More Aggressive Prepaid Mobile Efforts

Prepaid mobile calling offers have gotten more competitive over the past year as the overall market continues to saturate. T-Mobile launched FlexPay, providing prepaid customers the same plans as those currently available to contract subscribers.

Verizon Wireless enhanced its pay-as-you-go INpulse plans by creating lower voice and messaging rates. Boost Mobile, meanwhile, introduced Unlimited by Boost to counter prepaid offers from Leap Wireless and MetroPCS.

As carriers and mobile virtual network operators search for new subscribers, they increasingly are targeting the prepaid customer base. Not only are more carriers launching postpaid-like monthly prepaid plans that include buckets of minutes and value-added features, but they are also extending value-added services to standard prepaid services such as messaging buckets and even unlimited messaging.

Carriers have even started selling prepaid customers subsidized handsets, which is something that was unheard of in the industry just 18 months ago.

T-Mobile arguably is the most aggressive of the major carriers in competing with the regional prepaid players. Up to this point AT&T and Verizon Wireless have mostly avoided chasing that customer segment with any vigor.

Broken Internet by 2010?

"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,"
Jim Cicconi, AT&T VP, says, in a speech reported by the Financial Times.

"In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today," Cicconi maintains.

He argues that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" will increase 50-fold by 2015.

"Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute," he says, predicting that "video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today."

eBay Considering Skype Sale?

At the CTIA Wireless meeting recently, people were wondering where some of the Google voice guys were. The speculation was that Google was mulling a purchase of Skype.

So now eBay CEO John Donahoe says in the Financial Times that "if the synergies are strong, we'll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we'll reassess it." Any such decision and sale won't come until the end of this year, though.

Skype had revenues of $126 million for the quarter, up 61 percent year over year, and that it added 33 million new registered users, giving it a total of 309 million registered users around the world. eBay indicated it even hopes to make a profit - for the first time - on Skype this year.

The $4.2 billion eBay acquisition of Skype had been to meld Skype into eBay's core auction businesses. So far, that has proven to be a virtually insurmountable problem.

Bubble Bursting Time Again?

Fearing a reprise of the 2000 catastrophe which wrecked hundreds of tech companies, big firms in the sector are hoarding cash. The broader problem is that these firms don't need it. In the last major contraction cycle, it was all the little startups who died when the capital markets slammed shut.

Something like that, but on a lesser scale, is about to happen again. That means the big cash-flush firms will once again have a chance to snap up assets while some of the smaller startups simply vaporize.

Of course, it takes less capital to innovate these days, compared to 2000. But we are in for a winnowing period, nevertheless. I don't think anybody thinks we collectively are in a "bubble" of manic proportions. Wiser heads now prevail just about everywhere.

The similarity is simply that there's lots of innovation, but with a period of capital stringency upon us, many of the innovators won't be able to sustain their development efforts. The lack of access to capital won't kill innovation. Perhaps innovation won't even slow in ways that are industry damaging, overall.

Amazon, eBay and Google were among the notable successes of the late-1990s wave of innovations. One would have a hard time coming up with a similar list of financially-successful firms among the most-recent generation of innovators.

History doesn't necessarily repeat. So we are not seeing an "Internet bubble" all over again. But cycles of capital availability are important. Let the winnowing begin.

Transfer Money Using Your Mobile

Obopay says customers can now use their existing bank accounts to send and receive money using their mobile phones. With Obopay’s mobile money transfer, non-customers can pick up payments without signing up for Obopay.

These innovations make it easier than ever for any bank customer to conveniently send and receive payments from their mobile phones.

By linking an existing checking or saving account — at any American bank — with Obopay, customers can send money directly from and receive money into that account using any mobile phone.

Anyone can pick up money received by having it deposited directly into their existing bank account or by requesting a check, without having to sign up with Obopay.

“Obopay’s mission has always been to provide the best tools possible to conveniently get, send and spend money from any mobile phone,” said Obopay Chief Executive Officer, Carol Realini. “Now we provide it directly from any bank account."

Many new applications just take a while to get traction. Mobile payments seem to be one of them, at least in the U.S. market. Japan has been the model, but over the years there have been significant cultural differences between regions of the world that could affect market adoption.

A decade ago it remained true that Europeans preferred debit cards while Americans preferred credit cards. But as with the text messaging habit, U.S. consumer behavior is starting to resemble that of other regions. Mobile payments still have some ways to go before becoming a natural habit for U.S. users.

80:20 Rule Holds in Rural Markets

Wireless "unlimited" plans exist for one reason: to retain the loyalty of the heaviest users--synonymous in many ways with "best customers." But that same sort of thinking increasingly should be seen in the broadband services and wireline customer business as well.

John Rose, president of the rural telephone trade group OPASTCO, says not only that fiber to the home is coming for rural telcos, but that symmetrical bandwidth is coming as well. But that doesn't mean every customer will buy every service. That's a big change for rural telcos, who are used to nearly universal take rates.

Some providers already are finding that even when triple play services are available, a third of customers only buy voice, a third take video and voice while a third take all three services, he notes.

So even on the wireline side of the house, high-end customers are emerging. So it will be really important for rural telcos to take care of those best customers, Rose says.

IPTV: Barking up the Wrong Tree?

Analysts at Accenture say service providers might be taking the wrong route in emphasizing IPTV and video on demand when the future might well favor over-the-top video viewing. Not many service providers agree, based on where money is being spent today.

It is hard to argue with survey findings Accenture points to: an overwhelming percentage of global consumers want to download, stream or otherwise consume video content in non-linear fashion.

That isn't to say all consumption will be non-linear. But to the extent consumers increasingly want to watch what they want, when they want it, Accenture analysts think over-the-top could well become the preferred choice.

3G iPhone to Download at 7.2 Mbps?

Is it possible the new Apple iPhone might run as fast as 7.2 Mbps in the downlink? Some chip-level sleuths think so. The Infineon chipset some think will power the communications link for the 3G version can support 7.2 Mbps in the downstream.

Live recording and two-way video calls also ought to be possible, providing Apple adds a front camera and perhaps video chat capabilities.

For a mobile smartphone, that would be ludicrous speed.

Grande Communications: Multitasking on One Screen

Grande Communications, a San Marcos, Texas-based broadband provider, is launching a multiplexing service that allows viewers to watch as many as five discrete live video feeds on a single screen.

GrandeVision will launch in Austin, at no additional charge for its digital cable customers. Users will be able to use their remote controls to navigate between channels and interact with Web video and banner ads.

Grande provides Internet, local and long-distance telephone and digital cable in parts of Austin, Corpus Christi, suburban northwest Dallas, Midland, Odessa, San Antonio, San Marcos and Waco.

Sports fans will go crazy!

Telcos, Satellite Providers Picking Up Customers

In any competitive market with a leading incumbent and many challengers, one normally would assume that the direction of market share shifts would be away from the incumbent and towards challengers, assuming those challengers are reasonably competent at crafting offers and delivering on their promises.

And that is just about what ChangeWave survey suggests is happening in the mass market video arena. A February survey suggests that video consumers who plan to switch providers are disproportionately switching to new providers.

Asked the names of their planned new providers, about 30 percent said they would switch to DirecTV while 28 percent said they would switch to Verizon FiOS. About 14 percent said they would switch to at&t while 10 percent said they would switch to Dish Network.

That's 38 percent choosing satellite providers and 44 percent choosing telephone company video services.

Mobile Web: 38% Euro Usage by 2013

Analysts at Forrester Research say 38 percent of mobile phone users in Western Europe will use mobile Internet services by 2013. That's 125 million Europeans accessing the Web regularly from their mobile phone, triple the number that do so today.

As that happens, something will start happening with mobile advertising, no matter how undeveloped the art is at the moment. Forrester reports that 83 percent of marketers it surveyed recent believe mobile advertising will become more effective over the next three years, despite a finding that just seven percent of users "trust" mobile ads.

That's just the nature of the business these days. Communications service providers are in the midst of transformation efforts that require them to replace most of their current revenue with new sources. Do they--does anybody--have absolute crystal clear vision on precisely how all that will happen? No. Will it happen? Yes.

Is that quite a lot of uncertainty? Yes. But will service providers get there? Yes. In that regard, the communications business is no different than lots of other businesses these days. Most of the products lots of companies will be selling in 10 years haven't been invented yet.

How Many WiMAX Providers

A business associate asked how many WiMAX operators might be active globally. Maravedis says they have profiles on about 256 operators globally, and I assume there are others possibly too small to have been profiled yet, or who have not yet begun operation. Given the large number of small independent wireless ISPs just in the United States, it seems likely many will kick the tires on WiMAX gear.

Amazon Adds Elastic Compute Cloud Persistent Storage

Amazon is adding persistent storage for users of its Elastic Compute Cloud. These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you'd like), Amazon says.

Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; developers can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance, Amazon says. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.

Users also will also be able to perform "snapshot" backups of your volumes to Amazon Simple Storage Service, a feature that can be used to create new volumes or to roll back stored data to an earlier point in time.

"The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating world-wide," says Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO. "Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications."

Both of the new innovations make it easier to envision use of cloud computing resources as the way to host Web-accessed applications for just about any sort of application, especially globally.

AOL Ad Net Hits 91% of U.S. Internet Audience in March

Each of the top 15 ad networks delivered ads to at least half of the total U.S. Internet audience in March, says ComScore. Platform-A, the AOL ad network that combines Advertising.com, Quigo and Tacoda, served ads to 170 million U.S. Internet users in March, representing 91 percent of the total U.S. online population, to rank as the top ad network.

That's not to say 91 percent saw or interacted with every ad, but that the network placed them. That's serious reach, on at least one dimension.

On a stand-alone basis, Advertising.com would rank as the top ad network with a reach of more than 167 million Internet users. Yahoo! Network ranked second with a reach of 160 million, followed by Google Ad Network (152 million) and Specific Media (140 million).

As ad networks have expanded their reach and influence online, a new crop of ad networks has surfaced to serve specific demographic and behavioral target segments, says comScore

Snap Shots Network delivers ads to users of Snap.com’s Snap Shots. The network reached more than 18 million U.S. Internet users in March. Widgetbucks Network delivers contextually relevant ads through a widget, and had reach of 9.5 million, while NeoEdge Game Network, which delivers ads through games, had a reach of nearly 1 million.

Other ad networks on this list target specific audience segments, such as HispanoClick by Batanga (Hispanics), Indieclick (young influencers or “tastemakers”) and The Heavy Men’s Network (men).

Waiting for FiOS

We haven't seen any doorhangers or other outbound marketing yet, but it appears, given the recent activity by Verizon-branded trucks in the neighborhood, plowing orange conduit into the ground, that Verizon is laying an optical distribution network in Reston, Va., presumably in preparation for rolling out FiOS service.

We already buy Verizon voice and digital subscriber line at the Reston location, so what will happen--absolutely, positively--is that a new Verizon video and FiOS Internet access account will be purchased, as soon as we get the opportunity to sign the check. Verizon will, of course, lose a DSL account while Comcast loses at least one video RGU.

These days, consumer services are akin to trench warfare, and this is how the war is fought: one RGU at a time.