Ron Shuttleworth

Mobile Apps Stores: Billing Systems May Determine Success

Paypal has about 170 m accounts but only about 70 m are active. iTunes has over 100 m accounts with 65 m active - I tried to highlight it in the table. I believe that the cut off for active is 1 year - although it was not explicit. WRT Paypal/RIM overlap...it is likely smallish to start. I still think that the overriding theme is that its easier to upsell into large account bases...like the carriers. If the carriers are not aligned, then the unaligned handset folks may suffer uptake - at least initially. It's funny how MSFT is so discounted in the space - which they probably like as they hide in the weeds. thx for the comment!


On Apr 07 04:15 PM Scott Conroy wrote:

> PayPal has about 150 million users and I would say that there is
> a significant overlap of smartphone users and PayPal users. This
> overlap will only increase when considering that Skype is likely
> to be one of the most popular applications on most smartphones (and
> paying for Skype is very easy with PayPal).
>
> Is Microsoft planning to offer applications for non-MS phones? I
> haven't heard as such. Assuming they're not, one shouldn't count
> total carrier subscribers, but only those subscribers using phones
> based on a Microsoft OS. That number is a tiny fraction of the total
> number of subscribers.