Enterprises Can't Block User Mobile Phone Choices

As most enterprises struggle to get a grip on mobility costs and strategy, users continue to impose their own desires for devices that better integrate their jobs and personal lives, says Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group analyst. They will use what they find most useful in both settings regardless of any corporate efforts to slow or block adoption.

Enterprises were not able to stop users from bringing consumer messaging and VoIP applications into the office, and mobile devices won't prove any different, despite general IT executive opposition.

According to Yankee's latest research, at least 45 percent of all enterprise workers operate outside of the traditional office setting at least part of the time.

If consumer-driven mobile systems offer workers better performance and more robust applications than the devices endorsed by their employers, they will use them, Kerravala says.

Google Riding Global Wave

As much speculation as there has been about a possible Google bid for 700 MHz spectrum, there now are new reasons to think Google is deadly serious, and that provide new strategic reasons to win the auction, not just to bid for tactical reasons.

A U.N. telecom meeting has decided to give mobile service providers access to similar bandwidth currently reserved for terrestrial television broadcasts, making mobile Internet access a major new wireless feature globally by 2015.

Google simply would be early in the new business if it acquires and then operates a mobile Internet service. Significantly, global data roaming will be much easier as the new rules on spectrum use will rely heavily on common frequencies in diverse regions, meaning handsets will be able to interoperate. That promises higher sales volumes and hence lower costs, on both the infrastructure and handset fronts.

Consumers in the United States are to gain access to at least some of the spectrum in question by 2009, but it will take an additional six years before those in Europe, Africa, China, Russia and much of the Middle East will have the same access.

A U.S. government auction of key 700 MHz spectrum 698 megahertz to 806 megahertz range)is scheduled for February.

The same frequencies will be available for mobile services throughout the Americas, India, Japan, Korea and a number of other Asian countries, while the rest of the world will initially use only the 790 megahertz to 862 megahertz range.

Unlike many recent spectrum auctions, which essentially resulted in more bandwidth to support legacy services, most observers think the new spectrum largely will be used for IP-based Web applications and data.

Despite the challenges and risks, Google might want to move more aggressively given the new global implications.

Email Communication Declining in U.K. Market

Most people would guess that teenagers send more instant or text messages than emails. In the U.K., says ComScore, it is a quantifiable trend. As it turns out, people now are communicating more from within the context of their social networks than using portal-based email. That isn't yet true for business communications, of course.

But it stands to reason that personal use of email is for communication with friends and family. And if those people are part of a social network, one doesn't have to go outside the network to send messages. Some day soon, people will launch and receive voice, video and other communications from within the social network as well.

Mobile IM Use Increasing

According to the second annual AP-AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey, 25 percent of respondents send instant messages from their mobile phones, including 32 percent teens.

In addition, IM users are instant messaging from within their social networking profiles.

More than 27 percent of users say they use instant messaging at work. Further, half of at-work IM users say that instant messaging makes them more productive at work, a 25 percent increase over last year.

More than half (55 percent) of teen IM users have used instant messaging to get help with their homework. This is a 17 percent increase over last year. Meanwhile, 22 percent of teens say they have sent an IM to ask for or accept a date.

Forty-three percent of teen IM users say they have used instant messaging to say something they would not say to someone in person. Teenage girls are more likely than boys to do so. Nearly half of teenage girls surveyed have used instant messaging to say something they would not say in person, compared with just over a third of teenage boys.

Nearly three in four teens (70 percent) and one in four adults (24 percent) send more instant messages than emails.

Multi-tasking remains very popular, as IM users tend to engage in multiple online activities while sending instant messages. Checking email is the most popular activity among eight in ten adult and teen IM users. After email, adult IM users most often conduct online searches (49 percent), while teens say they like to research homework assignments online (57 percent).

Nearly four in five (79 percent) at-work IM users say they have used instant messaging in the office to take care of personal matters. One in five (19 percent) IM users say they send more instant messages than emails to their co-workers and colleagues.

Google Will Bid on 700 MHz Spectrum!

Google is preparing to bid at least $4.6 billion for wireless spectrum to be bought at the Federal Communications Commission's January auction, the Wall Street Journal reported says. The company is planning to bid without partners, a move some of us would not have predicted.

The company is beta testing a wireless solution in preparation for running a full-scale national mobile network. Obviously, Google as a mobile network services provider would be highly disruptive to the existing legacy carrier business models, given the likelihood Google would emerge fairly quickly as a packaging, pricing and
network functionality innovator.

One simply has to point back to packaging and pricing innovation by just one carrier--AT&T--to illustrate the fact that a significant new pricing pattern, in this case the concept of a bucket of minutes for a flat fee, can cause an entire industry to react.

A bid obviously would vastly complicate Google's other efforts to gain favorable placement of its software on all sorts of devices compatible with all sorts of carrier networks. But Google probably wins even if it loses. By creating a "bid" poker chip, it can wring concessions out of recalcitrant carriers who might be wary of giving Google more play.

And there are very real costs to be borne by the likes of Verizon and at&t if Google enters the bidding contest. It is not simply the threat that Google wins. If Google bids, the final price paid by the auction winner, whether at&t or Verizon, will be higher than if Google had not been a contestant.

Making War on Your Customers a Mistake. Duh!

Edgar Bronfman, Warner Music CEO, says mobile service providers should not make the mistake the music industry did. "We used to fool ourselves,' he says. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was."

"We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding," he says. "And of course we were wrong."

"We inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won," he says.

Mobile operators risk making the same mistake with their music services, he says.

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," Bronfman says. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content."

"They want it to be easy to buy with a single click," he adds. "And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are, 24/7."

BT: Another Twist on Social Networking

Tradespace is a community platform that allows businesses to interact together and use PayPal to make transactions. It currently features 20,000 largely small business users.

The SME employs 10 million people in the U.K. market, about half of the total private workforce, says Ben Verwaayen, BT CEO. About 24 percent of the U.K. workforce works from home. About 60 pecent start-ups also are home-based.

"They don't want hassle but they want to live in the 21st century," says Verwaayen. "So they want to have the capability to communicate, to delegate, to go out in the world and find supplies, find customers and do that in a way that they concentrate on what they do best," says Verwaayen.

And that's one example of how social networkng can work for small business.

Enterprise Software Not Where It's At Anymore

The future of enterprise computing will draw from what is being developed on the consumer side, says Paul Otellini, Intel CEO. "Consumers today are the number one users of semiconductors; they passed over IT and government in 2004."

"Prior to that period, most people developing silicon in the industry were focused on the main market: the enterprise and IT," says Otellini. "Today, most of us are focused on the consumer market as drivers."

"Not so long ago, if you were technology-oriented and wanted to do something innovative and cool that would make you rich, you wrote a new piece of enterprise software," he says. "Or you came up with a new design for a server. Or you figured out a way to link business people with their offices while on the road."

That's just not the case anymore. Innovation is coming from the consumer Web.

Global Telecom Revenue Up Again

For all the talk of how IP-based services will cannibalize legacy communications revenue, only narrowband voice services seem to be stalled at this point. In 2008, projects Insight Research, worldwide service provider revenues are predicted to grow to $1.7 trillion
in 2008, and to keep growing to $2.7 trillion in 2013.

While the overall CAGR is 10.3 percent, there are notable regional differences. The Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA)region has the slowest growth rate at 5.2 percent annually. The Asia Pacific region is experiencing the highest five-year growth overall, at 15.5 percent. The Latin American region is next with a growth of 12 percent.

Broadband wireline revenues are growing at a 6.7 percent cumulative annual growth rate over the forecast period, while narrowband wireline services revenues are essentially flat at 0.4 percent over the same period.

Clearly wireless and broadband are where the growth is. Wireless revenues will grow from 60.3 percent of all telecommunications services revenues in 2008 to 72.3 percent in 2013.

Wireless services revenues are growing at 14.4 percent over the forecast period, while wireline services, which includes both broadband and narrowband services, grows much more modestly at 2.6 percent.

Heavy Text on iPhone? Not so Accurate

You probably would have guessed this would be the case: User Centric, Inc., a Chicago-based usability consultancy, says iPhone owners can enter text just as rapidly as a BlackBerry user can, but the error rate for iPhone users is higher, and significantly higher for longer messages.

While iPhone owners made an average of 5.6 errors/message on their own phone, hard-key QWERTY owners made an average of 2.1 errors/message on their own phone. Nor does it appear experience makes that much difference. Though User Centric found that experienced iPhone users could type faster, they made as many mistakes as users who never had touched an iPhone before.

Participants who had previously not used either a hard-key QWERTY phone or an iPhone also were significantly faster at entering text messages on the hard-key QWERTY test phone than on the iPhone. These participants also made significantly fewer errors on the hard-key QWERTY than on the iPhone.

Numeric phone owners made an average of 5.4 errors/message on the iPhone, 1.2 errors/message on the QWERTY test phone, and 1.4 errors/message on their own phone.

The study involved data from 60 participants who were asked to enter specific text messages and complete several mobile device tasks. Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners who owned their phones for at least one month. Twenty more participants were owners of traditional hard-key QWERTY phones and another twenty were owners of numeric phones who used the “multi-tap” method of text entry.

Each participant entered six fixed-length text messages on their own phone.
Non-iPhone owners also did six messages each on the iPhone and a phone of the “opposite” type.

The opposite phone for numeric phone owners was a Blackberry and for hard-key QWERTY phone owners it was a numeric Samsung E300 phone. Some participants did additional tasks, including a contact search and add contacts, as time allowed.

iPhone owners entered six text messages on their own phone. They also typed two pangrams – a sentence that includes every letter in the English language at least once – and one corpus – a set of characters that represents the exact letter frequencies of the English language. These tasks were included to ensure that participants experienced the various phone keyboards in a thorough manner. iPhone owners also completed tasks involving text correction, contacts, and visual voicemail

Non-iPhone owners entered a total of 18 text messages – six each on their own phone (hard-key QWERTY or numeric phone), the iPhone, and the “opposite” phone (numeric test phone for QWERTY phone owners, hard-key QWERTY test phone for numeric owners). These participants also entered two pangrams and one corpus on their own phone and completed the contact list tasks if time was remaining.

As it turns out, subjects preferred hard keys for texting. “Not only was their performance better,” says Jen Allen, User Centric user experience specialist, “their rankings and ratings of the phones indicated that they preferred a hard-key QWERTY phone for texting.”

Participants rated the hard-key QWERTY phone highest out of all three phones for ease of text messaging. The hard-key QWERTY phone was also most frequently ranked first out of the three phones by the numeric and QWERTY users. Overall, the hard-key QWERTY phone was ranked first in text messaging by 85 percent of users.

The iPhone was ranked second by 60 percent of these users. None of the hard-key QWERTY phone owners ranked the iPhone first for text messaging and only three numeric phone owners ranked the iPhone first.

In general, hit rates for all keys on the iPhone keyboard were consistently 90 percent or higher. The average hit rate was about 95 percent.

But participants repeatedly pressed certain keys when they intended instead to press other adjacent keys. Several iPhone keys had high error rates: Q (66 percent), P (27 percent), J (22 percent), X (21 percent), and Z (15 percent). In contrast, the median false alarm rate across the iPhone entire keyboard was 5.48 percent.

iPhone keys with the highest false alarm rates were those in close proximity to the five most frequently used letters in the English language: E, T, A, O, and I.

In addition to the high false alarm letters listed above, other false alarm letters included W (10 percent), R (6.5 percent), Y (8.7 percent), and S (6.0 percent), which are also adjacent to high-frequency letters.

B (8.2 percent) also had a high false alarm rate, potentially because of its location near the letter N (which is the sixth most frequent letter, User Centric says.

On the hard-key QWERTY keyboard, the hit rates for all keys were above 97 percent, except for V (96 percent). Additionally, the false alarm rates for keys on this keyboard were below three percent, with the exception of Q (8 percent).

Performance on the keyboard was much better than on the iPhone keyboard. The letters with higher false alarm rates were similar on both keyboards, involving many of the 5 least frequently used letters in the English language, such as Q, Z, V, and B.

Also, the Q and P keys were problematic for users of both keyboards, suggesting that the issue for these keys arises from their location near the top edges of the keyboards.

Participants made different types of errors on the iPhone and the hard-key QWERTY phones.

The majority of errors made on the iPhone involved substituting a nearby letter for the intended letter. However, on the QWERTY phone, participants made more insertion and omission errors than substitution errors.

Also, many of the substitution errors that were made on the QWERTY keyboards involved swapping the order of the correct letters in the words, such as typing “stomr” instead of “storm”.

Compared to hard-key QWERTY devices, the iPhone may fall short for consumers who use on their mobile device heavily for email and text messaging, says User Centric.

The iPhone was clearly associated with higher text entry error rates than a hard-key QWERTY phone.

The finding that iPhone owners made more texting errors on iPhones than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts (on their own QWERTY phones) suggests that the iPhone may have a higher fundamental error rate. The iPhone’s predictive and corrective text features do alleviate some of the errors users make while texting, but it does not catch them all.

The touch screen obviously is an elegant interface for some tasks. It just doesn't appear to be the best interface for all tasks. Mutlitap and touch screen will work fine for many people. Others will find QWERTY keyboards the only way to go.

Nortel Launches Communication Web Services

Nortel has unveiled a Communications Enablement strategy that enables Web services on some Nortel products and provides a software-based environment to simplify the creation of customized communications-enabled applications and business processes.

Nortel also is working with IBM to support Service-Oriented Architecture and Web services that allow customers can integrate advanced communications services into business applications.

Nortel recently unveiled Web Services enablement on the Application Server 5200 and Communication Server 2000 IP Multimedia Softswitch, which allow service providers to offer their enterprise and residential customers interactive multimedia communications tools for their websites based on functionalities such as instant messaging, videoconferencing and presence. Nortel has also rolled out extensive Web Services capabilities on its Contact Center and Advanced Speech platforms.

Nortel also is developing a software-based foundation environment that enables network engaged applications or services across a customer's multi-vendor communications infrastructure. It is expected to be available to customers in the first quarter of 2008, and will provide orchestration of real-time services in a multi-vendor infrastructure environment across multiple domains (enterprise, carrier, wireless and wired).

The intent is to enable the creation of communications-enabled applications that are integrated to customers' business processes.

Vodafone: Pipes, Not Content?

Vodafone had a good quarter. It might also have had an instructive quarter. The stand out? Organic growth of 45 percent in non-messaging data revenue. In fact, non-messaging revenue is now up to a level of half that of messaging (text and multimedia messaging.

"The organic growth in data revenue of 45.1 percent was particularly strong and can be attributed in part to increasing penetration of Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data cards and handheld business devices," the company says. Translation: Wireless notebook computers and BlackBerry style email devices are driving data growth.

Vodafone handhelds in the business category increased by 112.6 percent since September last year and Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data cards grew by 78.9 percent. Assume there are 1.8 million data cards in use and 1.4 million email-centric handhelds as well.

Assume the monthly revenue stream for a notebook card is £35 a month. Assume an email device such as a Blackberry represents £25 a month. That suggests £294 million in revenue from data cards and £165 million from email devices, or £459 million, over a six-month period. EU-wide, Vodafone got something like £843 million in non-messaging data revenue over the same period.

So "pipe" revenues have increased from 46 percent to 54 percent of Vodafone's European data revenues over the last year. "Dumb pipe" trumps "content," in this case.

Another Ridiculous Patent Suit

Technology Patents, a Maryland entity having its principal place of business in Potomac, Md, (address P.O. Box 61220, Potomac, MD 20859, http://www.arismardirossian.com/), has filed a patent infringement suit claiming that 131 carriers, handset suppliers and application providers have infringed a patent covering global transmission of text or short message service (SMS) communications.

Technology Patents alleges that all of the defendants, which include T-Mobile, Vodafone, China Resources Peoples Telephone Company Ltd, AT&T, Samsung, Palm, Microsoft, and Yahoo! (among the 131 defendants), have caused international text or SMS messages to be sent to and from Maryland, thereby resulting in infringement of the asserted patents in Maryland.

TPLLC has asked for a permanent injunction against the defendants, enjoining them from providing international messaging operations and capabilities in the U.S. market.

My views on this, as previously mentioned, are that there is way too much use of "patents" as a business weapon or means of extortion, and too little use of patents as a genuine way to spur the formation of intellectual capital. We aren't talking about one or two "infringers." We are talking virtually the entire global telecommunications industry here. Can that possibly be the case? Or is this yet another example of "prior art" that should never have been given patent status in the first place?

It's crap.

iPhone Not Enterprise Class? Avaya Says It Is

Avaya says its Avaya one-X Mobile unified communications platform will support Apple iPhone. The company also announced the availability of Avaya one-X™ Mobile for RIM, Palm, Java and WAP mobile devices. The first company to announce access to enterprise communications from the iPhone, Avaya now extends this access from the broadest range of mobile devices of any enterprise communications manufacturer today.

Avaya one-X Mobile unites enterprise and mobile networks, allowing the two to work together more effectively while increasing the value of existing investments in communications infrastructure.

With Avaya one-X Mobile, mobile devices from Apple, RIM, Palm, Motorola, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony Ericsson and others become endpoints on the corporate network.

From the iPhone, users will have iPhone optimized access to the Avaya one-X Mobile interface, providing the same ability to make the iPhone their personal remote control for enterprise communications.

Flat Rate Data Roaming from Asian Mobile Providers

A group of Asian mobile carriers early next year will provide traveling users data access for a flat daily fee.

The carriers call themselves the Conexus Mobile Alliance, and include Hong Kong's Hutchison, Indonesia's Indosat, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, the Philippines' Smart, Singapore's StarHub, South Korea's KT Freetel, India's Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., Manager Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) and Taiwan's Far EasTone. The alliance covers 11 territories and 160 million consumers.

All the carriers use the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access data standard operating faster than 3G.

Some of the carriers already have deployed high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), supporting speeds up to 1.8 Mbps. NTT DoCoMo already offers 3.6Mbps, and plans to launch a 7.2M bps service early next year.

The carriers hope the new alliance will boost data usage within Asia.