August 15th, 2011
Top 5 Reasons Why Google Bought Motorola
Google continues its “innovation run” by acquiring smartphone vendor Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The deal between the search giant and mobile phone pioneer signals Google’s official entry into the smartphone market. According to Google CEO Larry Page, the Motorola acquisition will “supercharge the Android ecosystem.” Among the 39 manufacturers that use the Android OS, Google thinks Motorola is the best company to enhance and improve the Android platform.
Motorola has 80 years of innovation in communications, introducing the world’s first portable mobile phone over 30 years ago. Motorola was one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, and was one of the first smartphone vendors to associate a definitive brand with the Android ecosystem via its Droid smartphones.
Here are my top five reasons why Google acquire Motorola:
- Most People Access Social Sites via Mobile
A no-brainer, most people log in to Facebook or Twitter through their mobile phones. The Android OS supports both social platforms (and if not, through a third-party app). And with most offices implementing a social media policy, most employees will go online using their cellphones. People who are using mobile to access Facebook are twice more active than non-mobile users.
- Mobile Payment System (Google Wallet)
PayPal sued Google months ago when the former PayPal employees “took” their ideas to Google. PayPal won’t bother suing the search giant if they know that they’re in trouble when Google launches Google Wallet payment system. Regardless who wins the lawsuit; Google Wallet will enhance mobile eCommerce for everyone and is now being deemed to be better than PayPal.
- Location-based Deals (Google Offers)
Why do people check-in? Is it just a fad? I bet not, with Foursquare hitting the 10 million mark months ago, Google sees the potential of location-based deals to complement Google Places. Google Offers has been launched in major cities already, which I suppose are heavy-users of mobile phones. Need I say, go figure?
- Mobile Landing Pages
With Google Places giving a boost to small and local businesses, Google recently added a useful function on Google sites by allowing users to make a simple mobile landing page for free. It gives a business owner without any HTML experience a quick and convenient way to build a mobile landing page for his business. Businesses can also integrate their social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on the mobile landing page. The game-changer: businesses can get analytics of traffic to their mobile sites.
- Every Internet Company Needs a Smart(phone) Ally
Twitter has Apple. Facebook has Microsoft. Google now has Motorola. In the mobile phone wars, functionality of a unit used to be a crucial factor for it to be a hit among consumers. Today, a smartphone should be social media-friendly for people to buy it. More than 150 million Android devices activated on the planet, it’s Apple’s closest rival in the war of smartphones. And with Motorola carrying an extensive patent portfolio, it’s Google’s counter-punch even before Apple asserts their intellectual property rights against them.
August 8th, 2011
Innovation Adoption Cycle Applied to Social Networks
I recently stumbled upon a post by Italian digital strategist Vincenzo Cosenza via his Tumblr blog. The post showed an infographic that resembled a bell curve so I decided to read the original post on this blog. Cosenza applied the Innovation Adoption Cycle to various social media platforms which included Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
According to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation, any individual who engages with a particular innovation fits into one of its five categories. It’s really a great idea to apply such to social media platforms because it’s a no-brainer that every social platform is a product of innovation. And with innovation comes the notion that no social network is perfect. But before we dwell with that, let me give you a short description of each category. Here they are:
Innovators (2.5%) – Brave people, pulling change. Innovators are very important communication. (Google+, Foursqure)
Early Adopters (12.5%) – Respectable people, opinion leades, try out new ideas, but in a careful way. (LinkedIn, Orkut)
Early Majority (34%) - Thoughtful people, careful but accepting change more quickly than the average. (Twitter, MySpace)
Late Majority (34%) - Skeptic people, will use new ideas or products only when the majority is using it. (China’s QZone)
Laggards (16%) - Traditional people, caring for the old ways, are cirtical towards new ideas and will only accept it if the new idea has become mainstream. (Facebook)
Via Vincenzo Cosenza
If you’ll notice each category accounts for a share of adoption in the cycle, it shows that every category has a given set of psychographic characteristics which determines whether people will be more or less likely to adopt a given technology at a specific time. The relative speed in which members of a social system adopt an innovation equals to the rate of adoption. In this case, the length of time is a requisite for a certain percentage of users within a social system to adopt and embrace an innovation.
The most notable figures are within the Innovators, Early Adopters, and Laggards. Google+’s rampage saw Google’s social network rake 20 million users in 3 weeks, it has the potential to be the social network to dash through the adoption lifecycle. After reaching Early Majority, MySpace’s users plummeted from 225 million users to 125 million, while Facebook’s userbase was gradually increasing. On the Laggards stage, will we see Facebook hit a billion users? And what comes after that? With Google+ on the rise, will Facebook lose some of its users? Let’s wait and see.
