In an announcement that is indicative of the increasing relevance of Near Field Communications (NFC) to the smartphone industry, Broadcom last week released a new quad-radio wireless chip that provides support to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM and NFC. This new chip follows Broadcom’s introduction in Sept’11 of a standalone NFC chip for smartphones. The company had projected at the time that roughly about 100 million smartphones with standalone NFC chips would be sold in 2012, a 10-15% share of overall smartphone device sales.

Near-field communication (NFC) technology has been an area of interest in the context of smart devices for more than five years now. The first NFC enabled phone was introduced by Nokia in January 2007, and over the years, more and more new NFC enabled phones have continued to enter the market. Yet, NFC is still a small portion of the handset market, and Broadcom’s new combo chip might just be the fillip NFC needs for greater adoption in handsets. Broadcom is the dominant seller of Wi-Fi/BT/FM combo chips, and to the extent it can control costs on the new quad-combo chip, NFC may now be able to latch on to the proven demand for the other communication standards. More importantly, with second largest combo-chip maker TI already selling an NFC combo chip, there is now enough momentum in the market to make NFC commonplace in handsets in the near future.

Are handsets then enough to create mass-scale adoption for NFC? Vivotech’s recent sale of its contactless reader business suggests that NFC adoption in handsets might at least be a necessary if not sufficient condition for the technology. Also needed is the adoption of large-scale use cases (the primary one being contactless payments) and platforms enabling such use cases (such as mobile wallets, secure elements, and enabling software such as that offered by Opus portfolio company Sequent). So the NFC battle is far from won, but Broadcom’s move, based clearly on ROI, suggests we are still on track.

Continue Reading ...

Capgemini Consulting, a global strategy and transformation consulting firm, and Badgeville, a fast growing startup focused on gamification of enterprise applications, last week announced a partnership to accelerate the use of gamification techniques to enable enterprises to motivate employees and customers.

This partnership seems like a win-win solution for both parties. Enterprise operations have seen multiple waves of innovation in recent years. Functions such as CRM and HCM first started migrating to the cloud, followed by proliferation of mobility into the enterprise. More recently, companies such as Yammer, Jive and Dropbox have brought social and collaboration, and in doing so have blurred the distinction between consumer and enterprise. All in all, now we are seeing increasingly dispersed enterprise teams using cloud-hosted software and communicating pre-dominantly through online means. As such, gamification represents the logical next step as enterprises work to keep their distributed workforce engaged and motivated, providing startups like Badgeville with an excellent selling proposition to such enterprises. What Badgeville and others lack is a strong distribution channel, and firms such as Capgemini which do thousands of customer engagements every year and which are looking for means to participate, can provide exactly what Badgeville needs.

So what’s the long term game for this trend towards consumerization of the enterprise? Could BYOD eventually result in enterprises becoming just collections of individuals? Maybe, and by the time that happens, Badgeville and/or its likes will have become entrenched enterprise players. IT consulting firms will probably have another inflection point at that time, and may need to transition into part-consultants and part-product-players. Until then, partnerships such as Badgeville – Capgemini will be very beneficial for enterprises and consumers alike.

Continue Reading ...

Last week brought news of consolidation in the POS system segment – National Cash Register (NCR) Corporation announced its $650M acquisition of Retalix, a developer of software for managing sales, stores and logistics for retail chains. This is the second large acquisition for NCR, coming a years after its acquisition of hospitality and specialty retail POS company Radiant Systems for $1.2B in July’11. As of August’12, Retalix was deployed at more than 70,000 store locations and more than 400,000 customer touch points; an excellent addition to a company which was already the leader in banking ATMs, retail self-checkout and POS systems, hospitality and specialty retail.

This is an interesting play by a company that is more than 125 years old, and while the obvious motive here would be scale and consolidation, the other more important underlying driver might be mobility. As smartphones and tablets have become increasingly pervasive, brick and mortar stores are starting to embrace mobility and related software and services. Players such as Square in their pursuit of disrupting the larger financial transactions marketplace are also contributing to lower growth in NCR’s core POS and ATM product lines by weaning SMBs away from stationary POS sytems. In response, NCR has begun to introduce its own solutions for mobile payments and mobile customer interfacing. The Retalix 10 Store & Sales Channel Suite now adds a much needed software and services layer that helps NCR become a more vertically integrated solutions provider, and as such might allow the combined entity hold on to at least the larger players in retail, hospitality, healthcare and banking for the time being.

And so on to the broader question – will brick and mortar stores survive in the face of the ecommerce revolution? That is a difficult question to answer, but at least for the medium term, it is good to see a company with a long legacy and a throwback name continue to keep itself relevant and at the cutting edge.

Continue Reading ...