Cars are Where People Listen to Music

Though it might seem that MP3 players are the dominant way people consumer music, the car stereo is the most popular device to listen to music, followed by the home stereo and the PC, Forrester Research says.

About a third of U.S. adults regularly listens to music on a MP3 player, and eight percent listen on their mobile phone. Many observers have suggested that the iPhone is the next-generation replacement for the iPod. The usage statistics so far do not generally support that contention. Most people seem to use their MP3 players.

The Data Digest: Which Music Devices Do People Use

Android 2.2 for Evo 4G

The version 2.2 update for the Android operating system will start to be pushed out to Sprint Evo devices the week of August 3 or so.

Android 2.2 brings with it a number of new features, including the ability to turn the phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot, improved performance, and new widgets for the home screen.

Android 2.2 comes to Evo 4G next week

Location-Based Apps Still Early on Growth Curve

A new analysis by Forrester Research can be viewed as an excuse not to dive into location-based services, or location-based advertising, at the moment.

Only about three percent of people surveyed by Forrester Research say they use location apps, such as check-in apps, frequently or at least once a week.

Some 84 percent of respondents say they don't even know what the apps are.

None of those findings should surprise anybody, at this point. LBS still is in its infancy. Not many people use any new device or application, at first.

Growing Channel Conflict Between Programmers, Distributors

Despite competing efforts by YouTube, SeeSaw, Hulu, MSN and others to aggregate catch-up TV online in this way, U.K. broadcasters are keeping control of their own inventory for online viewing, including "catch up" services that allow users to view shows they recently have missed.

U.K. broadcasters ITV, C4 and Five each sell their own video ads on either their own sites or on YouTube and SeeSaw (C4 and Five).

The point is that channel conflict between content companies and distributors continues to grow as the online channel becomes more important.

BSkyB, for example, also recently got exclusive rights to HBO content, while Virgin Media, which has on-demand rights for content it shows on its cable network, apparently does not have those rights for mobile or Web distribution.

Virgin Media Names VOD Player Line-Up

Top 10 Global Broadband Providers

If the number of fixed-line broadband subscribers were the measure, Comcast and Time Warner Cable would rank among the world's top-10 largest Internet service providers.

The 10-biggest broadband ISPs in March 2010 had 191 million total subscribers, representing 39 percent of the world’s 492 million broadband customers.

KT of South Korea, the world’s tenth largest broadband ISP, is the only new member of the top ten ranking, having displaced Telecom Italia, which is now the 11th largest broadband ISP globally.

Just two providers, China Telecom and China Unicom, accounted for 20 percent of global broadband subscribers.

Broadband provider rankings: The Rise and Rise of China

53% of Mobile Customers Use Data

About 53 percent of mobile users now use mobile data services or applications of one sort or another, Validas reports. That is up from 42 percent in 2009. The typical user consumes 145 Mbytes a month, compared to  96.8 MBytes in 2009. The typical smartphone user consumes 415 Mbytes, up from 139 Mbytes in 2009.

Mobile PC broadband users consume 1.5 Mbytes a month, up from about 1.4 Mbytes in 2009.

Feature phone users consume about 68 Mbytes a month, up from 46 Mbytes.

Verizon Wireless posted the largest percentage increase in mean data usage per user from 48 MBytes to 147 MBytes.

T-Mobile users consume 121 Mbytes, typically. Sprint users consume about 133 Mbytes, primarily because more Sprint customers now consume 50 Mbytes or less each month.

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0.3% of BitTorrent Files are Legal

The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal, a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed.

Researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory scraped torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted.

They found that 89 percent of the files they sampled were confirmed to be illegally shared, and most of the remaining ambiguous 11 percent was likely to be infringing.

Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal

AT&T Credit Rating at Risk

S&P may lower AT&T’s credit rating, on the heels of Sprint-Nextel posting a widening loss.

“AT&T Inc. may not be able to achieve financial metrics fully supportive of the current rating within a reasonable time frame,” S&P said.

That might not mean much to most people, nor is it a user's responsibility to worry about the service provider's problems. But the potential downgrade is important because it illustrates the pressures the largest U.S. communication carriers now face. A lower credit rating means higher borrowing costs, and therefore less money available to fund network upgrades.

The potential move also illustrates a situation that gets too little attention from policymakers, who tend to act as though America's largest providers of communications services are "too big to fail."

In fact, any careful analysis would suggest there is huge risk in the communications business, and that the objective now is to avoid negative growth. Most of the revenue growth the biggest carriers now get simply replaces revenue being steadily lost from legacy lines of business. They are hardly "too big to fail."

AT&T’s ‘A’ corporate credit rating and the ‘A-1′ short-term and commercial paper ratings were put on CreditWatch with negative implications. “We expect that a potential downgrade of the corporate credit rating, if any, would be limited to one notch,” S&P noted.

AT&T Gets Slammed By S&P, ‘A’ Corporate Credit Rating In Doubt

More Women Than Men Use Social Networking

Globally, women demonstrate higher levels of engagement with social networking sites than men, new comScore survey finds.

Although women account for 47.9 percent of total unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57 percent of pages and account for nearly 57 percent of total minutes spent on these sites.

Women spend significantly more time on social networking sites than men, with women averaging 5.5 hours per month compared to men’s 4 hours, demonstrating the strong engagement that women across the globe share with social sites.

Social Networking Sites Reach a Higher Percentage of Women than Men Worldwide

Mobile Category Will Dominate Consumer Electronics Growth in 2011

Mobile computers will provide the consumer electronics industry's primary revenue growth in 2011, according to the Consumer Electronics Industry.

CEA projects that mobile computing, which includes laptops, netbooks and tablet computers, will reach more than $26 billion in shipment revenues by 2011, and "most" of that segment's growth will be driven by tablet PCs.

Wireless handsets, which have driven growth in recent years, also will represent about $26 billion worth of revenue, says CEA. Together, mobile PCs and phones will represent about 53 percent of total consumer electronics industry revenue.

CEA Says Mobile PCs, Mobile Phones Will be 53% of Consumer Electronics Revenues

Is Multichannel Video Business in Danger?

Smaller providers in the communications and cable TV business never have had a terribly easy time coping with the emerging shift to broadband-based services. Scale is an issue, and smaller providers, by definition, do not have scale.

Small telcos often cannot take advantage of wireless or video in the same way that Verizon and AT&T can. Small cable companies often cannot take advantage of either wireless or video scale economies.

For many smaller telcos, hanging onto the voice business is a key challenge. Now some might argue the same is true for small cable operators and their video businesses.

"What's dead this year is video," said Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin. "The programmers are destroying the video business" by shifting to online and mobile distribution channels, she argues.

Consumers are gravitating to Internet and mobile applications, she argues, so operators should focus on mobile services, commercial services and the data access business.

"Take the cash flow, if there is any after the programmers get done with you, and what you need to do is protect the future," she said.

Clearly, Martin sees online video as a direct threat to the multichannel video business. It might be shocking to hear an analyst recommend that a cable company get beyond video, as it once was a shock to hear analysts suggesting telcos had to get beyond voice. But the logic is hard to argue with, as tough as the advice will be to heed.

‘Video Is Dead', Analyst Laura Martin Declares

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Mobile

Five years ago, the Motorola Razr was the "hot device." The BlackBerry was carried mostly by business users. While smartphones existed, the devices were really more like PDAs with a phone built-in rather than mobile computing devices as we know them today.

There were mobile phone apps, but the app store concept as we know it now was still years away. And while many mobile phones had the ability to access the web, the experience was slow and painful.

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Mobile

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