimited data service, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, helping Verizon distinguish the smartphone from AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T), which stands to lose its exclusive grip on the device.

Verizon to offer the iPhone with unlimited data plans...

The report, which cited an unnamed source familiar with Verizon’s plans, said the carrier will begin selling the iPhone around the end of the month. The Journal, along with other media outlets including Bloomberg and Reuters, reported that Verizon will unveil the iPhone at a media event in New York City Tuesday. Verizon sent out invitations to event, which starts at 11 a.m. EST and will be headlined by Lowell McAdam, president and chief operating officer of Verizon Communications and the former head of Verizon Wireless. The invitation asks recipients to “join us as we share the latest news,” but provided no details. FierceWireless will be onsite Tuesday covering the event.

AT&T has been the exclusive provider for the iPhone since 2007 and last year introduced tiered, usage-based data plans. Verizon has long offer an unlimited data plan for smartphones at $30 per month, but late last year added an option of 150 MB per month for $15.

Verizon has been insisting for months that its network is capable of handling increased traffic from an iPhone. The company’s network has been tested by an influx of millions of subscribers using devices that run on Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform. AT&T has admitted it was unprepared for the deluge of traffic the iPhone caused, but has since spent billions upgrading its network to support faster data speeds and increased traffic.

While the announcement by Verizon is not yet official, analysts are already trying to predict how the competitive landscape will be altered if Verizon does launch the iPhone. Sales estimates by many analysts vary, but a consensus has emerged that Verizon might sell 9 million to 12 million iPhones in 2011. Others, however, are more cautious.

“PRTM believes that analyst predictions of as many as 13 million Verizon iPhone sales in 2011 are unlikely to be fulfilled,” PRTM analyst Dan Hays said. “More likely, we will see 2011 Verizon iPhone sales in the range of 5-7 million, slowed by the high cost of subscribers breaking existing contracts, limitations of Verizon’s CDMA technology for multi-tasking and global roaming, and an attractive portfolio of competing 3G and 4G devices in Verizon’s arsenal.”

The iPhone’s arrival from Verizon could also help blunt the growth of Android and stall BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM). According separate reports from research firms Canalys and the NPD Group, Android captured around 44 percent of the U.S. smartphone market in the third quarter, besting both Apple and RIM.

via WSJ: Verizon to pair iPhone with unlimited data plan – RealtyGo