Why Open is Good for Mobile Service Providers

Recent efforts by Apple and Google to reshape the wireless industry ultimately will help mobile operators and handset vendors, In-Stat argues. The reason is simple: in a business environment where partners and third-party developers now are essential for rapid development of new applications, the more-open and standardized frameworks will allow for faster rates of innovation, even if carriers find the change a bit unsettling.

The current telco-centered approach to developing Internet mobile applications has created an ecosystem for application developers that is complex, fragmented, difficult to enter, and offers a high risk of failure, the high-tech market research firm says.

Look for early examples in the location-aware advertising area, especially as revenue sharing models come into play.

Jajah, eMobile Launch IP Mobile Voice Service

Jajah and Japan-based eMobile have launched an IP-only mobile device, the EM-ONE, allowing users to make and receive voice-over-mobile-broadband calls without a traditional mobile phone connection.

The Jajah Mobile software uses the data channel, a HSDPA connection, to deliver voice services. In 2007 Jajah and eMobile released an outbound-only IP-mobile service, which attracted thousands of Japanses users. Now eMobile customers can not only use their device to make calls to more than 200 global destinations, but for the first time also to receive calls.

For about $5 a month, eMobile customers can purchase a Direct Inward Dialing number, for their Sharp EM·ONE Ultra Mobile Device running Windows Mobile 6, which turns their device into a fully functioning mobile phone, without a cellular connection, beginning August 1, 2008.

Analysts at Ovum predict that, by 2010, 77 percent of the voice connections in the Asia-Pacific region will be mobile and that the region will host over two billion fixed and mobile voice connections, 42 percent of the global total. Ovum’s annual voice service forecasts mobility to be the key growth technology in the voice market for the foreseeable future.

In addition to low cost long-distance and international calls, calls between eMobile customers are free and transmited over a pure SIP connection.

Digital Living Room Market Still a Bit of a Niche

While data-centric home networking is mainstream, the market for Internet-connected TV devices is still nascent. Early adopters of networked digital home services today are found, as you might expect, in higher-income homes.

The target connected digital living room consumer household has household income between $100,000 and $150,000, says MultiMedia Intelligence. These households typically have children and are located in a metropolitan area on the East or West Coast.

So Much for UGC Advertising

Would-be film makers hoping to make a little money creating content and posting that content on video sites will do exactly that" generate a little money.

Though user-generated video will continue to account for close to half of total online video streams between 2008 and 2013, UGC content will produce no more than four percent of ad-related online video revenue at any time during this period, according to The Diffusion Group.

In fact, UGV mostly will be an indirect way of drawing more viewers to professional online video sites capable of generating sustainable ad-related revenue, TDG says.

According to Mugs Buckley, UGV currently accounts for 42 percent of online video streams, yet generates less than four percent of video ad-related revenue. Conversely, professional online video (including both short-clip and long-form content) accounts for 58 percent of streams and 96 percent of ad-related revenue, a reality unlikely to change over the next five years.

So much for the unrealistic hope that amateurs are going to reshape the content business.

Why I Won't Be Defecting from the Windows Ecosystem

Windows Vista operating system has been a challenge for many of us. It is not a secret that lots of us prefer using XP, and will continue to do so for a while. That doesn't mean we aren't planning to switch.

To be sure, some Microsoft users will find they can switch to another operating system without losing much. But many of us will not find that appealing.

As somebody who gets asked to beta test new applications and services, I just find that running XP or Vista is a business requirement. If beta versions of new applications routinely are made available on some other operating system, that is a different story. If that does not happen, as the saying goes, "resistance is futile." One sticks with the operating system the rest of the ecosystem uses, and so far, in my case that means a Microsoft platform.

Many of the problems some of us encountered early on were incompatibilities with other devices and applications that worked fine using XP, and stopped working when Vista first launched. That doesn't mean we think those problems will not be fixed. They are being fixed. And the time will come when any application or device that worked with XP will work with Vista. Problem fixed. But it will take some time before that happens. How much time might be an issuse for some applications. But Microsoft's ecosystem will get all that fixed.

So everybody who remains on XP, sooner or later, will migrate to Vista. XP support will be discontinued, Vista support will be ubiquitous. It's a little like the reason end users are migrating to IP-based phone systems. All considerations of new features and lower costs aside, support for legacy TDM systems will some day end. So, going forward, everybody will move to IP-based systems.

Refreshingly, Microsoft owns up to the early issues. "We had an ambitious plan," says Brad Brooks, corporate vice president, Windows Consumer Product Marketing. "We made some significant investments around security in this product."

"And you know what, those investments, they broke some things," he says. "They broke a lot of things. We know that. "

Speaking to application partners, Brooks was honest and direct. "We know it caused you a lot of pain in front of your customers, in front of our customers."

"And it got a lot of customers thinking, and even yourselves and our partners thinking, “Hey, is Windows Vista a generation that I want to make an investment in?” he adds. So forget about the flash. Vista was designed around Internet security, and Brooks says it succeeded in that effort.

"There's been 20 percent fewer security problems on Windows Vista than XP in 2007," he says. "Windows Vista is the safest OS in terms of security vulnerabilities in its first year of operation, safer than any other commercial or Open Source OS in its launch."

"When you run Windows Vista you're 60 percent less likely to get malware on your machine than if you use Windows XP SP 2," he says.

"It is only getting better as we move forward, because Windows Vista, it's an investment in the long term," he says.

"The same architectural changes that we put in that caused the heartaches moving to Windows Vista are things that we are going to carry forward into Windows 7," he says. "And we are going to target roughly the same hardware specifications that we did when Windows Vista launched."

That means developers can invest in Windows Vista applications knowing they will run the same way in Windows 7.

That was the right thing to say, and I expect it is what Microsoft will do. Looking back on the specific incompatibility issues I encountered with Vista, it was those incompatibilities--now being fixed--that were the issue, not the particularities of Vista.

So despite the fact that I have chosen to run XP on my latest machines, not Vista, that does not mean I will not upgrade to Vista, or Windows 7. I might hope not to be in the first wave of adopters of Windows 7, but that's just a practice many of us have adopted over the years when a new OS is rolled out.

Microsoft does not have to worry about me defecting from the ecosystem. It does have to worry about its ecosystem defecting, though. So far, I detect no movement of that sort. For that reason, I am sure I'll be moving to Vista. The ecosystem is hard to ignore.

3G Smart Phone Battery Life: iPhone Leads

The battery life on Apple's new 3G iPhone isn't great, but it beats that of other 3G smartphones we've seen, say testers at PC World's Test Center. In the study's standard talk-time battery life test, an iPhone, on average, ran 5 hours and 38 minutes, a performance PC World deems "fair."

The original iPhone, which ran on AT&T's slower EDGE networ, lasted 10 hours of our test. But the 3G iPhone beat out the rest of the current 3G smartphone pack, most of which fell shy of the five-hour mark that's the cutoff between a word score of fair and poor in PC World's performance ratings.

The HTC Touch Dual had an average talk time of 5 hours, 18 minutes. The AT&T Tilt lasted 4 hours, 47 minutes, trailed by the Pantech Duo at 4:46; the Motorola Q9 Global at 4:43; and the Palm Treo 750 at an abysmal 3:53.

The iPhone 3G also beat out competitors on Sprint and Verizon's EVDO mobile broadband networks, including the Palm Centro (4:19) and the Samsung Instinct (5:33), PC World says.

1 Million 3G iPhones Sold in 3 Days

Apple sold a million 3G iPhones in three days after its launch on Friday, July 11. iPhone 3G is now available in 21 countries—Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US—and will go on sale in France on July 17.

The App Store also experienced more than 10 million application downloads in less than a week.

IPTV Subs Increase 53%

IPTV subscribers have more than doubled for the second year running with an increase of 53.14 percent in the 12 months to 31 March 2008, and now stand at 15 million, according to Point Topic.

The statistics also show that worldwide broadband subscribers have reached over 370 million with DSL remaining the most dominant access technology with 65 percent of the world’s subscribers. However, fiber subscriptions have risen by 33 percent since the beginning of 2007, with over 10 million people connected to a fiber network. This increase in fiber subscriptions may be attributed to the increased popularity of bandwidth hungry services such as IPTV. However, the leading technology delivering IPTV today is ADSL2plus, with 12,049,817 subscribers.

Europe has over 8.4 million subscribers, making it the strongest market in terms of growth and total subscriber numbers.

DSL continues to be the most popular access technology with close to 240 million of the world’s subscribers. Cable subscriptions rates have slowed to 18 percent growth rate, while subscribers on FTTx rose 33 percent in the last year.

Mobile Phone Sales Slow Globally

Mobile phone sales began to slow in the second quarter, causing Gartner analysts to lower growth forecasts. said it cut its forecast for cellphone market growth in 2008 to 10 percent to 11 percent. Gartner previously had expected 10 percent to 15 percent growth.

"In the last month however, the economic environment started to negatively impact emerging markets as well as mature," Carolina Milanesi, head of mobile device research at Gartner, says.

It's iPhone Day

The App Store seems to be getting raves. So the issue is whether Apple can do for third party mobile apps what iTunes has done for music. So far games seem to dominate interest. But if other apps start to get traction, lots of entities will benefit.

Carriers will sell lots more data plans. Third generation and fourth generation networks will have a shot at creating revenue models for mobile Internet services and investments. Open platforms will get a boost, though international mobile calling prices will start to fall faster.

Innovation requires small companies. It also appears to require sponsorship of big companies. Apple and Google come to mind. But in sometimes halting fashion, so too the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

ISPs Agree to Block Some Content

AT&T will purge all servers containing child pornography Web sites and block user access to newsgroups that center around pornographic material relating to children. AOL, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint also have signed agreements with the state of New York doing the same.
The agreements point to the complicated nature of "blocking," "filtering," "traffic shaping," even anti-virus and anti-spam measures. In principle, most people would likely say they are in favor of "free speech" and therefore "no blocking" of Internet content.

In practice, there are lots of reasons nearly everyone would block some traffic, especially when it is harmful. The carriers have agreed to block some content lots of people think justified. That illustrates the complexity of Internet or other freedoms.

In other cases, as on most college campuses, though most people would say they favor free speech, some expressions of clearly political speech are deemed so odious the claim is made that there is "no freedom" for the expression of the clearly-political ideas, even though the same people might loudly protest other real or imagined threats to "free speech."
More than 40 years ago, in 1964, a "free speech movement" started on the campus of University of California at Berkeley in response to a ban on political activities. We may debate the later consequences, but there's little doubt rights of free speech were involved.

And 40 years later we may wonder how well those concepts are honored. These days, it is not university administrators but students and faculty that sometimes actively move to suppress ideas they disagree with. It is quite a turn of events.
The point, I suppose, is that defending free speech takes different forms in different eras. The term "political correctness" describes the current context within which free speech has to be evaluated. It might be helpful to remember that threats to free speech, historically and currently, have both left-wing and a right-wing sources. I don't think most people think left-wing suppression is any better than right-wing suppression.

I suspect most people think the carriers are doing the right thing. It's a legitimate thing to debate what free speech means in the current era. Strict constructionists might argue the "speech" to be protected is directly political speech, not any utterance, of any sort.

Carriers might take some heat for compliance with New York's rules. But it is the right thing to do. Rights are one thing. Responsibilities are another. Protecting the vulnerable among us might conflict with some notions of freedom.

In Catholic philosophy, freedom is the right to do the right thing. Ability to make a free choice is the issue, not the nature of the choice. Sometimes it might be the right thing to limit some expressions.
That isn't the same thing as blocking specific applications, or classes of applications, necessarily. But that's what makes net neutrality such a difficult concept.

So That's Why Internet Access Vaporized Yesterday

Workaround to Sudden Loss of Internet Access Problem

Date Published : 8 July 2008

Date Last Revised : 9 July 2008

Overview : Microsoft Update KB951748 is known to cause loss of internet access for ZoneAlarm users on Windows XP/2000. Windows Vista users are not affected.

Impact : Sudden loss of internet access

Platforms Affected : ZoneAlarm Free, ZoneAlarm Pro, ZoneAlarm AntiVirus, ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware, and ZoneAlarm Security Suite

Where in Media Ecosystem does Google Sit?

There's absolutely no doubt that tier one communications service provider executives "fear" Google more than they fear competition from cable operators. For the most part, the concern is that Google (and other Web contestants) have the ability to "suck the air out of the room" as far as creating value for end users that translates into revenue and creates business models.

Nor is there much doubt that communications and media are ceasing to be two distinct businesses, already overlapping and in some cases destined to merge. Add in consumer electronics and you have a volatile and unstable business environment.

Volatile in many ways because traditional industry and segment boundaries are being erased. There's little argument to be made that Google is part of the media ecosystem, for example.

The tough part is figuring out the extent to which Google itself has become media. It's a hard question to answer because Google now has operations in the ad placement business (Web, newspapers, radio), which makes it part of the classic "ad agency" business, owns YouTube, which makes it part of the video business, and blog hosting, which makes it a distribution channel, akin to a magazine, radio or TV station or programing network.

If the definition of "media" is content supported in whole or part by advertising, then search now is "media." Where Google has stretched our notions is that it is a "non-traditional" form of media and also is part of the "advertising agency" business: it creates media and also places the ads.

That's the broader problem service providers grapple with as well. It is hard to see how far network-based businesses can move in the direction of becoming media. It is hard to foretell how much "over the top" distribution will displace any existing distribution method and business model. And it is hard to estimate how network services providers will be able to create new revenue out of relationships with Web-based services and applications.

The monetization issues Google is having with YouTube, and the relatively small sums it now generates in the newspaper and radio ad placement business, mirror the steps network service providers also are taking to capture space in adjacent markets such as video distribution.

This is more like a 10-year process than a five-year process, one suspects. And though advertising today represents a relatively small proportion of cable operator revenues, at about four percent of total revenue.

You might wonder why cable operators now are spending so much time on targeted advertising efforts, then. The thinking is that global ad spending is going to keep shifting, towards the Internet and mobile formats. Of the current $510 billion spent on advertising, there is general consensus that newspaper share, 15.9 percent or about $132 billion, is highly vulnerable, as share has been shrinking for more than a couple of decades. The other big bucket of spending is television, which gets 37.6 percent of all ad spending, or about $192 billion.

Cable operators now are thinking they can grow a new ad format by taking share from newspaper and other TV media. As TV and newspapers between them represent $324 billion, or 64 percent of all advertising, you can see the attraction.

To the extent that network service providers more familiar with voice and data also are in the entertainment video game, and also have the same targeting opportunities as cable operators do, it is fairly easy to predict growth in targeted ad capabilities at some point.

Google is media. So, ultimately are telcos, in their roles as video and Internet service providers. the only issue is how much in that direction telcos will move.

Madison River, Comcast

So what does "Madison River" have in common with "Comcast"? Both might wind up being examples of Internet service providers formally punished for blocking Internet traffic.

There are reports Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will recommend that Comcast be fined for previous traffic-shaping practices that delayed peer-to-peer traffic. The vote is scheduled for Aug. 1, 2008.

87% U.K. Multi-Channel Video Penetration

Multi-channel video entertainment service penetration in the U.K. hit 87.2 percent in March 2008, Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, reports. To the extent there are differences between the U.S. and U.K. markets, it is the greater market share held by satellite services in the U.K. market, compared to the U.S., where cable is a more-important factor.