A new Citi Investment Research study from analyst Mike Mahaney points to Netflix still increasing its share of Internet movie and TV viewing. Between May and December, Netflix's share of those watching movies on TV grew from 20 to 27 percent. Most of that came at the expense of Hulu, which was down from 19 percent to 15.
As hinted earlier, Google Wallet on Monday went active for real users. The service in starting off will still work on just Citi MasterCards and the virtual Google Prepaid Card, but is now opening to rival cards. American Express, Discover, and Visa are all making their NFC specs available to let banks add the cards to the mobile payment system.
Google is finally expected to switch on Google Wallet on Monday after unveiling it four months earlier. Partners are receiving a notice telling them that the NFC (near-field communications) tap-to-pay service will be ready to use anywhere a MasterCard PayPass terminal is active. Although a few NFC-aware phones have launched since, TechCrunch understood that the Nexus S 4G running Android 2.3.4 would still be the only phone to support it at first.
Google at its New York City event launched Google Wallet as the first major NFC mobile payment system in the US. The platform revolves around the concept of virtual cards, including a Google Prepaid Card, that lets users pay at a store just by bringing the phone close to a terminal. It ties in directly with Google Offers and can give offers based on the phone's location, deals pushed from the web, and NFC tags built into posters and other ads.
Isis on Monday night set out a timetable for testing its NFC payment system. It now plans to start a trial in early-to-mid 2012 in Salt Lake City. The experiment will cover both paying for goods at stores as well as paying for UTA buses and trains.
Large-scale e-mail marketer Epsilon warned this weekend that at least 14 major companies had their e-mail lists compromised through a security hack. TiVo, as well as banks like Capital One, Citi, and JPMorgan Chase, warned that their customers could be targeted by phishing attempts or anything else that relies on knowing an e-mail address. The affected group stressed that they didn't have any other personally identifying data besides names, although rewards programs from Marriott and Ritz-Carleton also exposed point balances.
Citi Investment Research sparked a reaction in the market today by predicting that Sprint and T-Mobile will merge before the end of 2010. Company analyst Michael Rollins in a note increased the odds of a deal to 55 percent as Sprint may not consider its job cuts and cellphone business improvements enough to offset widening losses. It could change its mind in the first half of the year if any service changes in the winter don't bear fruit, Rollins explained.
Palm could push as many as 1.5 million units of its Pre smartphone in a year, according to an investment note by Citi analyst Jim Suva. The researcher has upgraded the company's stock rating from "sell" to "hold" based on the technical abilities of the device, which has a more modern operating system than existing Palm phones and is also the company's first large touchscreen phone. The phone is seen as a direct factor in soften Palm's mounting losses and bringing its sales back up.
