Mobile Social Networking Forecast

In-Stat forecasts over 229.5 million mobile subscribers globally could be using mobile social networking services by 2012. Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, In-Stat says.

Carriers will benefit from wider use of data plans, to be sure. But the more important insight probably is that the handset becomes the focus of attachment. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life, In-Stat argues. If so, carrier brands will be less important than the handset brands.

"The critical issue most mobile social networking site and application developers struggle with is how to make money with their services," says Jill Meyers, In-Stat analyst. "There are three primary methods of revenue generation for mobile social networking applications- advertising, subscription services, and premium upgrades."

Little of that potential revenue is available directly to network service providers, though. And it remains unclear whether social networking actually is the foundation for a revenue stream or simply a really important feature.

Digital Savvy Dangers

Research from Scarborough Research shows that early adopters are different from other consumers. "Digital savvy" consumers use more technology and have more money, than the typical mass market consumer.

Cable operators never make the mistake of getting hung up worrying about early adopters. Everything they do is tuned for the average consumer, the sort of "other side of the chasm" customer technologists have to learn to deal with to achieve real mass market success.

It is important to note what sorts of experiences are getting traction, of course. It's just a different matter to tailor those experiences for the great mass of consumers who will not put up with much inconvenience when using new applications and services.

Lots of entrepreneurs fail when they don't clearly understand the differences between the bleeding edge early adopters and the real mass market.

Email Still Tops for Adult Consumers

Two-thirds of adult respondents said they preferred e-mail for communicating with businesses, say researchers at Ipsos.

Just as many—and this might be the important part—say they expected to continue preferring email five years from now.

The issue is how other younger age cohorts will adapt to the email-centric culture prevalent in business. One suggests they'll adapt quickly, even as they push for use of additional tools.

TiVo to Rent Disney Movies

TiVo says its subscribers will soon be able to rent Disney movies through their DVRs, as part of a service offered in conjunction with CinemaNow, NewTeeVee reports.

Content will be offered in both standard and high definition and will be available for a 24-hour rental period.

"Large" Suite Does the Job

Not all of us enjoy messing around with technology; backing up files, restoring software, tweaking application settings, defragmenting our hard drives and so forth. In that regard, I ran a scan using Large Software's "PC Tune-Up" suite on my XP machine.

The Suite quickly found about 504 problems, most of them said to be "serious" or "moderately serious." The dashboard information was clear, intuitive and the scan seemed to run faster than I recall other similar suites operating. Again, this was not a controlled test, so I can't speak to how other programs might have performed.

I will say the application executed much faster than I was expecting, especially in the defragmentation phase of the tune-up.

As service providers look to avoid "dumb pipe" status, supplying enterprise, peformance optimization would seem a logical place to extend the range of services such as anti-virus, firewall and anti-spam functions many Internet service providers now supply as an integral part of the access service.

The other thing is that some services are more "logical" parts of service bundles. An enriched software experience that improves Web and Internet performance probably will be seen by users as a logical extension of basic access.

Also, as the actual user experience migrates beyond a service provider network interface (a router in a small business setting, IP phones in an enterprise or mid-sized business setting or the PC in a consumer application, service providers of necessity will be seen as the "entity to call" when something isn't functioning properly.

If you can't avoid the calls to your customer service center, you might as well extend service and support to the actual end user device. Most of us by now have discovered the "dueling applications" problem when loading any new software. A hosted approach should eliminate that problem.

That's not to say I experienced a single issue using the downloaded version of the software. Set-up was completely uneventful and the application executed better than I expected. The observation is simply that distribution as part of a bundled "access" service would make sense.

Lots of us just want to do things. We don't want to be system administrators. This should help.

Average Capacity Prices Dropped 10 to 20% in 2007

The average price of wholesale circuits in most major markets dipped 10 to 20 percent in 2007, according to TeleGeography. For many, that would be considered price stability.

As price declines have moderated, international bandwidth demand has remained strong, growing at a compounded annual rate of 52 percent over the past five years, TeleGeography adds.

But revenue growth remains elusive for many wholesale network operators, the company says. A key reason lies in bandwidth buyers' changing purchase patterns: they simply are substituting bigger pipes for smaller pipes, paying more money in aggregate but at lower prices per megabit per second of capacity.

Companies that may have purchased a few 155 Mbps STM-1/OC-3 circuits five years ago are now opting for 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps wavelengths. These large circuits are far cheaper in terms of the price per Mbps of capacity than the smaller circuits.

"The effective price per megabit per second of capacity sold is falling a lot faster than nominal circuit prices, themselves," says TeleGeography Research Director Robert Schult. "Carriers need to sell ever larger volumes just to maintain stable revenues."

Which Devices Will Drive Mobile Web?

Given a choice between believing what people say they will do and evidence of what they have done, I've always found it is more helpful to believe what they have done is a better predictor of what they will do in the future.

So consider a bit of survey data which seems to have the ring of authenticity and some purchase behavior that might bear on the development of mobile Web devices.

The clear winner in an In-Stat survey of U.S. consumers about preferred mobile Web devices is the smart phone, the research firm says. Nearly half of the respondents said they preferred the smart phone as a mobile Internet device.

Fewer than 10 percent indicated a preference for the capabilities of mobile Internet devices, such as an ultra-mobile PC or a mobile Internet device. In some ways that simply makes sense. The mobile device most people carry is a mobile phone. Given the ability to add Web access from that device, one would expect most people to say that is the preferred, "use every day and everywhere" device.

The issue is that consumers rarely if ever provide decent input on applications or devices they have not seen or used. Survey responses would seem to carry an awful lot of that sort of data.

About one quarter of users like the idea of the ultra-mobile PC as long as it does not involve sacrificing the capabilities of a full-function laptop. But few users have them, at least so far.

Those showing an interest in MIDs were unclear about how they would use these devices or where to buy them. Again, there is a lack of awareness and experience with such devices, which make the feedback less useful.

The main objection for non-users of mobile data technology in general, and smart phones in particular, is that users are skeptical of the benefits of mobile data and view it as a “luxury.”

On the other hand, there is data gathered from Finland mobile operators suggesting very strongly that it is in fact PCs that drive most of the mobile data traffic.

It might be that today's mobile Web users primarily are users with characteristics different from the ultimate base of mobile Web users. That might be the case for 3G data card users and iPhone users, for example.

The point simply is that we won't know what users actually will do until they have ample chance to see and use mobile devices capable of using the Web. There is ample evidence that iPhone users have mobile Web usage profiles astoundingly different from users of other Internet-capable mobile devices.

Enterprise VoIP Winners

Pike and Fischer analysts predict that AT&T, Verizon and Qwest will capture the biggest share of large enterprises as VoIP customers, but will face competition in the SMB space from a variety of new entrants.

The big issue is whether the former RBOCs also will have the same success in the consumer market, despite early dominance by cable operators.

This analyst thinks they will.

Microsoft Expects 50% Mobile Software Growth

Microsoft Corp. expects global unit sales of its Windows Mobile software for mobile phones to grow at least 50 percent per year in fiscal years 2008 and 2009, driven by smart phone demand.

"Fifty percent growth is the minimum," Eddie Wu, Microsoft managing director, told Reuters.

He said Microsoft expects to sell 20 million units in its 2007 to 2008 fiscal year ending in June 2008, and expects to grow at least 50 percent annually over the next two years.

Web 2.0: Features, Not Business Models?

Lots of valuable features do not provide a foundation for fleshed-out business model, many Web 2.0 entrpreneurs seem to be finding.

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers, the Financial Times reports.

“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, says Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures. That's just part of the innovation process, as you know if you were part of the Web 1.0 boom of the late-1990s.

But features often are an important and long-lasting effect, even when completely new business models are not built. Email arguably hasn't created a stand-alone business model, for the most part, yet it has radically changed user behavior and expectations.

Social networking appears to be one of the lasting fruits of the current Web 2.0 wave, no matter what happens with most of the companies attempting to make a business out of it.

U.K. Rural PC Penetration Tops Urban

It appears that U.K. PC use in rural areas, use of Internet access and broadband access rates are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, U.K. regulator Ofcom reports.

Some will note that unbundling of access loops is at 100 percent in the U.K. market. What that effectively means is that every potential customer has access to broadband, eliminating uptake differentials limited by physical unavailability.

Get 'Em in the Gate, They'll Spend in the Park

Six Flags says spending by customers inside its theme parks increased 13 percent over prior quarters, in the fourth quarter of 2007, the first quarter of 2008 and the first two months of the second quarter.

With just about everybody now skittish about the impact of economic sluggishness on consumer spending, that's not only reassuring for Six Flags, but a metaphor for what service providers might consider as well.

"Getting people inside the park" in that case means creating and sustaining a relationship, with virtually any single service. Once that is done, there is an opportunity to sell other things. In Six Flags' case that is food, beverages and souvenirs.

For service providers, it is an array of other services, applications or usage upon which partner revenue streams can be created. An entirely new "targeted" advertising business might be created on the back of widespread "video on demand" or "content on demand" offerings, for example.

It isn't yet clear how current charging mechanisms might change, and there is lots of standardization work to be done so potential advertisers can buy what they want conveniently. Not to mention the "danger" that Google and other application providers get there first.

Still, the analogy, though imperfect, is instructive.

42 Mbps iPhone?

An unnamed Telstra executive tells Australia-based ChannelNews that the Telstra version of the Apple iPhone will run at download speeds as high as 42 Mbps.

"We know what is coming we have seen the new device and it will be available on our network as soon as it is launched in the USA," the executive is reported as promising. "By Christmas this phone will be capable of 42 Mbps which will make it faster than a lot of broadband offerings and the fastest iPhone on any network in the world."

Whether fully correct in all details or not is less important than the ultimate reality of the claim. Wireless providers indeed are readying networks that will run that fast, and faster in the future.

Mobile devices capable of communicating that fast might not be as disruptive as mobile voice threatens tethered voice in some markets.

The larger issue is that once mobile broadband connections run that fast, and ultimately faster, some percentage of single-household users might well find mobile broadband a suitable replacement for fixed connections.

My gut level expectation, though, would be that most mobile broadband connections will supplement rather than supplant fixed broadband. There simply are too many other interesting reasons to maintain a fixed broadband connection.

Mobile voice does not suffer from form factor issues that make it a convenient replacement for tethered voice, for example.

Mobile broadband might cannibalize fixed broadband in some cases, but logically as a substitute for PC connections.

An iPhone operating that fast will enable sessions that largely are supplemental to fixed broadband.

SureWest: Broadband Exceeds Telecom

Make no mistake: transforming a legacy "telco" into a "broadband" company is tough, expensive, often-slow work. But SureWest Communications, for the first time, now makes more money from broadband revenues than from traditional telecom segment revenues.

A couple of observations. SureWest lumps its out-of-region services in the "broadband" category, so the growth is not all in-region broadband access connections and video, though both are growing.

Still, the milestone is important. SureWest is in some ways a "classic" smaller, independent "telco." But it has invested heavily in fiber-to-home networks based on Ethernet standards and IPTV. It has no mobile assets and has "bet the farm" on broadband.

But the strategic implications are impotant. It has gone "out of region" in an important way. Most smaller entities, as well as tier one providers, now find that out-of-region growth is crucial.

Also, business customer revenues are important. Over time, as it faces heightened competition from cable companies in the consumer space, SureWest has found business customers a more important customer segment.

That will be true for most smaller providers that cannot rely on mobility or mobile broadband to fuel growth.

Will Millennials Use Email?

Email is not going away, isn’t dead, and won’t be dead for a long time, says Media Post's Loren McDonald. The statement might seem odd, except it occurs after a panel of college-age Internet users at the Email Insider Summit.

One of the difficulties, when trying to predict how enterprise communicatons might change as Millennials enter the workforce, is precisely the fact that most of them are not in the active, full-time workforce.

Just as a "lone eagle" professional does not need a full enterprise-grade, premises-based phone system, so a college student has no need for one either. So it is hard to extrapolate from one stage of life pursuits to another than requires collaboration with other people in an existing social ecosystem, with established rules for communicating.

Today, the commonplace and accurate observation is that instant messaging and text messaging are preferred over email. But pre-workforce users will change as their life circumstances change.

That doesn't mean "nothing important will change." At a minimum, Millennials will retain the IM and texting habit for purely "personal" communications, even if they get used to email for business-related communications.

Beyond that, the additional implications are hard to predict.