Bing Maps Augmented Reality Demo

I admit I use Google Chrome and Firefox more than I use Explorer and Bing. I use Google Maps; I don't use Bing Maps. But that doesn't mean Microsoft engineers are not working on new tweaks to provide more value for Bing and its related apps.

RIM, Apple, Google Grow in Smartphones, Microsoft and Palm Drop

Over the last three months, Research in Motion, Apple and Google have gained smartphone market share, while Microsoft and Palm have lost share, comScore says.

42.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones in an average month during the November 2009 to January 2010 period, up 18 percent from the August through October period.

RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 43percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, rising 1.7 percentage points versus three months earlier. Apple ranked second with 25.1 percent share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft at 15.7 percent, Google at 7.1 percent (up 4.3 percentage points), and Palm at 5.7 percent.

Google’s Android platform continues to see rapid gains in market share.

In an average month during the November through January 2010 time period, 63.5 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.5 percentage points versus three months prior.
Browsers were used by 28.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 1.8 percentage points), while subscribers who played games made up 21.7 percent (up 0.4 percentage points). Access of social networking sites or blogs experienced strong gains in the past three months, growing 3.3 percentage points to 17.1 percent of mobile subscribers.

Social networking now is more popular than listening ot music, at least where it comes to mobile device activities.

Apple is Going to be Bigger than Microsoft

Based largely on the strength of its position in the mobility space, Apple seems close to closing what once was an impossibly-large gap in equity value, compared to Microsoft. In 2000, Microsoft was about 600-percent larger than Apple, in terms of market capitalization.

One can argue it is the strength of the iPhone product line, or Apple's better positioning in the mobile business overall, that accounts for the change in market value. Long gone is the time when Apple was a PC supplier and Microsoft dominated the PC operating system market.

The difference between 2000 and 2010 was that where the 1990s might still have been an era of PC-based computing, the 2000 period saw the emergence of the Internet as the key factor in the computer-mediated experience business. Between 2010 and 2020 we are likely to witness yet another evolution based on mobility.

Unless Apple stumbles, or Microsoft somehow can discover a new and heightend role n mobile experience computing, Apple is going to be a bigger company than Microsoft. Market capitalization is not the only important measure of a company's stature, of course.

But Apple quitely has amassed a patent portfolio larger than Google's. Based largely on the strength of its position in the mobility space, Apple seems close to closing what once was an impossibly-large gap in equity value, compared to Microsoft. In 2000, Microsoft was about 600-percent larger than Apple, in terms of market capitalization.

One can argue it is the strength of the iPhone product line, or Apple's better positioning in the mobile business overall, that accounts for the change in market value. Long gone is the time when Apple was a PC supplier and Microsoft dominated the PC operating system market.

The difference between 2000 and 2010 was that where the 1990s might still have been an era of PC-based computing, the 2000 period saw the emergence of the Internet as the key factor in the computer-mediated experience business. Between 2010 and 2020 we are likely to witness yet another evolution based on mobility.

Unless Apple stumbles, or Microsoft somehow can discover a new and heightend role n mobile experience computing, Apple is going to be a bigger company than Microsoft.

Of course, market capitalization is not the only measure of a company's stature and influence. In that regard, Apple has been especially active in the patent filing arena. Between 2004 and 2007, when Apple was preparing the iPhone, it filed 507 patents, while Google filed just 67, for example.

Very few--in fact virtually none--of the leader's in one era of computing also were leaders in the next era of computing. Apple might be the first firm in computing technology ever to manage leadership in more than one era. Or, one can argue that Apple did not lead in the PC era, and is emerging now as a leader in the coming mobile Internet era because it has become a mobility company.

Right now, I can only think of three possible contenders for such history-making: Apple, Google and Cisco.

Google to Leave China?

Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to the Financial Times.

Google's search results are censored in China, as are results provided by all other search engines as well.

Google is also seeking ways to keep its other operations in China going, although some executives fear that a backlash from the Chinese authorities could make it almost impossible to keep a presence in the country, the Financial Times says.

But Google’s executives have made it clear that they still hope to stay in the country, whatever the fate of Google.cn. “It’s very important to know we are not pulling out of China,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told the Financial Times at the time. “We have a good business in China. This is about the censorship rules, not anything else.”

The company’s other operations, which pre-date the launch of Google.cn four years ago, include its research centre in Beijing and a sales force that sells advertising on the Chinese-language Google.com search service, based outside China, to advertisers inside the country.

This sort of issue has been tough for any companies doing business in China, in the past. Software and hardware sold by companies into China can, and are, used in ways that violate sensibilities in the West. Suppression of dissent, spying on citizens and so forth do happen in China, and technology supplied by Western firms is used to do so.

Google might have to take steps that many would agree are principled and just, but will harm its business interests. Similar thorny decisions have been made by other software and hardware suppliers to the Chinese market, with different outcomes. It's an area of moral tension executives cannot escape, though most seem to prefer not to talk about it.

Beyond all that, the dilemma shows that the old Internet, where any user could communicate freely with any other user, is gone. When the any government shuts down applications people use to communicate with each other, the old Internet is gone.

Financial Times article

The Creative Age is Different, Way Different

General Motors isn't Facebook. Heck, it isn't even Cisco or Microsoft. But neither are any of those companies like Facebook. I don't mean "like Facebook" in financial, social or cultural terms. Facebook is unlike other companies in the way that it creates a product. Most companies create products using some combination of internal resources ("employees") and business partners ("suppliers").

Most companies can tell you who "works for the company" and who does not. What is different about Facebook, and Wikipedia, Google and YouTube is that the "product" is produced by all sorts of people, both inside a "company," inside its "partner suppliers," and from "outside the company." What makes Facebook's product different is that "users" must participate to create a better and more useful product.

That might be true for any sizable organization, to some extent. Consumers help shape products when they decide to buy some more than others, and some not at all. Consumers help products evolve when they start to use products in new and unexpected ways.

But Facebook and others with a "social" product cannot develop with passive or secondary input. They require active creation of content, links and networks by participants. Not every product can be produced in this way. But it is a so-far distinctive attribute of products produced in a "post-information age" era.

Some might call the upcoming era the "creative" era, to differentiate it from the information age. Collaboration is a key cultural attribute of firms that create social products. Facebook depends on users, developers to create its product, which is an experience.

fuller discussion

More Evidence of How Hard it Is to Replicate Google's Success

It's an impressionistic, but useful take on Google's uniqueness among companies, that so few ex-Googlers have been able to replicate Google's success. Googlers are smart, there is no question about that. But Microsoft and many other firms go out of their way to hire "smart people." That fact alone does not seem to automatically produce out-sized results.

Think you can be the next Google?

Google's Culture Flat Out Rocks

Nilofer Merchant, Rubicon CEO and founder, has penned a fabulous post about Google's corporate culture, that is worth reading, especially because you and I will rarely, if ever, encounter a company with a culture this unusually oriented towards innovation; so fearless its atmosphere towards new ideas; so intellectually egalitarian.

Few companies you encounter will ever approach this level of cultural openness. You will run into lots of companies that claim they are this way. They are not. If you speak with enough people, at enough companies, you will discover that most of them think they are "above average," "very good" or even "excellent" at  customer service, or quality, for example.

By definition, this is incorrect. No normal distribution can have a majority, or the vast majority of the population ranked in the top five percent, 10 percent or 20 percent of anything. And yet that is what you'd tend to find, if you asked.

Google, whatever else one thinks about the company, should be applauded, studied and emulated, as should Apple, in some key ways, when it is possible. Most companies cannot meaningfully emulate the core cultural traits of either company, of course. But that's why Apple and Google will remain such important companies.

Most will not try to emulate them, and most cannot, even if they want to. Sometimes the problem is simply that the culture of an organization matches the core tasks it must tackle to be successful. You wouldn't expect a "Google" style culture at a nuclear power plant, a telco or larger military organizations.

You would hope and expect to find it on any small software team, smaller consulting organizations and think tanks, smaller research or policy institutes, smaller marketing firms or architectural firms. Note the emphasis on small; that normally has something to do with it. Still, smallness is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite.

Lots of small organizations are not "collaborative" in the robust sense. People matter.

Merchant's full post

Motorola Backflip Offers New Navigation Interface

Motorola's New "Backflip" offers a new way of navigating Web pages. The Backflip allows you to navigate its screen by touching a panel behind it, thus keeping fingers off of the screen. The Backflip, which runs on AT&T's 3G network, costs $100 after a $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year agreement.

Its name comes from its design: The Backflip's screen seems to flip backward when the QWERTY keyboard flips down for use. In the device's "closed" position, the keyboard flips back up and is automatically turned off.

No Inevitable Need for Usage-Based Pricing, AT&T CEO Says

Usage-based wireless broadband pricing does not necessarily mean an end to unlimited-use plans, says AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. But it might mean plans that tie usage in some broad way to retail cost of service.

Consider the way mobile plans are sold today. There are some true "unlimited plans" for voice, data and text messaging. But there also are plans with buckets of usage that sell for various lower prices. That same content might well work for future broadband access plans as well.

PC-based wireless broadband users, for example, consume more bandwidth than smartphone users. It might therefore continue to be the case that unlimited use is more practical for smartphones than for PC dongle service.

At the same time, there also are existing precedents for fully unlimited use even for PC devices. Business-grade services such as T1 connections, for example, are unlimited-use services, but also sell for higher prices than typical consumer services.

Anthony Melone, chief technology officer at Verizon Wireless also suggested the U.S. wireless industry might not be able to wait 10 years for additional spectrum of the sort the Federal Communications Commission now hopes to entice TV broadcasters to part with. "They need to have something in the five-year time line."

Perhaps the most interesting comment is Stephenson's take on the continued role for fixed broadband capacity. Stephenson says wireless capacity issues would maintain a role for fixed-line connections "at least in his lifetime."

That suggests even Stephenson can envision a time when fixed connections are not nearly as relevant as they are today.

link to source

TV Everywhere Will Stall Growth of Online Video, One Can Argue

Some observers, not without reason, predict the days of linear multi-channel video are numbered. But that possible transition is likely to take much longer than most expect, in part because incumbents still have weapons at their disposal, including the $32 billion in fees cable operators alone pay to programmers every year.

"TV Everywhere," will allow online viewers to watch shows for no incremental charge, if they're cable subscribers. If programmers go along with the concept, there is almost no way a sizable alternative channel will open up, at least for network fare.

Cable industry executives hope the plan will indeed deflect the online video threat. At least so far, content owners seem unwilling to abandon their long-standing distribution agreements with cable operators. And so long as cable and other distributors remain so key to profits in the broader video ecosystem, no challengers are likely to succeed.

full story here

U.S. Wireless Business Twice the Size of Wireline in 5 Years

In five years, the U.S. wireless business will be more than twice the size of the entire landline services business, say researchers at Insight Research Corp.

Keep in mind that the U.S. wireless and wired network businesses were roughly equivalent revenue producers in 2009.

That is but one example of a profound change in the telecommunications business globally, where wireless already has emerged as the key telecommunications service, with wireless accounts outnumbering wireline voice lines by a four-to-one margin.

In 2000 there were 738 million global mobile subscribers. In 2010, there are 4.3 billion mobile subscribers. In other words, mobile users have doubled twice in just 10 years.

It took just four years to double the number of global mobility users, from 2000 to 2004, and just another four years to double yet again, from 2004 to 2008.

All U.S. landline communications spending stood at $161.4 billion at the end of 2009 and will grow slowly to $165.7 billion by the end of 2014, representing a negligible compound annual growth rate of 0.5 percent.

Total U.S. wireless spending stood at $160.3 billion in 2009. But wireless revenue will grow at an 18.4 percent annual rate between 2010 and 2014, reaching $373.2 billion in 2014.

It now appears 2000 was the year U.S. wired voice accounts hit their peak, as they have been steadily declining ever since.

It is a truism that new technologies cause far less change in the early going than observers predict, but also cause more change than expected once the changes really take hold. It is a related truism that tipping points occur with great suddenness. Long periods of gestation, where each year appears to be much like the next, suddenly erupt, with acute changes unexpectedly obvious.

It appears the U.S. communications industry is about to hit one of those important inflection points, where a new pattern suddenly is obvious.

Will Historic Consumer Spending Patterns Hold Up?

Long-term interest rates are quietly heading higher, and consumer confidence is headed lower, economists and financial analysts now say. Rising rates are a drag on the economy, making it more difficult for businesses and households to finance spending and investment.

This is going to slow the economic recovery and challenge my thesis that communications and multi-channel video entertainment businesses suffer slower growth, but still grow, even in recessionary times.

Just to recap, over the last 25 years, in every recession, telecom and cable TV revenues, for example, have grown, year over year. Growth rates slowed, but were never in negative ranges, overall.

That does not mean consumers were not economizing, they likely were. But overall spending on what have come to be viewed as essential services has not faltered in any recession over the last 25 years.

What tends to happen in a recession is that consumers stop buying incremental or enhanced features and products. That can take the form of less spending on premium TV, pay-per-view and on-demand content; delaying the purchase of a new mobile phone or switching to a prepaid account.

Consumers also typically shift spending away from other activities in recessionary times, propping up core communications and video entertainment services.

There has been pressure of other sorts, though. Firms including Verizon and Time Warner Cable mention that housing market distress has lowered new customer acquisition rates. When people are not moving into new houses, or stop renting and move in with relatives, or lose their homes, that reduces new subscriber additions and increases churn.

But there are other structural changes bubbling away underneath. Fixed voice lines mostly have been a case of shifted market share from telcos to cable operators, but also some apparently-growing amount of abandonment in favor of mobile. Roughly the same thing has been happening in the video business, as cable operators slowly lose share to both telco and satellite providers.

Trading market share leaves the overall business about where it was, overall. Over the past decade, though, service providers have benefitted from one truly new product--broadband Internet access--and skyrocketing additional mobile accounts. To the extent voice lines actually are shrinking, not just being shifted to new providers, mobile revenues and broadband have more than compensated for the losses.

In all likelihood, mobile broadband now is going to replace mobile voice as the revenue and growth driver for the next five year period. Assuming there is no change in the underlying rate of mobile substitution, and no sudden replacement of the multi-channel video product by an over-the-top alternative, I would continue to stand by my prediction that, even in the face of sluggishness on the economic front, cable and telco providers will continue to show revenue growth, if slower than they would like.

The real danger comes from some unexpected shift of demand that radically changes spending patterns. That is the sort of thing one cannot anticipate very well, and the reason I spend so much time trying to follow consumer behavior.

related story on growth issues

Two-Tier Internet is Not Necessarily a Bad Thing, Says Esther Dyson

"The biggest problem that net neutrality has is nobody knows what they’re talking about when they talk about it," says Esther Dyson, noted computer industry analyst. "The issue is who pays and whether they’re monopolies or not, so there’s a whole lot of, I think, disingenuous discussion about control without ever really looking at the fundamental issue, which is somebody’s got to pay for more bandwidth if consumers are gonna be uploading and downloading video."

"As long as there’s healthy competition, I have no problem if someone pays extra for additional bandwidth, as long as that doesn’t cut off people’s access to the other stuff," says Dyson. That does not mean she believes access providers should be able to put up walls around Internet content. 

"There’s this disingenuous discussion of if you don’t allow us to pay extra, you’re not gonna get free content," she says. "Well, of course not, but let the consumer decide whether they want paid or subsidized."

Beet TV

"Superphones" Will Drive Widespread Media Consumption, Glaser Says

Many observers have called the mobile phone or smartphone the "fourth screen" for multimedia content, and RealNetworks agrees with that assessment.

In fact, a new generation of devices one might call a "superphone" will be a primary way users consume video and audio content, says Rob Glaser, former RealNetworks CEO.

The future of media will be information consumed on superphones while on the go, Glaser argues. By 2013 the installed base of smart and superphones will exceed the installed base of PCs, and those Web-surfing devices will be mobile.

People want digital persistence, he argues. In other words, they want their content to be available everywhere, at any point in time, Glaser argues. That implies a world in which content is available on any number of devices, with methods for verifying the right any single has to use paid-for content.

That's part of the thinking behind the cable industry's "TV Everywhere" initiative, but also a way for cable distributors to maintain their relevance in a world with alternate distirbution channels.

Such ability to experience TV or video on mobile devices will have repercussions for a wide range of participants in the video ecosystem. Mobile providers will have to supply an order of magnitude more bandwidth. Devices will have to adapt to form factors conducive to media player usage.

Distributors will have to work to maintain their relevance in the content distribution system, and mobile marketers will find mobile video a more-attractive marketing medium.

Books Lead Apple App Store Inventory

There are lots of applications available in the Apple App Store. But a huge number of those items are discrete book or game titles, not applications. And those most applications downloaded from the App Store are of the "free" sort, about 75 percent of the books and games are "for fee" downloads.

In fact, "books" are the biggest category in the store, followed by games.

The App Store is an awful lot like iTunes, it appears: a distribution mechanism for content.