My session is about mCommerce – no surprises there. But I think we often lose sight of what mCommerce is as it embraces two areas of retail sales, one of which is much more unique to mobile. mCommerce is:

1. Like eCommerce (or PC-based commerce) but on mobile. So you buy stuff from Amazon or ASOS, or from more traditional retailers like Tesco or M&S, both of whom have thriving online businesses, and the stuff gets delivered to you shortly afterwards.

2. Mobile enabled commerce. This is where you use the mobile to enhance shopping in physical stores. So, you might allow people to use their mobiles to compare prices, navigate the store, get more product information or watch video on their mobile. Or in my frame of reference these days, you might give them a coupon that can be digitally redeemed to drive purchases in shops.

The first area is much more easily understood and gets most attention. However, if you are a multi-channel retailer, the second part is much more important. Why? Because 90%+ or more of your sales are going to be via your stores.

This might sound a little surprising as whenever reports are written about this kind of area, the emphasis is on the triumph of online, the double digit growth of eCommerce or mCommerce and how physical stores are on their last legs. The reality is very different. Sure, online is a great big fat success story. But it’s still dwarfed by old fashioned people-going-shopping. Forrester, for example, claims that just 8% of shopping is done online today.

If you’re a retailer, you obviously know this – you’ll have your own stats to refer to. So while it’s clearly important that you look at mobile to sell your goods and services online, the bigger potential leverage point is to use mobile to support the store sales.

We’ll be seeing a whole lot more of these types of mobile-enabled commerce initiatives and perhaps it’s time we had a name for it to distinguish it from classic mCommerce. sCommerce (for store-based commerce) perhaps. If you have an idea for it, leave a comment and I’ll launch it at The Guardian, naturally giving you full credit!

But in the meantime, note that the world is going to change again for retailing, just as everyone thought they were getting the hang of it.

Firstly, let me clarify one brief point. When I wrote about my plans a month ago I suggested that I would be looking at some advisory work, investing and mentoring. This is something I’m still doing and plan to continue, so taking a full time gig is not a u-turn in any way, but very much complementary to the work I’ll be doing at Eagle Eye. You’ll still hopefully see me on the speaking circuit and I’m especially looking forward to the MLOVE Confestival taking place in a castle near Berlin at the end of June. I’ll be expanding on some of my recent talks about the exponential growth of mobile technology, The Singularity and the short and long term implications for businesses. And there’s a bunch of great speakers and plenty of partying to look forward to – check it out and book your place.

Anyway, back to mobile vouchers.

When I were a lad starting out in marketing, we used to bandy around the phrase “Advertising loads the gun and Sales Promotion pulls the trigger”. Like many truisms, it contained a healthy dollop of fact and wisdom, even if it was simplistically expressed. Basically, it suggested that Advertising’s job was to build a brand and create consumer demand for the product. And Sales Promotion created the sale by, for example, driving store traffic, promoting the product in-store or running loyalty programmes.

Today, Sales Promotion has been officially abolished in favour of “Promotional Marketing”, but broadly speaking, the principles are the same.

However, the hybrid “performance marketing” has also grown disproportionately important, where the ad also stimulates a purchase – largely driven by PC-based display and search marketing. This is a very effective technique for advertisers and can often be purchased on a payment-by-results basis – you only pay when the consumer engages with the brand by clicking on the ad (Pay Per Click), or in some cases, actually making a purchase of the product (known as CPA or Cost Per Action).

Digital Direct Response Advertising or Performance Advertising has proved truly revolutionary, but really only for companies who can complete an action or make a sale online. So if you’re say, Amazon, eBay or LastMinute.com, Performance Advertising is marketing nirvana. But if you still rely on a purchase of a physical product in a real-world store, the case is less clear. If online activity simply drives consumers to your website which doesn’t actually stimulate a transaction, does this have real value?

Rather than getting into a debate about the merits of this argument, let’s just look at the facts.

According to eMarketer, online ad spend now accounts for 15.4% of the total. There’s an argument to suggest that this is low anyway in comparison to how much time the average person spends online, as opposed to engaged with other media. Despite this, Nielsen states that

Big FMCG brands in particular might appear to have been rather shy of the online space, with Procter & Gamble investing just 1.3% of its overall media spend in paid-for internet ads, Nestle 2.7%, Unilever 1.9% and Tesco 1.4%.

Now, let’s just remind ourselves, these are 4 of the most sophisticated and innovative marketing brands globally and they’re consistently underspending in digital. And the main rationale for this is lack of measurable of results in terms of sales created. Or as Jerry Lloyd-Williams, head of content at MediaCom Beyond Advertising suggests:

For a lot of FMCG [CPG in the US] brands, one question still prevails, which is: do the dollars and pounds they spend on digital equate to sales? There’s still a lot of research that needs to be done, but the caution with which they are spending online is built on a reasonable research question.’

But let’s look at mobile, as opposed to PC-based advertising. Mobile can actually link advertising to a physical sale in a store. A brand can issue a mobile coupon and provided that the coupon can be digitally redeemed (as opposed to a sight-check by store staff), we can suddenly measure sales precisely and develop appropriate ROI formulations.

This isn’t a new concept, by any means. As an industry, we’ve been talking about “closing the loop” for the 11 years I’ve been in the industry and it’s remained the big promise of mobile marketing – but a promise that hasn’t yet been delivered. Most launches into this area rarely get beyond a trial as every method tried to date – from barcodes to NFC – require a significant upgrade in either the retailer’s EPoS or mobile handsets, or both. Such upgrades are expensive and take time to deploy.

When I was looking for my next role, I was looking for a market that had the ability to become a billion dollar business within 5 years. So it’s perhaps not surprising that mobile coupons would make my list. It’s potentially huge, with over 300 Billion paper coupons issued every year in the US alone. In addition, I know that mobile coupons will be embraced by retailers and FMCG/CPG verticals when a secure abd foolproof redemption methodology is in place.

However, in the last 11 years, I hadn’t seen a technology that would actually deliver the promise today in a scalable way. Until I came across Eagle Eye Solutions, which owns a great piece of patented technology that has the potential to disrupt several industries all at once – retailer marketing, mobile marketing and couponing.

While most players in this market have focused on scanning technology of some form, Eagle Eye have very cleverly thought out-of-the-box. Their idea has been to partner with the companies who supply retailers with their Credit Card Terminals in-store, or what we call in the UK, Chip and PIN Terminals. By integrating with these companies, which are already linked to the retail EPoS, something very neat indeed can be achieved. This is how it works.

1. Consumer Requests a Coupon

The ways in which a consumer might learn about the availability of a coupon are many and varied. But essentially, they’ll be responding to an ad – whether via traditional media, such a radio or press, or perhaps more likely, via mobile advertising itself. If by mobile, they can click on an ad or link and get a coupon sent to their phone, usually via ubiquitous sms.

2. The Coupon

The coupon is actually a simple unique PIN programmed for one-off usage.

3. The Retail Experience

They visit the store, make their purchase and use the Chip and PIN machine to enter the PIN as part or full payment. All the evidence so far points to very positive consumer acceptance of this mechanic, as they’re used to entering numbers in this way.

4. The Marketing

If the promotion is being run by the retailer, they get real-time reporting and analysis on their campaign. Ditto, if it’s a brand running the campaign via the retailer.

5. The Security

One of the dirty little secrets of the coupon industry is fraud.

There are two types of coupon misuse in operation. Malredemption is trade fraud – for example, where a retailer cuts out and collects coupons and claims back the face value and trade handling allowance, without ever involving a consumer. Clearly, this is a problem mainly involved with independent shops, but it is and always will be an issue using paper-based systems and manual fulfilment and reconciliation.

Misredemption is a far wider problem and involves the consumer claiming the value of the coupon without having ever purchased the product. It’s pretty hard to quantify the size of this wasted marketing budgets. Occasionally, a company with a vested interest in minimising the problem commissions a survey which finds that most people claim not to do it. But as you’re asking them to ‘fess up to cheating, maybe that’s not a big surpise.

Anyway, digital redemption is secure as the discount isn’t given by the retail EPoS unless the product is purchased. Brand budget holders can wave goodbye to this perennial headache for good.

6. The Fulfilment

No waiting for fulfilment houses to count coupons and send cheques (checks) around the country. So, the Green implications are pretty impressive too – especially avoiding the printing and distribution of the vouchers themselves.

Of course, the really huge opportunity here is using all the data to the best effect, but I think that’s a post for another day.

The mobile coupon/voucher space is already a crowded one. But that’s great for Eagle Eye as there are loads of companies who need the technology that we can deliver. The Facebooks, Groupons, LivingSocials and any company involved in running mobile advertising campaigns will all benefit from partnering with us to deliver mobile couponing today. So, I hope others will quickly see what the opportunity is here.

When I joined AdMob 5 years ago, many people questioned just what the hell I was doing getting involved in a company that ran banner campaigns on mobile websites. Clearly, I don’t need to explain that any more. In the same way, many people have asked the same thing about mobile couponing – or at least been very underwhelmed at the news.

Believe me, this sector is going to be massive and is worth getting very excited about indeed as the mobile revolution continues. Whether or not Eagle Eye turns out to be a big winner is yet to be seen. But I’ve researched this market very carefully and really believe that it’s got a good shot at winning big.

So, will mobile couponing be a billion dollar business in 5 years? We’ll see. But it’s going to be fun finding out.

AT&T’s CMO says that what it’s labelled “quick-messaging phones” — feature phones with QWERTY keyboards — will “usurp the feature phone”. We’re certainly seeing more and more of them here in the US, across all the operators. But from my view, I’m not sure I see them “usurping” featurephones so much as hampering Blackberry’s consumer push, and perhaps some of the growth of smartphones. I’ve felt for a long time the main attraction of Blackberry and other QWERTY smartphones to the consumer market wasn’t push email, but rather the keyboard, and how much easier it makes texting and IM.

Further, I don’t think that adding QWERTY keyboards to devices means the feature phone is dying, it’s simply evolving, as you’d expect it to. The feature phone market, or at least the non-smartphone market, still has a lot of life left in it, and increasingly, the smartphone/feature phone distinction will become less and less important.

If you’ve swapped back and/or forth between QWERTY and non-QWERTY devices, I’d love to hear about your experience and your thoughts in the comments. Are devices with standard keypads on their way out?

Anyway, lots of people there taking pictures and shooting video with their handsets, as usual. But lots of them were going to be disappointed with that part of the experience, as there were plenty of flashes firing from the back of the hall, jittery video, and, as I discovered, the sound was just too damn loud, overwhelming the mic and rendering the audio unlistenable (turn your speakers WAY down before clicking that link).

Obviously the hardware in use here isn’t perfect for this sort of thing, but could there be a better software solution? Detecting tons of noise and adjusting the mic level would help, for one! But perhaps instead of trying to mimic digital camera interfaces and settings, more scenario-driven settings modes, like, say “Concert Mode”, that reflect the times people use their handsets’ cameras, might help. Of course, you’d still have to get people to select those modes, but maybe it’s a start.

Of course, the WSJ post has the usual caveats, including this huge one:

Nokia is deciding whether it wants to team up with an established Web player like Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., or to build a social network from the ground up, said people familiar with the talks.

While experience tells me otherwise, I have a really hard time believing that’s much of a choice. I’ll repeat again what I said in September:

“So, to sum up, if you’re an operator or a handset vendor, don’t try to sell your users on some new social-networking site. Make it easier and better for them to access Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever social site they’re already invested in. Don’t try to sell them on some new IM service that’s closed off to most of their friends; make Skype or AIM or MSN work better on their handset.”

The news of talks is an encouraging sign that Nokia is getting this — maybe next week at MWC they’ll have something solid to announce.

What are your thoughts? Am I off base in thinking that integrating services like Facebook into mobile devices is a no-brainer?

I’ve never really been a huge fan of touchscreen devices, but I’m starting to think that’s because the bulk of my experience with them has been on devices with crappy UIs. A poor user interface is poor, regardless: I’m thinking of my experiences with touchscreen and non-touchscreen Windows Mobile devices, none of which have been particularly positive.

It’s really important for platform and UI developers to keep this in mind, especially when moving legacy software platforms over to touchscreens (ie Blackberry, S60, etc). Adding a touchscreen changes the way that users interact with a device, and it can call for you to toss out much of the existing legacy of a user interface. You may have a UI that’s great for a non-touch device, offering great ease of use, but that’s doesn’t mean it will translate instantly, easily and effectively to a touchscreen device.

- The G1 is chunky. It’s fairly thick, and it’s a bit bulky as well. Compared to my Nokia E71 or the iPhone my wife is eyeing, it looked and felt like a whale. The hinge mechanism that flips the screen up to expose the keyboard also looked slightly janky to me, raising some doubts about the G1′s durability and build quality.

- It wasn’t as fast at loading web pages as I expected. Whether that’s because of a slow 3G network or a slow browser, I’m not sure.

- The Android UI looks pretty nifty, but I think that many of its features will be lost in complexity on many users. In addition, I found the presence of both a trackball and a touchscreen a bit odd. You can get a very basic idea of the interface from WDSGlobal’s demo. The UI wasn’t particularly intuitive to me, and I think most users will face a pretty steep learning curve with it (as they do with most new platforms).

- One thing I thought was really cool was an app called Locale, which was one of the top 10 apps in the Android Developer Challenge. It’s a GPS app that allows you to create situations and conditions on your device that change its behavior. For instance, you can create an “At Work” situation, which based on your location, will silence your device automatically (or shut off Wi-Fi or forward calls) when you’re at work. Nifty stuff — and the sort of thing that should come standard on GPS devices IMO.

Like I said, these impressions were based on 5 minutes with the G1, and I’m looking to get a hold of one for a longer period of time to play with it some more. If you’ve got a G1, or have spent some time with one, chime in with your thoughts in the comments, as I’m really curious to see what other users think of the device and the software. And if you’re looking for an in-depth review, check out Phone Scoop’s lengthy review.

I’m thinking 3.2 megapixels, autofocus, my past experience with Nokia cameraphones… something isn’t right here. So I shoot an email over to Rafe from All About Symbian, asking if he thought the pic was particularly bad for an E71. Rafe responded that he thought it was worse than the ones he usually took, and that pressing the T key on the E71 to autofocus was a bit tempermental.

Wait. T to autofocus? So I try again, hitting T this time, and as you can see, the results were much better. But T to focus? I’m sure somebody will pop up with a “RTFM” comment, fair enough. But am I so obtuse that I’m the only person to whom pressing T to make the camera focus isn’t intuitive at all? It doesn’t make sense to me. I’d simply, and wrongly, assumed that pressing the center of the D-pad to snap the image would engage the autofocus, like pressing the shutter button on my N82 and N71 (and my Sony Ericsson K750 before that, if you want to keep going back) did. Oh well, live and learn, as long as I’ve got Rafe to email.

But at the very least, I’d have appreciated a “Press T to focus” message on screen.

One foible: I don’t like how you can’t hit the green send key to send a message, like you can in the messaging app on the device. Hopefully this will get added, and the rest of the bugs will get worked out. I’m curious to see what happens in this space for Nokia, since they announced this week they were shutting down work on their enterprise push email software, as well as buying IM/email provider OZ.

Others have claimed it before, but it would certainly appear that Apple’s transformation into an orifice of its own is complete, given the way it’s refused to allow a podcasting app to be distributed through the iPhone App Store. The app, called Podcaster, lets users stream, manage and download podcasts directly from their iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple says since the app “assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes,” and therefore it won’t be allowed in the App Store.

Of course, the iPhone and iPod Touch can’t access podcasts without syncing their device with their computer. Accessing podcasts over the air, wirelessly, would seem to be a pretty natural capability of the devices, but El Jobso and Co. have decided that users shouldn’t be able to do so. What’s the harm in selling this application that adds this nice bit of functionality for interested users? Particularly given that Apple doesn’t profit from distributing podcasts through iTunes, or from the sync-only model, why do they care?

“Think different,” etc etc etc. But when it comes to mobile, does Apple really think any differently than all the other operators and handset vendors and platform providers it and its overzealous army of supporters have so long derided?