Singtel, Telstra Show Where Priorities Lie

It typically is instructive when any business decides to get out of its legacy business entirely, or give up its monopoly.

Few remember it, but Rochester Telephone, an independent telco operating in Rochester, N.Y., once wanted to get into the competitive long distance business badly enough to trade away its local access monopoly, breaking itself up into a "wholesale" infrastructure company and a separate retail entity that bought network service from the wholesale company just like any other competitor in the market.

Choices made by SingTel and Telstra also indicate where those companies see the tradeoffs.

SingTel decided to give up its local monopoly in the same way Rochester Tel did, in exchange for freedom to deploy its capital in other international markets.

Telstra has essentially sold its network assets to the wholesale-only National Broadband Network in exchange for rights to bid on Long Term Evolution spectrum.

The similarities? All three have given up their historic businesses to pursue growth other ways. For Rochester Tel, it was the unregulated part of the business. For SingTel it was expansion offshore. For Telstra it is mobile.

Big bets. They also show how companies are having to work at growth strategies.

National Broadband Network is that to achieve the plans goals, the NBN was essentially forced to purchase all of the Telstra network infrastructure. Telstra, who is the largest Internet provider in Australia was originally a government owned entity that was privatized in the late ’90′s and early millennium. Telstra believes that the future is in wireless and they have agreed to sell their entire network to the NBN for $11 billion and the rights to bid on precious LTE spectrum.

U.S. Should Consider Logistics of Australian Broadband Plan

What Happened to Enterprise Mashups?

Once touted as the future of business intelligence, providing quick and easy access to disparate information in one place, enterprise mashups, at least as a term, appear to have fallen out of favor.

Google search volume shows the trend. what happened to enterprise mashups?

It is possible that the process continues, but that the term has fallen out of favor. Consider "unified communications." It would be hard to argue that adoption continues, but the term doesn't have the hype value it did several years ago.

On the other hand, it is possible that "mashups" are just another victim of misplaced optimism. Not all innovations succeed; not all are adopted as originally conceived.

Perhaps "mashups" have become relatively mundane because creating new widgets or apps from other existing apps happens at a practical, relatively small-scale level that doesn't drive the creation of huge new markets, which is one driver of hype cycles.

Maybe enterprises simply aren't talking about their mashups. Or, it could be that the new apps are too hard to create, too expensive or offer too little return on effort.

It is clear there isn't much talk about the subject in 2010, compared to 2008.

What Happened to Enterprise Mashups?

Mobile Gaming Revenues Growing 19% at a Compound Annual Rate

Apple says the iPod "Touch" has more than 50 percent share of the mobile gaming market.

That presumably puts the Touch in line to garner a disproportionate share of mobile gaming revenues growing at a 19 percent a year compound rate.

Where paid gaming is growing about 17.5 percent, ad-supported gaming is growing at a 39 percent compound rate between 2010 and 2014.

That is one reason Apple thinks its iAd network is going to be valuable.

Apple Updates iPod Line

Apple has refreshed its line of iPods. A new iPod Shuffle combines buttons and voice controls in a new small design. It will be in 5 colors, will get 15 hours of battery life and will hold 2GB of music for just $49.

New iPod Nanos have eliminated to the click-wheel and now feature a touch screen with a square-shaped miniature iOS device. It also features a clip on the back like the shuffle, and the screen can be rotated with a pinch-and-twist motion. It has the same colors as the shuffle, plus granite and red versions. $149 for 8GB, and $179 for 16GB.

The iPod Touch, the top portable game player, is now thinner and gets all the hardware upgrades from the iPhone 4, including the Retina Display, the A4 chip, the gyroscope.

Also, it features forward and front-facing cameras, and can now run FaceTime for chatting with iPod and iPhone owners. $229, $299 and $399 are the prices for 8, 32 and 64 GB models.

Apple Event Announcements Rundown: iOS 4.1, New iPods, iTunes 10, Ping and Apple TV

iPod Touch is Top Mobile Gaming Platform

The iPod touch has become the number-one portable game player in the world, Apple CEO Steve Jobs says. The iPod Touch outsells Nintendo and Sony portable game players twice over, he noted, and controls more than 50 percent of the mobile gaming market.

Everything Apple Announced Today

Canada Mandates Wholesale Broadband Access for Cable and Telcos, at Equivalent Speeds

Every nation has its own way of regulating communications services. In the United States, for example, telcos are not required to sell wholesale access to "fiber to the home" facilities to competitors, though they must do so on copper facilities.

No U.S. cable companies are required to sell competitors wholesale access. This is not the case in Canada, where cable companies as well as telcos have to provide wholesale access, as telcos do (at least that is my understanding of the matter). 


Apparently there has been dispute about whether the wholesale obligations also include the availability of wholesale access at the same speeds a facilities-based telco or cable company must provide to potential wholesale partners. 


The CTRC apparently has ruled that this must be done, and that the obligations apply to cable as well as telco services. 


"This will enable competitors to make use of the cable companies' services just as easily as those of the telephone companies," the Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission now says. The CRTC says telcos, at least, are allowed to mark up wholesale prices to "10 percent above network costs." 


In the U.S. market, telcos have argued that provides an insufficient profit margin, since many other costs also are involved. Competitors, on the other hand, likely will argue that the fees are too high. It's just another example of channel conflict in the ecosystem. 


The decision does appear to mean that, for the moment, competitors will in most cases have a choice of two underlying providers in each local market, and will be able to match prevailing speeds offered by the telcos and cable companies in each market. 

CRTC ruling

SEO Versus PPC: Where's Your Budget Going in 2011?

28 percent of the biggest companies recently surveyed by (those with revenues exceeding $1 billion per year) in a recent survey apparently do not think search engine optimization is all that important. The firms report spending nothing on SEO.


An eConsultancy survey asked for information on company budgets for search engine optimization. About nine percent reported spending nothing on SEO. Some 43 percent spent up to $25,000. About 18 percent spent between $25,000 and $75,000.

Another 13 percent spent $75,001 - $150,000. Some 16 percent of respondents said they spent $150,001 to more than $3 million on search engine optimization in 2009.

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Foursquare Sees 'Biggest Day Ever' After Facebook Places Launches | ClickZ

Marketers often say that having a powerful new competitor in an emerging market sometimes, or often, is a good thing because it validates the market for all the contestants. That appears to be the case for Foursquare. At least, that is what Foursquare hopes is the case.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley tweeted on Thursday that his company had its "biggest day ever in terms of new user signups."

The disclosure came one day after Facebook launched its location-based feature, which some industry pundits had deemed a "Foursquare killer."

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Study: 83% of ALL Holiday Shoppers Influenced by Reviews « Marketing Pilgrim

Of the 92 percent of consumers surveyed by Channel Advisors that say they read product reviews, only three percent say they weren’t swayed by such reviews. That suggests 83 percent of consumers are influenced by online reviews.

A surprising 67% said they would purchase an identical product from an unknown website if the retailer offered a better value, meaning low pricing and free shipping, typically.

So the issue is, what is the balance between low price or free shipping and recommendations as drivers of user behavior. One might suggest low price and free shipping mostly always win when recommendations are favorable.

One might also suggest that favorable recommendations will fail to outweigh price and free shipping.


http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/09/study-83-of-all-holiday-shoppers-influenced-by-reviews.html

Amazon Said to Plan Film, TV Web Service With Studios

Amazon apparently is trying to create its own Web-based content service featuring TV and movie programming, as part of its shift to sales of digital goods. In principle, the approach is the same as Amazon has taken with books, where it sells both physical versions and digital versions.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-01/amazon-said-to-plan-film-tv-web-service-with-studios.html

eBay to Ban Google Checkout: What About That PayPal-Android Deal?

eBay sats that third-party checkout solutions, like Google Checkout, will no longer be supported on eBay after June 30, 2011. eBay says that other checkout solutions (besides PayPal) are only used less than 10 percent of the time on eBay.com.

As with all such decisions, one suspects a heightened sense of competitive threat is playing a large role in eBay's thinking.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/223346-ebay-to-ban-google-checkout-what-about-that-paypal-android-deal?source=feed

The Generational Culture Gap: Marketing Implications

Different generations have attitudinal orientations that affect the creation of marketing messages.

Gen X military recruitment ads, for example, have focused on “risk, the individual, and personal conquest,” for reasons related to the attitudes Gen X consumers tend to have.

Millennials, on the other hand, value teamwork. So marketing messages pitched to millennials have to hightlight the meaning of the choice and the teamwork.


http://millennialmarketing.com/2010/09/the-generational-culture-gap/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MillennialMktg+%28Millennial+Marketing%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Social Commerce: In Friends We Trust

Social networks generate very-large numbers of pageviews and longer times on site than other sites, which has made them attractive for advertisers. But some say social networks actually aren't like traditional media, meaning traditional advertising and campaigns might not work as people think they will.

The gist of the argument is that social networks are about users communicating with other users, making marketing messages a bit of an intrusion.

None of that seems to be slowing advertiser interest, though.


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User-Generated Content More Important, at Least for Google Rankings

While search engine providers have talked about fresh content for years, Google Caffeine's emphasis on freshness gives user-generated content a lot more weight. Maintaining a good ranking according to Google's algorithms now requires that at least some of the page's content is fresh and dynamic, which indicates to Google that the page is still relevant.

Adding customer reviews or user-generated questions and answers can obviously help provide fresh content.

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What's the Next Game Changer in Digital Marketing? Mobile

Mobile devices, will be the "number-one platform for persuasion" in 10 to 15 years, predicts BJ Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab. "If you want to influence people, it will be more important than the Web, than TV."

But we are only at the beginning of a long learning curve, for practitioners and end users. "We're going to see a lot of failure," he said.

Others might argue that is why there is at the moment so much optimism about all forms of mobile marketing, communication and commerce. But it will take a while. Many will find they are "too early" in the market. Just about all of us will find we didn't understand the medium very well.


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