The emergence of ubiquitous connectivity–changing the meaning of location in our lives as a global network lets us be wherever we want–provides enormously rich research fodder for Yankee Group analysts. The move to Anywhere is nothing more, but nothing less, than what we care about here.

Summer is for reading, and I enjoy seeing what our clients are reading of our analysts’ work. And read they do; to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the written word are widely exaggerated. (Mostly spread, I suspect, by people who don’t like to write!) Here are the six most widely read reports by thousands of Yankee Group clients in the last three months — and what they have to say:

1. Anywhere Network Scorecard: Phil Marshall sets out Yankee Group’s unique assessment methodology for the work we’ve begun to score global network providers on their journey to building out the Anywhere Network.
2. Surviving the Digital Home: Josh Martin calls out the winners — technologies, behaviors, companies — in the game to build out the fully digital home environment. Given spiralling energy costs, it’s good to see that tele-working will improve dramatically.
3. Riding the Wave from Mobile Commerce to Mobile Transactions: Jon Paisner, Chris Collins, and Nick Spencer explain how and when mobile transactions will finally emerge after years of wishful thinking, as Anywhere Consumers embrace financial services on mobile devices.
4. Advancing Mobile Applications through Managed Services: Nick Spencer shows how application architectures and the IT channel play in increasing adoption of enterprise mobility.
5. Thinking Beyond Flat-Rate Business Models: Ari Banerjee says that next-generation business models for network providers–charging a premium for quality of service, for instance– means tackling new kinds of charging technologies inside the network itself.
6. Finding a Femto Future: Roberta Wiggins forecasts the world market for femtocell technology: cool in-home bandwidth distribution that’s a game-changer for consumer broadband. But she also sees potential beyond residential applications, into the SMB/SOHO markets too.

The first report is available free on our homepage; the others are only available to Yankee Group Link Research clients. Check them out — and tell me what else you think we should be investigating on the road to Anywhere.  Happy reading!

When banking was about protecting touchable financial assets–stacks of gold coins and engraved stock certificates–the edifices built to contain them looked like fortresses, imposing and impregnable.

When the essence of banking is about transferring a few bits from one side of a digital ledger to another, banks can look like this:

This is a typical storefront in Kenya, where there are thousands of small entrepreneurs selling necessities packaged in the daily doses that many Kenyans’ limited cash can afford at one time. Yes, some of those Kenyans make up the world’s unbanked, but that’s not the point. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already seen retail banking outlets cropping up in the supermarkets of the developed world.

The principal raison d’etre of a retail bank–holding onto my money and letting me get at it from time to time–is going away. It just is, and the reason (you were expecting this, perhaps) is nothing less than ubiquitous connectivity. With a network wherever I need it, I can store digital money anywhere, as long as there are many physical devices that can help me transfer those assets when and where I need. So why would that physical place have to be a destination dedicated to that, as opposed to one that might also let me pick up a few groceries, pay some bills, mail a package, or anything else I need to do in life?

Vodafone’s intrapreneurial mobile transactions effort, called M-PESA in a clever adaptation of the Swahili word for cash and led by the impassioned Nick Hughes, has signed up over 2 million users in Kenya through the mobile operator Safaricom. It allows its subscribers to load digital money to their mobile phones, to transfer it to other people and institutions, and to offload it back to cash. “Only some of our users are unbanked. As a payment service, we’re really competing with the cash economy,” he told me. We talked last week at ITU Telecom Africa, in a quick meeting sandwiched in-between his mission to win banks on board for the expansion of the program in other markets. He admitted they’re a tough crowd to win over.

Dominic Endicott, a partner in the wireless-focused venture capital concern Nauta Capital, said something the other day that is probably supremely obvious, but potentially earth-shaking: “The wireless world can give us more information about the behaviors of its users than at any other time in the market.”

When mobile operators can easily and instantly move our money around for us, and can mine that activity to know where, how, and when we spend it–why on earth do I need a retail bank, reluctant or otherwise?

Media, both the industry and its physical representations–LP, tape, DVD, more–have been forever transformed by the move to bits. Retail banking, and indeed physical currency as we know it today, will go away. Blame–or thank–the network.

At Yankee Group, we’ve been researching and predicting the future for a while now. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes not so much. Our biggest Big Bet is the one we’re making around Anywhere — the notion that the global connectivity revolution will introduce dramatic changes in the way we live and work.

A key part of our Big Bet is around something very tiny. Made from plastic and glass and silicon, mobile phones are getting smarter every day. Even better, the increase in flat-rate data plans means that the mobile internet usage is going to explode. This broad macro trend — increased mobile internet usage — has profound implications for security, and in particular for mobile identity. If you take your phone, keys and credit cards with you, it seems to me that you will want to take your identity along too.

With that background in mind, I’m pleased to give YG blog readers a quick preview of a report I just finished today called Sizing the Mobile Identity Opportunity that puts numbers around how big mobile identity might be. Based on a model derived from our consumer data and mobile forecasts, the numbers, which I believe are conservative, are eye-popping. Assuming our forecasted mobile usage trends continue as we expect, by 2012 US mobile subscribers could generate over 360 billion identity events per year. By “identity event,”  I mean the act of authenticating to an online service or website. Applying the Law of Large Numbers to a miniscule fee per event yields another big number in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These are dollars that mobile operators and identity management vendors could leave on the table unless they capitalize on the opportunity.

This report won’t be available for several weeks. It usually takes a little while for our Editorial services group to bang out the dings in my dented prose, and for our peer reviewers (which in this case will include several outside organizations) to weigh in. More about this soon!

The New York Times magazine this past Sunday took on a topic near and dear to Yankee Group’s heart: “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” And while it will take years before we know the answer, some of the data they cited was intriguing to say the least.

“Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.”

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The rattle of jackhammers and traffic gridlock welcome any visitor to London after the ides of March.

The UK financial year is ending: Spend your budget by April 5 or expect a cut, particularly if you’re in public works.

This year, the thud of suitcases locking and money swooshing down the Thames join this noisome mix. London’s non-doms and investors are in startled exodus.

The cause: severe new UK tax laws. And they’re empoverishing our industry.

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Heard the one about beer and nappies? It’s a piece of data warehousing folklore that alludes to the power of correlating data to uncover buying preferences and attitudes.

I’d like to believe that it’s smart to place beer next to baby products to lure men out shopping for the wife. But it’s rubbish, like much electronic information held about groups of consumers, employees and, for that matter, me.

My learned colleagues Daniel Taylor and Brian Partridge are getting all het up about who’s going to make pots of money out of rich subscriber data. They’re assuming of course that this data is accurate, manipulable and freely available to the diversity of companies vying to monetize it.

All of this I contend.

Living in Europe, where memories cast long shadows, I’ll stress that data privacy remains extremely pertinent to the political agenda. And whatever technical capabilities are on tap for global advertising mavens, it won’t be an easy ride to deploy them here.

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Have you begun to think that the Verizon TV spots with the “can you hear me now” dude are getting tiresome?

I have. Verizon takes pains to test the availability of their nationwide network and they have made sure that we all know it. But is it that much better than AT&T, Sprint or T-Mobile’s? Maybe a little, but for the most part the ability to make a clear voice call anywhere you want has become a non-differentiating aspect of service. So now what?

This question, in one form or another, is asked of our analysts every day. I believe that a long menu of subscriber-centric services will supplant reliable mobile voice service as the killer network application over the next several years. For this reason, the “crown jewel” asset under an operator’s control will rapidly shift from the network itself to the subscriber-centric data it contains. We define this valuable data as rich subscriber context; and it can generally include information that the network provides such as a user location and their current state of presence. It can also include information about a subscriber’s usage rights, individual preferences, credit worthiness, etc. As most network operators are set up today, the data described is found in various nooks and crannies throughout the various network and application stovepipes. We have begun to explore the strategies available to bring all of those data sources together, either logically or physically, to provide a centralized view of the subscriber.

The appropriate use of rich subscriber context, once/if it can be obtained, offers infinite possibilities for new revenue streams by enabling new services including those enabled by 3rd parties and advertising-based business models. [Check out the U.K. based Blyk if you want to read about an interesting mobile advertising business model which offers a limited amount of free service for its members in exchange for advertising exposure.] Blyk

The question remains….will they get it right?? The possibilities to screw this up are seemingly as numerous as the opportunities to cash in. Will the CEO of a Tier 1 operator have to “pull a Facebook” and send a mass apology to its users for violating their privacy? Will they sell our/their information to highest bidder to create a new revenue stream and the equivalent of mobile spam on our handsets? These are roads that demand to be treaded very lightly but you can almost hear the tanks firing up in the background.

As we start to think like Anywhere Consumers — taking our experiences with us wherever we go — dependable demand for mobile payments is beginning to emerge. An upcoming Yankee Group report takes a broad look at the future now that both consumer appetite and device penetration is catching up to the long-imagined potential.

I’d assumed that one big challenge to making it real still has to be dealing with the two established parts of the system: the carriers over whose networks these activities take place, and the banks whose accounts are tapped for transfers. Talk about getting between a rock and a hard place — both have a large stake in any change and plenty of downside risk.

But Lisa Stanton, CEO of Monitise Americas, a mobile banking and payments service firm, says at least some banks haven’t been that hard to win over. Since Monitise’s approach is through the ATM network, they don’t have to get into the bank’s IT guts, and thus can get something happening quickly. And mobile customers don’t have to be online banking users — which matches up better with the Facebook generation.

“When I first took this job, I asked a friend in banking to hear my first pitch — really just as a test. We went through it all with her team, and answered a few questions. She looked around the table at her people, their heads nodded, then she said, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘OK… what?’ ‘OK, we’ll do it!’ It’s been like that pretty much since then.” She admits it’s partly a matter of the right targets; smaller banks are less likely to have a viable internally-led alternative.

My wallet photos have already moved to my mobile. The sooner I can replace the rest of its contents, the better. Sign me up!