Not Your Imagination: The World is Younger

It isn't your imagination: more people are younger these days, and they all use mobile phones. Nearly half of the world's population is under the age of 25 and over 85 percent live in developing countries, according to the World Population Foundation.

Globally, a majority of people in the 15- to 25-year segment have a mobile device of some sort.

Why Mobile Technology Is Still Going to Save the World

Blockbuster Express Plans 10,000 U.S. Locations by End of 2010

Blockbuster Express, the self-service movie rental service, is supposed to be available at 10,000 U.S. locations in 2010. The service competes with Redbox.

Unemployment Above 9% Until 2012

The White House’s annual Mid-Session Budget Review assumes unemployment will not fall below nine percent until 2012. In other words, the White House believes we will continue to be in a virtual "jobless recovery."  In fact, the White House expects unemployment to remain at seven percent until the start of 2014.


The unemployment rate is projected to aver­age 9.7 percent in 2010. This is the average level of unemployment that has prevailed dur­ing the first six months of the year. Despite the growth in output, unemployment is projected to decline slowly because, as labor market condi­tions improve, discouraged workers rejoin the labor force, adding temporarily to unemploy­ment, while part-time workers increase their hours of work.

Even with continued healthy growth in 2011 and beyond, the unemployment rate is projected to fall, but it is not projected to fall below six percent until 2015. Traditionally, an unemployment rate around four percent has been considered a sign of "full employment" conditions.

That is going to put pressure on every business selling products and services to consumers or business customers, and will increase pressure on firms to grow by acquisition, as internal customer growth and average revenue per user will be tough to come by.

read the full report here

Apple Claims Droid X Suffers From Signal Fade When Held

Apple claims the new Droid X also suffers from signal attenuation when held in the hand.

watch the video

State of Social Gaming Business

Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners,talks about the social game market, reviewing 2009 and 2010 trends. 

Verizon Wireless Gains Outpace AT&T

Despite the undeniable success the Apple iPhone has been for AT&T, Verizon might be finding ways to compete even without ability to sell the popular device. In the second quarter of 2010, Verizon Wireless added a net 665,000 contract customers, boosted from the increased demand for its line of Droid smartphones, which run on Google Inc.'s Android software.

AT&T added a net 496,000 contract customers in the same quarter. The impact of iPhone 4 sales will not be reflected in AT&T's performance until the third quarter, though, as sales started at the tail end of the second quarter. That should help AT&T post strong net adds numbers in a quarter that typically is one of the weaker quarters of the year for net adds.

Verizon Wireless Gains Outpace AT&T

iPhone 4 Spoof

Darth Vader Complains About His iPhone 4

Wireless Again Drives AT&T Results

AT&T's financial results for the second quarter of 2010 were driven by its wireless segment. The company says it added 1.6 million total wireless subscribers and a "record" 3.2 million iPhones.

Customer churn meanwhile has dropped to 1.01 percent for postpaid customers;

1.29 percent churn overall.

AT&T saw a 10.3 percent increase in wireless service revenues, with postpaid subscriber average monthly revenues per subscriber up 3.4 percent.

AT&T also saw 27.2 percent growth in wireless data revenues, year over year.

If there is anything to watch, it is that AT&T is activating fewer new iPhone customers that are new to AT&T. The company is getting a lower mix of iPhone subscribers from rival carriers than it has in the past.

During the second quarter, about 27 percent of its iPhone activations were customers new to AT&T. In the latter quarters of 2009, about 40 percent of iPhone activations were of devices used by customers new to AT&T.

This suggests either that the potential universe of users who want an iPhone is shrinking, either because other reasonably comparable models are available from other carriers, because interest in Android devices is growing, or because smartphone demand overall is shifting in some way to lower-priced devices.

The iPhone exclusive has been a smash hit for AT&T, without any doubt. The danger is the obvious risk that reliance on any single product or customer always has for any firm. When revenue is driven by a single customer, or a few customers, or a single product, a shift in demand can lead to rapid distress.

AT&T Delivers Double-Digit Earnings Growth in Second Quarter, Raises Full-Year Outlook

Jajah Founder’s Next Project Is Mobile Payments

Daniel Mattes, Jajah founder, appears to be targeting online payments for his new company Jumio. It appears Jumio is focused specifically on mobile payments, both between individuals and businesses, with an emphasis on removing fraud and ensuring trust.

Jumio: Jajah Founder’s Next Project Is Mobile Payments

Amazon Kindle At "Tipping Point"?

"We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle," Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos says. "The growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189."

"In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format," Bezos says. "Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books."

Amazon Media Room

Verizon Wireless 4G Caps "Unfair"?

Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam reportedly said at a Barclays Capital conference that Verizon Wireless likely will move away from unlimited plans on the 4G Long Term Evolution network, instead charging for 'buckets' of megabytes.

That is one more sign of the direction the entire industry will take. Some observers think this is somehow unfair. They sometimes base this belief on the lower "cost per megabit per second" or "cost per transferred megabyte" of a 4G network, compared to a 3G network.

It is no more inherently unfair than a company lowering its headcount, wage rates, reducing advertising or any other steps it may take to keep costs in line with anticipated revenues.

The fundamental trend in the communications business is that the "retail price" of bandwidth keeps dropping. When that happens, providers must sell more units to maintain flat revenue. In a business that also has major declining lines of business, any entity must, over time, reduce its costs in line with the revenue drops in those lines of business as well.

The net effect is a need for greater efficiency, and the lower cost per bit of a 4G network is part of that effort, as much as it is a hedge against constantly-growing bandwidth demand.

Moore's Law adequately captures the typical pace of semiconductor density change. But most of the rest of the natural world cannot improve its performance metrics at that pace. Not batteries, not construction, transportation, manufacturing or marketing cost. Greater efficiency in the transmission network is simply part of preparing for a future where bandwidth costs, per unit, will keep squeezing.

Verizon looking at non-unlimited plans for 4G data

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported | Broadband for America

A new MIT study says that previous estimates of U.S. broadband speed may have underestimated just how fast our national networks really are. In March, the FCC said that the broadband network was only half as fast as advertised.

However, the MIT study found that those measurements didn’t fully measure the speed of the “access network,” which Internet service providers (ISPs) control. For example, using the best method, Ookla/Speedtest, current typical speeds are 7.7 Mbps, not 3.8 Mbps.

According to the study, a simple figure for broadband speed isn’t sufficient to understand the quality of the nation’s digital infrastructure, and it’s just as affected by a user’s computer and the location of servers being accessed as it is by the ISP.

That's a bit akin to attributing all of an iPhone's dropped call performance to AT&T, and attributing zero to the iPhone's design, to the extent that the device itself can cause dropped calls.

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported

Bad Connection Inside the iPhone?

Much attention has been focused of late on the external antenna design of the Apple iPhone 4 as a cause of signal attenuation (weak signal). Much attention also has been paid to AT&T's wireless network in at least some locations--New York and San Francisco, for example--as regions where bandwidth problems are worse.

But Wired magazine also claims that software issues related to the iPhone's baseband radio, might also be playing a part in the "dropped call" problem. Wired magazine says Apple sources confirm that the software running the iPhone’s main radio, known as the baseband, was "full of bugs" and contributed to the much-decried dropped calls.

What’s more, Apple had chosen to source the radio from Infineon, whose hardware was used widely in Europe but rarely in the United States, where cell towers are placed farther apart and reception is therefore less forgiving. The suggestion is that the radio has not be tweaked for different tower spacing, at least not well enough.

In truth the relationship between smartphone manufacturers and service providers likely has grown more complex. Handset vendors want maximum feature richness so the devices become indispensable. But carriers obviously would rather that the consumer bond be with the network, not the device.

Also handset suppliers want their devices to be used. To the extent that such use put additional demand on the networks, wireless providers might prefer that wireless data services did become essential, but not terribly network-taxing in terms of bandwidth consumption.

It's hard to tell, anecdotally, whether users typically blame AT&T or Apple for reception problems, but most might agree that AT&T has gotten the blame, up to this point. Perhaps the view will be a bit more balanced now.

Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown

Redbox Plots Web Strategy

Redbox is developing an online strategy to stay competitive with larger rival Netflix.

Redbox is losing some business as renters use kiosks to get new releases and go to Netflix for older, harder-to-find titles. Adding an online distribution component might help Redbox, which generally stocks about 200 new and top releases in its kiosks.

Redbox Plots Web Strategy in Challenge to Netflix - Bloomberg