Life throws curve balls.

Life throws curve balls.  Patriots don't get the perfect season. Red Sox come from behind to keep their title hopes alive. It happens. 

Enterprise Mobility Demand Still Growing

Roughly half of all  business and consumer communications spending goes to wireless services. But there appear to be relatively-distinct niches within the enterprise mobile user base. The "information worker" segment, including sales, information technology and managers use real-time data, email, calendar and portal accessed applications, say reserachers at Forrester Research. There are lots of devices used and IT staff tends to have limited control over them.

"Task workers" such as supply chain personnel, medical personnel, manufacturers and others using line-of-business applications on a single device such as inventory scanners, data entry tablets. IT tends to have significant control over the limited range of supported devices. 

But there is an emerging demand from "wannabes," including just about any worker not represented in one of the two other segments. Wannabees likely will use a wide range of devices for email, calendar, product information management and basic portal access, for work and personal uses. IT will have to support a wide range of devices and will have limited control over them, Forrester argues.

So far, though 57 percent of smart phone users engage in work--related phone calls, 

48 percent check email and 42 percent acess the Internet or a company Intranet for work related information. Some 35 percent of users say they use their smart phones "only for personal purposes." Keep in mind that nearly seven out of 10 enterprise mobility users pay for their own service. 

At the moment, 69 percent of employees pay for their voice service, while 23 percent have mobile paid for by the employer, Forrester says. About eight percent of workers cost share with their employers. 

About 59 percent of employees pay for their own mobile data services. About 34 percent have their mobile data service paid for by their employers. About seven percent of workers have a cost share agreement with their employer. 

What Does AT&T Do For An Encore?

Executives at AT&T have to be spending time thinking about what to do when the Apple iPhone ceases to be an AT&T-only product. 

In October 2006, before potential customers were aware that AT&T would have exclusive rights to market the iPhone, Verizon Wireless was getting twice as much upside from "churners" as AT&T was. 

About 28 percent of poll respondents surveyed by ChangeWave indicated they would be switching to Verizon for mobile service. About 14 percent indicated they would be switching to AT&T. 

After the deal was announced, the churn gap closed. And AT&T has had a net advantage in customer switching behavior since very-early 2008. Many would say this is an "iPhone effect." Some might argue it also is the result of other activities, including AT&T promotional activity. 

We won't really know until the iPhone exclusivity deal ends. In the meantime, AT&T marketing staffs have to be working on the next game-changer. 

Sylantro in the Amazon Cloud

Sylantro Systems has announced compatibility of its Synergy platform with the Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  By doing so, Sylantro makes its voice and Web applications available in a cloud computing environment.  

Amazon EC2 from Amazon Web Services is a Web service providing hosted, resizable compute capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis. It is designed to make Web-scale computing easier and cheaper.

So look at it this way: applications developed for Web delivery, using the Amazon infrastructure, now can be configured to work with Sylantro calling and communication features. In principle, this allows more applications or services to provide a range of communication features one normally would expect from a business phone system. 

Service providers can use the capability to test demand for services provided on a hosted basis, especially on a "sample this" basis, or as a way to provide hosted business or consumer communications services with a disaster recovery angle.

Sometimes Demand, Not Supply, is the Issue

SureWest Communications has expanded television, Internet and telephone service to some 3,500 Kansas City area homes and remains on track to reach 10,000 by the end of the year.

In the broadband services area, SureWest customers and prospects have something like an embarassment of riches, though some will argue the prices are too high.

Customers can buy 20-megabits-per-second connections for about $92 when purchased as part of a bundle, and can get 50 Mbps service for about $192 when when bundled with one other service.

Business customers can buy 100 Mbps service. So the issue, at least where SureWest operates, is demand, not supply. 

The argument can, and probably will be made, that prices for the higher bandwidths are too high. Observers should keep in mind that commercial prices for T1 lines offering 1.544 Mbps service cost as much as the 50 Mbps service, if not more. Perhaps that will not be enough to sway some opinion on the pricing front. 

But in this case, at least, broadband supply is not a problem. Demand is the issue.  One can argue that prices should be lower. It is harder to argue that SureWest's ability to remain in business requires that level of prices at its forecast penetration levels. If SureWest does a lot better than it now forecasts, lower prices are possible. But this now is a demand generation exercise. 

"Hyperconnection" Driving Wireless Broadband?

Some 16 percent of Internet users live a “hyperconnected” life, meaning they regularly use more than seven devices and more than nine applications, says Scott Wickware, Nortel general manager.

Some 36 percent are “increasingly connected,” meaning they use four devices and nine applications, he adds. About 20 percent are passive online users and 28 percent are "not very connected," he says.

So although about half of Internet users might not agree they are living in "a hyperconnected world” that requires or benefits from mobile broadband access, Wickware suggests 52 percent are candidates for mobile broadband.

The logic is simple enough: as users got comfortable with email and then wanted to have email available in their pockets and purses, so they increasingly will want access to their social networks, video and audio entertainment in the same way.

As voice once was a service delivered to "places" and now is delivered to "people," so email used to be delivered to "PCs" and now is delivered to mobiles. Roughly the same process will unfold with broadband as well, most argue. Where broadband used to be delivered to a place, it increasingly will be delivered to people; where applications are used on PCs, they in the future will be used by people on a number of mobile devices in their purses and pockets.

2.3% IT Spending Growth in 2009, Says Gartner

Granted, everybody is looking in the rear-view mirror, but Gartner analysts now expect an information technology spending increase of 2.3 percent in 2009, revised down from the original expectation of 5.8 percent, according to  Peter Sondergaard, Gartner SVP. 

“Developed economies, especially the United States and Western Europe, will be the worst affected, but emerging regions will not be immune. Europe will experience negative growth in 2009, the United States and Japan will be flat.”

Give it a quarter, though. October's impact might not yet be so clear. 

How Long Will Your Cash Last? Start-Ups Too Casual

Entrepreneurs are not worried enough about herding their start-ups through a rough patch, Rafe Needleman, CNET News writer says. A recent survey of 491 respondents found that 30 percent reported having two or more years of money in the bank, or are cash-flow positive.

About 21 percent say they have a year's worth of cash set aside.

About 49 percent reported having only three or six months of cash. That suggests as many as 50 percent of firms will be in serious trouble if an economic slowdown lasts more than a year.

Also, only 33 percent of the 524 respondents say they are "worrying about revenue and payroll."

Granted, the slowdown does not to some of us appear to be a "nuclear winter," though one could get a huge argument going on that score. Still, when young companies cannot raise the next round of funding, they die. Hence the importance of cash on hand.

Wireless Reconnectors: Wireless-Only Has Downside

A recent survey conducted by Nielsen Mobile suggests wireless-only households now have reached about 17 percent penetration nationwide, and could well hit 20 percent penetration by the end of the year.

But Nielsen also found something else: 10 percent of U.S. households with landline phone service in the second quarter 2008 were previously wireless-only users, and had chosen to buy wired voice service again.

That is important for obvious reasons. Just as some users find wireless-only service to be attractive, 10 percent of users also have found wireless-only service to be unsatisfactory.

The issue is “why?” When we look at the landline tenure of these former wireless-only users, approximately one percent of wireless-only users may return in any given quarter, Nielsen Mobile says.

As it turns out, mobile coverage is sometimes perceived to be insufficient for would-be or former wireless-only users. Dropped calls and poor audio quality are reasons wireless-only users decide a landline service still makes sense.

Web 2.0 Bubble Burst: Been There, Done That

For some of us who were part of companies that cratered during the Internet bubble burst starting in 2001, past truly is prologue. Some companies will discover "zero" is their present valuation. Others will be gobbled up by the elephants in the room. Larger, better-capitalized firms are going to find attractive assets to buy, and buy them.

Media companies will move relatively early, even telcos might find it is the right time to "move up the stack" from layers one and two to the application layer, in broader ways.

Remember the last sea change? All of a sudden, "eyeballs" (reach) largely ceased to matter. Revenue did matter. But firms that already have scale and revenue might be able to reposition acquired assets that primarily represent "reach," and convert reach into revenue.

In the start-up business, 80 percent failure rates are the norm. All that will happen now is that failure rates will accelerate, as firms find they cannot get the next financing round. But the elephants will be dancing.

Typical Media-Buying Behavior Seen

Given that consumer spending has been generally sluggish all year, even before the recent liquidity crisis, it shouldn't be surprising that some discretionary purchases are showing sluggishness as well. 

Mid-summer research by Changewave Alliance, for example, has been showing slowing consumption of downloaded media. Compared to a year ago, ChangeWave's latest survey of 2,248 consumers shows entertainment downloading has actually slowed. 

Where in July 2007 about 48 percent of respondents reported downloading songs, in July 2008 just 43 percent said they currently were downloading songs. Likewise, where 14 percent of respondents in July 2007 reported downloading movies, just 11 percent said they had done so in July 2008. The same declines were seen in TV show downloading, computer games downloads, music or book downloads as well. 

Moreover, the percentage of our respondents saying they do not download entertainment has risen to 41 percent, about six points higher than in 2007. 

This sort of behavior might be likened to what one typically sees in times of economic stringency: people downgrade some forms of discretionary entertainment spending. People do not tend to disconnec their cable or wireless services. But they might downgrade a service package to eliminate premium channels like HBO or Showtime. 

Downloads of songs, movies or TV shows fall into that category. One can simply download fewer titles to save a little money, while keeping the basic subscription services (broadband stays, but fewer items are purchased). 

Xohm Latency Performance Stands Out

In recent tests conducted by Computerworld, Sprint's 4G Xohm network showed latency performance far superior to the AT&T "Broadband Connect" 3G network, with higher throughput as well. Where downloads ran at about 1.3 Mbps to 1.7 Mbps for Broadband Connect and 3.4 Mbps to 4.4 Mbps for Xohm, the more-important statistic might have been the latency figures.

Where the AT&T 3G network had a "ping" response of about 234 milliseconds, the 4G Xohm network had 97 millisecond pings. In layman's terms, Xohm-delivered applications responded faster to user requests. 

Low-latency performance--sometimes described as latency performance identical to a traditional wired network--has been a key design goal for the Xohm network, and has been deemed important for support of real-time applications. 

People Use Cloud Computing; They Just Don't Know

Whether one looks at how average consumers “compute,” or how industry segments “compete,” it now appears that cloud computing is poised to change the ways users interact with each other, use applications, communicate and compute. Some of the changes are obvious; others only now developing. 

Conceptually, there are several ways cloud computing already is used. Applications in the cloud is what almost everyone already has used in the form of Gmail, Yahoo mail, wordpress.com, Google apps, search engines, Wikipedia or virtually any Web-executable application.

Platforms in the cloud are used virtually exclusively by software developers and their clients. Developers write their applications to a open specification and then upload their code into the cloud where the app is run remotely.

Infrastructure in the cloud takes the software development process a step further. Developers use remote, network-based compute, storage, queueing, and other resources to create and run their applications.

“Cloud computing” sometimes is likened to grid or distributed computing, utility computing (computing as a service), software as a service, network computing, Internet-based applications, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing or remote processing. It typically is some combination of those things.

And as much attention as cloud computing gets in the enterprise information technology space, it already is making serious inroads in the consumer space.

Some 69 percent of online Americans use Web mail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the Web, say researchers at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They are, in other words, already users of “cloud computing,” an emerging topic in the enterprise computing space as well.

Some 56 percent of respondents say they have used a Web mail service such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo. About 34 percent say they have stored photos online. Some 29 percent say they have used online applications such as Google Docs or Adobe Photoshop Express, as well.

About seven percent say they store personal videos online, while five percent say they have a for-fee online storage service and another five percent say they use an online backup service.

About 51 percent of Internet users who have done a cloud computing activity say a major reason they do this is that it is easy and convenient. Some 41 percent of cloud users say a major reason they use these applications is that they like being able to access their data from whatever computer they are using, Pew researchers say.

Some 39 percent cite the ease of sharing information as a major reason they use applications hosted in the cloud, or store their data remotely.

As you might expect, users with mobile computer access are more likely to have done these activities. Among the 34 percent of online users who have used a WiFi connection on their laptop to go online, 79 percent have used at least one cloud computing activity above, and 52 percent have used at least two.

Release Window Opens; in South Korea

Warner Bros. Entertainment recently decided to release movies online before releasing them on DVD, at least in South Korea.  This reverses the long-established Hollywood distribution model and may open the door to a major increase in movie downloads. Why in South Korea? Film piracy.

Moving the more secure online system earlier in the release window is viewed as a way to keep pirated content out of the public domain a bit longer.

But researchers at MultiMedia Intelligence see the Warner Bros. initiative in Korea as being the start of a trend in implementing early release window content online. Already television studios are experimenting with online distribution windows that precede TV broadcast or DVD release windows. 

Make no mistake: it's all about the money. When content owners think they can make more money by giving online distribution a higher priority, they will do so. Today it is the DVD market which provides the highest profit and gross revenue, but not many expect that to remain the case forever. 

Mobile Enterprise Demand Grows

Enterprise information technology managers are badly underestimating the future demand for mobility devices and services in the enterprise arena, overlooking a new emerging class of mobile workers that rely on smart phones, where the traditional demand has been provided by traveling workers. 

On-the-road executives or managers, telecommuters or field service employees currently represent 20 percent of the workforce, says Forrester analyst Michele Pelino.

Call the workers driving the demand "mobile wannabes," if you like. Already, nearly a third of smart phone users expense all or some of their monthly bills for wireless voice services to their employers, while 40 percent expense the cost of their wireless data access to their company. Forrester Research estimates that by 2012, 73 percent of the workforce will be considered mobile.

This new class of workers represents just six percent of the present workforce, but Forrester estimates that they will grow to 25 percent of workers within the next four years. In fact, Forrester estimates 73 percent of the workforce will be considered some sort of mobile worker by 2012. 

Mobile wannabes include executive assistants, human resource workers and finance department employees who are generally at their desks most of the day but use smart phones to access email and other corporate applications while commuting to work or while away from their desks. Millennials, workers younger than 30 years of age also expect mobile support.

Most of this growing group of users buy their own devices, so the trick is to create new service plans that are affordable enough to encourage broader use of mobile data services, Forrester says.