Google: One Billion Video Streams a Day?

Google reportedly has confirmed that it serves up one billion video streams a day, far more than most had guessed. That is four to six times higher than the best industry estimates! 

Until now, Comscore, for example, has estimated that Google streams 225 million videos a day, or about seven billion a month. Nielsen has estimated Google's video streams at 5.5 billion a month. 

Based on an assumption that Google represents about 40 percent of global video streams, that implies global usage of about 80 billion streams a month, again, far higher than most had supposed. 

What remains a challenge is the business model. To some extent, user interest in online video does drive demand for bigger ISP access pipes. 

But highly customizable, targeted episodic content underwritten by advertisers, which was supposed to be the model, remains just a hope. Hulu is essentially legacy linear TV with online distribution and fewer ads. Great for viewers, not good for content owners or distributors. 

Some criticize brands or agencies for being too lazy to learn how to use online video, but there is a simple explanation for why more doesn't get done in some digital media realms: it sometimes isn't a rational use of one's time to do so. 

About 11 percent of advertising budgets are allocated for all forms of online media, according to eMarketer. So in many cases, a time-pressed marketer would be hard pressed to justify spending quite a lot of time on 11 percent of the spend when a smaller amount of time can be spent optimizing nearly 90 percent of the spend. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/09/AR2009060900324.html

$13 Billion Mobile Apps to be Sold in 2013

Mobile Internet access will see significant gains over the next five years, with the number of mobile Internet users reaching 134 million in 2013, says  eMarketer. By 2013, Informa predicts smartphones will make up 38% of all handset sales worldwide, more than double their share in 2009.

And means growth is use of mobile applications. Analysts at Piper Jaffray estimate that combined spending on consumer and business mobile applications will top $13 billion worldwide by 2012, a nearly fivefold increase over 2009.

Since advertising and marketing efforts likewise ultimately follow people to where they are and what they are doing, “it is increasingly evident that for many marketers, mobile applications constitute a necessary avenue for reaching and engaging with their customers, either by building and marketing a proprietary application or sponsoring a third-party app,” says Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007124

Has Twitter Growth Suddenly Flattened?

There's something unusual going on with Twitter traffic, it appears. Unique Visitors to twitter.com increased to 19.4 Million in April, surpassing the New York Times for the first time.

Oprah’s first tweet on April 17, 2009 delivered the highest Daily Reach ever to the site, with nearly two percent of all Americans online visiting Twitter.

But there also is data suggesting Twitter traffic has flattened, growing just 1.47 percent (up to 19,728,619 monthly visitors) in May 2009, according to Compete.com.

One possible explanation is that the pool of people with an immediate resonance with Twitter already have joined. Monthly visits to Twitter have increased by 6.99 percent, up to 134,536,240. That might be explained by heavier use among current users, since new user growth apparently has flattened.

10% of Tweeters Produce 90% of Tweets

The top 10 percent of prolific Twitter users account for over 90 percent of tweets, say researchers at Harvard Business School. So what does that mean? Maybe less than you would think.

Some will argue it shows Twitter actually isn't actually as popular as it seems. And at least one other study shows a very-high churn rate of new Tweeters.

"Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent," says David Martin, Nielsen Wireless VP.

Unless that churn rate changes, Twitter ultimately will reach only about 10 percent of Internet users, Nielsen Wireless predicts. A company, service or application cannot churn 60 percent a month and expect any different conclusion.

Twitter's big problem seems to be that so many people do not find it useful. The fact that 90 percent of Tweets come from 10 percent of users is in fact not surprising or unusual.

Others will suggest that the highly-skewed tweeting pattern means Twitter activity is more like a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network. But something similar to this is true of blog posting as well. A small percentage of people supply most of the posts.

A typical social networking site might have the top 10 percent of users account for 30 percent of all activity as well.

At Wikipedia, the top 15 percent of the most prolific editors account for 90

percent of Wikipedia's edits.

The point is that it is user churn, not the disparate distribution of tweets, that are of significance.

The Pareto principle, colloquially referred to as the "80-20 rule" or the "long tail,"

occurs widely in both human and natural domains.

Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days. That would not be unusual if tweets follow the Pareto rule, and they seem to.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.h

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Is Twitter Really a Late Boomer Technology?

Only 22 percent of Generation Y consumers between the ages of 18 ad 24 are using Twitter, according to a new survey by  the Participatory Marketing Network.

Separate data from Nielsen Online shows that the single biggest Twitter cohort is users between 35 and 49.

$99 iPhone Available Now, 2-Year Contract Required

The 8GB 3G iPhone now can be bought for $99. A two-year contract is required to get that price, and monthly costs for a package with 450 out of network voice minutes, 5,000 night and weekend minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calls to other AT&T customers, with 200 text messages,will cost $88 a month after the taxes are added to the R75 monthly cost of service.

Sprint Offers Corporate Liable Customers $39.99 Mobile Broadband

Sprint is Selling a $39.99 mobile broadband service for "corporate liable" accounts, providing 500 MBytes of data monthly, a bucket Sprint says is two times what Verizon offers and 10 times what AT&T offers at the same price point.

In addition, customers pay only five cents per for each additional megabyte of usage, which is less than half what the competition’s $39.99 plan charges for overage. Verizon's $39.99 plan has a 250 MB cap and charges 10 cents per MByte for overage.

AT&T's $40 plan has a 50 MByte cap and $1.00 per MByte for overages. 

The AT&T "moderate user" plan is probably enough for users who basically only check email and do some light Web surfing. 

The Verizon plan probably is enough for traveling workers who use the Web pretty heavily on the road and check email. 

The Sprint plan probably is sufficient for traveling workers who watch streaming video to a certain extent. 

The assumptions are monthly email consumption of about a couple Mbytes a month and per-day Web consumption of a couple of megabytes a day a day when out of the office. 

The issue is video streaming, which will be the driver of overages for most users. Most enterprise workers who are not watching tons of video probably only require a couple of gigabytes of usage each month. 

If one assumes a worker at a desk most of the day, and really using the Web heavily, could consume 50 Mbytes to 100 Mbytes each day, you have some idea of how to estimate usage. Most workers probably do not consume even that much. 

On the road, most people are doing other things, so it wouldn't be unusal to see daily consumption drop far behow behavior seen at a desk.

Perhaps 5 Mbytes a day would be typical. Of course, every user is different, but most enterprise workers who travel a couple days a month, and are in meetings or doing technical support will not even use 5 Mbytes a day when on the road. 

Streaming video, though, will upset all those assumptions. 

Online Advertising Dips 5% for First Time

Some people seem to be shocked that online advertising, which has been growing for seven straight years, dipped about five percent in the first quarter. It wouldn't be the first time people have argued, or seemed to believe, that something related to the Internet can transcend the operation of markets.

At the turn of the century, new "Internet" business models were touted that seemingly defied the normal business rule that one must have revenue to be sustainable. Others argued that valuations of Internet companies were different from valuations of companies based in the physical world. 

Anybody who argued to the contrary was ignored with a direct or indirect "you don't get it" attitude. That belief was proved devastatingly wrong.

Online advertising is advertising. Advertising is a cost of doing business. Companies are being careful about the costs of doing business. So it is no surprise there is a bit of a dip. The Internet is part of human life. It is not immune from things that happen in the broader spheres of life. 

Nor is the delusion especially new. After 1917, the Soviet Union believed it could wall itself off from the global economy. After World War II it maintained the fiction of two global economies, one capitalist, one socialist. The Soviet Union was wrong. 

The Internet changes lots of things. It doesn't repeal or escape economic laws or human behavior.

IP PBX Line Shipments Will Dip for First Time Ever in 2009

IP PBX lines shipped in 2009 will decline for the first time ever in 2009, say analysts at Dell'Oro Group. Aside from the global recession, vendor instability (Nortel, in all likelihood) is causing a bit of hesitation.

“For 2009, we anticipate a degree of vendor volatility that will cause many customers to stay on the sidelines for a longer period of time than we would expect if downward pressure was coming only from the weakened economy,” says Alan Weckel, Dell’Oro Group director.

“In the current environment, some customers will hold on to existing analog and digital lines for a longer period of time,” Weckel says.

According to the report, Cisco, Avaya and Nortel had the most IP line shipments in the quarter. The eight largest vendors in the market, including Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel and Siemens represent about 49 percent of total line shipments in the first quarter of 2009.

Notwithstanding, IP telephony penetration will continue to grow this year, albeit at a slower pace compared to the previous years.

Branch Offices Ripe for Cloud Computing?

At many enterprises, branch offices account for 20 percent of a company’s IT infrastructure, according to Forrester Research. Since IT departments are seeking to cut costs, branch office IT investments likely will be shifted to remote services provided by some sort of cloud computing infrastructure.

The potential impact on the service provider business is not so clear, but one might assume there will be greater bandwidth requirements at remote locations and in the backbone than presently is the case, as the traditional trade-off in computing is between local processing and bandwidth. One can compute locally, substituting cycles for bandwidth, or compute remotely, substituting bandwidth for cycles.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Branch-Offices-Ripe-for-IT-Consolidation-Forrester-239188/?kc=rss

Social Networking Explodes 83%, Facebook 700%

U.S. users increased their time using social networking apps 83 percent last year, according to Nielsen Online. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.

One wonders what all those users are doing less, as they network more. Even if one assumes multitasking is going on, attention and time still are linear. People can't do more of one thing withoug doing less of another, or at least are attention sharing to the point where it is questionable how much actual attention is being paid to something that is "available and in use."

INQ Mobile to Launch Twitter Phone

Cell phone maker INQ Mobile plans to introduce a "Twitter phone" for the Christmas selling season. The device is intended for sale at prices less than $140, and feature an Internet-based Twitter client, says Frank Meehan, INQ CEO.

The phone will use Internet connections for sending Tweets, not text messages. The idea is to spur usage by eliminating the text messaging charges, and using the mobile phone's data plan, instead.

INQ in 2007 had introduced a mobile device optimized for use of Skype. The move indicates a developing niche in mobile devices and applications: social networking as a lead application.

In a sense, you can think of the BlackBerry as an "email phone" and the iPhone as an "Internet phone." INQ earlier this year also introduced what some call the "Facebook phone," as it is optimized for instant access to Facebook, Skype and other social networking applications.

And the optimization might be working. Traffic on INQ1 "Facebook phones" are three to four times higher than from other phones, says Marc Allera, 3 UK director of sales and marketing.

About 65 percent useFacebook on a regular basis while 50 percent use Windows Live Messenger regularly.

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5513L820090602?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

AT&T Launches New Small Business Bundle

AT&T has launched what it calls the nation's first bundled offer targeted at small businesses,  including wireless, wired and high speed Internet services, starting at $99.99 a month.

The “All for Less” bundle is now available to small business customers with one to four lines at a single location, across AT&T’s 22-state footprint.

The wireless plan features 450 minutes of use each month for each wireless device.

The broadband service operates at rates up to 1.5 Mbps and comes with as many as 11 email accounts and AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot connectivity.

The local voice service comes with unlimited local calling, call forwarding and caller ID, as well as unlimited domestic long distance calling.

To qualify, customers must already have wireless service or purchase new wireless service from AT&T in addition to new or existing local voice, long distance voice and broadband services.

The offer expires Aug. 31, 2009 and requires a two-year service agreement. Additional bundles that include other high-speed Internet speed tiers and/or wireless plans are available at additional costs.

Fring Launches New Social Networking for Mobile App

Fring haslaunched a new version of its social community and communication service that combines each contact’s separate online social communities into one, manageable profile on the users’ mobile phone.

Fring enables users to talk and chat with their Internet instant-message buddies on Skype, GTalk, Facebook, Twitter and last.fm, among other services, from one integrated, searchable fring contact list. 

The new fring version combines a user’s multiple IM contacts into one dynamic profile, which shows each friend’s current availability at a quick glance and enables interaction, all directly from this combined mobile profile.

As social networking becomes a more-popular mobile activity, we are likely to see mobile devices optimized for social networking, much as iPhones have popularized the notion of a "Web" phone or BlackBerry essentially created an "Email phone."

In fact, the notion of a "smart phone" should at some point stop being a meaningful end user category at all, replaced by a lead feature corresponding to a lead app. 

Has the Recession Ended?

ADP’s jobs data is showing an expected jobs decrease of some 532,000 for the month of May. The data for April from ADP also showed that the job losses were revised down to 545,000.

If the Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirms the trend on June 5, 2009, it will add to other data suggesting the recession has ended. Unemployment claims are a lagging economic indicator and a rule of thumb is that recessions later are determined to have ended about 30 days after the peak rate of new claims.

The SurePayroll Hiring Index rose 26 points to 11,430 in May, up from 11,404 at the end of April. The uptick was 0.2 percent from the prior month, suggesting that on average small businesses were hiring.

Year-to-date, the Hiring Index is up 1.4 percent, which puts small business hiring on track to increase 3.3 percent for calendar year 2009.

The results suggest that the U.S. economy is in much better shape these days than many may realize, SurePayroll says. Small businesses often lead economic recovery, so it is good to see that small businesses are continuing to add new employees, the firm notes.

It might seem odd to call the end of a recession when the nation still is losing a half a million jobs a month. But if the trend is confirmed, the economy's direction has changed.