Going Out Is Social, Why Shouldn't Local Discovery Be? | The Hoppit Perspective

Choosing a place is very social. Think about it. You decide where to go with other people. You desire to read reviews from people like you. And, you want to go to places that can be enjoyed by the entire group.

But social place searching is hard to do, and the existing players in the market struggle to be social.

For example, let’s pick on Yelp. Yelp struggles to be social because it is impossible to run a search query that accounts for the preferences of multiple users, even though we rarely eat or drink alone. Yelp also struggles to instill trust in its review system because users don’t know the taste of the reviewers – and how can you trust a user that you don’t know?

The same goes with CitySearch, Ness, and Alfred. All these technologies are set up for individual restaurant searches. But every time I eat, it's with other folks.

At Hoppit, we believe that the future of place searching is social, and we designed Hoppit with that consumer psychology in mind. Hoppit is pioneering the concept of social place searching; our search engine and complex algorithms can take into account the taste of multiple users. We're striving to always have an answer to the question - "What should we do tonight?"

Next time your group is trying to decide where to go, check out Hoppit.

Kudos to eBay's Corporate Strategy Team. GSI + Where + Magento = Awesome

eBay's GSI Commerce acquisition, followed by its Where.com acquisition, followed by its Magento acquisition (today) - are the fruits of a very intricate Corporate Strategy. And that strategy will have VERY interesting implications for the future.

Let's take this one step at a time.

1) eBay acquires GSI Commerce. This, in my opinion, is genius. It gives eBay the ability to rival its chief competitor - Amazon.com - by giving them an immediate global logistics network. It also gives eBay the experience to serve mid-size to large retailers in a MUCH more a effective way, as GSI has many notable large retailers. Up to this point, they had been getting beat silly by Amazon in the mid to large size game. GSI's shipping infrastructure levels the playing field.

2) eBay acquires Where.com. Again, great acquisition. Where.com has reach into 120,000 retailers - both large and small, and therefore is a significant participant in the Local Commerce space (which everyone is trying to win right now). What can eBay do with Where.com? Oh, I don't know - only give its ENORMOUS retail base access to intelligence on local markets in real-time. This is huge - especially for retailers with both a brick-and-mortar presence and an eCommerce and mCommerce preserence.

3) eBay acquires Magento - Magento, being the open source eCommerce platform with 90,000 SMB retailers and 1,000 large Enterprise retailers. Magento, also being the first open source mCommerce platform - not to mention the company which recently launched Magento Go, hosted eCommerce for SMBs and emerging businesses. Magento, the company that has Apple's verison of the app store, but for eCommerce retailers - an eCommerce app store, basically. This acquisition gives eBay an incredible retail reach and great additions to its technology portfolio.

So now we have eBay + PayPal + GSI + Where + Magento. Wow. Imagine the possibilities! eBay is well positioned to do many significant things -

• Amazon, beware! The eBay marketplace can overtake Amazon as the market leader. eBay can now offer sellers so many tools and technologies and sophistication (a la GSI and Magento), as well as more channels (Magento and Where.com).
• So. Many. Synergies. GSI and Magento retailers can take advantage of lots of PayPal innovation in the payments space. Where.com can also provide a lot of intelligence layers to GSI and Magento retailers.
• Local, Local, Local. eBay is eCommerce + mCommerce + global + social - and now local. Here's a little forward-looking note: watch out for eBay to rise up as a leading hyper-local services provider for retailers. In the future, eBay can help you reach local consumers in real-time.

So, all in all, I'm quite impressed with eBay's corporate strategy group. Kudos.

Now the only thing is - execution. Which is quite the tricky beast.

Best of luck, eBay.

-Steve

On the Verge of the First U.S. Mobile Payments Ecosystem

Apple, Visa and DeviceFidelity are close. Visa Inc. and DeviceFidelity, Inc. are working to allow iPhone users to make payments by simply waving their iPhone in front of a contactless payment terminal. The new technology, developed by DeviceFidelity and certified by Apple, combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that hosts Visa's contactless payment application, called Visa payWave. The technology will work for both iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G devices.

iPhone users will be able to make Visa mobile payments in retail stores, at fast food restaurants, in taxis, during sporting events (such as at baseball games), and also make purchases at vending machines that have contactless payment terminals. Thousands of merchants throughout the U.S. have already upgraded their payment terminals to allow consumers to make Visa mobile payments. Market trials of the payment-enabled iPhone are scheduled to start this summer.

But how fast will adoption be? Analysts speculate: not fast.

What can we learn from Japan? Well, even in an extremely technology-savvy society like Japan, after 7-8 years of mobile payment introduction, only 17% of the country has an active mobile payment account. Celent, a financial services research firm, estimates that there are 28 million registered mobile payments accounts in Japan and about 20 million active mobile payments accounts. These constitute 24% and 17% of all contactless payment accounts, respectively.

Prospects for the U.S. are in the range of 4-8% penetration of contactless payments. Even so, I believe this is where the market is moving. iPhone users in particular would prefer that their phone be everything: a phone, an iPod, a computer, a TV remote, a passport, a credit card - everything.

I, for one, will be using my iPhone in the Visa network this summer.

Mobile Money: Can Any Firm Have Global Scale?

In 2009, McKinsey conducted the largest study of its kind and sized the market for mobile money through to 2012. The following statistics are quite striking:

-The # of unbanked people with mobile phones is expected to increase from 1 billion (2009) to 1.7 billion (2012), a CAGR of 19%
- 290 million more previously unbanked people could be using mobile money services by 2012, bringing the global total to 364 million unbanked using the services
- Mobile network operators stand to earn $7.5B in direct and indirect revenues from serving the 364 million clients ($5B in direct and $2.5B 5ndirect revenues)

This has served as an impetus for large players like Western Union to reveal an international mobile strategy. And it's not just Western Union. It's Fidelity, Fiserv, Gemalto, Verifone, Alcatel Lucent, Amdocs, and the list goes on and on.

Which players will win, and what is the criteria for winning? One thing is for sure. Strategies must be market-based. Zambia's mobile needs (e.g. capabilities in money transfers), are far different from Brazil's mobile needs (e.g. capabilities in mobile bill payment). So now the question becomes this:

Is any solution truly scalable?

If the space is so profoundly market-based, can any player develop a solution and walk away with 25% slice of that growing $7.5B pie? Can one player develop deep enough capabilities around the entire value chain to offer a-la-carte mobile services to every market? Or, will we continue to see dozens of market entrants succeed on a small scale?

In my opinion, it's the latter. I believe we'll continue to see both small and large players enter the market, and dependent on their market strategy, partnerships, and technology, all have the possibility of success.

Email opinions to thestroop@gmail.com.