Ifbyphone Buys Cloudvox to Support Development of New Apps

Ifbyphone, provider of Web-based  voice and phone applications especially for call center type applications, announced today that it has acquired Cloudvox to give its customers the tools they need to build their own open-source, customized phone applications to fit their business needs.

The deal gives Ifbyphone an open applictions programming interface it can use to provides Web developers (even less experienced ones) with all the pieces they need to build working Web-based telephony services.

At the same time, Ifbyphone will still equip them with the technology they need to deploy and scale their newly-built applications.

Developers can build web telephony services to work with any existing software, whether it uses Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C# or HTTP. They can still build on all the features they need to control every phase of a call with only a few clicks of a mouse — and without adding any new equipment or infrastructure, Ifbyphone says.

The move is an example of the growing importance of end-user created and customer applications in the business and organization segment of the market.

Truphone Becomes a Mobile Service Provider

These days, any company that really wants to become a mobile service provider can do so. Recently Mitel, a provider fo business phone systems and solutions, became a mobile service provider to deliver turnkey communications solutions for its business customers.

Now Truphone has launched "Truphone Local Anywhere," allowing local mobile calling initially in the United States and the United Kingdom, using a subscriber information module (SIM) approach. Addtional markets, including European countries, Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa, will be added in 2010.

Initially, the service will be most valuable for U.K. mobile users who want to call the United States, but the service soon will extended across Europe and other markets U.K. callers may frequently wish to reach.

The new service offers mobile users local rates for voice, data and text services for all countries where Truphone establishes operations, all on a single SIM.

In conjunction with the launch of Truphone Local Anywhere, the company announced it has become a mobile virtual network operator in the United Kingdom.

Truphone Local Anywhere eliminates the need for users to swap SIM cards, juggle multiple mobile devices or use complex dial-back systems in efforts to avoid costly roaming charges.

Amazon Offers Authors, Publishers 70% of Revenues from Kindle Sales

Amazon.com has launched a new program allowing authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform to earn 70 percent of the revenue from each Kindle book they sell, net of delivery costs.

The new option does not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option and will be available on June 30, 2010.

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15 per MByte, Amazon says.  At today's median DTP file size of 368 KBytes, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold.

This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

"Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books," says Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content.

The new pricing shows, once again, how disruptive the Internet can be. This new plan will encourage more authors to "go direct" to Amazon, or at least force their publishers to sell ebooks at a substantial discount.

That will increase the pressure on traditional publishers to cut prices on wholesale Kindle books.

Amazon says the new program applies only to author or publisher-supplied list prices between $2.99 and $9.99. Why that price range? It creates a permanent and substantial pricing gap between Kindle-delivered content and a physical product delivering the same content. The list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book.

Publishers won't like that, but will have to get used to it.

The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights, which similarly avoids the typical regional royalty deals, putting pressure on publishers worldwide.

Books must be offered at or below price parity with prices for the same content on other e-book readers or physical products.

This looks like a brilliant play from Amazon.  E-book prices need to (and should) drop substantially: When the cost of an incremental sale is near-zero, publishers have no business charging physical-book prices.

The traditional publishing industry obviously will have to deal with the reality of a new cost structure in the business, and that will have ramifications up and down the ecosystem. Margins will be lower, on a permanent basis, with all that implies for existing business arrangements.

On the other hand, the new policies could increase the volume of sales and certainly will create an opportunity for more niche publishing. It's just another example of how the Internet disrupts the economics of any business it touches.

33% of Users Will Post to Social Networking Sites Such as Twitter

The thing about social or online media is that people use media in different ways. In fact, even thinking about those ways has to be updated from time to time. Twitter and other social networks provide an example. Analysts at Forrester Research have for a couple years used the notion of "social technographics" to describe the different ways people interact with Web content.

Up to this point the focus has been Web sites and blogs. But now social networking is part of the model, as Forrester has added a new category, "conversationalists," to the framework. About a third of people will update their status information on a social networking site or post updates to Twitter.

That is more people than the 24 percent of people who actually publish a blog, for example, while 70 percent read them.

About 59 percent of people maintain a profile on a social networking site or visit social networking sites. About 37 percent post reviews or ratings, leave comments or contribute to online forums.

The analysis tries to describe ranges of online social media behavior, which has lots of people consuming content and relatively fewer creating it.

Conversationalists are 56 percent female, more than any other group in the framework.

Aside from the idea that people have different levels of involvement in the social media content creation process, the new category illustrates an important new feature of social media: the ability to create, sustain and promote conversations.

Skype Traffic Grows 63%

International long distance traffic growth has slowed, while Skype traffic is accelerating, says Stephan Beckert, TeleGeography strategy VP.

Over the past 25 years, international call volume from telephones has grown at a compounded annual rate of 15 percent. In the past two years, however, international telephone traffic annual growth has slowed to only eight percent. To be sure, growth rates always slow for any product or service that has attained high penetration, simply because any additional growth is compared to a larger base of existing users.

There have been some recession-related changes, though overall demand obviously has remained strong. Traffic to Mexico, the world’s largest calling destination, declined four percent in 2008, and aggregate traffic to Central America declined five percent, for example.

While international telephone traffic growth has slowed, Skype’s traffic has soared. Skype’s on-net international traffic (between two Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes.

"The volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous," said Beckert. "Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far."

Is Net Neutrality a Case of "Feeling Good" Rather than "Doing Good"?

With typical wit, Andrew Orlowski at the U.K.-based "The Register" skewers "network neutrality" as a squishy, intellectually incoherent concept. It is so nebulous it can mean anything a person wants it to be, and often is posed as a simple matter of "goodness." Which makes people feel righteous, without having to noodle through the logical implications.

Yes, there often is a difference between feeling good, and doing good, and Orlowski wants to point that out.

"As a rule of thumb, advocating neutrality means giving your support to general goodness on the Internet, and opposing general badness," he says. "Therefore, supporting neutrality means you yourself are a good person, by reflection, and people who oppose neutrality are bad people."

"Because neutrality is anything you want it to be, you have an all-purpose morality firehose at your disposal," he says. "Just point it and shoot at baddies."

Beyond that, there are fundamental issues that seem hard to reconcile, because they are hard to reconcile. Consider the analogy to freedom of speech.

In the United States, at its founding, the right of free speech was said to belong to citizen "speakers," engaged in clearly political speech. Recently, the opposite view has been taken, that the right belongs to "hearers of speech." But that means there is tension: is it the creator of speech who is to be protected, or those who might, or might not, want to listen.

Does copyright protect creators of intellectual content, or those who might want to access it? Do property rights in real estate protect those who own property, or those who want to own it?

Network neutrality essentially poses similar issues, and they will not be easy to reconcile.

412 Million M2M Subscriptions Globally by 2014, Juniper Research Predicts

The number of mobile connected machine-to-machine and embedded devices will rise to almost 412 million globally by 2014, say researchers at Juniper Research. That is one answer to the question many are asking about where service providers--mobile and fixed--will replace lost voice revenues with new services.

Though much discussion logically centers on new services or products that can be sold to end users on broadband connections, the attraction M2M represents is that it frees service providers from a frustrating reliance on selling more things to human beings.

Up to this point multi-service bundles have been a primary way service providers have increased average revenue per user. But there are limits to how much can be gained that way. As industry executives might put it, getting an additional $10 a month revenue from a consumer customer is a big deal, and hard to do.

Enterprise spending on communications is not increasing as much as some might expect, in part because organizations are using IP-based communications to get more for less money. The big exception has been mobility support, which likely is the fastest-growing part of any large organization's communications spend.

M2M services might represent less gross revenue per connection, on a monthly recurring basis, but there are lots of devices to be connected. In the Indian market, for example, Bharti Aitel is making a big push to complete reliance on mobile networks for meter reading, for example, says David Nishball, Bharti Airtel president of enterprise services.

http://www.juniperresearch.com/analyst-xpress-blog/2010/01/19/will-mobile-m2m-create-the-next-5-billion-cellular-connections/

App Store Software Sales $30 Billion in 2013, Advertising Nearly $8 Billion

Advertising-sponsored mobile applications will generate almost 25 per cent of mobile application store revenue by 2013, amounting to nearly $8 billion in revenue.

Consumers will spend $6.2 billion in 2010 in mobile application stores while advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide, according to Gartner analysts.

Mobile application stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010, eight out of ten of which will be free to end users.

Gartner forecasts worldwide downloads in mobile application stores to surpass 21.6 billion by 2013. Free downloads will account for 82 per cent of all downloads in 2010, and will account for 87 per cent of downloads in 2013.

“Games remain the number one application," says Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner.

"No incremental cost" applications will use other revenue models, she says. Developers will charge for additional functionality, sales of products and services or advertising.

Worldwide mobile application stores’ download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion in 2009 and will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013.

Verizon Offers New Bundle Pricing and Features

Starting Jan 18, 2010, qualifying customers can order double- or triple-play bundles with up to 7.1 megabits per second high-speed Internet access for the same price as bundles with up to 3 Mbps, a $10 per month rate reduction.

Consumers in select Verizon regions can also order quad-play bundles at the new 7.1 Mbps bundle price.

In addition, new voice and high-speed Internet access customers ordering qualifying double-, triple- or quad-play bundles are eligible for their choice of a Compaq Mini netbook or $150 back in the form of aVerizon Visa Prepaid card.

Existing Verizon customers who add either new home voice or High Speed Internet service in a qualifying bundle are eligible to receive a $100 Verizon Visa Prepaid card along with the other incentives.

Bundles eligible for these offers include the triple play featuring "Verizon Freedom Essentials" unlimited local and long-distance calling, up to 3 or 7.1 Mbps HSI and DirectTV's "PLUS DVR" service, including a free DVR upgrade, and the double play with Verizon Freedom Essentials and up to 3 or 7.1 Mbps HSI.

Customers who sign up now can get all this value for just $94.99 per month for the triple play and $69.99 per month for the double play, with the prices guaranteed for 12 months. One-year Verizon agreements and two-year DirecTV agreements apply.

Triple-play bundles that feature up to 1 Mbps HSI, Verizon Freedom Value and the DirecTV "Choice" package are offered at $84.99 per month for 12 months.

Double-play bundles that feature Verizon Freedom voice options with either HSI or DirecTV programming are also available, many at carryover or lower pricing from 2009, and range from $54.99 to $89.99 per month for 12 months.  One-year Verizon agreements and two-year DirecTV agreements apply.

New HSI customers with Verizon home voice service who do not opt for a bundle can order the broadband service for $19.99, $29.99 or $39.99 per month for up to 1, 3 or 7.1 Mbps service, respectively, and enjoy a lifetime price guarantee as long as they maintain the same tier of service and Verizon HSI is available at their service location.

Telecom Italia Sparkle, iBasis Activate First All-IP Bilateral Operational

iBasis and Telecom Italia Sparkle have migrated all their bilateral traffic between Italy and the Netherlands to IP, using i3 Forum specifications. "We are pretty sure this is the first all-IP bilateral agreement," Chris Ward, iBasis senior director says.

All traffic over the connection uses iBasis premium voice service, with quality of service guarantees.

"I already sense some real energy about what we are doing, where there is greater access to the full range of resources at KPN," says Ward, because of the recent acquisition of all of iBasis by KPN.

Right now iBasis represents about seven percent of KPN revenue, but KPN obviously expects that to grow significantly. In part, that optimism results from a change in iBasis strategy of late.

"We have been very focused on margin growth over the past couple of years," says Ward. "But revenue growth is now more important."

KPN's corporate resources will play a part, but also KPN's status as a "member" of the global carrier club. To the extent that financial stability and resources are an important requirement for carrier business partners, the new ownership structure should prove reassuring.

But the iBasis core strategy hasn't changed. It wants to be a leading provider of global voice operation outsourcing for carriers who frankly have many other priorities and might prefer to focus on customers and products with 30-percent profit margins rather than the four percent to seven percent margins international long distance now provides.

"You can't be Neiman Marcus and Wal-Mart all at the same time," says Ward. "You have to choose."

As carriers migrate traffic to IP, we are a natural partner for outsourced international voice operations, says Ward."It doesn't make sense to run international long distance, for most people, unless you are a specialist."

"It's sort of like email, in a way," he says. "Don't devote resources to it, if you can avoid it."

U.S. Mainland to St. Thomas Route Upgraded to 20 Gbps

The Americas I North Submarine Cable System between Vero Beach, Florida and St. Thomas, USVI; and the Columbus 2b Submarine Cable system between West Palm Beach, Florida and St. Thomas, USVI has been upgraded from  a single 2.5 Gbpschannel to 20 Gbps using Xtera Communications gear.

This upgrade project significantly increases capacity between the United States and the Caribbean. The consortium parties participating in this upgrade are ANTELCOM, AT&T, SETAR, Tricom and Verizon Business.

Are Apple and Google Reshaping Mobile Phone Competition?

At a deep level, the developing contests in the high-end smartphone business are less about the devices, and more about the applications and business ecosystems the devices will help to support.

Mobile app stores have become the surprise success of the smartphone business. Unfortunately, it isn't a business for most, as most of the apps available on popular app stores are offered free, and most sell for less than a dollar.

And that's where advertising might be important. If developers cannot profit at all, or not much, from direct app sales, perhaps advertising might develop as a key revenue model. Some skeptics will note, rightly, that "advertising" is the magical business model many free Internet app providers have claimed would be their ultimate revenue model.

Some will make it work, but most will not. On the other hand, who would want to bet against Apple and Google being at the very forefront of firms that could find a way to make it work?

So how could Apple or Google make advertising work much better? By vastly improving the relevance of every message, using location and existing profiles of user behavior, and by making "advertising" a more entertaining experience.

To do so, Apple needs a network of advertisers and the technology to target ads to customer behavior, which most observers would say Apple now has with its purchase of Quattro.

Nor might Apple necessarily be thinking of "out-Googling" Google in mobile search. That isn't the way Apple's executives think. Rather, they think about creating whole new businesses, not improving existing businesses.

That is the thinking many have in asserting that mobile apps might someday replace search in a mobile context. The reason is partly the chores of interacting with small screens and text input. Apple will be looking at that, and so will Google. The whole idea will be to automate the process of finding things, so it is a more natural, certainly more easy process.

The other angle is simply screen real estate. Some would argue display ads work better on small screens, as the ad might sometimes occupy the entire screen. Users are likely to see such approaches as intrusive.

Oddly enough, the new shift to app stores and mobile advertising might lessen the value of hardware ingenuity, because the new game is monetizing applications and creating commercial transaction potential using location. There is a sense in which the mobile device battler is shifting from hardware to software.

Right now, it would be hard to argue that Apple and Google are in the strongest positions where it comes to software and advertising.

Do People Expect Too Much from Nexus One?

The Nexus One launch has not gone flawlessly, that is clear enough. Users report their devices are randomly switching between the T-Mobile USA 3G and the EDGE network. Early Apple iPhone devices had the same problem, some niote.

Others are disappointed Google wasn't "more disruptive" of the retail pricing regime, or the lack of multi-touch support for the screen (an input capability using input from two fingers, used to enlarge a section of the screen image by pinching or sweeping the touch points apart or together.

Despite the "earned media buzz," Nexus One's first-week sales appear to fall far short of sales of the Apple iPhone, for example. Flurry estimates the iPhone sold more than a million units in three days when first introduced, and 1.6 million units in its first full week,  while the Nexus One might have sold only 20,000 units.

The Verizon Droid sold 250,000 units the first week it was available, while the HTC "myTouch" sold 60,000 units in its first week of availability.

To be sure, Nexus One, myTouch and Droid all are available on just a single network in a single coutnry. The iPhone initially was available in eight countries and eight carriers.

That's no coincidence. After the iPhone hype, it is proving more difficult for each competing device to illustrate how it is similarly "revolutionary." There's just no way to get around the fact that the iPhone was revolutionary, and so far, the other devices, though unique in many wasy, simply are following in the general mode.

Apple might have seized such a mindshare lead that there simply is no way any other device can "challenge" iPhone. That isn't to say many other touchscreen smartphones will fail to be built and marketed, but simply that the "buzz" hasn't been matched by the same sort of enthusiastic consumer resposne as the iPhone received, simply because no subsequent device, so far, as proven to be such an advance over the earlier generation of devices.

So far, all the other models are "like the iPhone." So far, that hasn't been enough. That's one reason why at least a few of us might think the challenge for all the other devices is to create a unique identity in the market, not to "be the next iPhone." That probably cannot be done at this point.

What device promoters can do is what Research in Motion achieved with th BlackBerry. RIM created an email-optimized device that syncs seamlessly with key Microsoft applications such as "Outlook," in additiion to handling email, capturing a specific segment of the mobile device market and end user base (business users).

But there's more to it than just that. The mobile is a mass market retail business, where marketing, distribution and customer support all matter. As much earned media attention as Nexus One has gotten, it is nothing like what Verizon was apparently able to do with a huge marketing and advertising blitz for its "Droid," or what Apple was able to do, not just with its own earned media campaign, but with a follow-on marketing campaign and network of highly-trafficked retail locations.

The Nexus One is being sold through a Web site, with only earned media support. Verizon launched a $100 million on marketing blitz, including the key Christmas selling season. Suffice it to say many many millions more people know the name "Droid" than "Nexus One."

T-Mobile, whose currernt role in the Nexus One ecosysem is largely indirect, does not appear to have supported the Nexus One launch with its own marketing funds, though it did for the myTouch.

Also, with a few new Android devices now competing for attention, there may be some fragmentation of the message. There's just one iPhone; there are several Android smartphones.

Also, Google might not have priced the device at levels that would drive more volume, though it also is battling the known resistance most end users have to paying $500 or more for an "unlocked" smartphone that only works on one U.S. network (with full access to all the frequency bands) anyway. What does "unlocked" mean to most consumers when the device can only be used on one network?

Beyond that, there is the simple fact that device hype likely outstrips ability to deliver, at this point. Everybody is looking for the first true "iPhone competitor." That might be asking too much.

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/29658/Flurry-Special-Report-Google-Nexus-One-Launch-Week-Sales

Next Broadband Round Will Be Heavy on Middle Mile Projects

The National Telecommunications & Information Association and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service have announced the second round of bidding, as well as a specialized third round specifically for satellite projects. These rounds will dispense about $4.8 billion in grants and loans  to expand broadband access and adoption.                    

NTIA’s program allocates $2.6 billion in this funding round of which approximately $2.35 billion will be made available for infrastructure projects. In this round, NTIA is adopting a “comprehensive communities” approach as its top priority in awarding infrastructure grants, focusing on middle mile broadband projects that connect key community anchor institutions – such as libraries, hospitals, community colleges, universities, and public safety institutions.

That is a significant development. NTIA projects, which have been seen as aimed more at metro areas than the Rural Utilities Service program, which exclusively aims to support rural projects, seems to have concluded that actual upgraded access projects are less valuable than middle-mile trunking services.

In other words, much of the spending in both the first and second rounds will go not to any new broadband access facilities, but to intermediate trunking networks that later can be used to provide actual broadband access.

The other interesting change is the new emphasis on a "third round" that specifically will accept satellite projects for the most-isolated locations.

In addition, NTIA plans to award at least $150 million of the funding for Public Computer Center projects, which will expand access to broadband service and enhance broadband capacity at public libraries, community colleges, and other institutions that service the general public.

NTIA also plans to award at least $100 million for Sustainable Broadband Adoption projects, which include projects to provide broadband education, training, and equipment, particularly to vulnerable population groups where broadband technology has traditionally been underutilized.

The separate Rural Utilities Service program will allocate $2.2 billion in this funding round. A second funding window will open later which will provide grants for satellite service for premises that remain unserved after all other Recovery Act broadband funding is awarded.

That round also will award grants for regional economic development projects using broadband, as well as make grants to rural libraries.

RUS will focus its round on last mile projects, which are anticipated to receive the vast majority of funding.

RUS will also fund middle mile projects involving current RUS program participants. RUS has decided to use a 75 percent grant, /25 percent loan model for all projects.

The application window opens Feb. 16 and closes March 15, 2010.

AT&T Announces New Pricing for Unlimited Mobile Plans

AT&T has announced new unlimited plans across all of its devices. The new plans, available beginning Jan. 18, 2010, feature an unlimited voice plan for $70 a month. "Family Talk" customers (two lines) will be available for $120  a month.

Texting plans remain unchanged at $20 for unlimited plans for individuals and $30 for Family Talk plans.

"Quick Messaging Device" (feature phone) customers can buy unlimited talk plans for $70 a month and Family Talk customers can buy unlimited talk plans for $120 per month (two lines).

These plans also require a minimum of $20 per month for individual plans and $30 per month for Family Talk plans for texting or Web browsing packages for new and upgrading customers.

All smartphone customers, including iPhone customers, may now buy unlimited voice and data for $100 a month.

For smartphone customers on Family Talk plans (first two smartphones), unlimited voice and data is now available for $180 a month. Texting plans remain unchanged at $20 for unlimited plans for individuals, $30 for Family Talk Plans.

Beginning Jan. 18, 2010, existing AT&T customers can change to any of the new plans without penalty or contract extension