Typical Small Business Search Advertiser Spends $2231 Per Year

Small businesses have dramatically increased their spending on search advertising over the past year, up 159 percent, in fact.

Kindle's Future in an "iPad World"

 Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com CEO, thinks there is plenty of room in the market for optimized e-book readers.
Bezos believes the Kindle can continue to succeed as a device that’s dedicated to reading, especially long-form reading. Amazon isn’t looking to “create an experience." Amazon thinks the author will create the experience.

In a world with short attention spans, one would hope Bezos is right. Fast-paced, short form content is good for lots of things. Reflection isn't typically one of them.

Voice Quality Isn't What It Used to Be

Most people, despite the reliance placed on their mobile phones, likely would say there are times when call quality isn't very good and calls get dropped. Most users of business-grade IP telephony and consumer VoIP might also agree that there are times, especially on multi-party conference calls, when quality also is not good, despite the measures taken to control each discrete set of resources.

Unfortunately, for all the good things that loosely-coupled systems make possible (faster innovation, greater creativity, lower end user prices), one of the downsides is inability to control session quality end-to-end.

The old AT&T monopoly might not have been so good at innovation and pricing (slow innovation and high prices) but it was very good at ensuring high quality.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Is Mobile Device Market Becoming the PC Market?

The phone device market is turning more and more into the PC market, says Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.

What she apparently means is that devices are becoming commodities where software and services do not create as much differentiation as once was hoped.

On the other hand, that might be good for consumers who will find they get more power and utility from newer devices without paying higher prices.

"Some, including me, thought that apps and services would help vendors add value to hardware," says Milanesi. "It seems to me though, that the popularity of Android is not going to allow that to happen."

Perhaps oddly, what Milanesi is suggesting is that "open" platforms, though generally considered a better way to foster innovation than "closed" approaches, might need to be re-thought.

She says Apple and Research in Motion provide alternate examples, where suppliers can innovate and capture the returns. She also seems to be suggesting that the separation of ownership of operating systems and hardware is not necessarily the best way forward for device suppliers.

The healthier financial approach would be to feature an "open" approach to applications on "closed" platforms (operating system and hardware bundled).

2Q10 Earnings season comes to an end. One main theme: margins pressure

Rep. Dingle OpposesTitle II Reclassification

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission Rep John Dingell (D- MI) said that the chairman should abandon his effort to reclassify broadband.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently responded that while he looks forward to working with Congress to a update the Communications Act, the Commission cannot wait for Congress to complete its deliberation.

Virtually all observers expect protracted legal action should the FCC reclassify broadband access as a regulated Title II service.

Dingle Opposes Broadband Reclassification

Best Buy to Sell Branded 4G Mobile Services

Best Buy will offer its own branded mobile broadband services using the Clearwire. network. The deal is noteworthy to the extent that Best Buy is the first major wholesale customer that is not an investor in Clearwire.

Best Buy has tried selling its own branded communications services before, in particular broadband and voice services for small businesses. That effort was modestly successful, one might argue.

Best Buy hopes to fare better with consumer-focused communications services, namely mobile gadgets.

Best Buy partners with Clearwire for 4G service - Rethink Wireless

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.

link

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