Rebecca Day

LAS VEGAS -- Walmart will be ready to implement Google Glass in mobile commerce when the technology goes mainstream, said Gibu Thomas, global senior vice president-mobile and digital in the company’s e-commerce division, in a CTIA show keynote Wednesday.

LAS VEGAS -- The second-screen experience is creating a new measurement tool for TV viewing, panelists said Monday at the Parks Associates Connections conference held in conjunction with the CTIA conference. “In the past,” said D.P. Venkatesh, CEO of content discovery company mPortal, audience measuring companies would “tell you what people in America watch.” Now, he said, a new model is emerging based on broadband activity which “lets you know exactly what people are doing.”

Powermat and Helsinki-based PowerKiss, representing conflicting standards in the wireless power industry, announced Tuesday they have agreed to join forces under the Powermat Technologies umbrella. As part of the agreement, the companies have committed to the PMA (Power Matters Alliance) standard supported by AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Google and the Department of Energy, among others. P&G’s retail charging products are sold under the Duracell Powermat brand. One goal of the agreement is to provide a consistent public charging experience to consumers in the U.S. and Europe, Ran Poliakine, CEO of Powermat, told Consumer Electronics Daily. “We are trying to eliminate ambiguity about standards,” Poliakine said, saying consumers expect their wireless phones to work when traveling between countries and should be able to expect the same kind of seamless charging options as well. Powermat has more than 1,500 charging spots in the U.S. located in airports, coffee shops, malls and arenas. In Europe, more than a thousand PowerKiss charging spots are in more airports, hotels and cafés, including McDonald’s Europe locations, the companies said. Poliakine said Powermat has invested more than $100 million in the technology and will continue to invest with the vision that PMA charging spots in the future will be as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi hotspots. Consumers carrying their cell phones “will expect to get power without any hassle in any public venue they go into,” he said. Today, public places where consumers can charge wirelessly “are dominated by PMA,” Poliakine said. The standard isn’t just about the magnetic connections, he said; a standard means “it’s useful for consumers and they have a place to charge.” He added that in the last five months, several prominent device manufacturers have joined PMA, whose ranks now include Samsung, NEC, Sharp, Huawei, TCL, Kyocera, LG and BlackBerry. Apple is not a part of PMA.

LAS VEGAS -- The real diversity of a “CTIA Power Panel” that opened the CTIA show Tuesday wasn’t just the gender of the all-women executives who took part in the workshop, but that it reflected the wide array of industries participating in the show, said one panelist, Allison Cerra, Alcatel-Lucent vice president-global marketing and communications. Other panelists included Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm executive vice president-global market development; Mary Chan, president of General Motors’ Global Connected Consumer Group; Beth Jacob, Target chief information officer; and Gerri Martin-Flickinger, chief information officer of Adobe Systems.

LAS VEGAS -- AT&T’s Digital Life went to “great lengths” and “great expense” to protect its cloud-based service, Senior Vice President Kevin Petersen said at the Parks Associates Connections conference being held in conjunction with CTIA. Petersen cited an environment rife with hacking scenarios and said when it comes to consumer security, “You can’t have them."

Intel launched an eight-city global tour Friday called “Experience Intel. Look Inside.,” aimed at introducing consumers to Intel-loaded devices including Ultrabooks, convertible laptops, tablets, all-in-one PCs and smartphones. In our tour of the New York pop-up booth, a 40-by-40-foot balloon tent, Intel staffers walked consumers through two interactive sections and a “Clinique” case where products were shown under glass. The tent was erected in the trendy Meatpacking District on the west side of lower Manhattan, a few short blocks from an Apple store.

Walmart’s fiscal Q1 was a “more difficult quarter than expected,” said CEO Mike Duke on the company’s earnings webcast Thursday. Walmart reported a comp sales decline of 1.4 percent from Jan. 26-April 26 versus the year-ago quarter due in part to a delay in income tax refund checks, “challenging weather conditions” and the payroll tax increase, Duke said.

TiVo launched an update to its iPad app Thursday that’s designed to funnel personalized viewing suggestions to subscribers using popularity metrics and personalized usage data, Jim Denney, vice president of product marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The “What to Watch Now” feature shows programs airing within the next 30 minutes in six categories: most popular shows, sports, movies, kids programming, favorite channels and viewers’ recorded TV shows. The latter gives users fast access to their 20 most recently recorded shows as a shortcut to scrolling through titles in the My Shows section, Denney said. Suggested programs update every 30 minutes, he said.

Virtualization and the complete transition to more efficient LTE networks could help bring down the costs of mobile handsets as storage and processing power requirements shrink in coming years, said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. “Fascinating, underlying trends” going on within the wireless infrastructure are leading to a “downward bias” in capital requirements for carriers and a residual impact on handset costs, he said Wednesday at a J.P. Morgan investor conference webcast from Boston.

Pandora’s recent listening cap on the free tier of its music streaming service has allowed the company to “clean up the edges” of how listeners consume music on the mobile platform, said Chief Financial Officer Mike Herring at a J.P. Morgan investor conference Wednesday. Only in the past two quarters, since Pandora put the caps in place in February, has mobile monetization caught up with mobile listening hours consumed, Herring said. “Hours are the main driver of cost,” he said. “We pay for every hour that we stream.”