This New Year’s Eve, Verizon Wireless expects its customers to send and receive more than 300 million messages in the 16 hours between 12 p.m. today and 4 a.m. ET New Year’s Day. This forecast of SMS use by Frost & Sullivan shows how expectations have grown over the past couple of years as Frost & Sullivan analysts raised their forecasts.
Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says Australisan Internet Service Providers will be required to provide filtering of pornography and violent Web sites as the default option for schools and consumers. Senator Conroy says anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.
Steel Partners, a New York-based investment firm, has acquired nearly 10 percent of the shares of EarthLink Inc., or 11.9 million shares. Steel Partners said the total purchase price of the shares is $97.3 million.
Steel Partners is controlled by Warren G. Lichtenstein, a young corporate raider and associate of investor Carl Icahn. Steel Partners may now be EarthLink's largest shareholder.
Vonage Holdings Corp. and Nortel Networks Corp. have settled their intellectual property dispute by cross licensing their VoIP patents.
The settlement involves a limited cross-license to three Nortel and three Vonage patents, and dismisses claims relating to past damages and the remaining patents. The settlement is subject to final documentation.
The licensing concerns technology used to make emergency calls or dial 411. Neither company will pay the other anything for any alleged unauthorized use of its technology.
The settlement points up the increasing importance patent portfolios seem to be assuming in the service provider space, mirroring the enhanced importance such portfolios have assumed in the hardware and software space, where cross-licensing deals are a standard way suppliers settle such disputes.
This year Vonage has faced--and lost--several suits from other service providers over use of VoIP-related patents. At some level, one has to wonder whether any independent service providers using anything other than standard hardware and software sold by the largest providers is protected from similar threats. Vonage appears to have placed itself at greater risk precisely because it developed at least some of its own technology, instead of buying it.
In December Vonage agreed to pay AT&T Corp. $39 million as part of its settlement. Vonage has also agreed to pay Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. a total of $200 million to settle their respective lawsuits.
Vonage sued Nortel in August, claiming three patents Nortel held were mistakenly granted to the company. Nortel counter-sued, claiming Vonage is violating a total of 13 of Nortel's patents, and asked that Vonage be kept from using the technology.
Generation Y "Millenials" (age 18-30) are most likely to turn to libraries for problem-solving information of all generational groups, say researchers at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Faced with a problem in the past two years that they needed to address, about one in eight adults (13 percent) say they turned to their local public library for help and information. And it appears computer availability is a reason.
Some 65 percent of adults who went to a library for problem-solving help said that access to computers, particularly the Internet, was key reason they go to the library for help.
Also, 62 percent of adults who went to the library for help actually used the computers at the library. At the same time, 58 percent of those with problems to solve said they used library reference books.
About 42 percent of those with problems to solve said they read library newspapers and magazines.
The problem most likely to be cited by those who went to libraries seeking information was an educational issue such as making a decision about a school, getting more training, or finding financial resources to do so. That reason was cited by 20 percent of the adults who went to libraries for help.
Asked whether they would go to a library in the future to help them solve problems, 40 percent of Gen Y respondents said it was likely they would go, compared with 20 percent of those over age 30.
About 53 percent of American adults report going to a local public library in the past 12 months. The profile of library users shows an economically upscale, information-hungry clientele who use the library to enhance their already-rich information world, Pew researchers say.
Public library patrons are generally younger adults, those with higher income and
education levels, and those who are Internet users. Parents with minor children living at home also are very likely to be patrons. There are no significant differences in library usage by race or ethnicity, Pew researchers say.
Engadget has done some digging and reports that the Recording Industry Associaton of America's lawsuit against Jeffery Howell is not for ripping CDs to an MP3 player, but to pedestrian illegal downloading. While we might disagree about the practice, RIAA is within its rights to pursue that sort of action.
So it appears the difference is the public assertion, as part of the suit, that MP3s ripped from legally owned CDs are "unauthorized copies." That remains the more critical issue. Is that sort of thing, done for personal use by the legal owner of a music CD, fair use or not?
Effective January 1, 2008 there are new rules on lithium-ion batteries used with PCs, iPods and mobile phones, particularly spare batteries.
The Transportation and Security Administration says the new rules apply only to spare batteries, not the installed batteries.
Spare lithium batteries cannot be packed in your checked baggage, but can be carried on board in carry-on luggage.
Battery size limitations also apply, expressed in grams of “equivalent lithium content.” (8 grams of equivalent lithium content is approximately 100 watt-hours; 25 grams is approximately 300 watt-hours).
Under the new rules, fliers can bring batteries with up to 8-gram equivalent lithium content. All lithium ion batteries in cell phones are below 8 gram equivalent lithium content. Nearly all laptop computers also are below this quantity threshold.
Users also can bring up to two spare batteries with an aggregate equivalent lithium content of up to 25 grams.
For a lithium metal battery, whether installed in a device or carried as a spare, the limit on lithium content is 2 grams of lithium metal per battery.
Almost all consumer-type lithium metal batteries are below 2 grams of lithium metal.
Level 3 Communications has filed a patent infringement suit against Limelight Networks, alleging that Limelight's content delivery network infringes four Level 3 patents.
The filing cits patents 6,185,598; 6,473,405; 6,654,807 and 7,054,935, according to Dan Rayburn, streamingmedia.com EVP. Level 3 says it notified Limelight of the potential violations in February 2007, but that Limelight did not redesign its network to avoid infringing.
Given the notification by Level 3 and lack of response by Limelight, one has to assume Limelight thinks it is not infringing.
These days, it does not seem to be enough to have the right assets, people, channels, partners and technology. One often has to own intellectual property as well, if only to use as bargaining chips for cross licensing.
Hardware and software suppliers have known this for years. What is new is that service providers have to do the same.
We assume iSuppli is not far off the mark in publishing this forecast of MP3 player shipments. And since the Recording Industry of America seems intent on declaring war on sideloading of music, one assumes the goal is to take control of the revenue model for MP3 downloading, forcing users to pay for downloads rather than sideload.
While acknowledging that there are copyright issues involved, there also are technologial issues. Precisely to avoid its use as a mass copying device, every Apple iPod, for example, allows linking to each iPod to just one PC and its hard drive. Which is fine if one's hard drive or CPU or input devices never fail. If a user's PC does become unusable, any iPods linked to that PC now have a problem. They no longer can sync. Which means the devices are permanently loaded with exactly what is already on them, or must be erased and synced to whatever new PC a user designates.
That means reloading all of the original collection of music.
Alternatively, if one loses the use of the MP3 on which purchased downloaded music has been loaded, there might be no legal way to move the music to an alternate MP3 player when the original MP3 player itself dies.
Both of these sorts of technical issues must be confronted by MP3 music users. In essence, the Recording Industry of America argues one should be able to buy a music CD, but only be able to play it on one device: a home audio system but not on one's vehicle audio system, for example.
There are copyright issues here, to be sure. But there also are major end user technology issues dealing directly with personal use of legally-obtained music. And the ability to copy is essential is a "purchase" is to be anything other than a "rental." In other words, if a user "buys" a song, but then cannot transfer the song to another playback device when the original hard drive dies, is that really "ownership" or simply a "lease of unspecified but limited duration."?
How long can an industry that sues its own paying customers thrive or survive? In what appears to be an escalation of on-going legal efforts, the Recording Industry Association of America has sued Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 purchased music recordings on his personal computer, reports Marc Fisher, Washington Post staff writer.
The RIAA argues it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a compact disc to transfer that music into his or her own computer. By extension, one would assume the RIAA also opposes sideloading music onto an MP3 player.
That is going to be problematic if digital music downloading continues to grow, as iSuppli and virtually every other research outfit argues.
The RIAA argues that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal, says Fisher.
But lawyers for consumers point to a series of court rulings over the last few decades that found no violation of copyright law in the use of VCRs and other devices to time-shift TV programs; that is, to make personal copies for the purpose of making portable a legally obtained recording, Fisher notes.
Digital media has proven to be a headache for copyright holders, to be sure. In a previous era where only imperfect analog copies could be made, and recording was cumbersome, the issue was inherently limited in scope. Digital technology of course creates an infinitely-bigger problem, in part because copies are identical and because it is much easier to copy.
The problem is that common sense suggests one should not have fewer rights in a digital domain than in the analog domain being displaced. That is to say, one should not find that legal personal uses of media in the analog domain are illegal in the digital domain.
That's essentially what the RIAA is arguing. There' a "moral hazard" here, as economists might describe it. If any established code of conduct, law, regulation or practice is routinely violated often enough, behavior changes. What formerly was seen as "prohibited" now is seen as "right."
While it is understandable that the RIAA wants to protect a business model, it isgoing about things in an ultimately destructive way by making war on its customers. The RIAA might think it is within its rights to restrict copying of a single user's legally-bought music to that user's own MP3 player. Users do not agree.
So by insisting on defense of its rights, seen as a violation of fair use by users, the RIAA creates a climate of greater "lawlessness," as users simply will lose all respect for the RIAA's position.
There arguably are as many threats and opportunities as mobile carriers move towards more-open networks and terms of use. Not all customers will want all that much control over their experience, devices and services. Walled gardens work well where optimizing a complicated user experience is necessary. iPod offers a salient current example of that approach.
Others will want nothing so much as a mobile version of the Interent. But most users will be found in between those two poles. For many consumers, the ability to unbundle the device purchase decision from the service provider will be change enough, as has been the case in European markets where such unbundling is commonplace.
The open networks trend will more troubling for carriers to the extent that more users may want to use their mobiles just like they use their PCs to access apps and services delivered by the Web.
The business challenge there is the same one carriers have faced in the wireline broadband access market. They have a pipe business based on "access." Beyond that it has been tough to monetize the access.
It isn't clear yet how the user expectations about payment models change over time. For some, there will be a permanent change in thinking about devices. People will own the devices they want and then select access and transport services separately, much as they buy their own PCs and buy broadband access from any number of suppliers.
Just as clearly, some will prefer to have their handsets subsidized in exchange for service contracts.
It is clear enough that mobile applications will explode, much as they did when the broadband-accessible Web was popularized. Carriers will sell lots more data plans, and bigger data plans. Beyond that is where the business models will have to be developed. Right now, it's hard to determine whether this is primarily good or bad for carriers, as much as it is clearly good for end users. Obviously there is new thinking by carrier executives that the trend now is inevitable in any case, and offers the possibility of rapid applications development that will drive the attractiveness of mobile broadband access itself.
In what might be seen as a successful open source transition, AOL is shutting down its support efforts for the Netscape browser and encouraging Netscape users to switch to Firefox, the Mozilla-powered browser.
AOL acquired Netscape Communications Corporation in 1999. By 2000 AOL had launched the Netscape Communicator Web suite, otherwise known as Mozilla. The Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser in 2003 was supported by the independent Mozilla Foundation.
AOL was a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the foundation. Perhaps AOL has succeeded.
By most estimate Microsoft Explorer holds about 66 percent market share while Mozilla has about 25 percent. Netscape currently has one percent or so share.
By some estimates U.S. cable video penetration is in the mid-60s, at the upper level at 70 percent. Satellite video is said to be between 25 percent and possibly 28 percent. And yet at the same time some estimates show "no provider" other than over-the-air transmissions for as many as 26 million homes, something on the order of 23 percent of U.S. households.
The numbers don't square, and there are few explanations other than false reporting by cable and satellite operators; incorrect housing statistics or much-higher-than-expected numbers of homes where consumers are buying multiple subscriptions. False reporting of those sorts of numbers is so unlikely as to be implausible. One has the impression that consumers tend not to buy both satellite and cable video service. Try and think of someone you know who does this.
One can make the argument that multichannel video subscriptions are nearly 100 percent, or as low as 75 percent. So things are better or worse than we might think. It is hard to tell which is the case.
This summer, the Consumer Electronics Association estimated mid-year 2007 that 16 million high-definition televisions would be sold during the year, bringing the total number of HDTVs sold in the U.S. to 52.5 million.
Thirty percent of U.S. households had an HDTV in the early summer of 2007, likely rising to 36 percent by the end of this year. Among these HDTV households, almost a third own more than one high-definition set.
The issue is what happens as the analog TV broadcast shut off occurs in February 2009. Most surveys show a fairly high degree of consumer confusion about the coming change. That, in turn, has some observers calling for more vigorous programs to prepare the market.
The problem might not be as big as most people assume, irrespective of "awareness." For starters, most TV watchers in the U.S. market get their video from a cable or satellite provider.
Estimates of overall cable penetration range from 67 to 70 percent. Satellite providers have 25 percent penetration or more. Telcos aren't much of a factor yet, but the salient point is that these providers have a vested interest in making sure their customers remain customers, and will undertake most of the actual customer notification and equipment upgrade tasks when the time comes.
Some of those customers already get 100-percent digital signals using a decoder already in the home. Others already are outfitted with HDTV decoders as part of the upgrade process cable operators actively are pushing for "digital TV" tiers of service.
True, there are some viewers who get their signals over the air, and who will not own HDTV tuners by the analog shut off date. That's an issue, but affects a sub-set of over-the-air TV viewers.
Some 40 percent of 2,200 U.S. consumers between the ages of 13 and 75 surveyed by Deloitte & Touche are making their own entertainment by editing movies, music and photos. You might not be surprised that 56 percentof all Millennials (ages 18 to 24) do so. But you might find it interesting that a quarter of users (65 or older) do so.
More than one in 10 Millennials are actively uploading their own videos on the Internet and 51 percent of all survey respondents are watching or reading content created by others. Some 71 percent of Millennials watch or read content created by others while 56 percent of Gen Xers do.
About 53 percent of Millennials say they would download more videos if connection speeds were faster.
But the survey also shows that traditional media, including television and magazines, remain part of the user mix. About 58 percent of Millennials say magazines help them learn about what’s “in.” Also, about 64 percent of users say they tend to pay greater attention to print ads in magazines or newspapers than advertising on the Internet.About 58 percent say they use magazines to find out about what's "cool and hip," such as clothes, cars and music. Perhaps more important, almost three-quarters (71 percent) enjoy reading print magazines even though they know they could find most of the same information online.
Millennials, though, are most receptive, as you would guess, in just about any area of "converged" or "new media" experience. About 64 percent want to easily connect their television to the Internet for viewing videos and downloading content to their television. About 60 percent want the ability to move their content to any device they own without any problems. Some 57 percent want an entertainment and communication device that lets them "do everything." Nearly half (49 percent) want a computer or similar device that will be the center of their household media experience.
Wal-Mart shuttered its video download service Dec. 21. Videos purchased and downloaded as part of the service still are playable, so long as the original PC the movies were downloaded to remains operational. Due to licensing restrictions, those videos cannot be copied or transfered to a different computer.
That's an obvious measure to protect copyrights, but points to one objection some users may have to buying downloads. Some of us go through a PC a year, so "buying" really means viewing until the hard drive or PC dies.
Having learned the hard way this will happen, some of us now store iTunes collections on external hard drives, so we can lose the CPUs without having to reload all the music again.
Alliance Bernstein Research reports that DVD sales were down 4.1 percent in December, year to date, and that the fourth quarter declined 2.1 percent, based on Nielsen VideoScan tabulations.
That makes 2007 the first negative sales growth year-over-year since DVDs came to market. Which drives one to speculate that multi-tasking and attention sharing now is beginning to show. There are other possible explanations, of course.
The high-definition format battle might be a factor. Consumers might be waiting until the dust settles before beginning a switch to HD format disks.
As retailers blame the weather for slower than anticipated sales, we might this year point to a tougher economic climate and consumer unwillingness or inability to spend on such things, as well.
The total North American concert industry also posted its slowest year since 2004. According to Pollstar, the top 20 tours generated $996 million, down 15.6 percent from 2006 totals.
Warner Music is making its entire back catalog, free of copying restrictions, available for purchase through the Amazon MP3 store. New releases won't be part of the deal.
Amazon therefore will be able to sell 2.9 million songs in encryption-free MP3 format. Music copyright holders obviously don't like the MP3 format. As a user, I wouldn't buy any music that isn't in MP3 format. Let them flail around some more. No MP3, no sale. That simple.
Many music industry executives probably still are kicking themselves for not "getting" digital distribution, then not "getting" iTunes.
Apple has a deal with News Corp's Fox for a movie rental downloads. So far, the viddeo download business has been called a "hobby" by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Disney has had its catalog available on iTunes to allow for purchases, and other studios have partial movie and partial video content catalogs already available. It isn't clear how much impact the new "rental" capability will have. Apple probably doesn't expect much revenue lift for the moment.
Blockbuster and Netflix, of course, will be watching closely, as both of those firms want to dominate the video download business.
If Apple succeeds, it will illustrate one interesting thing about "disruptive" innovation. Normally, one expects more innovation from smaller companies. But sometimes it takes a big, influential company to really shake things up.
Google and Apple are those sorts of companies.
Marketing operations, as much as anything else, will mean at&t customers who actually have fiber-to-the-home will get the same bandwidth and services as customers served by the U-Verse networks, which use very-high-speed Digital Subscriber Line as the drop wire. That means 6 Mbps data access and one high-definition TV stream at a time, even though FTTH networks are capable of more.
About a million at&t customers actually will have fiber drops by the end of 2008.
The marketing issue is analogous to what happens when a citywide broadband network has to be build and marketed. In the early stages, it isn't really possible to use mass media such as radio or television because the service provider simply generates lots of calls for service which it cannot meet. Early on, door hangers and direct mail work better.
To market U-Verse with scale economies, at&t wants to avoid confusing the market by touting offers that one out of 18 customers actually can get. So at&t has to "dumb down" the fiber access pipe. It makes total operational sense, even if some users who know the difference will be disappointed they can't take advantage of the optics.
One would assume that Android phone developers will want to show prototypes of possible devices at the Mobile World Congress in February. This screen sort is supposed to be one of the concepts.
Keep in mind that this is supposed to be a functional prototype on which the developers and engineers can do their work, not a polished industrial design. That sort of thing almost has to be done before February, if Google is to gin up much buzz.
The U.S. Court of Appealrs has ruled that Google’s AdSense program does not infringe on any Hyperphase Technologies patents related to contextual linking and presentation of information. Google won the initial decision, which was appealed. However the court overturned the part of the initial decision covering the AutoLink browsing tool, ruling that there may be infringement of two patents, and sent the case back for another look.
The AutoLink browser tool parses Web pages for fragments of text in certain formats, and then transforms them into links to relevant Web pages.
One senses that something is wrong with the patent system. Fostering innovation by protecting inventions is a good thing. But some patents seem so generic, covering entire processes, not simply the expression of a process, that the patents are overly broad, and seem examples of prior art.
Gmail will increase the amount of free storage it provides to 5 Gytes. Some users already have seen the increase. Everybody will notice in January. In October the amount of free storage was something on the order of 4 Gbytes.
From January 4 on, users will get an additional 3.3 MBytes every day, an expontential rate of increase. Pretty amazing.
Google Apps mail accounts will have the same quota as standard Gmail accounts, while Google Apps Premier Edition will have 25 GB mail accounts. Previously, Google Apps accounts had 2 GBytes of storage, while the business edition offered 10 GBytes per account.
Gmail's paid storage option will feature around 50 percent more storage for the same price: 10 GB for $20 a year, 40 GB for $75 a year, 150 GB for $250 a year and 400 GB for $500 a year.
Japanese wireless provider DoCoMo, which is said to be in the running to sell the Apple iPhone in the Japanese market, also is moving to feature Google applications including search, Gmail, calendar and photo apps, according to "The Nikkei."
DoCoMo is also said to be weighing development of a next-generation handset using Google's Android OS for mobile devices.
It isn't unusual for mobile providers to feature applications on their phones, of course. What is new: making it easy for end users to access mobile-optimized and formatted third-party Web-based apps.
Pittsburgh is on a short list of new markets Cbeyond now is is reviewing. And the recent Federal Communications Commission decision that several Verizon markets were not yet sufficiently competitive to relax wholesale special access rates (broadband access services such as T1s and DS3s)can be credited, in part, for the interest.
The FCC ruling means Cbeyond can buy T1s at discounted rates, and that's quite helpful for Cbeyond's business model, which typically involves provision of voice and data services to small businesses over one or two T1 lines.
Cbeyond apparently has been considering Pittsburgh for some time but the FCC ruling was pivotal, Cbeyond Vice President and Corporate Counsel Bill Weber says.
"Had that FCC decision gone the other direction, in all likelihood we would have never come to Pittsburgh because it would no longer be possible for us to make money," Weber said.
Cbeyond might not begin operations in Pittsburgh, should it decide to expand there, for as much as two years. Typically a fierce competitor in the small business market everywhere it operates, Cbeyond will run into Comcast in Philadelphia as well as Verizon and other providers.
As you might expect, 65 percent of heavy smart phone-using small and medium-sized organization associates say access to corporate applications and data anywhere and anytime would most benefit them in their work roles, according to a survey undertaken by the Yankee Group. Smart phone-centric employees generally have jobs that require more remote working and therefore find some value in smart phone technology.
Excluding corporate email, the most-used applications by employees who have smart phones are Web browsing, business
productivity suites such as Microsoft Office, customer relationship management, project management and corporate instant messaging.
However, no more than a quarter of SME employees are using these applications on their smart phone in the office. Also, in most cases, no more than a handful of SME employees are using these smart phone-enabled applications outside the office in work-related venues such as airports and hotels.
Considering only those SME associates whose primary mobile device is a smart phone, material requirements planning and supply chain management applications are top applications.
However, none of the SME employees in the Yankee Group survey in this segment use MRP and SCM applications on their smart phones regardless of workplace venue.
Both MRP and SCM applications are valuable tools for operations-based employees to track flows of raw materials, pre-finished goods and finished goods at various stages in the supply chain and manufacturing process. Non-office use of these applications is stymied today by a lack of mobile-enabled solutions, Yankee Group researchers argue.
Things might be improving. The Apple iPhone helps with Web browsing. User experience for productivity apps is hampered by small screens, formatting issues and device processing power. Salesforce.com helps with CRM, but the need to support multiple IM clients is cumbersome.
The point, Yankee Group analysts say, is that there is lots of room for further refinement of user experience that could boost use of mobile apps by small and mid-sized business associates.
Fairpoint Communications, a provider of rural telephone service, has had its bid to buy some rural Verizon landlines rejected by the Vermont state government. Verizon and Fairpoint announced the deal, which consists of 1.6 million landlines in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire, nearly a year ago.
The deal has also faced opposition from regulators in Maine. The Vermont Public Service Board's decision doesn't terminate the deal, but it forces the companies to reach a new agreement, which could mean lowering the sale price.
It's just another reminder of how much regulators shape and condition the telecom market.
The "trouble" with WiMAX, I've maintained, has nothing to do with performance, or necessarily with network cost. The technology will work. The issue is how and where WiMAX fits in the business environment. In developed markets where lots of competition already exists, the issue is figuring out where WiMAX plays in the applications environment. As a fixed alternative to cable modem, fiber-to-customer or Digital Subscriber Line services, the issue is how big a market exists. As a mobile broadband platform, the issue is how it competes with 3G networks and Long Term Evolution, the GSM-based fourth generation network alternative.
There's less contention in rural areas or less-developed broadband environments. Where it is too expensive to deploy a terrestrial broadband network, WiMAX has a clear logic. Even there, though, there might be questions about how more-established mobile voice and 3G networks factor into the competitive equation. One certainly can argue that WiMAX will provide much more bandwidth than 3G, today. The issue is how long it will take to create robust revenue models for 3G services, let alone providing those services more effectively over a faster 4G network.
It is, in short, a business issue, not a technology issue. To be sure, one can argue that a new market for broadband-enabled devices other than mobile phones is coming to fruition. But the issue there remains whether WiMAX necessarily or primarily provides access to those devices in ways that 3G cannot, let alone 4G. One might argue that WiMAX has a shot at providing access to all kinds of consumer devices other than "phones." But one might also argue that such connectivity has to be much cheaper than anything we've seen so far.
WiMAX networks might be half as costly as a 3G network to build. But that's not enough. They also have to be less than half as costly to operate, or prices won't be low enough to entice users to pay for connections to cameras, music players, game or entertainment platforms, for example. Those functions also are enabled on 3G networks, in many cases, combining the text and voice functions with the very services WiMAX might enable.
WiMAX might not prove to have the market traction its supporters hope for, in other words, at least in developed broadband markets where there is robust competition from cable modem, DSL, fiber to home, 3G mobile, fixed wireless, Wi-Fi hotspot and satellite broadband alternatives. The difference could come if WiMAX becomes the mobile provider 4G platform or if mobile WiMAX access is priced well below current mobile rates, allowing customers to access enable more devices than they now do.
It is not unthinkable for users to consider simultaneous broadband subscriptions. But it does require a more-compelling value/price relationship. We can assume standard-issue mobile phones, increasingly of the "smart" variety and optimized for Web experiences. We also can assume greater penetration of wireless data cards to support notebook PC use in nomadic fashion. What is not yet clear is the potential demand for broadband-connected music players, cameras, game players, dedicated navigation devices or video players. How many different subscriptions are users willing to pay for?
There is some thinking that WiMAX will be used especially heavily by mobile PC customers, as WiMAX is seen as powering a good chunk of the access card business.
“In 2010, the forecasted WiMAX subscriptions in North America will represent two percent of that for mobile 2.5G/3G and 66 percent of the subscriptions for mobile data cards,” say Philip Marshall, Yankee Group vice president, and Tara Howard, Yankee Group analyst.
Yankee Group estimates the number of WiMAX subscribers will increase from 1.3 million to 7.8 million between 2006 and 2011 and that in 2011, 7 million subscribers will be using 802.16e technology. Some percentage of that use will be for fixed broadband access, of course.
Assume such forecasts are correct. The percentage of WiMAX subscribers relative to residential broadband subscribers in the North American market then will increase from 2.2 percent to 7.4 percent between 2006 and 2010. Whatever else one might say about this level of adoption, it certainly doesn’t represent some sort of full-blown challenge to cable modem, DSL or fiber-to-customer access technologies. In fact, WiMAX, if it is adopted as Yankee Group researchers now forecast, will be yet another ancillary or niche form of broadband access.
So in mature markets, the major upside opportunity for WiMAX is expected with mobile personal broadband services, with fixed and portable services gaining moderate early market traction. In some Asian markets, such as Korea, it is conceivable that WiMAX-based mobile broadband could succeed, despite the existence of robust 3G and mobile video alternatives.
Still, the ultimate role of WiMAX in the wireless market is debatable, says a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report. “Large supporters such as Intel have a vision that WiMAX will change the way we all access the Internet in a matter of years,” says the report.
“Detractors claim that the economics of large-scale WiMAX networks are simply not justified,” the OECD report suggests.
Mobile WiMAX technologies may have the most profound impact in some urban areas because they could fill a connectivity void between 3G data networks and Wi-Fi, though.
Ultimately, this will not be a matter of technology, but of commercial issues and creation of new niches. It's hard to see GSM mobile operators going with WiMAX as a full-blown replacement for 3G, when LTE is coming. And it isn't simply a matter of technical performance. Smooth migration paths are important for large carriers. WiMAX might be too abrupt a transition for many. That might not be the case in undeveloped broadband markets, where a fixed broadband capability is reason enough to deploy it. Mobile broadband is a tougher matter, though.
In its story on "Technology in 2008," The Economist makes three predictions, one that will not happen in 2008, one of which could--but won't--happen and one which already happened. The three:
1. surfing will slow
2. surfing will go mobile
3. networks will go open
Oddly, the article predicts the Internet will clog because of spam. The article also says access pipes operate "symmetrically." If only it were so! The article is more apt when it says user-generated content, especially of the video sort, will stress the networks. "Gridlock" is the prediction. But it won't happen. Pipes are being upgraded and "reasonable use" policies are going to change. Traffic shaping is coming and access pipes are getting bigger. "Surfing" isn't going to slow.
The article is correct in noting that wireless access is coming. But the article implies that it is the 700-MHz auctions that will drive the change. Keep in mind, these are predictions for 2008. There is no way any new network using 700-MHz spectrum is going to be operating in 2008. And the tier one mobile providers are doing everything they can to convince more users to buy data access plans, with modest success so far. It's coming, no doubt about it. But it's been coming for years.
Use of data cards, browsing plans and email access plans will grow incrementally, and at a faster rate, to be sure. But there's no "big bang" coming in 2008. The trend began years ago.
In predicting that we'll see more "openness" in mobile networks, the article is on track. Perhaps the article focuses a bit too much on open operating systems and not enough on unlocked phones and access, but of the three predictions, this one is most nearly correct. But a new operating open network in the U.S. market at 700 MHz, in 2008. Absolutely no way.
Web services are going mobile and open, no doubt. But neither trend is specific to 2008.
Motorola says it increased to 15 the number of contracts for commercial WiMAX networks and demonstrated the historic first live mobile WiMAX 802.16e handoffs between continuous WiMAX cells supporting voice, data and multimedia applications during WiMAX World USA in Chicago.
The company also increased to more than 57 the number of WiMAX engagements in 38 countries worldwide, including 44 active trials.
Motorola says it is on track to support the Sprint Xohm soft launch in Chicago by year end 2007 and is on schedule with deployment for the planned commercial launch in the second quarter 2008.
The company also says it has completed the deployment of the first 802.16e commercial WiMAX network in Pakistan for Wateen Telecom and has completed the first phase deployment of two additional commercial WiMAX systems in France and Germany.
Senza Fili Consulting says WiMAX is due for some growth.
Some years ago, many observers were convinced VoIP would be "disruptive" to the global telecommunications industry. There's much less certainty now. In fact, one might ask: is VoIP mostly a better way to do voice, or just a new way? Mobile clearly is a new way, and might be disruptive in many ways. So is VoIP. But "different" isn't the same thing as "disruptive."
The global industry made a transition from analog to digital switching, as it earlier made a transition from mechanical to electronic switches. New services and efficiencies were gained in each of these transitions. But one can question whether the differences were transformational.
Likewise, most of the U.S. competitive local exchange carrier industry thought it was doing something revolutionary in buying its own Class 5 switches to compete with incumbents. As it turns out, that wasn't hugely disruptive.
These days, most tier one carriers earn only about 20 percent of total revenues from consumer voice, and not significantly higher percentages even if enterprise voice is included in the total.
The point is that "voice," though still hugely important as an end-user value, is less and less the revenue driver for the global industry. So VoIP is in many ways a much-better way to use voice, but such a smaller part of total revenues that it cannot strategically change industry dynamics, one way or the other, so long as a transition away from reliance on voice revenues is predictable.
There are precedents for that as well. Long distance revenues have been declining, in terms of revenue per minute, if not volume, for decades. But the industry had time to transition away from long distance as a driver of profits.
At this point, it certainly looks as though VoIP is more nearly the latest enhancement to basic voice, rather than a disruption. If anything, it is mobile that represents the big "disruption."
Earlier this year Level 3 caused a stir when it said it would enter the content delivery network (CDN) market with a radical pricing model: essentially offering the quality of service features at no incremental cost to what customers expect to pay for simple IP transit. And if you think about it, that's precisely what a CDN does: provide QoS features on top of dumb pipe. All of which should have, and did, raise fears about the health of the CDN market.
After all, if a contestant says it will give customers for free, what they today pay for, that's disruptive. Most recently, at&t itself said it was getting into the CDN business as well. Which should have caused another shudder: remember Northpoint, Rhythms Netconnections and Covad? They were the three independent providers in the nascent Digital Subscriber Line broadband access market. Of course, when the incumbent telcos decided broadband access was a business they had to "own," they simply moved to do that.
So are Level 3 and at&t a threat to market-leader Akamai? Right now it's hard to say much, beyond the obvious fact that competition is increasing in the space. One issue could ultimately be the size of the market opportunity, the reason for that being that a smallish market will favor specialists, while a large market will favor the larger telcos.
And it is not necessarily simply because scale economies might kick in. It is more a matter that large telcos tend not to do well in market segments that are small. Small markets never get the attention they might deserve in a large organization. So unless the market gets fairly sizable, a large telco simply will not invest enough to keep pace with smaller specialists.
So how big is the market today? As it turns out, that's a guesstimate of sorts.
Some things are hard to count. Unified communications software is an example. People who track these things like concrete measures: ports, servers, licenses sold. So how do you track "presence" features that simply are embedded in the basic functionality of an IP PBX?
Other markets aren't quite that hard to track, but still are fuzzy because mutltiple revenue categories get lumped together in the reporting. Streaming media services, as distinct from application acceleration, provides an example of that sort.
Dan Rayburn,StreamingMedia.com EVP, provides a reasonable way of current approaching the U.S. market size, though. Working backwards from benchmarks, Rayburn suggests the market for CDN services (but not P2P apps) currently is less than $800 million.
Internap's 2007 revenue is about $24 million. Limelight Networks generated about $105 million for 2007 and about $95 million of that was earned in the U.S. market.
Akamai probably generates $400 million to $450 million of its $625 million total revenue comes from their CDN services. Rayburn further guesses that U.S. CDN revenues amount to $300 million.
Level 3 wasn't in the market for much of the year, but might have earned $2 million or so.
VeriSign might have earned about $8 million for the year in the U.S. market.
Mirror Image, CacheLogic, Panther Express, CacheFly and Advection.NET taken together will do about $20 million in the U.S. market.
EdgeCast, CDNetworks and BitGravity combined did about $5 million for the year. Again, these are new services that didn't have a full year of operation to measure.
PEER 1, NaviSite and Ignite Technologies together collectively generated about $8 million.
All other smaller regional service providers providing small and medium sized businesses outsourced video delivery services sold under $20 million in 2007.
Now that I've had a chance to look at Research in Motion's most recent quarterly results, which were robust, one can make a comparison between what RIM did, and what 9to5mac.com expects Apple to announce it has done. Namely, 9to5mac.com expects Apple to announce sales of five million iPhones in February.
RIM sold 3.9 million Blackberries in its most recent quarter across more than 100 carriers and 13 product lines. It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The two companies have different quarterly "endings," RIM finishing Dec. 1 and Apple Dec. 31.
Plus, it isn't clear what time period the five million iPhones were sold over. 9to5mac.com does not indicate a belief that all five million were sold in one quarter, and one suspects that isn't the case. Make it 3.5 million or so devices in the quarter.
What is interesting is how well Apple would have done, should it report anything like five million devices over even two quarters, given its early status in the market.
Apple has been selling one model of a GSM iPhone in four countries with just four carrier partners; while RIM, with a huge head start, is sold by more than 100 carriers, and features 13 different product lines.
Firefox has taken a step towards cloud computing by releasing the first version of Weave, a way to blend of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.
Basically, Weave pushes browser metadata (bookmarks, history, customizations into the cloud so it can be retrieved and used on any machine. The metadata is transparently reflected everywhere an individual gets online. Weave also will provide a basic framework for easily sharing and delegating access to this metadata to friends, family and third-parties. And it's a Mozilla product so there will application program interfaces for developers.
Mozilla intends to provide the infrastructure and an consistent model for how a user can open up their browser metadata to friends and third-party applications.
at&t Wireless and Alltel finally are shutting down their old analog and first-generation cellular (TDMA) networks in February 2008. Verizon Wireless says on its Web site that it will retire its analog network on Feb. 18, 2008, and will not provide analog service after that date.
Almost nobody will notice. The carriers say a million phones out of 250 million in use might be affected. No phone capable of text messaging uses analog technology. No Sprint or T-Mobile phones use analog, either.
Carriers have been telling analog customers about the shutdown and offering them new digital service plans and phones, so it isn't clear that any active users will experience issues. There might be some "phones sitting in drawers" that users keep around for emergency 911 calling, without plans, that could be affected.
But at&t, which had the largest number of analog customers at one time, has been phasing analog out since 2001, and with the high rates of phone replacement, can't still be supporting many users on the older system.
Separately from the analog shutdown, Alltel and AT&T will finish phasing out networks that use a first-generation digital technology known as D-AMPS or TDMA (for Time Division Multiple Access).
Some observers caution that Google is over-estimated where it comes to innovation. "Not everything Google does succeeds," that line of thinking goes. And of course that is quite correct. Lots of things Google has done have not been runaway successes. Some initiatives have failed, plain and simple. GTalk hasn't caught on, and Google bought YouTube because Google's home-grown video site wasn't getting traction.
Perhaps the implication is that potential competitors shouldn't fear Google as much as they seem to, as Google fails often enough. Perhaps the other way to look at matters is the frequency with which Google does, in fact, succeed, compared to the number of attempts. And given the number of attempts, the more Google fails, the more it will discover things that work.
Sure, Google seems to go off on tangents now and then. Google defends these explorations as attempts to find other really big businesses. Maybe. And maybe Google just goes off on tangents now and then. Either way, the attempt to start new things is going to lead to lots of failures, if Google tries enough new things. Some of us might argue that is precisely what makes Google so fearsome: it innovates so fast for a firm its size.
Still, the observation that Google does not succeed with much of anything outside of search might be premature. Even "search" took a while to catch on. So, no, Google does not immediately dominate "every" market or segment it enters. It experiments. It fails. If it succeeds 10 percent of the time, and fails often enough, it just might discover some significant-sized new businesses.
MEMO: December 1st
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
I'm happy to inform you that the company Christmas Party will take place
on December 23rd at Luigi's Open Pit Barbecue.
There will be lots of spiked eggnog and a small band playing traditional
carols... feel free to sing along.
And don't be surprised if our CEO shows up dressed as Santa Claus to
light the Christmas tree!
Exchange of gifts among employees can be done at that time; however, no
gift should be over $10.
Merry Christmas to you, and your family.
Patty Lewis, Human Resources Director
MEMO: December 2nd
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
In no way was yesterday's memo intended to exclude our Jewish employees.
We recognize that Hanukkah is an important holiday that often coincides
with Christmas (though unfortunately not this year). However, from now
on, we're calling it our "Holiday Party."
The same policy applies to employees who are celebrating Kwanzaa at this
time.
There will be no Christmas tree and no Christmas carols sung.
Happy Holidays to you, and your family.
Patty Lewis, Human Resources Director
MEMO: December 3rd
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
Regarding the anonymous note I received from a member of Alcoholics
Anonymous requesting a non-drinking table, I'm happy to accommodate this
request, but, don't forget, if I put a sign on the table that reads, "AA
Only," you won't be anonymous anymore.
In addition, forget about the gifts exchange -- no gifts will be allowed
since the union members feel that $10 is too much money.
Happy Holidays to you, and your family.
Patty Lewis, Human Researchers Director
MEMO: December 7th
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
I've arranged for members of Overeaters Anonymous to sit farthest from
the dessert buffet and pregnant women closest to the restrooms.
Gays are allowed to sit with each other.
Lesbians do not have to sit with the gay men; each will have their own table.
Yes, there will be a flower arrangement for the gay men's table.
Happy now!?
Patty Lewis, Human Racehorses Director
MEMO: December 9th
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
People, people! -- Nothing sinister was intended by wanting our CEO to
play Santa Claus!
Even if the anagram of "Santa" does happen to be "Satan," there is no
evil connotation to our own "little man in a red suit."
Patty Lewis, Human Rat Race Director
MEMO: December 10th
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
Vegetarians -- I've had it with you people! We're going to hold this
party at Luigi's Open Pit whether you like it or not, you can just sit
at the table farthest from the "grill of death," as you put it, and
you'll get salad bar only, including hydroponic tomatoes. But, you know
tomatoes have feelings, too. They scream when you slice them. I've heard
them scream.
I'm hearing them right now... Ha!
I hope you all have a rotten holiday! Drive drunk and die, you hear me?!
The ***** from Hell
MEMO: December 14th
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
I'm sure I speak for all of us in wishing Patty Lewis a speedy recovery
from her stress-related illness. I'll continue to forward your cards to
her at the sanitarium. In the meantime, management has decided to cancel
our Holiday Party and give everyone the afternoon of the 23rd off with
full pay.
Happy Holidays.
Terri Bishop, Acting Human Resources Director
IBM’s Blue Cloud is a platform for cloud-based computing, expected to be available to customers in the spring of 2008, supporting systems with Power and x86 processors.
“Blue Cloud" will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet, enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.
It is, along with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, a seminal step towards network-based computing architectures. Sun Microsystems was ahead of its time in declaring that the "network is the computer." But cloud computing is going to fulfill the prediction.
Call it "software as a service" if you like. The point is that we are nearing an era where resources will be invoked from the computing cloud using a Web browser. Policies still will be needed to authorize use of specific resources, to be sure. But the larger point is that computing, storage and application resources will reside "in the cloud," and be invoked as required by users at the edge of the cloud.
There are all sorts of practical advantages. Distributed or mobile workers can simply invoke their services and information from where they are, using a standard Web browser. Everyone always will have the latest version, the latest patch, the latest version or update.
Computationally intense activities can be handled by clusters of machines designed for such intensity. Storage can be invoked, not carried; used rather than built.
If a developer needs expensive resources, they can be gotten on a sort of "time shared" basis, rather than on a "build your own computing center" basis.
Blue Cloud will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.
The interesting speculation is about how cloud computing might change the way enterprises think about their application and storage architectures. Given the massive increase in the scale of IT environments, one wonders how they'll assess the trade-offs between "building data centers" and "renting reources."
Up to this point, the enterprise data center has been the penultimate computing resource. Might the "cloud" surpass even local and networked data centers?
Between emerging social networking tools and Web browser front ends, it is conceivable that the need for enterprise "intranets" is not so urgent anymore. As the Internet was seen as an external network, intranets were supposed to make internal data bases, information and communication available to enterprise associates.
But email, instant messaging, texting, mobile phones, Saleforce.com and other Web-based tools arguably not allow organizations to do those things without building dedicated intranets.
Instead, we've flipped everything inside out. The big movement now is towards software architectures that allow internal resources to be exposed to users with access to Web browsers.
Sometime big has changed when a former Delta Airlines COO takes over as the CEO of a technology company like Red Hat.
Red Hat isn’t a little startup trying to convert people to Linux. It’s a business selling to big corporations. It needs leadership used to selling enterprises.Also, if Red Hat can reasonably expect to compete to supply half of the worldwide server market by 2015, it will really have to scale. Companies like Delta are about systems and logistics, the sort of things one needs to really scale.
James Whitehurst, of course, wouldn't be the first non-technology executive brought in to head a technology company. Lou Gerstner transformed IBM into a services company, using a background of RJR Nabisco and American Express.
The choice shows how mainstream open source has become. Red Hat needs to sell to enterprise executives, with huge scale.
Vonage and at&t have finalized the settlement of a dispute between the companies. No details were released. But $39 million had been mentioned earlier.
Not being a "techie," I first became aware of "IP Multicasting" in 2000, when working with some folks developing a streaming media service. As somebody who spent some time in the cable TV business, it made a huge amount of sense. Basically, the idea is that for popular content, say a TV show that millions of people want to watch, one uses multicasting to launch a single stream that all those viewers can watch, rather than millions of discrete streams. Those of you who are network engineers will appreciate the elegance of the way this conserves bandwidth, in the same way that satellites deliver a single stream that millions of viewers can watch. That's the beauty of all multicasting: highly efficient sharing of downstream bandwidth.
Carriers proved resistance to enabling multicasting, however, for all sorts of other reasons, not the least of which was the fear that control over available bandwidth would be lost. But technology journalist Mark Stephens (Robert X. Cringely) argues multicasting is the future of television. Well, at least the future for some sorts of television: the highly-viewed, synchronous sort.
Multicast was built into the structure of the Internet from the very beginning but was generally not turned on because network administrators view it as a resource hog (local storage and resources, not bandwidth, per se).
Cisco long has been a huge supporter of multicast because it requires ever bigger and more powerful routers. That might be true, but multicasting still makes eminent sense as a way to distribute highly-popular video. Sure, there are other sorts of video that have to be unicast because demand is low. But multicasting is quite efficient of bandwidth for highly-popular streams.
Stephens uses a simple example. Say a user wants to see Seinfeld episode 60, and is entitled to do so. That event gets assigned a multicast address.
When the show is made available on a server anywhere on a part of the net that supports multicast, the user receives it. All the routers between here and there look for multicast subscriptions and enable them and the episode is is cached locally.
In order to lower their bandwidth bills, ISPs are trying to take greater control of the way we, their customers, use our "unlimited" bandwidth, says Stephens. But IP multicast offers another tool to do so, and is less bothersome.
Both Comcast and Verizon are rapidly rolling out IP multicast, Stephens notes. The reason is that IP multicast remains a highly-efficient to deliver popular programming, and means most of the linear cable channels. ESPN demands as part of its contracts that much of their programming on MPEG-2-equipped cable systems must delivered at 5 Mbps to 8 Mbps, compared to the 2 Mbps used for most other channels.
Contracts are similiar for premium cable services such as HBO or Showtime.
Internal audience studies at Comcast have shown that 90 percent of the customer base watches 10 percent of the available channels.The problem is that each of use might have a different seven favorites. Also, even if few people actually are watching, cable companies can't turn them off because programming contracts with the studios require carriage.
Multicast solves this problem because it allocates no bandwidth to channels that aren't being watched. It's an interesting business issue: the signals are "carried" but maybe not "broadcast" to consumers who aren't actually "tuned" to the channel.
IP Multicast is an alternative to P2P, in other words.
Cleve Nettles at Mac9to5 thinks so. Nettles expects Apple to say so in January, at Macworld. The issue is how those sales relate to the announced goal of selling 10 million iPhones. Some people recollect Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, promising sales of 10 million phones in calendar year 2008 alone. Others seem to think he meant 10 million by the end of 2008, in total.
Rivals at Nokia and Research in Motion probably aren't excessively worried either way, given the installed base of devices each of those firms has, and the number of new devices they ship every month. Of course, Apple has a distinct advantage. It gets recurring revenue from the sales of each of its phones.
RIM and Nokia do not. So one iPhone sale is worth a lot more revenue than the sale of a new BlackBerry or Nokia handset.
The coming year is when we see just how formidable U.S. cable companies will be in the small business communications market. To be sure, many veterans of the business communications market don't think cable will much of a factor in the enterprise market. Maybe not. That's not where cable companies are going to focus, which is the small business customer.
Comcast Corp. apparently plans to spend $3 billion to sign up 20 percent of small companies in its territories by 2012. Time Warner Cable Inc. is also pursuing businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. And Cox Enterprises has been signing up lots of business customers for years.
Phone companies dominate the $25 billion annual market, which can generate profit margins about 10 percent higher than services offered to consumers or enterprises.
On the other hand, large telcos don't generate nearly as much money from phone lines and calling as they used to. In fact, small business lines provide only about five percent of at&t's revenue these days.
Cable providers, with less than five percent of the small business market, may seize one-third by 2012, saus Sanjeev Aggarwal, AMI-Partners VP.
So two things are going to happen. In some cases telcos will cut their own prices to match the discounts cablers are expected to offer. They'll keep share but sacrifice margins. Or, telcos can simply accept the loss of some share to maintain margins for a while longer.
Anticipating the onslaught, Verizon and at&t seem to be prepared to cut prices and bundle services to keep small-business customers who sign up on contracts.
Verizon offers 20 percent off Internet access for companies taking unlimited local and long-distance calling plans for one year. Customers buying voice services from at&t pay roughly 40 percent less with an annual Internet service contract.
About 54 percent of AT&T's small and mid-sized-business customers in areas where cable may compete have might already have signed new contracts, some observers suggest.
According to ReadWriteWeb, a five-year-old bet was settled recently. The bet, between New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz and Web 2.0 Founding Father Dave Winer, was about blogs topping the New York Times in Google search results for the top five news stories of 2007.
Rogers Cadenhead has done the tabulation and found that Winer, and blogging, have indeed won. Sort of, ReadWriteWeb notes.
According to the Associated Press, the top 5 news stories of 2007 were Chinese exports, oil prices, Iraq war, Mortgage crisis and the Virginia Tech killings. Obviously this is a list for US news markets and not the entire world.
Today, a Google search for those terms brings up a blog higher than the New York TImes for Chinese exports (Blogging Stocks 19th vs. NYT 20th), Iraq War (a blog was 17th, NYT 20th) and Virginia Tech killings (Newsvine coverage of the AP's top stories of the year is 9th in Google vs. the Times at number 30.) So blogs topped the Times in 3 out of 5 top stories.
Wikipedia, however, ranks higher than both blogs and wikis according to Candenhead.
The three blogs that topped the Times in the Google results in question don't tell such a simple story. Two are stories from the AOL-owned Blogging Stocks and one is from social news site Newsvine, now owned by MSNBC.
You'd be hard pressed to find a more significant year in the U.S. mobile business than the one that is passing. We witnessed the entry of a major consumer and computer electronics retailer--Apple--into the mobile business. We saw the emergence of an unprecedented revenue model for the iPhone.
We saw Google put together an open source community around Android that includes tier-one mobile service providers. We saw Google make at least an opening bid for actual spectrum, and cement development deals with Sprint and Clearwire for WiMAX handsets.
We saw the Federal Communications Commission mandate an "open networks, open devices" regime for the 700-MHz C block spectrum, the best quality mobile spectrum yet to be made available, because of its wall-penetrating abilities signals in the 700-MHz range possess.
We saw Verizon Wireless declare its support for "open" networks as well. Taken together, all the developments signal the emergence of the mobile Web. And that is going to create new space for contestants, including the most-popular Web brands.
That is not to say networks are unimportant. It is to say that now handsets and brands become much more important in the wireless business. That's a huge change.
Even though television plays a key role in alerting and updating people about big news stories, the initial awareness often comes by word of mouth or the Internet.
After the April 16 Virginia Tech massacre, Frank N. Magid Associates polled Millennials; Gen Xers; and Baby Boomers about how they first got the news.
Television coverage was the primary source to which all three groups turned for information on the shooting spree, but nearly a quarter (23 percent) of the adult Millennials first learned about the story on the Internet, compared with 19 percent of Gen Xers and 16 percent of Baby Boomers.
About 29 percent of Millenials heard about the Virginia Tech story by word of mouth, which includes text messaging.
In fact, in all three target demos, word of mouth was the number one source of alerts to those who weren't at home.
On the other hand, 37 percent of Millennials first learned about the story from TV, as did 43 percent of Gen Xers and 50 percent of Boomers.
Spain's top media company Prisa said Monday it had taken legal action against Nielsen for miscounting traffic to its ElPais.com Web site as well as readers of its newspaper.
Prisa said its Internet arm Pisacom and El Pais were suing Nielson "based on the damage caused by the unjustified downward revision in the number of unique visitors of ELPAIS.com during the current year."
"The lawsuit argues that due to the serious negligence on the part of Nielson in its measurement of audience figures for ELPAIS.COM, El Pais and Prisa suffered serious damages due to lost advertising this year."
Data from marketing firms like Nielsen are important in determining the amount websites charge for advertising, with sites with high viewing figures being able to charge higher fees to sponsors. Networks sometimes have such disputes with the firms doing the counting.
One has to wonder when somebody will sue Google for mishandling a search ranking.
Is Google the new Microsoft? Some people think it is on the way; others say there is no chance of such an enduring dominance. For regulators, the question is thornier. Every competitive market sooner or later turns less competitive, for very simple reasons: users flock to great products and stop using or buying the less-good products. Over time, that naturally creates market dominance, and that in turn ultimately draws in regulators to prevent excessive market control.
But regulators have to define what markets are in the first place, define the relevant competitors, then quantify the impact and propose remedies. Let's assume the relevant market in this case is "search." Ignore for the moment the fact that neither Google nor any of the other contestants ultimately will operate in such a narrowly-defined segment as "search."
Sometimes, regulators, users and markets get the "dominance" thing wrong. Some of us can remember very-serious discussions about how to "control" the browser market, as that was deemed essential to "control" of Internet experiences. As it turns out, the browser was not central to "control." Then Microsoft proposed an Internet identification system called "Passport." Regulators were concerned that Microsoft could become the "toll keeper" to the Internet if the identity scheme were massively adopted.
For starters, it didn't get such adoption. In broader terms, the Internet itself grew so fast that it is questionable whether any single identity system could be said to "dominate" the Internet.There was competition after all.
All that said, regulators have ruled that Microsoft has a monopoly in desktop operating systems, that Microsoft has abused its monopoly position and that consumers therefore were harmed, though not necessarily in the opearating system market but in "ancillary" markets that might have developed more competitively.
So the issue is whether Google is becoming, in search at least, the equivalent of Microsoft in the operating system area. Curiously, Google will be charged simultaneously with being a "monopolist" over information and at the same time essentially a leech as it "creates no new information of its own." Google will be called an "information gatekeeper" even as it continually tries to devise better ways for users to find the very information it is supposed to be "gatekeeping."
The issue with that line of thinking is that Google doesn't "own" or "control" the information. What it "controls" is a user preference for its algorithms and search results. If Google interferes with the value of search results, users will go elsewhere. There arguably are more issues about paid local search. But the analogy there is probably "phone books" rather than search. Phone books are in the paid local search business. What Google wants to do is provider a better paid local search experience.
There probably are better-grounded objections in the privacy area. Google will know lots about its users. But that's something other Web application providers, entertainment and access services provider also are racing to capture. Privacy is a legitimate issue. The conflict between search and advertising models built around search seem less legitimate. Think of Google as media. Media always have had business models based on ad support for content. Google's privacy issues in that regard will not be different in kind from the issues other media will face as well.
To be sure, every era of computing has been lead by new companies. So some company, some day, will be acknowledged to have become that new leader. At some broader level, one wonders whether any such company will have "control" of the Internet and the Web the way Microsoft once controlled desktops.
So far, most consumers say they haven't even heard of "online versions of desktop productivity suites," for example. That isn't to say things will always be that way; just that domination of adjacent markets on the Web will be quite difficult.
Businesses use all sorts of access technology, if a recent Aethera Networks poll is to be believed. As you might guess, more than a quarter of business users have Time Division Multiplex access while more than a third use Ethernet of some sort.
You might not be surprised that more than a quarter use cable modems or Digital Subscriber Line, especially business-class DSL. What is interesting is that cable modem technology shows up in such surveys of the small business space. In fact, at least some business owners tell me they replaced T1 lines with cable modem service, and are happy they did.
So what would disruption of the global telecom industry by IP communications look like? It's a hypothetical question, for a couple of reasons. The newspaper industry, for examnple, has been in a lingering decline in readership and ad revenue for decades. Nothing spectacular, year over year: just a steady, decades-long decline.
The telecom industry has seen something like that only in the twin areas of rates per minute charged for long distance and number of wired access lines in service. The long distance data is different from what one sees in the newspaper business in that volumes have skyrocketed even as prices have dropped. There is no such elasticity in the newspaper market.
The parallel between newspaper and telco fortunes is most similar in the area of access lines, where there might even be something like negative elasticity developing: "drop the price and people buy less." But the analogy doesn't fit very well precisely because, unlike the newspaper industry, the global telecom business has developed a huge replacement business for wirelines, namedly wireless services.
In fact, global telco revenue has been climbing steadily almost without a break for more than a century.
At the same time, telcos have discovered data services in addition to voice, broadband Internet access, entertainment video, ringtones, music and game downloads and other smallish businesses. The point isn't "smallishness." The seeds of tomorrow's business already are planted.
Newspapers have done nothing of the kind.
Last year, McClatchy, a U.S. newspaper chain, acquired Knight Ridder. To help pay down debt, McClatchy sold the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis in March for $530 million. Even with an added tax benefit of $160 million, the sale price amounted to only about half of what the company paid for the paper in 1998.
And then in November, the company took a $1.37 billion after-tax non-cash impairment charge, partly to reflect a further decline in the value of its newspapers.
The company's share price recently was $12.75, down more than 80% from the 2005 peak. The decline leaves McClatchy, the nation's third-largest newspaper publisher by daily circulation, with a market capitalization of barely $1 billion.
There is one sliver of hope: McClatchy has a position in the online classified advertising market, though newspapers collectively have lost their hoped-for lead to the likes of Craig's List.
McClatchy acquired a 14.4 percent share of CareerBuilder.com, as well as a 25.6 percent stake in Classified Ventures, the parent of Cars.com and Apartments.com.
The issue is how much success McClatchy and other major newspaper chains are going to have in the local online advertising business. Compared to the telecom industry, the newspaper industry is well behind the curve in cultivating new businesses, even if small.
One is tempted to say it is a shift of consumption to the Web that is responsible for the newspaper decline, but that's not entirely correct. Newspaper consumption began its decline long before the Web existed, so one has to blame television-based news. A shift of information consumption to the Web simply is accelerating a trend already in place.
If you needed any reminding, email and instant messaging now is quite widespread in North America, Japan and Europe, as broadband penetration also has become a typical experience. Use of social networking sites still has a ways to go, except in Canada, where usage seems unusually high.
The U.K. is well ahead of most other European countries in its use of digital media, by some measures. By the start of 2007, more than 76 percent of U.K. TV households were receiving digital TV services, a rate higher than other Western European countries, Japan or the United States, for example.
According to Ofcom, U.K. adults also spend more time on social networking sites than other Europeans. Two in five U.K. adults regularly log on to these sites, clocking up an average of 23 visits and 5.3 hours each month.
In the U.K. market, 33 percent of users send picture messages via their mobiles and 16 percent use them to connect to the Internet. About 10 percent of U.K. adults use mobiles for e-mail.
Ofcom also believes that online advertising in the United Kingdom accounted for 14 percent of total advertising revenues in 2006, passing magazine advertising for the first time and registering more than total spending on outdoor, cinema and radio advertising combined.
Advertisers in the U.K. market also spend more money per consumer on Internet advertising than any other country, at £33. According to Ofcom, this is twice as much as France, Germany and Italy combined.
Online advertising revenues generated in the U.K. market in 2006 also beat the combined totals of Germany, France and Italy at £231 per head.
More viewers are turning to the Internet to supplement their traditional entertainment viewing habits, says Harris Interactive. In the past year, YouTube has widened its lead as a one-stop site for online video viewing.
Search and content providers, as well as online community sites, also have gained some ground on the video viewing front while TV network sites are holding their own as well.
While the incidence of online video viewership has increased overall in the past year (81 percent versus 74 percent), YouTube is by far enjoying the greatest increase.
Approximately two-thirds (65 percent) of U.S. online adults say they have watched a video at YouTube, compared to 42 percent at the same time last year, with the strongest gains among those over age 25.
Over 42 percent of YouTube viewers say they visit the site frequently, up from 33 percent last year. Just over two in five U.S. adults have watched videos on a TV network site (43 percent vs. 41 pecent).
While online video viewing declines with age for most sites measured, including YouTube, the incidence of online viewing on TV network and news sites remains consistent across age groups ranging from 18 to 64.
While interest in online video viewing is becoming more commonplace across older age groups, it is virtually ubiquitous among the under 30 set.
Yahoo and Latin America's top mobile phone company America Movil said on Thursday they have struck a deal to provide mobile Web services to 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yahoo's oneSearch service will be the default on America Movil's wireless carriers' portals. Yahoo plans to offer localized versions of oneSearch for each region, and said other Yahoo services may be added in coming months.
The partnership is the largest of the 21 search deals Yahoo has announced this year with mobile phone operators, the Sunnyvale, California company said.
Mexico City-based America Movil has 143 million wireless subscribers. Yahoo's broadest previous deal was with Spain's Telefonica SA, covering up to 100 million subscribers in several European and Latin American markets.
The good news for consumers is that high-definition DVD prices are falling. The bad news is that the format war still isn't over. As was the case with BetaMax and VHS in videotape recorders, consumers now have to choose between incompatible formats. Personally, I'm just going to wait until the war is over. I've been through enough of these technology standard battles to instinctively avoid buying "eight track," "BetaMax," or just about anything proprietary in the consumer electronics space. Of course, I don't care enough about video to adopt early, in any case, so I might be odd in that regard.
Sony's "Blue-ray" players are selling for under $300, while Toshiba's "HD-DVD" player is available for $200.
The edge right now seems to be on Blu-ray's side. since Thanksgiving in the U.S., Blu-ray discs account for 72 percent of the high-definition discs sold, while HD-DVD has 27.4percent of the share over that same time period. So maybe Sony can win a major format war for once.
Right now, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Metro Goldwyn Mayer support Blu-ray DVDs, while Universal (GE) has sided with HD-DVD. Warner Bros. supports both players.
Studios obviously hope the new format will spark higher DVD sales, which are highly profitable, but whose sales have started to slide.
We shall see. The download market and on-demand video streaming have to be taken into account, this time around. And with users opting for increased mobile or PC screen video, it isn't an absolute certainty how big the market might be for high-definition DVDs. It's great for big screen displays. But lots of viewing now takes place on all sorts of screens where the advantage is small, if much of an advantage at all. For downloaded video, in fact, less information, which means faster downloads, probably is more important.
Truphone's mobile VoIP service now is supported on five new handsets: the Wi-Fi-equipped Nokia N95 8G, Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8G, Nokia N82 and Nokia E51 models. Truphone also is freezing its rates until the end of February, so Truphone calls will be free to landlines in 40 countries, and to mobiles in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere, until March.
The mobile Web might be the future for a goodly portion of user activity in the future. But it isn't quite there yet, Accenture says.
The Japanese mobile market long has been seen as a trend-setter for mobile applications elsewhere in the world. As Accenture looks at the market, that remains the case. Japanese users simply do different things, with different levels of intensity, than users in Western Europe, for example.
The NPD Group says consumers who own Apple Mac computers are much more likely than PC users to pay to download music. According to NPD, in the third quarter of 2007 half of all Mac users had paid to download music tracks from sites like iTunes, but just 16 percent of PC owners had done so.
And while Mac users were more likely to pay to download digital music than their PC-using counterparts, they were also more likely to purchase CDs.
“There’s still a cultural divide between Apple consumers and the rest of the computing world, and that’s especially apparent when it comes to the way they interact with music,” says Russ Crupnick, NPD Group VP. “Mac users are not only more active in digital music, they are also more likely to buy CDs, which helps debunk the myth that digital music consumers stop buying music in CD format.”
According to NPD’s consumer panel data, unit-volume sales share for Apple computers increased from nearly six percent in 2006 to almost nine percent between January 2007 and October 2007.
Overall, more than 32 percent of Mac users report purchasing CDs in the third quarter of 2007, compared to just 28 percent of PC users.
In addition to purchasing CDs and downloading music, Mac users are also more likely to listen to music and watch videos on their MP3-players and computers.
While 34 percent of Mac users had uploaded music to their MP3 players, just 16 percent of PC users had done the same. Mac users are also much more likely to listen to music files on their computers (56 percent) than are PC users (31 percent).
Qwest Communications International Inc. no longer will pursue cable franchise agreements with Colorado cities or build community-wide TV service in areas where it's recently won franchise approval. That's more confirmation of Qwest's strategic direction in video, which is to rely on its partner DirecTV for linear TV services.
Though Qwest plans to upgrade its broadband capacity in 10 major markets and 10 smallers ones in the company's 14-state service area, that is solely for the purpose of broadband-based services other than entertainment video.
Qwest still supports the idea of statewide television franchises. But it won't seek such a franchise.
This image, from Mobile-Review.com, strike some people as looking like an N81, but larger. To others it resembles an N95. No specs available yet, it seems.
In February 2009, all over-the-air analog TV broadcasting will be shut off. Some observers are concerned that consumers aren't acutely aware of the coming changes, resulting in massive disruption of the TV experience on the day of the analog broadcasting shut off.
Maybe not. The only potentially-affected customers are those who rely solely on over-the-air signal reception. Customers of cable, satellite or telco TV services won't have to do anything. To be sure, cable, satellite or telco TV providers will have to supply a new digital decoder if one is not already in place. But the point is that the providers will take care of their own customers, and that's 85 percent to 90 percent of all TV viewers.
Of those customers who have over-the-air connections, those who have bought TVs with digital tuners will not notice anything other than universally-better pictures. So the real issue lies with a single-digits number of viewers who have analog-only tuners.
By the time the transition nears, every mass market electronics retailer will have taken steps to push the sale of digital decoders. So this will not be anything like a feared "Y2K" event.
In a recent survey, NPD asked PC users whether they had heard about online, browser-based office productivity applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets or other similar Web-based apps.
About 94 percent say they never have heard of Web-based productivity suites. About half of one percent have substituted Web-based productivity suites for desktop software such as Microsoft Office.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets perhaps is the most visible of the Web-based suites. But apparently a long ways from being a mainstream application.
I usually don't "plug" conferences. But EComm, to be held in March, is an exception, in part because it is a "bottoms up" meeting being organized by people in the IP communications business, not by a well-established conference producing organization.
The other reason is that I am primarily a "content" person, most interested in the intellectual capital being created at such meetings, not the important but more pointedly commercial aspects of trade shows. I respect the folks over at STL (Telco 2.0) for this reason as well.
Lee Dryburgh, who is pulling this together, shares a perspective on what is happening in the trillion-dollar-annual-revenue telecom business. "The first wave of the democratization of communications was market liberalization," Dryburgh notes. "The second wave was VoIP."
"Yet VoIP as a standalone product is not viable long term (consumer attraction is drifting away from "standalone telephony") and VoIP is unlikely to ever be highly profitable," he insists. "In short, VoIP is something 90s which has had little consumer success since."
"The third chapter onwards is far more exciting and profitable," Dryburgh believes. "It is this chapter onwards that eComm seems to track, promote and highlight."
"The third chapter takes VoIP as one building block of many to be fused together into "application experiences"; largely social applications or business efficiency products (or both)."
I happen to agree with him, and lots of us do. You should really check this out:
http://www.ecommedia.com
(I apologize for this not being a hot link, but I have never been able to figure out how to do that, despite following the instructions. Just a dumb end user problem.)
Or click on the new "Related Article" field at the bottom of the post. I've had to play with the HTML, which, as a Mac person, I really hate. I need to enhance it a bit, but that might take me a year...really....
If the future of the global telecom industry is a concern you share, be there.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will not try to block Google's acquisition of online ad-serving vendor DoubleClick, the agency said Thursday.
The commission voted 4-1 to approve the deal after an eight-month investigation. "After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition," the majority wrote in a statement.
The commission downplayed concerns brought by some privacy groups. Privacy concerns are "not unique to Google and DoubleClick," and "extend to the entire online advertising marketplace," commissioners wrote.
Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a "positive solution for both sides," though one might question the broader implications. Think Secret has in the past published rumors about upcoming new Apple products, and Apple is a notoriously secretive company in that regard. Apple has sued to force Think Secret to reveal its sources.
As part of the confidential settlement, Think Secret was not forced to reveal the sources of information it published. But part of the agreement also is that Think Secret no longer will be published.
The decision represents a "positive" outcome for Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, only to the extent that the financial damage from losing such a lawsuit would have been catastrophic. "Positive" for Apple in that Apple reins in "leakers" and media outlets.
There's nothing wrong with Apple's obsession about secrecy. It's a time-tested and successful "buzz marketing" tactic, and Apple plies it better than any other company. But the "chilling" effect on media is palpable. That isn't to say there are not some circumstances where revealing a source is socially desirable. As a rule, though, lots of "news" that actually is socially desirable is the result of somebody "leaking" something.
It's good that Nick still has a life. It's good that no Apple "leakers" will be prosecuted or "persecuted." I still respect Apple. It's just too bad it had to come to this.
There’s a big difference between the music and the video businesses. Music executives unsuccessfully fought the advent of digital distribution. But media and entertainment industry executives overwhelmingly believe that online distribution of TV shows is an opportunity, not a threat.
Video content creators will embrace online distribution, rather than trying to "kill" or "cripple" it, as music executives did.
Of the 100 executives surveyed recently by Accenture, 70 percent agreed that online distribution of TV shows is more of an opportunity than a threat, given its ability to extend the reach of its programming to a much wider audience at a relatively low cost
compared to traditional broadcasting or physical distribution.
“Technology will continue to alter the distribution landscape, allowing people to access content on their own schedule, wherever they are, in all kinds of ways,” says Leslie Moonves, CBS CEO. “Companies that can combine world-class content with powerful national and local distribution will have the competitive advantage.”
If that is the case, broadband service providers will have some role to play. “We see a big transition moment in the industry,” says Accenture managing consultant consultant Diego Mora Ovideo. “Our telecom clients have many questions about the main battleground.”
“A big question mark is how to change the corporate DNA and business structure to really compete,” he says. In large part, that is because the ecosystem is changing.
“Value is shifting away from simple access,” says Mora Ovideo. And there’s a big shift in Europe that North American carriers will have to confront at some point. “To change their DNA, some are looking at “netco” and “servco” models.
You might call this structural separation or functional separation. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, telcos are creating distinct organizations to handle retail sales and networks.
“Either there is a formal division into a network business unit and service business units, or sometimes separate organizations are created, without a formal separation of business units, Mora Ovideo says.
“It would be very difficult to think the current business model, skills and mindset will work in the new world,” he adds. Different backgrounds and skills and mindsets are required.
And such reorganizations are being conducted even though the amount of new revenue to be earned from new service offerings is necessarily all that large at the moment. “It isn’t about current volume, but building a position for the future,” he says.
“We must move fast enough o position and have a significant role”, is what service provider execs are saying, he notes. A few leaders like Apple, Nokia, News Corp. and Google are moving very fast, and our clients are moving slower, on purpose, to focus on fixed mobile convergence, substitution and other issues, he says. In the media space, service providers will build partnerships, Mora Ovideo says.
“There’s urgency to act fast,” he says, even though over the next two to three years access will remain the main revenue source.
Some incumbents also are moving to disrupt themselves, accelerating the change, in the voice area. As you would expect, the more aggressive moves often are made by smaller incumbents, who have more to gain from disruptive moves. ‘Absolutely, the weaker incumbents in a market are more likely to launch attacks,” he says.
“In any event, within four or five years, voice will not drive revenue,” he notes.
On the media and content front, 62 percent of executives look to “new platforms” as being the most important key to growth, while 31 percent say “new content” will drive growth, and seven percent say “geographic expansion” is the key growth lever.
Of these new platforms, online and mobile are seen as the key platforms, with a combined 43 percent of execs citing online as most important. Online portals were seen as key by 17 percent of respondents, while 13 percent think social networking sites will be important. About 13 percent think e-commerce sites will be key.
Mobile platforms were seen as key by 17 percent of respondents.
Most think (53 percent) of executives surveyed think “short form content” offers the
largest opportunity for “new content,” with “long form” or “full length” video content (greater than 60 minutes) garnering 11 percent of responses.
Video gaming” was viewed as a key growth area by 13 percent of executives. About 57 percent of respondents think “consumer-based competition” or “user-generated” content is the biggest threat to the media business, while 46 percent also are worried about “piracy or IP theft.”
Still, 68 percent of respondents believe that they will be able to harness user-generated content to create revenue within one to three years.
About 70 percent of respondents also think that social media is a natural evolution of today’s business but will be an evolutionary development. About a quarter of respondents think social media will be “revolutionary” in its impact.
More than 90 percent of the executives said that their companies would become
involved in social media over the next 12 months.
Some 93 percent of teens use the Internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction. Those of you around children and teens know that much of their social life is programmed and scheduled. To a greater extent than used to be the case, their lives are restricted for safety reasons. Social networking is a substitute for "hanging out" in the physical world with friends.
Despite the important of email for adults as a major mode of personal and professional communication, it is not a particularly important part of the teen communications pattern.
Only 14 percent of all teens report sending emails to their friends every day, making it the least popular form of daily social communication on the list researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.
Even among highly-connected teens who have access to multiple communication modes, just 22 percent say they send email to their friends daily.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64 percent of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57 percent of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.
About 39 percent of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33 percent in 2004.
About 33 percent create or work on Web pages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 at 32 percent.
Some 28 percent have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19 percent in 2004. About 27 percent maintain their own personal Web page, up from 22 percent in 2004.
About 26 percent remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19 percent in 2004.
The percentage of those ages 12-17 who said “yes” to at least one of those five content-creation activities is 64 percent of online teens, or 59 percent of all teens.
It isn't rocket science to suggest that social networking is a fundamental trend, not a fad, as some seem to think.
It's been a pretty significant year for the U.S. mobile industry and its users. First, a computer and consumer electronics company essentially dictated a new business model and took device usability to a different level.
Second, a shift to mobiles as "lifestyle" devices has accelerated. The expressiveness of design now is as important, if not more important, than device functions and features.
Third, a shift to "open networks" began, and even-faster innovation will be the result.
The lifestyle focus, in turn, will help drive mobile ad spending. That's partly because the mobile Internet is emerging, and partly because video, audio, games and entertainment are a bigger part of the "lifestyle" than the "work" device.
That, in turn, means many more ad-supported features, as is the case for the broader Internet and Web.
New CEO Dan Hesse says his first priority will be to tackle the customer-service problems and customer defections that have plagued the company in the past year.
An internal Sprint document recently disclosed described the company's "inferior results" in customer service. It pointed out that Sprint resolved just 53 percent of problems on the first call, compared with 71 percent for T-Mobile USA, despite Sprint having nearly three times as many customer service reps.
One would expect no less. Hesse is viewed as a highly-competent manager, and this is the sort of problem a good manager can fix. But later, recall that Hesse was the pioneer of AT&T's "Digital One Rate" plan, which introduced flat-rate pricing to U.S. wireless consumers in the late 1990s. That one move revolutionized mobile pricing in the U.S. market.
Once he gets the churn and customer service problems under control, we'd be watching for more innovation from Sprint than one typically sees.
In a historic first, online media companies collectively will sell more ads in local markets this year than such individual hometown media as newspapers, broadcasters and yellow pages, says Borrell Associates. That's a tipping point, a stage of development when critical mass for some new phenomenon is reached.
Five years ago business phone systems hit a tipping point: most new systems were IP-capable. A couple years ago another tipping point was reached and new phone systems mostly are IP-only. These days most new phone sales are for IP systems.
Likewise, Internet usage and access hit similar tipping points earlier this decade. Most people now use the Internet, and that wasn't true 10 years ago. Also, there was a tipping poin when broadband caught and then surpassed dial-up access as the dominant access medium.
Then there was some tipping point reached where access speeds accelerated beyond the "affordable mass access in the hundreds of kilobits per second range" to "affordable mass access in the megabits per second range."
You can see tipping points for text messaging and mobile phone use as well, even though it is only within the last decade that most people started carrying mobile phones and only within the last five years that most younger users began texting heavily, dragging older users along with them.
One watches for tipping points for all sorts of practical reasons, including evidence that it now is time to restructure the way marketing, sales, production, business models, distribution, industrial design, menus and all sorts of very practical things get done.
And the point is that all media are approaching tipping points of their own, and for reasons largely analogous to how communications is changing because of Moore's Law, IP, peer-to-peer, cheap storage, optical fiber, wireless and Web services.
In the newspaper local advertising area, a new tipping point appears to have been reached.
Online-only media companies will have claimed 43.7 percent of the $8.5 billion spent in 2007 on local advertising, usurping the long-time lead of newspapers. While newspapers three years ago controlled 44.1 percent of the local market, they will capture only 33.4 percent of sales this year.
The growth of the online media companies “came mainly at the expense of newspapers and yellow pages publishers,” who have lost a combined 19.6 points of local advertising share in the last three years, says Borrell.
Having spent some time working at newspapers, as well as at publishing companies with multiple products, a concrete way to view tipping points is the impact on structuring of sales forces.
Typically, newspapers and other local media try to build their online businesses by selling new media to their legacy customers. Sometimes they try to use a single sales force to sell online and legacy products. That doesn't work, long term.
In fact, it doesn't quite work even short term, as sales forces direct their behavior to where they can make the most money, and that never is in the emerging businesses.
So one winds up with a strategy akin to launching a Boeing 777 into the air by rolling forward slowly on a long runway. No matter what you do, you crash at the end, because there never is enough runway if you don't get your airspeed up pretty quickly.
Companies that rely on their legacy sales forces to sell the new products--even though it seems logical--will crash their planes at the end of the runway. The only way to succeed is to cut the cord. Build separate sales teams with separate incentive structures; not "converged" sales teams.
One does not "incrementally" jump a very wide ditch. One leaps. One makes it or not. But it can't be done incrementally and slowly.
Cisco, touting the power of telepresence, really is pushing for use of telepresence inside its own organization. Likewise, as IBM touts the value of Web-based tools for enteprises, it is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive.
IBM's Metaverse virtual reality software is one of these areas. Apparently some 2,200 IBM staffers are testing ways to collaborate with colleagues in the Metaverse.
Ackerbauer said IBM staffers leverage IBM's internal virtual conferencing application through Web services to have online meetings in 3D.
Ray Sharma, GMP Securities analyst, says the next generation of BlackBerry devices will target two markets: the touchscreen and feature phone segment.
"We believe that the screen will possibly include a tactile response mechanism akin to the Nintendo Wii controller," says Sharma. "We also believe that the device will have differing hard key positions as well as programmable keys."
"We believe that the new touchscreen BlackBerry will be positioned at the high end of devices with a C$450-C$500 carrier per unit price."
"The device will feature a half VGA (roughly equivalent to an iPhone) that will be written on a new generation operating system," Sharma says.
The Nokia Smartphone 360 survey shows that mobile users spend an average of 48 minutes per day on their smart phones, says iLocus. About 12 percent of the time is spent on making voice calls while messaging consumes 37 percent of user time; multimedia 16 percent; PIM 14 percnet; Games four percent; Browsing eight percent.
Browsing accounts for 72 percent of data traffic while entertainment accounted for four percent of the traffic in 2006. That pattern changed in 2007, though, with entertainment grabbing a sharply greater share of time spent with the mobile device.
In 2007, browsing represented 44 percent of time spent; entertainment 26 percent. Messaging increased from 11 percent of the data traffic to 21 percent year over year.
Nokia assumes that messaging traffic increased because users were sending photos using multimedia messaging service, while entertainment traffic increased due to increased podcasting.
Usage also peaks at different times of day. Music usage peaks at around 8 am and then again at 6 pm, suggesting music gets used when users are commuting. Voice usage peaks around 4 pm to 5 pm. Browsing peaks at around 10 pm.
Obviously mobiles are being used at home in the evening for browsing, and the question is why the home PC is not used instead.
Nokia assumes that the mobile phone is using Wi-Fi to download Internet content. According to Nokia, podcasting also is a later-in-the-evening activity.
About 47 percent of outbound calls are made on the move. About 29 percent of outbound calls are made from home. About 24 percent of outbound calls are made from the office.
About 35 percent of packet data is consumed when users are on the move. About 44 percent is used at home and 21 percent is used at the office.
Data traffic use increased from 6 mbytes a month in 2006 to 14 mbytes a month in 2007.
Wi-Fi or wireless LAN connections accounted for 31 percent of data use while mobile access accounted for the rest of use. WiFi sessions were longer with an average session duration of 4.5 minutes.
About 31 percent of the respondents used instant messaging. Some 38 percent of respondents listen to music at least once a week. Some 47 percent of the panellists say that mobile is now their primary music player.
About 59 percent are regular gamers. "Snake" and "Card Deck" are the most popular games. About 81 percent of users regularly use browsers, and the typical user visits two sites a week.
Mobility increasingly is the way human beings talk, though in many cases the use of Subscriber Information Management (SIM) cards might outpace the propagation of devices.
The substitution of cell phones for landlines is increasing across Morocco, Algeria, Sudan and Tunisia, for example.
In Mauritania, the number of SIM cards per landline was 29 in 2006, compared to 14.7 in 2005, which is the highest rate among the seven countries of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia.
In 2006, Egypt and Libya counted the lowest ratio of SIM cards versus number of
landlines, respectively, at 1.7 and 4.9. In Libya, 2006 marked the year whereby SIM card numbers topped landlines.
Avaya's one-X Mobile client software, expected to be available in Europe in the first quarter of 2008, will enable the iPhone to be integrated into most enterprise IP telecommunications networks.
From the first quarter of 2008, an easy-to-use, downloadable interface will convert mobile devices from Apple, RIM, Palm, Motorola, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony Ericsson and others into another endpoint on the corporate network. From the iPhone, users will have iPhone-optimized access to the Avaya one-X Mobile interface, making the iPhone their personal remote control for enterprise communications.
According to BtoB magazine's 2008 Marketing Priorities and Plans survey, 60.1 percent of marketers plan to increase their overall marketing budgets next year predominantly in online, events and direct, despite the softness in the overall economy. Some 29.6 percent plan to keep budgets flat, and 10.3 percent plan budget decreases.
Last year, 62.6 percent of respondents said they planned to increase their marketing budgets in 2007; 29.4 percent said budgets would be flat, and eight percent said they planned to decrease their marketing budgets.
In 2008 the primary marketing goal is customer acquisition, cited by 62.4 percent of
respondents, followed by:
Brand awareness (19.3%)
Customer retention (11.7%)
Other objectives (6.6%)
Of those planning budget increases next year:
27.8% plan a 5% to 9% increase in spending
24.6% plan a 10% to 14% increase
12.7% plan a 20% to 24% increase
10.3% plan an increase of less than 5%
The biggest budget increases will be seen in online marketing, with 79.1 percent of marketers planning to boost their online budgets next year, up from last year, when 75.6 percent of marketers said they planned to increase their online budgets in 2007.
BtoB's survey found that the average percentage of the marketing budget spent next year on online marketing will be 33.8 percent, up from 26.5 percent in 2007.
Among the online areas that will see increases next year are:
Web site development (74.0%)
E-mail (70.1%)
Search engine marketing (64.3%)
Video (39.5%)
Webcasting (39.1%)
Banners (36.4%)
Sponsorships (29.6%)
Social media (26.2%)
Event marketing will see a spending boost in 2008 with 49.5 percent of marketers planning budget increases in this area, as will direct mail with 49 percent of respondents planning to increase their direct budgets in 2008.
Nokia Siemens Networks has completed the world’s first multi-user field trial in an urban environment, reaching speeds in excess of 160 Mbps.
The test of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, which supports mobile data rates up to 173 Megabits per second, was conducted in a real urban outdoor environment with multiple users using the new 2.6 GHz spectrum.
It confirms that LTE performance requirements can be met using 3GPP standardized technologies and it realized data rates of more than 100 Mega bits per second over distances of several hundred meters, while maintaining excellent throughput at the edge of typical urban mobile radio cells.
Some 266 bidders for 700 MHz spectrum auction have surfaced so far. Not all the bidders will content for the national C block, though. Many of the bidders are small, independent telephone companies angling for local blocks of spectrum. But a few cable companies also are on the list. Of course, over time those fragmented allocations probably will be rolled up into larger networks, as has always happened in the past.
The bidders include Google (GOOG) Airwaves Inc.; Towerstream; Vulcan Spectrum;
Alltel; AT&T Mobility Spectrum; CenturyTel Broadband Wireless; Chevron; Cincinnati Bell Wireless; Cox Wireless; Iowa Telecommunications Services; MetroPCS 700 MHz; Qualcomm
Cablevision (CSC Spectrum Holdings); Verizon Wireless (Cellco Partnership) and Advance/Newhouse.
WildBlue Communications will be making Google Apps available to its broadband access service directly from the WildBlue.net home page in the first quarter of 2008. The apps include Gmail webmail services, Google Calendar shared calendaring, Google Talk instant messaging and Google Page Creator web page creation tools.
The new WildBlue.net home page will also feature a mix of news, weather, sports, and entertainment, plus powerful new customizable features from more than 2,000 available Google Gadgets that can be easily added to each customer's individual WildBlue.net home page.
To be sure, any Web user can access any of the Google Apps on their own. But the WildBlue deal should help increase awareness of, and use of, the Web-based apps. Some observers say most Web users aren't aware of Google Apps, so the deal will help popularize the tools.
The deal is reminiscent of the way the old SBC used Yahoo as a way to drive the usability of its Internet access services. Sure, the deal is not exclusive. Users can get access to the functionality some other way. But the packaging should help, in the same way that apps benefit from placement on mobile provider "main decks."
Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use billing and account management service that makes it easy for developers to get paid for applications they build on Amazon Web Services.
Amazon DevPay allows app providers to quickly sign up customers, automatically meter their usage of services, have Amazon bill users, and collect payments.
Amazon DevPay provides a simple Web interface for pricing applications based on any combination of up-front, recurring and usage-based fees.
To use Amazon DevPay, users develop using Amazon S3 or an Amazon EC2 Machine Image (AMI), register the apps with Amazon DevPay, provide a product description and configure your desired pricing.
The Amazon DevPay purchase pipeline is linked to the app Web site. Activity is
monitored on the Amazon DevPay Activity page.
There are no minimum fees and no setup charges. Activity is billed at three percent of the transaction amounts and $0.30 per bill generated.
Amazon now offers SimpleDB, a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.
Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database--real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data--without the operational complexity.
Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data and provides a simple API for storage and access.
Amazon SimpleDB provides streamlined access to the lookup and query functions that traditionally are achieved using a relational database cluster, while leaving out other complex, often-unused database operations.
Amazon SimpleDB allows easy scaling of applications as well. For the Beta release, a single domain is limited in size to 10 gigabytes and 100 domains. Over time these limits may be raised, Amazon says.
The service runs within Amazon's high-availability data centers and fully indexed user data is stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.
Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other web-scale services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. For example, developers can run their applications in Amazon EC2 and store their data objects in Amazon S3. Amazon SimpleDB can then be used to query the object metadata from within the application in Amazon EC2 and return pointers to the objects stored in Amazon S3.
Developers and users pay only for what they use; there are no minimum fees.
Machine use costs $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed. Data transfer in
$0.10 per gigabyte. Data transfer out varies based on volume. Costs are $0.18 per GB for the first 10 TB per month; $0.16 per GB for the next 40 TB and $0.13 per GB over 50 TB.
Structured data storage costs $1.50 per GB-month.
The point is that it is becoming easier by the day to create, store and execute applications based entirely "in the cloud," without ownership or lease of data facilities, access pipes or servers to support those apps. At some point, highly-distributed workforces or end user bases will find it congenial in the extreme to support remote users with services always available through a standard Web browser, with the latest version, with no need for loading updates, patches or extensions.
As software becomes a service, computing infrastructure also is becoming a utility or service as well.
An IDC survey of members of the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners suggests high expectations for software as a service.
IDC says 76 percent of solution providers who responded believe that SAAS will dramatically impact the partnering landscape, and more than 70 percent of solution providers view it as an opportunity. Solution providers believe that the most profitable opportunities related to SAAS will be in the area of deployment and implementation services.
But solution providers are also looking forward to the recurring revenue opportunity that comes with the SAAS business model.
SAP, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and IBM are among the application providers expected to be active in 2008.
Viacom Inc. has selected Microsoft Corp. as its Internet advertising partner in a five-year agreement initially valued at an estimated $500 million, also involving online games, shows and movies.
Microsoft will help Viacom place advertising on Viacom's U.S. Web sites and be the exclusive seller of its remnant display advertising, or ad space Viacom has been unable to sell.
As part of the deal, Microsoft will also license on a non-exclusive basis long and short-form television and movies from Viacom for the MSN portal and the Xbox 360 game system's online network.
Microsoft has also agreed to buy ads on Viacom's broadcast and online networks over five years and help Viacom establish itself as a publishing partner on Microsoft's casual Internet gaming sites.
The Skype VoSKY Exchange family of rack-mountable PBX-to-Skype gateways are now available worldwide, VoSKY says. The gateways allow businesses to make and receive free Skype-to-Skype calls with customers and partners, as well as between company offices, as an adjunct to existing business phone systems and calling services.
The co-branded Skype VoSKY Exchange 9040 and 9140 also add VoIP applications such as Click-to-Call, PBX Remote Access, Multi-site PBX Networking and Skype Trunking to existing phone systems.
Some will question whether the gateways are widely suitable for enterprise use. Well, they certainly are suitable for small and mid-sized business use. Enterprise policies might be more challenging, partly in terms of security, partly when complete call logging or recording is required.
For organizations without stringent call recording or logging requirements, the VoSKY gateways are an augmentation solution, used with existing phone service, not as a replacement. If the Skype network goes down, all calls simply are handled by the IP or TDM phone system as they normally would be.
XO Communications has signed a distribution deal with Tech Data Corporation, giving Tech Data partners IP communications services for small and medium-sized businesses.
Tech Data will offer its resellers and systems integrators XO's converged IP voice and data services, including XO SIP, which delivers converged voice and data services to businesses with IP-PBX systems over a single, high-speed connection.
XO SIP delivers converged voice and data services to businesses with IP-PBX systems over a single, high-speed connection. XO SIP features include unlimited local calling; unlimited site to site calling; long distance; dedicated Internet access; optional voice compression and online management.
EarthLink Executive Vice President Mike Lunsford, who acted as interim CEO after the death of former CEO Garry Betty, is leaving the company at the end of the year. Earthlink CTO Jon Kerner also is said to be leaving, as is Vice President of Production Operations Eric Alfaro. Kip Morgan, former EarthLink Vice President for Direct Marketing, Access and Audience, also has gone elsewhere.
When such things happen, one normally expects a sale of assets, which is what many observers expected when Rolla Huff took over at EarthLink.
T-Mobile and 3 are pooling their U.K. 3G transmission networks, a move expected to reduce mobile tower sites by about 5,000 and save £2 billion in capital spending.
Kevin Russell, 3's UK chief executive, said the joint venture deal includes contingencies should either company be taken over, but both expect it to be a long relationship.
The move is not unprecedented, but still is unusual. Though not dictated by regulatory requirements, the move essentially creates a wholesale entity both retail networks will use to operate their businesses. It is not a structural separation, but certainly a functional separation.
By the end of 2009 the two companies plan to have 13,000 sites, covering 98 percent of the population with a mobile broadband network capable of speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.
KPN seems to have found a way to take market share in the German wireless market: give customers unlimited calling for a flat fee, avoid phone subsidies or selling phones, and keep things simple. The growing number of wireless-only customers apparently is helping, as one obviously needs more minutes in the plan to cover the additional volume when all calls in and out are taken on the mobile.
For $108 a month, Base subscribers can make unlimited free calls anywhere in Germany. A comparable offer by Vodafone costs $144. The sister E-Plus brand KPN supports also has shifted to this "no frills" approach.
In the third quarter 2007 subscriptions wereup 16 percent year-over-year, to some 14.1 million. E-Plus operating profit also rose 79 percent over that period, with profit margins of 38 percent.
Of course, KPN will have to figure out how to translate that success into similar good fortune in the mobile broadband segment, where it might not be quite so easy to maintain robust margins of this sort. Still, KPN's approach to the market is an example of what a carrier can do in an environment where phones are unlocked.
As Verizon moves to "unlock" its CDMA network, and as the C block 700-MHz spectrum goes into operation, also with an "unlocked" approach to device use, one wonders how soon somebody will try this in the U.S. market as well. Cricket Communications, one might argue, already has been chasing the wireline replacement market, but without the unlocked phone component.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to impose a limit on the size cable operators can reach on a nationwide basis, limiting any single company from controlling more than 30 percent of total subscribers. The FCC in the past has maintained such a rule, but the limit was invalidated by a court decision in 2001.
Consumer groups say a strict limit on cable television system ownership is needed to prevent them from dominating television programming and Internet services and from blocking video competitors.
As a practical matter, the FCC action could affect merger deals Comcast Corp. would like to pull off, as Comcast already has about 27 percent. The rule might also affect smaller operators like Charter Communications and Cablevision , as it might rule out their acquisition by Comcast.
Analysts at the Yankee Group think there might be a new market developing for network elements or functions that provide the electronic numbering function that today is provided by peering federations. Such IP Routing Directories functionally provide the basic information required for interconnecting discrete VoIP networks.
Proponents of ENUM have argued that the business benefits derive from operational cost savings and service quality made possible by avoiding traditional PSTN routing infrastructure (SS7) to complete VoIP calls destined for a non-local VoIP
endpoint.
To date, business issues and volume issues have proven to be stumbling blocks. Large carriers make enough money from interconnection that any move to models that dispense with such payments are undesirable. That's the business issue.
And though native VoIP networks obviously require some sort of interconnection fabric, the fact remains that VoIP still is a small amount of total volume.
For the moment, legacy interconnection requirements remain essential. The percent of originating VoIP calls that are actually destined for an IP endpoint are sufficiently small that it might not make terrifically great sense to shift to an IPRD function of some sort.
Ideally, IP-to-IP connections are preferable. But the cost and quality issues might be a growing irritant rather than a compelling necessity for a large carrier, at the moment.
The pain of media conversion and database dips might not be creating enough pain to require an immediate shift to ENUM, in other words. Not to ignore the revenue implications for large carriers, either.
It might seem odd to question just how big the WiMAX infrastructure market might be, given strong support from the likes of Intel and others who see a data device optimized broadband network as a huge opportunity. And maybe WiMAX ultimately will create a large enough global base of infrastructure that handset and device manufacturers will have a large opportunity.
But potential end user volumes matter, and matter a lot, in today's world. The issue isn't whether WiMAX will work. CDMA works. But global volumes for GSM networks are so large that device innovation is higher on the GSM than the CDMA sides of the ledger. Volume also is a factor for software developers, who prefer larger markets to smaller markets.
Sprint got people excited with plans to build a $5-billion, nation-wide network in the U.S. but that strategy is now in question. Sure, there's the rest of the world, but if you have followed mobile technology trends for any time, you are more careful about the installed base, and the potential installed base.
In the third-quarter, Infonetics Research says, worldwide WiMax equipment sales climbed a mere six percent to $206-million. Meanwhile, worldwide unit shipments of fixed and mobile WiMAX equipment rose 16 percent in the third quarter of 2007.
Still, Infonetics is looking for Wi-Max to see annual growth of 87 percent between 2006 and 2010 as more carriers embrace the fourth-generation technology.
The number of worldwide WiMAX subscribers (fixed and mobile) is expected to skyrocket to close to 60 million in 2010, led by the Asian region, Infonetics says.
Still, there is the historic example of iDEN and CDMA to consider. Devices are more important than networks these days. And one has to contend with the issue of sheer mass, in that regard. There's no question that WiMAX will work. But that's not the crucial question. The issue is how large the market for WiMAX devices might be, compared to GSM and its derivatives.
Sprint Nextel has turned to a wireless industry veteran in naming current Embarq Corp. CEO and Chairman Dan Hesse new CEO and President. So what might we expect from him? Perhaps a focus on the many details of execution that seemed lacking in Sprint, of late. Hesse gets high marks for execution at Embarq.
Hesse also was considered a top candidate for the Qwest CEO post as well. And in some ways, Qwest and Sprint are in similar situations. Qwest does not have the financial ability to do some things one might expect from a former Baby Bell. Sprint likewise is in desperate need of serious attention to its core business, even as it contemplates a fourth-generation WiMAX rollout.
Neither company seems suited to a major acquisition that would fix the basic problems each faces. Qwest lacks scale to make some strategies work (it does not own a wireless network and arguably can't afford a major fiber-to-home video initiative).
Sprint remains the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier, but is feeling a rejuvenated T-Mobile nipping at its heels and has to do something really serious about its churn problems. Beyond that, Sprint is looking at some very basic decisions about future technology direction.
Volume in the global markets clearly is in GSM, and Verizon, the other major CDMA-based carrier, has made clear its decision to migrate to LTE, a GSM platform, for 4G. That leaves Sprint even more out on the fringe, as it now supports iDEN, which no other carrier uses, and CDMA which is losing traction in the U.S. market, if not yet internationally.
Before those issues can be tackled, Sprint has to stabilize itself. And Hesse is an adroit manager, most observers probably would say.
Before taking the helm at Sprint spinoff Embarq, he spent 23 years at AT&T, serving as President and CEO of AT&T Wireless Services from 1997-2000, then the nation’s largest wireless provider.
It is probably fair to say Hesse will have to right the ship before considering launching a new vessel.
Garmin and TomTom will both ship over 10 million personal navigation devices this year, recent forecasts suggest. Total production in 2007 for just those two manufacturers is something on the order of 22 million units.
To put that in perspective, that's about half of the 55 million iPod music players Apple probably will sell in calendar 2007.
Location-based services seem to catching on very rapidly in the consumer space, after a long gestation in the commercial markets. Is it any wonder Google is so hot on location-based services, or the advertising and marketing opportunities that seem destined to come along with location awareness?
This item just for fun, as my daughter worked on the company initial public offering. iRobot, which sells the Roomba vaccuum cleaner robots, got a five-year, $286 million contract from the U.S. Army for up to 3,000 military robots, spare parts, training and repair services.
Up to this point robots have used sparingly and mostly to deal with explosive devices. Apparently there are other things they can do. Aside from cleaning floors and sneaking up on dangerous explosives, that is.
By a vote of three to two, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved a plan to relax media cross-ownership rules. The rule change, which comes amid opposition from some politicians, allows companies to own both newspapers and broadcast stations within a top-20 market. The rules originally were put into place to safeguard the "diversity of voices" within media markets.
Of course, the context was different then. There were three national networks and maybe one or two major newspapers in a market, with a fragmented radio audience. Since then, cable programming has exploded, with three 24-hour-a-day news channels and two 24-hour-a-day business national news channels available in most markets, and multiple local news channels in many major metro markets as well.
The daily newspaper business, meanwhile, has continued its inexorable, decades-long decline. Indeed, one can argue reasonably that the daily metro newspaper might not exist in the future, at all.
And on top of that we have the rise of blogs, Web news portals, podcasts, Webcasts and other media and news outlets.
Though there was not unanimity on the issue, one can argue that local media markets bear little resemblance to markets of the past, and are in transition to an even-more-different structure in the future.
The last time I looked, the major broadcast networks had become "entertainment focused" in the extreme. I can't even tell you how the "voice" of any of the five local national broadcast networks differs from any of the others. To the extent that the concern about "voices" explicitly is about "political" voices, there seems even less justification than there used to be for cross-ownership restrictions.
National broadcast TV networks don't seem to have any substantial differences of voice. Newspapers are on the way to extinction. Radio is highly fragmented. And then there are the cable news outlets, national and local, plus Web-based news and opinion portals and blogs too numerous to count.
As elsewhere, legacy rules are straining to keep pace with rapid changes in media, communications and information infrastructure.
U.S. consumer household spending on wireless now equals spending on wired voice services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey shows. Homes with multiple teenagers and two working parents probably will argue that wireless spending now vastly outpaces wireline, as landlines are phones connecting "places," while mobile connect people. There being more "people" than "places" in such a household, it is easy to see that wireless is the dominant spending category.
Cellular phone expenditures increased rapidly from 2001 through 2006. Coupled with a decrease in spending on residential landline phone services (residential phone services) over the same period, spending on the two types of services were practically equal in 2006.
Expenditures for cellular phone services per consumer unit rose from $210 in 2001 to $524 in 2006, an increase of 149 percent. Expenditures for residential phone services per consumer unit fell from $686 in 2001 to $542 in 2006, a decline of 21 percent.
In 2001, the ratio of spending on residential phone services to spending on cellular phone services was greater than 3 to 1. In 2006, the shares of these two components were almost equal, with residential phone expenditures accounting for 49.9 percent of total telephone expenditures and cellular phone expenditures constituting 48.2 percent.
Tech Support: "What does the screen say now?"
User: "It says, 'Hit ENTER when ready'."
Tech Support: "Well?" Person: "How do I know when it's ready?"
Make no mistake: our civilization runs on software. So be exceedingly glad when developers hide complexity so well something seems intuitive and natural.
This is just humor: don't do this at work! And don't get me wrong: I love cats. It's just that they once were worshipped as gods, and they haven't forgotten....
1. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.
2. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
3. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.
4. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
5. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't care.
6. I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.
7. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?
8. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.
9. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.
10. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.
11. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.
12. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
13. No, my powers can only be used for good.
14. How about never? Is never good for you?
15. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.
16. You sound reasonable...Time to up my medication.
17. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.
18. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...
19. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.
20. Who me? I just wander from room to room.
21. My toys! My toys! I can't do this job without my toys!
22. It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy.
23. At least I have a positive attitude about my destructive habits.
24. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.
25. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.
26. Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
Users of RCN broadband access services are complaining about blocking of BitTorrent connections. That seems unlikely, though traffic shaping seems certain. RCN has in the past noted that more than 90 percent of upstream traffic was composed of P2P streams. And since upstream bandwidth is the key resource constraint, RCN traffic shaping was not unexpected. When users are sharing a scarce resource, some "rationing" is simply fairness.
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs reportedly has been talking with NTT DoCoMo and Softbank Corp. about becoming the exclusive supplier of iPhones in the Japanese market, says the Wall Street Journal. That market will be quite helpful if Apple is to meet its promised goal of 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008.
Japan's nearly 100 million mobile-phone users buy new phones every two years on average, and aren't adverse to paying for advanced electronics, so it seems a natural iPhone market. And smartphone adoption is headed up smartly, as this forecast by Research and Markets shows.
Apple sold a total of 1.4 million iPhones through late September, which shows the importance of adding the Japanese market to the relative handful of countries where the device can be bought. Travelers from countries where iPhone is not yet available, but which use GSM, have been known to stuff several into their bags before heading home from the United States.
Apple appears to be asking for the same percentage of revenue that it receives from other carriers, estimated at about 10 percent of revenue.
I am betting that the Emerging Communications Conference 2008, to be held March 12-14, 2008 in San Jose, Calif., will be one of the best meetings of the year. It is quite hard to get Bellheads and Netheads together in any venue where people actually talk to each other. It is very hard to find venues where people interested in Web apps and communications get together. My guess is that this will be a paramount venue in that regard. You should get there.
The link is http://ecommmedia.com/.
Ribbit has unveiled a new platform for developing telephony services and integrating them with Web apps, as well as what it says is a new business model as well.
The company says it has a 600-plus developer community and already can be integrated with salesforce.com.
"The world doesn't need another phone company," says Ted Griggs, co-founder and CEO at Ribbit. "What it needs is new kind of phone company, one that liberates voice from its current confines -- devices, plans and business models -- and more readily integrates into the workflow of our professional and personal lives."
At the core of Ribbit's technology offering is an open platform that enables developers to bridge the worlds of traditional telephony and the Web. The Ribbit SmartSwitch, evolved from a Lucent-tested CLASS 5 softswitch, and open Flash/Flex-based application programming interface will enable non-telephony developers to quickly build innovative, rich voice applications and integrate them into Web sites, communities and applications, Ribbit says.
By connecting voice from any Flash-enabled browser to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and new VoIP (voice over IP) networks, over 750 million computers become the next generation of phones with developers deciding how they work, the company says.
With an assortment of back-office and service delivery infrastructure, the platform also enables developers to not only build services, but sell them as well.
In the first quarter of 2008, the Ribbit for Salesforce workflow integration will be available for salesforce.com customers via the AppExchange.
In the first quarter of 2008, Ribbit will open its service to consumers. Also in the first quarter, the company will sell commercial and enterprise packages. Both the consumer, small, medium and enterprise markets will be areas of focus for Ribbit.
Ribbit is another example of the growing "voice is a mashup" trend, where communications and voice simply are integrated with applications.
The Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition Europe has formed to provide policy advocacy for IP communications in Europe. The coalition will work to educate, inform and promote responsible government policies that enable innovation and the many benefits that Internet voice innovations can deliver.
The recent release of formal Proposals by the European Commission to amend the existing regulatory framework for communications marks the start of a wide ranging review by the Council of Ministers and European Parliament.
Founding members of the VON Coalition Europe include iBasis, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Rebtel, Skype, and Voxbone.
Service providers worldwide recorded an estimated traffic volume of 328.7 billion VoIP minutes during the third quarter, according to iLocus. Of those minutes 72.3 billion were local, 232 billion were national long distance and 24.4 billion were used for international long distance.
About 69.1 billion of those minutes were retail, 3.2 were wholesale local VoIP (white labeling, for example).
There is about 10 percent double counting in national long distance and about 20 percent double counting in international long distance. Double counted minutes are those minutes where the same call is being relayed by two or more carriers and counted as traffic by each one of them.
The top five service providers ranked by minutes were China Telecom, China Netcom, AT&T, China Mobile and Qwest.
Preliminary results from the January–June 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that more than one out of every eight American homes (13.6 percent) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2007.
In the first six months of 2007, 13.6 percent of households did not have a traditional landline telephone, but did have at least one wireless telephone. Approximately 12.6 percent of all adults—28 million—lived in households with only wireless telephones; 11.9 percent of all children—nearly 9 million children—lived in households with only wireless telephones.
The percentage of adults living in wireless-only households has been steadily increasing since 2003, CDC finds. During the first six months of 2007, one out of every eight adults lived in wireless-only households. One year before, one out of every 10 adults lived in wireless-only households. And two years before that, in 2004, only one out of every 20 adults lived in wireless-only households.
The observed increase in the percentage of adults living in wireless-only households from the last six months of 2006 to the first 6 months of 2007 was not statistically significant.
But other observed increases over time in the percentage of adults living in wireless-only households were statistically significant, CDC finds. These results suggest a possible recent decline in the rate of increase.
The percentage of adults and the percentage of children living without any telephone service have remained relatively unchanged over the past three years. Approximately 1.9 percent of households had no telephone service. Approximately 3.5 million adults (1.6 percent) and more than one million children (1.7 percent) lived in these households.
For the period January through June 2007, the results reveal that more than one-half of all adults living with unrelated roommates (55.3 percent) lived in households with only wireless telephones.
Adults renting their home (28.2 percent) were more likely than adults owning their home (6.7 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
More than one in four adults aged 18-24 years (27.9 percent) lived in households with only wireless telephones. Nearly 31 percent of adults aged 25-29 years lived in households with only wireless telephones. As age increased, the percentage of adults living in households with only wireless telephones decreased. Wireless-only percentages were 12.6 percent for adults aged 30-44 years; 7.1 percent for adults aged 45-64 years; and two percent for adults aged 65 years or over.
Men (13.8 percent) were more likely than women (11.5 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones. Adults living in poverty (21.6 percent) were more likely than higher income adults to be living in households with only wireless telephones. Adults living in the South (14.9 percent) and Midwest (14 percent) were more likely than adults living in the Northeast (8.8 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
Non-Hispanic white adults (11.3 percent) and non-Hispanic black adults (14.3 percent) were less likely than Hispanic adults (18 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
CopperCom is getting out of the softswitch business, says Light Reading.
Light Reading says CopperCom CEO Julian Thomson says CopperCom "will no longer market the CSX, CopperCommander, and Switchmaxx/VoiceMaxx product lines."
The decision was "primarily due to a lack of demand for our products," Thomson says. "We looked at our forecasting, our market sizing, and so forth going forward, and the demand simply wasn't there."
While competitors stand to benefit from one less softswitch vendor in the market, Light Reading says the effect of CopperCom's demise will be minimal because the company hasn't been actively competing in the market for some time.
One might note that the softswitch market is a bit smallish for the number of suppliers. Infonetics data shown above.
Users of Vonage's internet telephone service have been reporting a major service failure, ongoing since Friday. In some cases, it appears that incoming calls are not connecting. Vonage is forwarding the attempted calls to subscriber landlines and cellphones, but repeatedly, and late, some customers report.
An anonymous administrator of Vonage Forum, the independent discussion board where gripes were aired, reports that Vonage claims to have resolved the issue this morning, but users continue to report problems.
Vonage can ill afford such lapses, to say the least. Not when its advertising emphasizes how reliable the service is. Not when it faces yet another patent infringement fracas, this time with Nortel. Unfortunately, nobody in the VoIP space benefits much (competitors might enjoy Vonage's travails to an extent) when VoIP has these sorts of issues. Sooner or later, everybody is going to do VoIP, and the residue is going to cling to all the other providers when that happens.
After completing a months-long stratgic review, Qwest Communications essentially has decided to "stay the course." There will be "no major shifts" in Qwest's basic approach to the market.
People shouldn't expect major acquisitions or a massive move into IPTV, for example. Instead, Qwest seems to be focusing on a balance between capital investment and shareholder return issues, such as reducing debt load, buying back shares and supporting the payment of dividends.
Partnerships are the way Qwest will provide new services in areas such as video and wireless. That's good news for Sprint, who provides Qwest mobility services, and DirecTV for video entertainment. It also means Qwest will be receptive to other partnerships as well.
"We are looking at partnerships to help us with offerings in the home," Mueller says. "Partners will be a huge part of our success, going forward."
But Qwest will not be looking to make major acquisitions, or dramatically change the rate at which it invests in broadband access, undertaking a major fiber-to-home initiative, for example, though it is increasing its "fiber-to-node" efforts in a relatively controlled way.
Qwest expects by 2011 to increase its broadband penetration to increase from 23 percent to 40 percent, with higher access speeds and a nominal increase in operating costs.
The fiber-to-node deployments are not, Mueller emphasized, related to IPTV, but rather to data services. "Qwest doesn't have the scale" for that, Mueller says.
But fixed-mobile products will be launched in late 2008, to leverage the broadband access investments.
Overall, Qwest will attempt to balance capital investment with returns to shareholders, as one would conclude given Qwest's resumption of dividend payments.
Capital run rates now set at about $1.8 billion are a "good run rate for us," Edward Mueller, Qwest CEO says. "We are trying to minimize capex where it doesn't drive growth," he says. "We will try, in the network operation, be picky and minimize capital expenditures in the outside plant where it doesn't make a reasonable return for us." There also will be a bigger emphasis on "success-based" capital investment, in the enterprise space, for example.
Qwest will focus in 20 markets, including its 10-largest markets, for the FTTN upgrades. Those upgrades might include support for gaming services rather than entertainment video, with the 20 Mbps downstream access capabilities the FTTN upgrade will support. Qwest earlier had said it would spend an incremental $175 per home passed to put the FTTN network in place for 1.5 million homes.
Qwest says it will focus its wholesale efforts on "profitable expansion," suggesting a "success-based" approach to out-of-region enterprise services. The hosting part of our business has promise, Mueller says.
Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, envisions that 90 percent of today's computing tasks can be moved online. High-end graphics processing is an example of a computing task probably not well suited to online use.
Google execs also argue that more and more computing tasks are unrelated to productivity suites. "If you're creating a complex document like an annual report, you want Word, and if you're making a sophisticated financial model, you want Excel. That's what the Microsoft products are great at. But less and less work is like that," said Google's Dave Girouard.
For now, 2.000 companies start to use Google Apps every day (most try the free version), Google Docs had 1.6 million U.S. users last month, according to Compete.com, while Gmail doubled its U.S. users to 20.1 million in November, according to comScore.
Different audiences now prefer different media. Older users continue to be more comfortable with traditional media. For users 41 and younger, the Web makes more sense.
The Web surfing habits of boomers and over-60s are more firmly rooted in traditional media than those of their younger counterparts, according to a Deloitte & Touche study conducted by the Harris Group.
The study found that 67 percent of boomers visited Web sites after seeing ads on TV or in print. Matures, those between 61 and 75, were just as likely to be driven to the Web by print ads and less likely by TV ads.
Yet these two age groups were less likely than Generation X (25 to 41) or Millennials (13 to 24) to visit the Web as a result of an Internet search engine or ad on another site.
A Lumin Collaborative study reinforced the connection between boomers and traditional media. The company found that boomers, defined as those currently ages 42 to 62, spent an average of 2.69 hours a week online, versus 2.83 hours watching TV and 1.93 hours listening to the radio.
The trends were flipped among the echo boomers (ages 18 to 31) and Gen X (32 to 41), who spent more time online than watching TV or listening to the radio and whose time spent online also exceeded that of their boomer counterparts.
Lumin also noted that only 39 percent of respondents in the boomer demographic regarded the Internet as their primary channel of information about companies or products. This rate was substantially less than Gen X (53%) or echo boomers (60 percent).
Boomers were the most likely group to choose newspapers, broadcast TV or magazines as their main source of information.
All of which means all content has to be delivered dual mode these days: Web for people under 41. Other traditional media for users older than 41, to a certain extent. But the direction of the shift is inexorable. The Web wins.
The New American Foundation, a Washington, D.C. policy advocate, argues in a new report that the Philadelphia municipal Wi-Fi effort has stumbled because it opted for private operation of the network, instead of sticking with a originally-recommended non-profit model that also avoided any use of public tax dollars. The report is critical of the decision to award a construction and operation contact to EarthLink.
"An executive committee, set up by the mayor’s office and tasked to study Philadelphia’s options for building a municipal wireless network, assessed
the city’s situation and recommended nonprofit ownership of the network," the report says. But Wireless Philadelphia disregarded those recommendations," the report notes.
"Instead, WP yielded to political pressure when it accepted EarthLink’s bid to own and operate the network."
As a result, the study argues, "WP has underperformed because it de-prioritized public input and constituent interests." The report argues that WP would have been more effective if it had assumed ownership of the network."
I don't know about that. Is it not obvious that a municipal network, even one operated as a non-profit affair, requires a resource generation mechanism? No matter what entity had been chosen to build and operate the network, some way to support construction and operation is necessary, and given the restriction on tax support, some other resource would have to have been available. Donations, grants, commercial fees or some other way of securing support is necessary.
So is it reasonable to assume that even a non-profit approach would have worked? Most observers of the municipal Wi-Fi scene now agree that the resource model is a stumbling block.That is to say, people might very well want to have free or cheap access. But there does not seem to be a sufficient resource input model to support that, if taxes cannot be used.
No approach to building and operating a network can be successful if scores of millions of dollars cannot be raised to construct the network. The legal structure of the entity does not logically seem to be the key impediment here. If tax dollars are not available, some other means of securing the inputs obviously is required. The report contains no suggestion of what that mechanism might otherwise have been. And that, it seems to me, is the big stumbling block. To the extent a non-profit entity had been chosen, what would that entity have been able to do in this regard?
With only an estimated five million new workers entering a workforce in which twenty-five million will retire over the next twelve years, IT shops are facing an obvious personnel crisis, argue researchers at Ovum. "North American IT shops may well be facing a staffing perfect storm," says Tom Kucharvy, Ovum SVP.
Do the math: Lose 25 million; gain five million, for a net loss of 20 million IT personnel. Assuming technology and software continues to be more important in the future than in the past, it seems rather obvious that enterprise, small business and consumer technology support has to change, and change dramatically.
So is it not reasonable to assume that technology has to be made easier to use; support has to be virtualized (not delivered on site, by a technician)and software has to be delivered as a service?
Two big challenges are certain, Ovum argues. "The impending mass retirement of baby boomers will deplete staff and starve many companies of critical skills."
"Meanwhile, a shortage of replacements due to a smaller crop of college graduates and a dramatic decline in students planning to enter IT-related fields will compound the problem.
"Fundamentally reassessing the skills that will be needed over the next five to ten years rather than attempting to duplicate or replace current skills is the first strategic step companies must take immediately to address the issue," says Kucharvy.
By October about 1.76 million (85 percent) of the 2.12 million U.K. workplaces already had Internet access. This is much the same proportion as six months earlier, in March according to Point Topic. Which could lead to several different conclusions. One might argue that the base of potential buyers is nearly saturated. Or one could argue that the remaining 360,000 sites require some new sort of plan. One might also argue that some businesses might not require broadband, for some reason.
Point Topic’s latest results contrast with the 6.3 percent increase found for the period May 2006 to March 2007 when the pace of broadband development was still high.
Part of the problem is that most of the remaining businesses without internet access are small and poor, Point Topic notes. There is a strong positive association between workforce size and business internet penetration. Organizations with more than 250 employees all have Internet access. Businesses with only one or two employees reported 75 percent penetration.
Internet penetration is 100 percent in the businesses with the highest sales volume, particularly those in the finance sector. All businesses with over £20 million in sales have Internet access, but only 77 percent of those in the “£50k to £100k” category do.
The wholesale and business services sectors are both close to saturation with take-up at 95 percent. The least connected is the retail sector, where only 67 percent of companies have Internet access.
About half of businesses say they are making do with an ordinary, low cost, consumer type internet service. But as the number of employees in a business rises, the proportion using consumer-type internet services falls and that using more expensive business-quality services rises.
In terms of internet connection types, cable modem connections are found much more frequently at smaller workplaces, with 20 percent of all Internet-connected one or two employee businesses choosing them.
Take-up is only around five percent at medium-sized sites and they disappear altogether at the biggest ones. More common amongst businesses with greater employee numbers are satellite, fiber, ATM, leased line or frame relay connections. Some dial-up or IDSN connections are found at all workforce sizes – with ISDN much more important at the larger end.
So says Bill Gates, Microsoft Chief Software Architect: One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity. This isn't true at all.
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
That's true for everyone from the retail store worker who uses a handheld scanner to track inventory to the chief executive who uses business intelligence software to analyse critical market trends.
So if you look at how progress is made and where competitive advantage is created, there's no doubt that the ability to use software tools effectively is critical to succeeding in today's global knowledge economy.
A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career.
Beyond that, however, I don't think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science.
If you look at the most interesting things that have emerged in the last decade - whether it is cool things like portable music devices and video games or more practical things like smart phones and medical technology - they all come from the realm of science and engineering.
The power of software
Today and in the future, many of the jobs with the greatest impact will be related to software, whether it is developing software working for a company like Microsoft or helping other organisations use information technology tools to be successful.
Bill Gates
Lifelong learning is vital
Communication skills and the ability to work well with different types of people are very important too.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
This isn't true at all.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
I also place a high value on having a passion for ongoing learning. When I was pretty young, I picked up the habit of reading lots of books.
It's great to read widely about a broad range of subjects. Of course today, it's far easier to go online and find information about any topic that interests you.
Having that kind of curiosity about the world helps anyone succeed, no matter what kind of work they decide to pursue.
Nortel Networks has sued Vonage Holdings Corp., alleging Vonage is infringing 12 Nortel patents. Of course, in some ways it is a counter-suit, as Vonage earlier had sued Nortel seeking to invalidate three of the patents.
An injunction would prevent Vonage from using technology that relates to 911 and 411 calls, as well as its "click to call" feature.
There are multiple reports from Twitter users on T-Mobile networks that Twitter streams are being interrupted. Separately, photographer Lane Hartwell has taken 5,000 images formerly available on Flickr out of public view. What's the resemblence?
Hartwell objects to images being used on the Web without credit or compensation. "I don't want people just taking my stuff and saying, 'We're going to redistribute this to the masses," she says. She wants to protect her business model, in other words.
Assuming T-Mobile actually is blocking Twitter posts, one would assume there is a similar motivation: to protect the business model.
"It is stealing," Hartwell says of the unauthorized use of her photo in a YouTube video. "I'm not a charity. This is my living."
Likewise, T-Mobile seems to be taking the position that its "short code" service requires a commercial relationship with T-Mobile.
“Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider, and some services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming," T-Mobile is reported to have replied to a complaint about the apparent Twitter blocking.
"We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to service, cancel or suspend service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion,” T-Mobile reportedly has said.
The point is that use of some resources occasionally is a direct assault on some individual's, or some enterprises's, business model, and those entities sometimes take steps to protect their business models.
The observation is that as all content, communications and information moves to IP delivery, these sorts of disputes are bound to multiply.
U.S. users posted a new record for the number of search queries performed on the top engines in November, with over 8.1 billion discrete searches. That’s roughly 48 monthly searches per person on average and 12 more monthly searches than the 36 per month that Compete estimated for November 2006.
Personally, I think I do something more like 48 searches an hour!
I might not be the most popular user in defending "fair use" policies, but I have to tell you there is such a thing as the "tragedy of the commons."
Without being overly literal about it, the "tragedy of the commons" is a way of describing how free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation.
This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource, while the costs of the exploitation are distributed among all those to whom the resource is available.
As a westerner, I'll illustrate the problem by pointing to the history of conflict over grazing and water rights. Assume you are a cattle or sheep rancher, grazing those animals on open range that actually is owned by the U.S. government. Assume the market for livestock is good. Each rancher then has an incentive to add animals to the herd, increasing the intensity of grazing. At some point, there isn't enough grass to support all the animals.
Now Internet access is a shared resource, by definition. If you use a cable modem, the actual bandwidth is shared by a large number of end users. If you use Digital Subscriber Line, the sharing happens further up in the network, but the resource still is shared. "Oversubscribed," we like to say. One never provisions enough bandwidth to meet the full theoretical demand any single subscriber might use.
Basically, designers use statistics to provide enough bandwidth to meet average demand, at average times of day, and day of week, to meet the demand created by users who actually are online and using the resource at any given point.
But those statistics are based on "typical" demand. So what might be typical? For a consumer user, somewhere between one and three gigabytes of use in a month. My business use--and I am on the Web all day from roughly 6 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m.--runs about 2.5 Gbytes a month, typically.
There always are a small number of users who "graze their cattle" vastly more extensively than the rest, creating something that might be less than a major "tragedy of the commons" problem, but clearly consuming enough bandwidth that user experience for all the other users paying the same amount of money is degraded.
"T'aint fair." There's a solution for very-high usage: buy a business plan that really offers "all you can eat" bandwidth at the level you require.
At Qwest Broadband, for example, the illustrative volume that really is excessive for a consumer user might be:
• 300,000-500,000 photo downloads in one month
• 40,000 to 80,000 typically sized MP3 music downloads in one month
• 15+ million unique e-mails each month
• Online TV video streaming of 1,000-3,000 30-minute shows each month
• 2-5 million Web page visits (approximately one every second, 24 hours per day)
Those of us who have jobs, spend time outdoors, play sports, garden, ski, raise children, go shopping, read books and so forth really don't have time to consume that much data in a month.
Some people might have to do those sorts of thing for work, but that's the point: buy business bandwidth that clearly is sold with the understanding that if you want to push the network that way, you pay more for the privilege.
So long as access bandwidth is a shared resource, there will be a "freeloading" or "tragedy of the commons" danger. Good citizenship, good manners and good neighborliness requires a little respect for other people here.
I fail to share the "outrage" of people who think they should be allowed to overgraze the commons. Nobody has a "right" to impose those costs on the rest of users who "play nice."
A recent poll of enterprise wireless subscribers found 84 percent of respondents who do use smart phones, use a BlackBerry, according to InfoTech. Palm Treo and HTC devices trail and Microsoft OS devices, though growing fast, appear to fare no better than fourth.
But Windows Mobile finally is making inroads. "As such, the world essentially will come down to RIM vs. Microsoft in the enterprise market," says InfoTech.
More than 70 percent of respondents say email is the most important function of a smartphone, followed by Internet Wi-Fi access at 12 percent, the survey found.
More than 80 percent of respondents indicated they also use text messaging.
About 49 percent of survey respondents across all enterprise sizes said they were using wireless data card, with nearly 38 percent reporting a preference for the Verizon Wireless network.
Sprint the second-largest base at 24 percent. And speed apparently matters. Some 81 percent of respondents would switch operators to get faster speeds.
A funny spoof at http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-11-20-n35.html
Plenty of challenges continue to face successful providers of hosted or premises-based VoIP services. In its most recent survey of IP communications demand in the small and medium business market, Savatar Research found some “good and bad news and some that is disturbing,” says John Macario, Savatar president.
“We were expecting a bump in the market, based on the last three years of work, or at least a growth rate consistent with the past,” he says. “The bad news is that adoption is flat.” There’s not a lot of growth, he says. SME adoption is stalled at about 17 percent.
“There’s increasing frustration among SMEs,” who apparently haven’t yet gotten the message about benefits, which are clear enough based on feedback from executives who have purchased and use IP communications products and services.
It isn’t that SMEs are buying legacy phone systems. They just are not moving. They’re “just sitting on what they’ve got.” And that’s true both for premises phone systems and hosted offerings, Macario says.
All of which suggests many service providers who don’t know how to serve the market, he notes.
Macario says there is some evidence that buying might even have slowed over the last year. For those who have purchased IP communications products or services, “more than 70 percent purchased more than one year ago,” Macario says. “Only 12 percent have purchased between six months to a year ago.”
“About 15 percent have bought last six months,” he says.
The good news is that “the buyers are insanely happy,” Macario notes. About three quarters of respondents say they have gotten economic benefit while 75 percent say the systems are much easier to manage.
About 84 percent say the quality of their IP systems is as good or better than their old systems. The same percentage say the IP systems are as good or more reliable than the old systems.
As you would expect, 82 percent say the IP feature set is far better. Astoundingly, 95 percent say they would recommend or highly recommend the service or system they now use.
They “really are enthusiastic,” Macario says. Among the most-used IP features is the auto attendant capability. For many SMEs, this is the first system that allows them to do so. Half of respondents say they use it. About a third use group-oriented features or informal call center capabilities as well.
About a third use find me/follow me or simultaneous ring, he adds. About a quarter use click-to-dial and the ability to integrate with Microsoft Office applications. “People are starting to explore the feature set and figure out what else they can do,” says Macario.
But it is wireless services of various types that seem to be top of mind and growing in importance. Wireless related services also seem to have huge potential for inducing churn.
Of those who have deployed some sort of IP communications capability, about 71 percent are very or somewhat interested in FMC as a desktop replacement service, if the pricing is acceptable. About 83 percent would be interested in using it as an add-on or replacement for at least some desk devices.
Asked what else they would consider buying from the same vendor who sold the IP communications service or system, about 40 percent indicated wireless was on the list. About one third would buy Web collaboration tools like WebEx or Live Meeting services.
Demand seems to be just as high even for respondents who have not bought any IP communications service or capability. About 75 percent of those who haven’t yet bought are somewhat or very interested in fixed-mobile solutions.
Some 70 percent said somewhat or very likely to switch from their wireline service to an FMC offering and 70 percent said they would switch from their current mobile provider to get the capabilities.
About 71 percent of respondents who haven’t yet bought an IP solution would be interested in mobile desktop replacement as well.
Respondents say they would be willing to consider replacing at least some desktop phones if doing do saves about 20 percent from their total communications bill.
About 35 percent of respondents say they now pay for employee use of mobiles, picking up between 76 and 100 percent of the cost of the service.
Traditional telcos also are getting more traction and mindshare in the business VoIP space, it appears. For two years, traditional phone companies have got a really low share where it comes to SME executive perception about “who” provides business VoIP servicers, says Macario.
This year, telcos moved seven points higher. About 24 percent of respondents now view telcos as providers of business VoIP. Interestingly, 29 percent said cable companies come to mind as providers of business VoIP.
Non-traditional providers fare best at smaller firms. As firm size goes up, telcos do better. In the 50 to 99 employee segment, only 20 percent say non-traditional telcos are logical providers. And note: the cable gets 22 percent of the votes in that segment category.
That might be surprising for CLEC and other executives who think cable will not get traction in the SME space. “When a CLEC or a pureplay provider knocks at the door, they want to know who they are,” says Macario. “Cable has a brand. That helps.”
Cable already has surprising share at the lower end of the broadband access market. In the one-to-four-employees segment, “about half use cable modems,” says Macario.
“Once you get up to five to 19 employees, then 11 percent have T1s,” he notes. “DSL share is 47 percent, 25 percent T1 at slightly larger firms.”
Overall, says Macario, service providers, in a broad sense, aren’t doing a good job of communicating the benefit of making a switch to IP communications.
U.S. consumers across all demographics and geographies appear to be adopting digital behavior that is far more personalized, distributed and niche oriented that executives at Avenue A/Razorfish previously had thought. In fact, a recent survey of 475 consumers found that the majority are personalizing their digital experiences and sampling a wide range of niche content.
Those behaviors span recommendation engines, blogs, customized start pages, video consumption, mobile behavior and use of social media. About 60 percent of respondents have customized their home pages, for example. And 82 percent use bookmarks “all” or “most” of the time.
But there is less use of more participatory features. About 18 percent subscribe to Really Simple Syndication feeds “all” or “most of the time.” About 39 percent read “most popular” or “most emailed” links “all” or “most” of the time.
Only about 12 percent use tag clouds “all” or “most” of the time.
According to the survey, nearly 70 percent of consumers read blogs on a routine
basis, and 41 percent have their own blog, or post frequently to blogs. In fact,
46 percent of consumers who responded to the survey read four or more blogs
on a regular basis. All of that blog activity is significantly cutting into the
reach of traditional media outlets, Avenue A/Razorfish notes.
Some 91 percent of consumers rely on the Web to get current news or information, vastly eclipsing more traditional outlets such as television, Avenue A/Razorfish says.
The growing use of niche content also can be seen in respondent consumption of music and video consumption as well. Some 67 percent of consumers watch videos on YouTube or similar sites on a regular basis and 42 percent purchase music online. Avenue A/Razorfish executives conclude that online video not only is becoming more pervasive but also is affecting offline consumption.
For example, 85 percent of consumers have watched a movie preview online before going to see the film at a theater. Some 58 percent of consumers have used a service to download (iTunes) or order (Netflix/Blockbuster) films online, and 71 percent have watched a TV show online.
Consumers also appear to react positively to recommendation engines and personalized services: 62 percent of respondents have made a purchase based on personalized recommendations (by retailers such as Amazon.com) while 72 percent find such services helpful.
Broadband might not change everything, but it changes an awful lot for communications and content service and application providers. For starters, broadband drives a tripling of user time spent online, says Nate Elliott, Jupiter Research senior analyst. That means users already spend more time online than with print media.
To the extent that service and application providers support their business models by advertising revenue, that means more revenue for Web sites and applications, less for print vehicles.
Where a typical user might spend three hours a week with print media, users in western Europe routinely spend four hours a week online. But there’s a huge difference. About two thirds of users who are 65 or older spend more than five hours a week with print media. Users between 15 and 24 are more than 400 percent less likely to do so.
By some recent measures, user involvement with content sites has eclipsed use of the Internet for communications. At least, that’s what the Online Publishers Association says.
Jupiter analysts say that does not mean “news” is dead, or that newspapers are necessarily dead, yet. News is the top type of online content, and users are 300 percent more likely to consume news than sports or video content. And rates of consumption of print haven’t changed in four years, Jupiter says.
Without a doubt, online video consumption is getting to be quite mainstream. Last year, 22 percent of Americans and 11 percent of Europeans reported watching video regularly, with 18 percent of French respondents saying they do so regularly, says Jupiter.
Overall, the video audience has doubled since 2003, and Jupiter estimates viewership will double again by 2011.
But something might have happened over the last year. A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life project found that 57 percent of all Internet users, and 57 percent of users between 30 and 49, have watched online video. In the oldest age demographic, 39 percent have watched an online video.
Possibly 10 to 18 percent of older users report watching video every day, the Pew research finds.
About a quarter of younger users between 15 and 24 say they watch online video regularly and are more than 12 times more likely to watch video as users who are 55 or older. That doesn’t necessarily mean those viewers have substituted online video for legacy TV, though, as reported TV watching hasn’t changed.
The intensity of involvement might be questionable, however. About 27 percent of users say they regularly multitask, using multiple media at once.
And while some surveys suggest communication activities are decreasing, Jupiter researchers say users “spend most of their online time communicating.” Compared to dial-up users, broadband users are 57 percent more likely to use email regularly, 147 percent more likely to use instant messaging regularly and are 125 percent more likely to blog.
More than 10 percent of European users visit social networks regularly and more than 40 percent visit such sites daily. In the U.S. market, use of social networking sites is spreading to older age groups. About 35 percent of social network users are between the ages of 35 and 54.
The thing about social networks is that they are in many ways substitutes for other activities such as email, instant messaging, texting, calling or entertainment sites and applications.
And while most new online activities are disproportionately engaged in by younger users, just about every new type of activity is being adopted by older users as well.
Location-based services might not be a big mass market business yet, but it seems almost inevitable that they will be. You don't get the likes of Nokia and Google placing such big bets on location-based services without something developing.
ABI Research expects personal navigation devices (PNDs) will grow to a global sales volume of more than 100 million units by 2011. While dedicated PNDs will remain the preferred form-factor for use in cars, GPS will increasingly be an expected ingredient in handsets, portable media players (PMPs), ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), and other mobile devices, ABI forecasts.
Handset-based GPS will grow strongly in North America, reaching a sales volume of 21 million units by 2012, ABI Research forecasts.
In-Stat reaches very similar overall conclusions, though it adds digital cameras and even handheld games to the mix of devices expected to include GPS. In-Stat predicts that sales of mobile devices with integrated GPS will grow from 180 million units in 2007 to 720 million units in 2011.
In fact, mapping-related and location-related Web apps might be more commercially attractive than entertainment was expected to be. For starters, mobile Web advertising revenues in 2011 are expected to be dominated by Web and search. In fact, Strategy Analytics estimates that about 76 percent of all mobile advertising will be generated either by Web apps or search.
All of that dovetails with Google’s thinking about the advertising potential of the mobile Web. And the point is that if consumers find location-based Web apps attractive, and there is a robust advertising support model, carriers are bound to see big increases in broadband service plans, even if they don’t see similarly robust demand for walled-garden enhanced services.
Mobile Web appears to be the most-frequently-used mobile app, according to new data from Orange U.K.(France Telecom).
Orange U.K. has 1.4 million broadband wireless customers, but the single most-used application is text messaging, which doesn't require broadband access. Orange U.K. customers send or receive about 71 text messages a day (more than 2,000 a month) but just about 4.3 Multimedia Message Service (MMS) messages a day (129 a month) for users who take advantage of MMS, and most do not.
About 58 percent of Orange U.K. customers can use MMS and six-month usage growth was 37 percent.
In the mobile search area, Orange saw about 250,000 repeat visitors each day, on a base of 1.4 million users. One might therefore estimate that about 18 percent of the base uses mobile search daily.
Orange users downloaded about 7,680 games a day across the user base, up about 3.4 percent over the last six months. Music downloads grew about 15 percent over the last six months to about 3,280 a day.
Orange mobile TV usage is said to be growing at double the management forecast, but one suspects the numbers still are fairly low, as the actual numerical results were not released. Mobile video clip downloads averaged 5,211 a day.
Downloads of logos, wallpapers and pictures averaged 3,233 a day. On the other hand, users are uploading about 23,333 photos a day to online photo albums.
So far, the story would seem to be consistent with what many would have expected: lots of niche applications but no single “killer app” beyond text messaging, which doesn’t require a 3G network. Orange U.K., like other mobile service providers, remains in a “throw it on the wall and see what sticks” mode, watching to see what apps are most compelling to users of 3G services.
So far, no other mobile carrier has discovered the elusive application that users intuitively understand and that is capable of driving 3G access. Right now, that’s the point: keep experimenting.
So far, one would have to conclude that mobile Web usage is the leading app, in terms of daily hits.
at&t appears to have decided not to buy EchoStar to jumpstart its TV business, as it has boosted its dividend and launched a stock buyback program.
In total, at&t might spend roughly $17 billion in 2008 on dividends and buybacks, consuming most or all of the cash its businesses are likely to generate, leaving little to finance a purchase of EchoStar.
at&t also plans to expand U-Verse to cover 30 million households by 2010 in the 22 states where AT&T is the main local-phone company, up from an earlier target of 18 million households.
Broadband access strategy might have played a role in the thinking as well. By speeding its TV capabilities, at&t automatically creates a better network for high-speed access as well.
Apple appears to be working on improving the iPhone's support of Microsoft's Exchange email platform, which could finally deliver true syncing capabilities, eliminating a potential objection to enterprise adoption. At least that's what one would conclude from a new company job posting.
The listing seeks a "motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills."
"You will join a dynamic team responsible for qualifying the latest iPhone products," the company wrote. "Your focus will be testing Exchange and Outlook functionality with Apple’s innovative new phone."
So far, the iPhone's official support of Exchange has been limited to IMAP functionality.
The lack of full support for the Microsoft platform is commonly cited as one of the primary barriers to adoption of the Apple handset by businesses, as Exchange is widely deployed as the email solution of choice amongst the corporate world.
But there are lots of other reasons enterprise IT might not be rushing to embrace the iPhone as an officially supported device. See the post below.
Forrester Research has put together a really good list of the top 10 reasons enterprise technology managers will not to support the iPhone. The objections are valid and important. And somehow we think users are going to use iPhones anyway, with or without enterprise support. Some of the objections are more important than other.
But Forrester analyts also note that enterprise "C" level executives are using them anyway, so it is only a matter of time before the iPhone filters down the corporate pyramid.
1. Doesn’t natively support push business email or over-the-air calendar sync. The iPhone can sync with Microsoft’s Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes over IMAP and SMTP ports, but server and security administrators have to configure their infrastructure to do so or purchase a mobile gateway. The issue is "doesn't natively support" push email. People can work around that, or the email services can be tweaked. A problem, but not a really big problem.
2. Doesn’t accommodate third-party applications, including those internally developed. This is a big problem. But Apple software engineers must know this. And there are rumors Apple already is working on a software developer kit that should take care of this objection.
3. There isn't a way to encrypt data on the device. Yes, this is a pretty big problem.
4. Can’t be remotely locked or wiped in the event of a lost or stolen device. Also a big problem.
5. Lacks a hard keypad that provides feedback, which isn’t ideal for rapid and accurate input. Not a major objection, ultimately. Yes, accuracy typically is less than on a QWERTY keyboard. But this is an irritant, not a show stopper. And people get better at it with practice, it seems.
6. Limited service provider support and its carrier lock-in inhibits flexibility. Issues, yes, but not as big a deal as the security issues.
7. It is expensive. Well, it is being bought by consumers, who bring them into the enterprise environment, so not a direct enterprise problem.
8. Is only the first generation, and lacks 3G support. This problem fixes itself.
9. Lacks a removable battery. Definitely an irritant. Apple doesn't seem to want to sell replacement batteries. But that support isn't available for iPods either, and we have found ways to replace those batteries.
10. There are no case studies of firms that have deployed it enterpris-ewide. Sure, IT will say this, but it isn't a major objection, ultimately.
One reason the iPhone probably is used in smaller businesses is that people don't have all those custom apps to support. And we are entering an era where maybe there are some devices and apps that IT will simply say it won't support, but users can buy them and do their own support. Younger users will do that. Even some of us older users will do so.
Really, its is the security and support for proprietary enterprise apps that are the real barriers.
Qwest Communications will issue its first dividend since 2001, setting a recurring quarterly payout to shareholders of eight cents per share. In some ways, the move represents the final end to the "dot bomb" and telecom crash of the early 2000s.
Zayo Group is acquiring Tulsa, Okla.-based Citynet Fiber Network, the wholesale division of communications provider, Citynet. CFN will become part of Zayo Bandwidth, Zayo Group's fiber based bandwidth business unit.
The CFN network has 8,500 route miles of fiber covering 57 Tier I-III markets in 10 states. The company's on-net buildings encompass many major carrier locations like local exchange carrier central offices, carrier hotels and wireless mobile switching centers.
The transaction is acquisition number six for Zayo, and part of the continuing consolidation trend in the U.S. metro access space.
One of the problems everybody faces as we move increasingly to a world of IP-enabled communications, information and entertainment is that a growing clash is occurring, piecemeal, between historically-distinct regulatory silos. Whether we can stumble forward forever, without acknowledging the end of regulatory silos, as well as technology or industry silos, remains open to question.
The problem is simply that different sorts of activities and businesses are governed by distinctly-different frameworks. Magazines and newspapers, for example, operate under First Amendment "free speech" rules and have virtually no "common carrier" obligations.
TV and radio broadcasters operate under different rules, with more limited "free speech" rights (broadcasters do not enjoy unrestricted rights to transmit any sort of content). Cable TV regulation is more akin to broadcasting than telecom regulation, but there are some tax and local franchising rules that are more akin to common carrier businesses.
Telecom companies operate under the most-restrictive rules, with legal requirements to interconnect with other telecom service providers and deliver their traffic. Data services and content generally have been immune from these rules, though. That's why the Web, and Web content, have developed essentially as a zone of freedom.
Of course, in the U.S. market there is more talk about "network neutrality", a troublesome issue not because of the immediate implications some attribute to it, but because it is just one more examples of how the old "silos" of regulation are breaking down, and becoming intellecutually incoherent in a world where media, TV, radio, music, talk, testing, Web surfing and data communications all occur over one physical pipe.
Should that not require some harmonization or revamping of the fundamental regulatory regimes each of the media types up to this point has enjoyed? And here's the crux of the matter: how does one square first amendment, "zone of freedom" rules historically applied to newspapers, magazines, data services and the Web, with common carrier rules applied to telcos, or the quasi-regulated broadcasting industry?
The fact that delivery modes change does not alter the zone of freedom newspapers, magazines and other media, even "Web media" are supposed to have. And the U.S. courts have ruled that corporations do possess rights of free speech as well. So the issue is whether the zone of freedom is expanded or contracted as multiple media types are delivered over IP pipes.
So it is that some consumer and public advocacy groups are urging the Federal Communications Commission to declare that "short code" text messages deserve the same nondiscriminatory treatment by telephone carriers as email and voice messages.
So are "short codes" advertising, a direct response mechanism, or are they "speech." And whose "speech" rights are supposed to be protected? Those of the speaker, as the early founders seemed to think, or the rights of the "listener," as jurists increasingly have argued over the past 50 years or so?
The issue is more complicated than sometimes positioned. Text messaging services might include a "zone of freedom" in terms of what is said. But note that the freedom is for the speaker. But who is the "speaker" whenever we are looking at media?
The Washington Post might not accept advertising from its competitor, the Wall Street Journal. Verizon Wireless might not accept ads from Sprint or T-Mobile. Cable companies don't take ads from telephone companies marketing competing services. In those cases, rights of speech are exercised by a "speaker." A TV, cable or radio network has the right not to allow speech (advertising also is speech) to be paid for and transmitted.
The fundamental problem is that as IP pipes carry virtually all communications, information and entertainment, we are going to see more disjointed efforts to regulate "unlike" things in "like" ways. That will be the corollary to regulating "like" things in "unlike" ways.
at&t says it is close to renegotiating a contract with Yahoo Inc. that undoubtedly will result in Yahoo earning less money. Under the current deal, Yahoo earns as much as $250 million a year of revenue. The renegotiation is expected to affect other deals Yahoo has with other telecom service providers.
The renegotiation is a reminder: large telcos often partner with other entities when entering a new market, and sometimes move slowly in those markets. That doesn't mean the relationships are stable. Ultimately, as they acquire the skills they believe they need, and scale, some partners aren't so important and "value" moves back inside the service provider organization.
There sometimes is a perception by outsiders that telcos are too "dumb" or "too slow moving" to dominate new markets. On the contrary, telcos are big enough, and smart enough, to wait for markets to develop before making a move to dominate. It's a business strategy, not an indication of "not getting it."
