He is forecasting that mobile commerce — purchases made from apps or the browser on a phone or tablet — will hit $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume this year, up 60 percent from $5 billion in 2011.

Donahoe made the predictions last night in Las Vegas, where he gave the keynote at a technology dinner for leaders of the Consumer Electronics Association.

Additionally, the company predicted that PayPal will reach $7 billion in mobile total payment volume this year, increasing from $4 billion in 2011.

He made the bold predictions despite the recent unsettling departure of PayPal President Scott Thompson to join Yahoo as CEO, indicating that he is still confident about PayPal’s mobile future.

During the keynote, Donahoe also announced that Best Buy was its newest partner to use the RedLaser barcode scanning app to offer local in-store pick-up services. Other companies that offer it today include Toys “R” Us.

Other big data figures: 

• EBay Mobile currently has more than 65 million downloads of its mobile applications across all platforms.
• More than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113 percent increase year over year.
• PayPal’s original prediction for 2011 was that it would achieve $1.5 billion in mobile total payment volume for 2011. Instead, it hit $4 billion. A year earlier, it totaled only $750 million.

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The National Transportation Safety Board last week asked states to ban cellphones while driving in response to a deadly collision in Missouri last year that the agency blamed in part on a driver who was texting while driving. The NTSB wants the ban to include hands-free devices, which let drivers keep their hands on the wheel while talking through speakers or a headset.

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The start-up, called Mobeam, got the endorsement of such a large company because of a major glitch in the couponing system: Most scanners in grocery stores cannot read a bar code displayed on the screen of a cellphone.

“Couponing has been one of the tried and tested tools to incentivize consumers to try our products,” said Jeff Weedman, P&G’s VP of global business development. “Ads around the world have moved digital, but there was a hole in the system. You can deliver coupons digitally, but frankly our customers weren’t happy about it. It doesn’t scan at most grocery scanners, and it slowed the system down because the checkout person would have to plug in the numbers manually.”

In October, Cupertino, Calif.-based Mobeam raised $4.9 million in capital to solve this problem, developing technology that coverts bar code data into a beam of light that can be read by most checkout-counter scanners.

A host of applications are already available for download on many smartphones — Starbucks has been one of the shining examples. Its application, which allows customers to pay at the register, has enabled 26 million mobile payment transactions this year alone.

But few people realize that Starbucks had to replace all of its scanners in its stores for the app to work.

Today, couponing is $3.7 billion segment of the consumer packaged goods market in North America, with more than 300 billion coupons distributed every year.

Increasingly, they are going digital, too.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in investments have been made this year in the distribution of coupons online and via mobile. Most recently, WhaleShark raised $150 million. Others include CouponCabin.com, which raised $54 million; and Coupons.com, which secured $230 million in two megarounds.

The prospect of finding coupons online and saving them to the phone, which can then be scanned at the register, is appealing. Currently, the main two options are to clip coupons from the newspaper, or to print coupons that were found online.

But don’t expect to be able to start using Mobeam’s technology tomorrow.

Mobeam will have to convince phone manufacturers to integrate its technology into their hardware. It says it is expecting phones to start shipping as soon as next year.

(Photo credit: sdc2027)

For the first time ever, so-called Cyber Monday registered as the biggest online shopping day of the year despite years of procrastinators lifting other days higher as they waited until a few days before Christmas to do their online shopping.

The theory had always been that consumers who flocked to stores on Black Friday would return to their desks on Monday to continue buying deals online.

Last year, the plan panned out and more than $1 billion-worth in items were added to virtual shopping carts across the U.S. to make it the heaviest online shopping day of the year — and the first time ever that a single day eclipsed the billion-dollar mark.

Now, with November already off to a strong start with a 15 percent increase in sales compared to the same period last year, another strong Monday could be in the works, according to comScore, which tracks online holiday spending. The research firm tracks shopping from fixed Internet connections, meaning it doesn’t count items purchased on phones or tablets.

Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — alone saw online sales of $816 million, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26 percent increase over the same day in 2010, comScore reported.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We now turn our attention to Cyber Monday, a day that Shop.org says will see eight in ten retailers running special online promotions. Last year, Cyber Monday was the heaviest day of online spending ever, with sales exceeding $1 billion, and we fully expect to see another record set this year.”

Cyber Monday may finally be living up to its name.

Amazon is a prime example of a retailer working hard to pry open wallets today.

Last year, the largest e-commerce company said Cyber Monday was Amazon’s peak day with more than 13.7 million items ordered worldwide, setting a record for 158 items sold per second.

Today, it will be important to achieve that pace again.

On Sunday, it bought full-color circulars in newspapers around the country promoting its lineup of discounts in its special Cyber Monday store.

On the front page, it touted its full lineup of Kindle e-readers, and a couple of pages were also dedicated to sales supposedly so steep you had to go online to see the prices for electronics, cellphones and videogames.

The Cyber Monday store, however, appeared a little unorganized with random “lightning deals,” which ranged from gift baskets to knife sets, board games, power tools and inexpensive jewelry — but nothing that seemed like the hit item of the season.

Other leading retailers, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target, will also be expected to offer special deals.

Surely, the theory goes, if enough marketing dollars are spent, and the discounts are substantial enough, it might get consumers to turn out again to break another record.

In a blog post, comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman explained that last year’s shopping bonanza on Cyber Monday — which was first named that six years ago — was finally successful thanks to consumer awareness.

Over the past few years, it’s been steadily climbing.

In 2009, it was the second-biggest shopping day; in 2008, it ranked third. Before that, it wasn’t even close to the top. In 2006, it ranked 12th and in 2007, it ranked ninth.

“Today the majority of consumers know what it is and the attractive types of deals they can anticipate. With increased awareness comes increased participation on the part of both retailers and consumers,” he wrote.

So, now we have to wait to see if the deals — and the shoppers — both turn out, or if Cyber Monday turns out to be just another big sales day.

(Image credit: iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

Wireless carriers have agreed to send warnings to consumers in danger of exceeding their monthly subscriber minutes or data plans under a deal with the Federal Communications Commission. The companies will provide the alerts to consumers within 12 to 18 months, FCC officials said.

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“People making $2,000 or less a month,” says Mr. You, a 28-year-old senior account manager for Huawei Technologies Co., “those are the people we want to reach.”

While Huawei is one of the world’s biggest makers of telecommunications gear for service providers, the company only recently started selling consumer products such as smartphones and computer tablets. That has put the Chinese company at a disadvantage against big-name rivals, especially in established markets.

Nigeria holds promise. Pushed by a burgeoning middle class, cellphone usage is surging across Africa. Over half of the continent’s one billion people have cellphones. And in Nigeria, more than 90 million people have cellphones, up from less than a million 10 years ago, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, said in a recent speech.

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RootMetrics, a Seattle-area company that focuses on measuring the quality of cellular networks and devices, said that Verizon was tops in call quality, data speeds and overall performance. Meanwhile, RootMetrics found that T-Mobile was tops in text messaging. A recent report for New York City found similar results.

However, for all the bellyaching about dropped calls on AT&T, the study found call issues were even more of a problem with T-Mobile, though AT&T fared second-worst on that measure, with Sprint and Verizon in a virtual tie.

On the data side, the study found Verizon’s 4G LTE network the fastest by far, though it noted that the network was not universally available throughout the area studied. Still, the carrier’s average data speeds were higher than the maximum speeds on any of the rivals, the study found.

RootMetrics gets its data from a combination of professional tracking as well as user-generated reports. The company has apps for Android and the iPhone that users can download to check their own performance and contribute to its overall findings. From there it posts maps that show down to the block level what quality of service users can expect in a given area.

That’s important, RootMetrics CEO Bill Moore said, because most coverage maps only show whether an area has service, not how good that service is likely to be, or the impact from congestion where many users are trying to access overloaded network equipment.

“Congestion is the real gating factor,” Moore said.

Next up, in addition to offering up reports on more cities, RootMetrics plans to compare service quality across different devices. Moore notes that performance can vary widely from one smartphone to another.

“There are differences between manufacturers,” Moore said. “We believe some of that is component parts and some of that is software implementation.”

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones–recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

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The first promotion–kicking off at midnight–will give customers who buy an Android device from Verizon Wireless $25 to spend on applications from the Amazon Appstore.

The offer ties together Amazon’s wireless store, which sells a variety of phones for all the major wireless carriers, and its brand new Appstore, which is an independent catalog of apps for Google’s Android operating system.

It also leans on tight relationships Amazon has formed with carriers, said David Camp of Amazon Wireless.

The promotion will continue for a week, and is only valid on Android phones purchased by Verizon, including the new HTC Thunderbolt, which runs on its speedy 4G network.

The promotion is designed to give Amazon’s Appstore, which just launched last month, a boost. But it also hints at the company’s interest in Android and a broader strategy it could be pursuing.

So far, it’s unclear how well the storefront, which is accessible on the computer and the handset, has been received–and Amazon is not sharing download figures. But it has almost doubled the number of apps available for sale from to 7,500 from 3,800 over the past few weeks.

That’s despite the fact that the International Game Developers Association cautioned game-makers about Amazon’s strict pricing conditions. Downloads could also be soft due to the fact that AT&T has blocked users from being able to download third-party apps, including from Amazon’s Appstore, to Android devices. The U.S. storefront is available to users from T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint.

So far, Amazon’s interest in the wireless industry has seemed a little scattered. However, this promotion starts to bring it into focus, and hints at how Amazon could weave together its strategies to drive sales to its own properties.

It also shows how important the retailer could be to Google.

Today, Camp says that Android devices are the best sellers on its storefront (the big caveat is that it doesn’t sell the iPhone).

Beyond its cellphone store at AmazonWireless.com and the digital Appstore, Amazon has also released a bevy of applications, including shopping portals, barcode scanners, Kindle apps for virtually every device and an MP3 store. More recently, it rolled out a Cloud Player, which allows people to store their music and other digital content in the cloud, making it accessible from both Android devices and an Internet-connected computer.

Monday’s promotion is just the start. “We will continue to do things like this in the future,” Camp added.

The San Diego-based company said it benefited not only from growing demand for its chips–used in various classes of cellphones–but also a rise in their average selling prices as users gravitated toward more-sophisticated models. Qualcomm gets much of its profit from patent royalties charged to hardware companies, based on a percentage of the price of each handset.

The company’s results, which exceeded analyst projections and its own estimates, caused its stock to jump in after-hours trading.

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HTC’s strong results reflect rising demand for smartphones as consumers continue to switch from traditional cellphones to gadgets that allow them to browse the Internet, write emails and watch videos.

The Taiwan-based smartphone maker, which is best known for making phones using Google Inc.’s operating system, has been growing at a rapid clip and is neck-and neck with Nokia Corp. in terms of market capitalization.

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Within a few years, the used market could account for a fifth of all cellphone sales in the U.S., says Stephen Manning, chief executive of ReCellular Inc., one of the largest U.S.-based cellphone refurbishers.

ReCellular resold or recycled 5.2 million cellphones last year, up from 2.1 million five years earlier. ReCellular sells about 60 percent of its phones in the U.S. and the rest mostly to dealers in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Until recently, the privately owned company acquired phones only in bulk, getting them from charities that held collection drives and retailers or others with returned merchandise. Now ReCellular advertises on cable TV that it is willing to buy phones one at a time from individuals via the Usell.com Web site.

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According to comScore, the number of U.S. visitors to Web-based email sites in November 2010 declined six percent compared with the previous year. Email engagement declined even more. Meanwhile, the number of people accessing email from cellphones and the like increased by 36 percent to 70.1 million. And the number who accessed it daily from a mobile device grew 40 percent to 43.5 million. The trend, then, is clear: Mobile email is going mainstream, and fast. Which is great news for companies, such as Apple and Google, that offer standalone mobile email apps, and potentially worrisome for those who don’t.

Not that Web mail is going anywhere. ComScore notes that it remains one of the most popular activities on the Web, reaching about 70 percent of the online population in the States each month. Still, there is a shift occurring. Said Mark Donovan, comScore senior VP of mobile, “In a relatively short period of time, adoption of mobile email has reached 78 percent of the smartphone population, which is very similar to the penetration of Web-based email among Internet users. These findings demonstrate just how quickly channel shifts can occur and why it’s now essential for media brands to have a strong presence in both arenas.”

In any case, there is a cottage industry developing for products that help those who want to stop texting and yammering on their phones, but need some help.

In the latest such move, T-Mobile plans to start offering a program for Android phones called DriveSmart Plus that allows subscribers who opt-in to have their phones automatically tell when the user is driving and put the phone into a driving mode that disables most texting and calling features. Calls can be set to go straight to voicemail, and a text message can be sent to people who are calling or texting to let them know that the recipient is driving.

Of course, all of this requires users to opt-in, so it will only help those who recognize that they have a problem and actually want to do something about it. And there are ways to override it, which is useful if there is an emergency or the cellphone user is a passenger in a moving car.

But, hey, it is a start. T-Mobile will offer DriveSmart Plus initially only for one phone–the LG Optimus T–but said it plans to expand the service soon. DriveSmart Basic, a free version of the app, is available for free on some T-Mobile phones, although that app requires users to tell the app when they are driving. DriveSmart Plus, the new premium program, will cost $4.99 per month and covers all lines on a subscriber’s account.

DriveSmart Plus is from a venture-backed start-up called Location Labs. T-Mobile is also launching another Location Labs-developed service, dubbed FamilyWhere, for tracking children or family members via their cellphones. It’s apparently useful for monitoring an elderly family member or keeping tabs on school-age kids (or perhaps tracking that cheating spouse, if they are foolish enough to opt-in to the service).

AT&T Inc. is offering its service in products called GlowCaps, which are designed to help people remember to take their medication. The caps send data to their manufacturer, Vitality Inc., whenever the user opens the bottle, and this information can be communicated to the patient’s doctor or family members. The caps also remind the user to take the medicine, by flashing a light and playing a ringtone on a device that plugs into the wall; they can call the user’s phone as a reminder and automatically order refills from the pharmacy.

The caps are aimed at getting people to take medications as prescribed — regularly and at the right time. It can be a big problem for people with chronic illnesses, and for the doctors and insurers who want to make sure they don’t get sicker.

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The Irvine, Calif., company said its first mobile phone, to be called Via Phone, will have a four-inch screen, a front-facing camera for video calls, a rear-facing five megapixel camera and the capability to shoot video. The larger mobile device, the Via Tablet, will have an eight-inch, high-resolution screen; WiFi wireless connectivity; three speakers; and a front-facing camera for video conferencing. Both items will be introduced this summer and run Google Inc.’s Android operating system, providing access to the application store associated with the popular operating system, Vizio said.

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The January 2011 issue ranking cellphones and services carries this headline on the cover: “Best and worst providers (Sorry AT&T).”

I’m going to try to pick up a copy this morning and will then update, but here are the highlights, according to the Houston Chronicle. AT&T got the magazine’s full black dot rating (that’s as low as it gets) in almost every nationwide category, while Verizon topped the rankings.

AT&T sent out the following statement in response to the rankings: “We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor 20 percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor 60 percent slower on average nationwide. And, our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent–the equivalent of just one call in a thousand–of the industry leader.”

On the device side, the iPhone (the same one that the magazine once recommended against buying) tops the list of phones available at AT&T, the Droid X and Samsung Fascinate tied for best Verizon option and Samsung’s Epic and Vibrant top the options at Sprint and T-Mobile, respectively.

Palm-CEO-turned-HP-exec Jon Rubinstein and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs faced off with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital at a Churchill Club event last night in an entertaining discussion on the future of mobile tech.

If you missed the live video feed of the event, check back with us–we’re working to repost the video. For those who want to read text, here is my liveblog of the event.

6:48 pm PT: We’re just finishing dinner. It was a chicken in some sort of puff pastry. Nothing is happening onstage, as if that wasn’t clear by the fact I am describing the meal. I think they will get started around 7:15 or so.

7:10 pm: Just about ready to go, with intros going on now. (And I just stole Kara’s seat at the head table.)

Kara: They’re both guys. Paul is taller and they work in tech.

7:14 pm: The plan is to talk about the future, but the event begins with a trip down memory lane as Jacobs holds up the Qualcomm PDQ–arguably the first smartphone combining a cellphone and Palm Pilot. For those who don’t remember, it it was bigger than a Palm Pilot and a huge phone strapped together.

7:20 pm: Digital device history continues. We’ve traced the last decade in digital devices, from the iPod through the Treo and iPhone. Don’t forget ringtones and cellphone bowling, Jacobs reminds us, referring to the Brew operating environment that Qualcomm developed.

The iPhone changed everything, Jacobs says, because it showed that the phone makers just weren’t putting enough work into the phone’s user interface.

7:28 pm: Talk is shifting to where we are today. What are the key things that are shifting? User interfaces, touch, etc. “The other things we are seeing is all of our lives are moving into the cloud,” Rubinstein says. On the limitation side, Jacobs points to the limitations of bandwidth: “We don’t have enough spectrum right now,” Jacobs says, adding that the industry and government are working on it. ‘We are just going to have to be more creative about how we get content to the devices.”

The other big limitation, Jacobs says, is battery life. You can do all this cool stuff on your phone, but then the battery dies three-quarters of the way through the day. He puts in a plug for Mirasol–Qualcomm’s low-power display technology.

Rubinstein concurs that battery and bandwidth are the two biggest issues. “Battery technology has not progressed at the same rate as all of the other things we are trying to do,” Rubinstein says.

7:38 pm: What about all the operating systems out there, Kara asks. Rubinstein: “There’s plenty of room in the market for multiple systems,” he says, adding it won’t be like PCs, where one operating system dominates. “It’s just different today.”

Rubinstein says it’s still the infancy of the major transition. Put on the spot to rank the operating systems, Rubinstein says that clearly Apple and Android are going gangbusters. The battle, he says, is for who is going to be No. 3. “We’d sure like to be that.”

Jacobs: “I agree. It’s very early days to be calling winners and losers.” He sees pretty wide diversity of operating systems, at least for the next five years, unless the operators really clamp down. Even then, there are some alternate distribution channels emerging. Either way, Qualcomm’s in good shape as an arms dealer, he points out.

7:45 pm: Discussion of carriers. While they are immensely powerful, Rubinstein says they won’t be the only distribution channel for every wireless device. “They are not all going to go through the carriers,” Rubinstein says.

More and more screens will emerge, Rubinstein says. If I fast-forward enough years, he says, the walls are going to be big displays capable of talking to other devices.

Jacobs notes that people will be able to use their device with any tool they have access to, from a big screen to a headset to a wireless keyboard. He says Qualcomm is working on a technology that would allow wireless headsets that could work in-ear like a hearing aid.

7:50 pm: Talk about some outlandish things. Rubinstein has already thrown out the idea of a headset in your pillow. Rubinstein points out that there will be a lot of sensors, pointing to the Nike+iPod as a really early example of what we can expect a lot more of.

7:55 pm: Augmented reality is also going to be big, the panelists agree. “The (StarTrek) tricorder is going to happen,” Jacobs says. Health care will also tap mobile technology, particularly in emerging countries where there is less regulation, carriers are trusted and there are fewer skilled health care providers available. “It’s a very efficient way to manage health,” he says. “Over the next few years we will see this happen,” he says. Eventually it will come back to developed markets, but today there is too much legacy and too much regulation in places like the U.S.

8:10 pm: Sorry for the delay–we were fixing some issues with the video coding, which hopefully should be solved now. Anyway, Rubinstein and Jacobs have been throwing out things that they expect in the next five years.

Jacobs’s list includes digital networked textbooks, cellphones as gateways for health care, as well as using augmented reality to translate all the signs and menus in a foreign country.

Rubinstein and Jacobs both see a digital wallet becoming a reality, with Jacobs throwing out the idea of an end to checkout lines as the phone could pay and the store could electronically disable the security on goods, allowing the whole transaction to take place without interaction with store personnel.

“Legal shoplifting, that’s interesting.” Kara says.

The technical hurdles aren’t that big, Rubinstein says. “Clearly NFC (near-field communications) is coming.” It’s more of a social problem than a technical one, Rubinstein says.

8:21 pm: Some good audience questions. One, on what does it take to deliver an Apple-like experience. Rubinstein, who has experience as part of Apple and trying to “out-Apple” Apple, says he thinks that the key is delivering an intergrated experience.

“I don’t think Apple is the only one that can do it, but I do think it is important to have all the elements,” he says.

Another question is on the future of mobile TV–a question that prompts Jacobs to cover his face (Qualcomm spent a bundle on its MediaFlo mobile TV service that saw very limited consumer uptake and Qualcomm is now evaluating what to do with it).

Too few people liked what the service had to offer, Jacobs says, referring to limits on content, screen size, etc. Jacobs said it appears that probably broadcast makes sense for live events, while streaming with TiVo-like controls makes sense for everything else.

“I actually believe strongly in mobile TV, still,” he says.

8:30 pm: Okay. That’s a wrap from me. Thanks for tuning in. If you want to hear more from Rubinstein, he will be speaking at next week’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

Shipments of ‘white-box,’ or unbranded, cellphones rose sharply in emerging markets as Chinese manufacturers expanded into regions like India and Africa, taking market share from the larger cellphone vendors, Gartner said.

Unbranded phone makers’ rapid growth hit the combined market share of the world’s five largest handset vendors, which fell to 67 percent in the third quarter from 83 percent a year earlier. Overall, shipments of phones increased 35 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier to 417 million units, Gartner said.

Chinese makers, who typically build phones around chipsets from Taiwan’s MediaTek Inc., can push out simple devices at very low prices as they have low manufacturing costs and often copy older hardware designs from other vendors, Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner research vice president, said in an interview.

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Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci have raised a $9 million round led by Khosla Ventures, sources say. I’m told the deal will give the company a pre-money value in the “mid-20s.”

Original investors, including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again.

As The Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson has reported, a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday.

So what is it? GroupMe is a simple, free service that lets users send text messages, on any kind of phone, to groups of friends. It competes against a handful of similar companies, but investors are impressed by its growth chart, which shows it adding tens of thousands of users a month.

They also like the fact that the company is explicitly targeting a wide range of users–not just those using Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. GroupMe works on any run-of-the-mill “dumbphone,” and part of the company’s pitch is that salt-of-the-earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August.

It’s also worth noting that Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot start-ups–Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively–to put their own thing together. The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May.

GroupMe plans on adding an array of bells and whistles to the service, like the ability to send pictures, and a sort of jerry-rigged location feature in the near future. And the more of those it adds, the more it will look like something that aspires to play in the same sandbox as Twitter and Facebook.

But what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York start-up–Foursquare. It’s worth noting that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out. It got this one.

I shot this interview with the two co-founders just two weeks ago* but wasn’t going to run it, because the two of them are framed so comically–Martocci is a tall dude, but he’s not that much taller than Hecht.

But it’s better than nothing, and now that these guys are officially the hot start-up of the moment, it’s time for the rest of you to meet them. Sorry, Jared and Steve. But lousy video about big news is a high-quality problem.