Sprint's New Mobile Wallet Application

This also leaves questions like why sprint does that? What is in it for them? Right now there is no direct revenue for them apart from building some customer loyalty. But in future, Sprint may expect revenues for provisioning a card in the digital wallet and some kind of cross selling offers inside the wallet and probably very small percentage from the vendors. There is also speculation that sprint may mine the purchase history to enrich the profiles of the user and probably use them for marketing purposes. if we observe at high level the operator is bending little bit to fit in the payments ecosystem, instead of fighting for a pie in a transactional revenue, finding other models to makeup the revenue.We have to see if digital wallet bring equilibrium among the payments value chain.

WebOS 2.0 with Pre2 announced

WebOS 2.0 is major upgrade since it was announced one and half years ago. Some notable features in the new OS would be the support for adobe flash player 10.1, They clubbed the concept of stacks which is the list of open apps and the multitasking. Just Type is another feature, which allows user to type before opening the apps and based on the context, use the typed text to perform certain tasks in the app. As every OS is layering a unified social experience, Web OS integrated with synergy platform to provide unified email and social experiences. With respective to Pre2, the major disappointment would be 3.1-inch screen which is way smaller is consumers eye when compared to other android phones with 4 inch screens. Pre2 may not be HP's flagship device, but HP plans to use WebO.S 2.0 in their upcoming devices. H.P also plans to integrate their existing cloud based services on to the new devices. Let hope H.P brings a decent competitor in 2011.

Seven percent of cell phone users make video calls

Video calling is getting traction again with the latest high performance gadgets like iphone4 with face time and android evo 4G devices. 7 percent of user using video calling may not be the bigger number at this point due to lack of end to end experiences. There are other multitude of issues like the variations in device capabilities between caller and calling devices. Apple with face time tried to control the end-to-end experience by limiting to iphone4 devices. They plan to open source the face time so other devices can implement the same. Sprint is boasting video as killer application with its 4G network. We may see little increase in video calling adoption over next few years.

Some stats from phonedog:


* As with online video calls, higher-income households had more experience with video calling. Around 10% of users with a household income of over $75,000 a year had experience with mobile phone video calls, as opposed to 4% of users with a household income of under $30,000 a year.
* Likewise, younger users are more likely to have used mobile phone video calling; 9% and 8% of respondents age 18 to 29 and 30 to 39 had experience with mobile phone video calls, as compared with 4% and 3% for older age groups.
* The male-female split was about the same. Roughly 8% of males responded that they had experience with video calls on mobile devices, compared to 6% of female users

GetJar gives away free games

GetJar, who claims to be the second largest app store in the world with their app store available in 200 countries supporting various handsets. They do have some hard time in competing with on-device stores especially in U.S market. Offering premium content for free to acquire the customers is not a new technique but it has never done in the apps world. They plan to give away 5 games from glu mobile supporting android, blackberry and java phones. It is interesting that they have choose game category to offer premium content which also make sense. The getjar appstore might be few clicks away from the on-device appstore placed in premium real estate but it good to observe the conversion rate.