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TAKE NOTE

Calling all Customers

With consumers already spending billions of dollars a year on ring tones and games for their cell phones can online shopping by mobile phone be far behind?

Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum, a technology consulting firm in London, England, says we’ll see it happening this year thanks to cell phone imaging that approaches the quality of personal computers.
Amazon.com started things off in 1999 with a Web site that could be browsed by cell phone, but few consumers had phones with the technology to render high-quality images. Now, Entner estimates that 190 million people in the United States have a cell phone and at least 150 million of those have color screens.

eBay says it is introducing mobile phone technology to Verizon users that for $4 a month will allow subscribers to browse the site, bid on items and receive alerts when they have been outbid. The service is already available to Cingular and Sprint users.

Will your customers be part of this next wave of shopping? Quite possibly. The more services added to these all-purpose phones, says Entner, the easier it is to get users to accept the next application.

Return of the Dot-com Boom

This time it has to do with high-speed broadband access. In 2006, experts say, for the first time a majority of Americans will use high-speed broadband connections to go online rather than dial-up access.
According to ComScore Net-works Inc., an Internet measurement service based in Chicago, IL, the number of Americans using broadband connections at home increased by more than 20 million since August 2004 to 86.9 million.

This change has given rise to a flood of Internet companies providing service and content to broadband users including audio and video but now also television over the Internet direct to computers—including laptops and cell phones with wireless broadband network connections.

Cheers!

American consumers are drinking better. That’s the assessment of the Distilled Spirits Council, a liquor industry trade group.

Liquor sales rose 7.5 percent to $16.3 billion in 2005, as the nation’s drinkers seem to be moving toward premium beverages. The market share for liquor rose to 32 percent of all alcoholic beverage sales last year, up from 31.2 percent the previous year, while beer sales continued a five-year decline falling to 51.4 percent of sales from 52.9 percent in 2004.