Android Passes iPhone in Revenue, Millennial Media Says

Millennial Media, which claims to have the largest data set of any third-party U.S. mobile ad network, reports that Android revenue exceeded iPhone-only revenue for its network, in September 2010.

Android requests grew by 26 percent from the previous month,and 1283 percent since January.

Anrdoid Passes iPhone in Revenue on Major Ad Network

Pricing Trends in the Web Conferencing Business

Prices for Web conferencing services continue to decline as the technology hits early stage mainstream adoption, say researchers at Frost & Sullivan.

Vendors are offering deeper discounts as they get into larger enterprise deals, bringing the average selling prices down by 10 percent to15 percent annually.

Vendors are addressing the market with a wide range of pricing models, but as the market matures, buyers are moving to named-user pricing. Frost & Sullivan estimates that more than 75 percent of revenues for Web conferencing services come from named-user licenses.

No Jitter | blog | Pricing Trends in the Web Conferencing Market

40% of Small Businesses Use Social Networks

Small business owners increasingly are tapping into social media to reach customers and prospects. Four-in-ten now indicate they use at least one social media platform; Facebook is by far the most popular platform, with 27 percent of relevant businesses on board. By comparison, only one-in-ten business owners a year ago were using online social networking to market their businesses.

Business confidence also seems to be improving, if frustratingly slowly. Over the last eighteen months, business owners have been streamlining business operations and cutting costs. Now, as a result of those tough decisions, many business owners appear to be in stronger financial position to jump on growth opportunities that might materialize.

Fewer report having cash flow issues (53 percent, down from 60 percent this spring), and while hiring plans remain stable overall, the number of business owners who plan to hire full time employees in the next six months has doubled to 10 percent versus spring 2010. That's the good news.

The bad news is that roughly half of small business owners still say cash flow issues are a problem. And 90 percent of small businesses continue to say they have no plans to hire full-time workers in the next six months.

While their confidence in the overall economy declined, more business owners said they thought sales over the next six months would be higher compared to last year (39 percent) and employee morale has shown modest improvements.

Of course, the same survey also can be read as suggesting 61 percent of small businesses do not think sales revenue will be higher in the next six months.

Small Business Owners Poised to Capitalize on Growth Opportunities, According to the American Express OPEN Small Business Monitor

4G Revenue Model Still Emerging?

Up to a point, the business model for fourth-generation wireless is "more:" more speed and more bandwidth. Up to a point, the business model also is about "less:" Less cost to deliver end users bits. Beyond those basics, there remains much cloudiness about how additional value--and revenue--can be added.

The wireless industry remains deeply divided on how best to monetize the deployment of next-generation wireless technologies, says Light Reading.

In his opening comments at the event, Heavy Reading senior consultant Berge Ayvazian shared research findings that show how average revenue per user figures flatten out over time unless a mobile data service provider is able to offer value-added services.

It isn't clear whether 4G will be any different than 3G on that score, unless compelling new applications and revenue models can be created.

Light Reading Mobile - 4G/LTE - Revenue Still the 4G Question

Fiber to the Home for Smart Grid Apps

Survey Says: 79 Percent of Consumers Have Experienced Poor Voice Quality with Call Centers

According to a recent survey undertaken by the Customer Experience Foundation on behalf of Empirix Inc., 79 percent of consumers have experienced poor voice quality. The study asked 3,925 consumers about their experiences in dealing with contact centers and identified technology related trends and common problems that are affecting customer service and costing organizations around the world billions of dollars.

The high percentage of global consumers that highlighted poor voice quality as a common problem points to a real issue in the industry.

The study also revealed that poor voice quality drives down sales volumes, increases call lengths and the number of calls that are forced to be redialed. And as a result, churn rates can increase for both customers and staff. The magnitude of the problem is indicative of how much businesses are struggling to come to terms with this issue, while consumers are quickly losing patience."

Survey Says: 79 Percent of Consumers Have Experienced Poor Voice Quality with Call Centers Costing Organizations Billions Globally

http://beconfident.empirix.com/mk/get/ENT-WS-WP-cefpoorvq-092010

Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks

A new study by Perfect Market has found that the most profitable online articles at several major newspaper online outlets were the ones readers were most engaged with, and that appears to be topics like unemployment, the egg recall and mortgage rates.

Perfect Market, a company that helps newspapers make their Web sites more profitable, examined the advertising revenue generated from more than 15 million articles from 21 news sites over a three-month period this summer, using data from newspapers including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Orlando Sentinel,

The reason, Perfect Market says, was that advertising is more effective when it is paired with news content that is relevant to the product, especially when the subject of the news is something in which readers have a personal interest.

Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks

Steve Job Anti-Android Rant

"Creative" Accounts for 52% of Ad Success, Says comScore

To the extent that the aim of an ad campaign is to stimulate additional sales, advertisers need to pay more attention to the quality of the creative, comScore says.

"The quality of the creative is four times more important than the characteristics of the media plan in generating sales,” said Jeff Cox, executive vice president of comScore ARS. “In fact, creative is the single most important factor and accounts for over half the changes in a brand’s sales over time.

Getting the creative right is absolutely essential, and yet its importance so often gets minimized in the process of developing an ad campaign. Now is the time for advertisers using digital, as well as more traditional media, to get serious about optimizing their creative on the front end so they don’t get a rude awakening when the ads don’t work and they are left wondering what went wrong.

In other words, a good plan and a good channel are helpful, but more than half of any new sales generation will hinge on whether the advertising succeeds in motivating behavior. That's more art than science, but it would appear too many advertisers neglect the art part.

comScore ARS Research Highlights Importance of Advertising Creative in Building Brand Sales

Moms and Millennials

The millennial generation is in one sense not a "market segment," but rather an indication of where all future markets are headed. As you might guess, behaviors of Generation X, sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, have some characteristics of both preceding and succeeding generations, though it is the differences that normally get the attention.

In a more immediate sense, Millennial behavior is important because it influences the behaqvior or older age cohorts, thus driving behavior now, and not simply in the future.

Moms and Millennials

eMarketer Webinar: Tips for Reaching & Engaging the Elusive Millennial

View more presentations from eMarketer.

Millennials are in one sense not a "market segment," but rather an indication of where all future markets are headed. As you might guess, behaviors of Generation X, sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, have some characteristics of both preceding and succeeding generations, though it is the differences that normally get the attention.

In a more immediate sense, Millennial behavior is important because it influences the behaqvior or older age cohorts, thus driving behavior now, and not simply in the future.

Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, is unapologetic about Apple’s "closed" or "curated" approach, which is to tightly control how everything integrates from the chips to the software to the industrial design.

“Open versus closed is a smokescreen,” he argues. “Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous,” says Jobs.

The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, “integrated versus fragmented."

There is some merit to that re-framing of the argument, though some will consider it a sophisticated bit of semantic gymnastics. Up to this point, Apple has been the salient exception to the "rule" that open approaches lead to more, and faster innovation.

But that is starting to change in the media business and with the rise of applications and closed user communities on the Internet. These days, in the content business, the options are "open," "closed" and "curated," which is another way of saying "fragmented," "integrated" or "annotated."

Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”:

Steve Jobs Predictably Disses 7-Inch Tablets

Perhaps predictably, Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn't think much of tablets with a seven-inch screen, such as the Samsung Galaxy or Research in Motion Playbook.

“Given that tablet users will have a smartphone in their pocket, there’s no point in giving up screen size," Jobs says. "Seven inch tablets are tweeners — too big to be a phone, and too small to compete with the iPad.”

Some of us don't agree. For many users, who cannot work without a notebook and a smartphone, and who travel frequently, an iPad is one more device to lug around in a backpack or briefcase. Some of us now routinely travel with a videocamera, two smartphones and a notebook, possibly another device (iPod or DVD player) "standard issue."

That means lots of AC adapters and cables, plus the actual devices.

To the extent that a tablet is a content consumption device, not so good as a content creation device, there might be form factor and weight issues that could tip the buying decision in the direction of a smaller tablet.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs rips into tablet competitors:

The Dot Mob Era

Some say a "Dot Mob" era is coming, and coming fast.

Similar to the "Dot Com" era, it is going to be a time of incredible mobile advertising growth.

Unlike the internet advertising era that took time to develop mainly because the infrastructure of the internet was so immature at the time, that will not be the case with mobile advertising, some might argue.

Google broke out its mobile advertising as a unique line item and says it is a $1 billion a year business, perhaps on the way to being a $10 billion business at some point not too distant.

Apple and the Dot Mob Era

Mobile Price Study: Only As Good As its Assumptions

Predictably, people are pointing to a new study on mobile pricing, published by the New America Foundation, as proof that U.S. mobile prices are too high.

The United States tends to fall in a band of countries that charge higher prices to individual wireless consumers for everything except pure voice service where prices are comparable, a study by the New America Foundation finds. read the full study here.

But a study is only as good as its assumptions. Taking a look at single-user plans, the foundation finds that "across postpaid and prepaid voice plans, Canada, U.S., U.K., and Japan mostly fall in the high to middle price tiers while India, Hong Kong and Sweden fall in the low price tier."

The United States is in the highest price tier in the postpaid and prepaid text plans sharing space with U.K., Canada and Denmark while Sweden, India and Japan fall in the lowest price tier, the foundation says.

Finally, Japan, Hong Kong, U.S. and Canada feature in the high to medium price tiers while India, Sweden, and U.K. emerge as winners in the low price tier, the New America Foundation says.

In Canada and U.S., consumers have the highest minimum monthly charge for a complete postpaid cell phone service at $67.50 and $59.99 respectively, the New America Foundation says. Other countries that follow a similar cost structure at lower rates are U.K. at $32.40, Denmark at $39.00, and Finland at $40.10.

So here's the problem: In the United States, in 2006, fully 54 percent of adult mobile users subscribe through a family plan, according to the Yankee Group. That was up from the percentage of users on family plans in 2005, when 49 percent of adult subscribers were on a family plan.

Eighty-one percent of all mobile-using teens were on a family plan in mid-2006, up from 75 percent in 2004, the Yankee Group found.

A reasonable estimate might be that 60 percent to 70 percent of U.S. users are now on family plans. That is important when comparing costs and plans across regions and countries of the world because the New America Foundation study compares individual plans, not family plans.

That isn't to say the New America Foundation study is "wrong." But it compares plans that most U.S. users are not buying.

The plans selected for study are important. Some are pointing to an earlier study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as well.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, suggests that U.S. mobile prices are "high," based on a standard set of usage buckets, mirroring the New American Foundation study.

But there's a problem. Most U.S. users talk about four times as much as some Europeans do.

The problem is that the OECD study uses definitions of "low," "medium" and "high" use that might describe usage in the Netherlands, but are wildly inapplicable to typical U.S. usage rates, says George Ford, Chief Economist of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies.

Specifically, the OECD analysis calls 44 outbound minutes a month "low," 114 outbound minutes medium and 246 minutes outbound "high" levels of usage.

The average mobile consumer in the United States uses 800 minutes a month, about four times as high as the OECD "high usage" level. Furthermore, the OECD considers 55 text messages a month to be "high use" where the typical U.S. mobile user sends or receives 400 text messages a month.

Since usage plans are directly related to usage, this is an issue that distorts the comparisons, difficult to make under the best of conditions. By definition, the "average" U.S. user is a "high usage" customer. So if U.S. users kept the same behavior patterns, but had to buy plans as the OECD baskets suggest, they would have to pay rates commensurate with very-high usage levels.

In other words, if users in a given country have low usage, and are on low usage plans, then average prices paid will tend to be "lower." In the United States, usage is vastly higher than in Europe.

Normalizing for usage volume, what one finds is that U.S. users pay modest prices for much-higher use. If users in the Netherlands had consumption patterns identical to U.S. mobile users, they would pay very-high prices.

In other words, one cannot simply compare low-usage plans in one country with high-usage plans in another, any more than one can compare low-usage plans in one country with high-usage plans in the same country. Nor can one compared plans that most users do not buy, and produce results that are terribly meaningful.

Who has the most expensive phone bills? North Americans!: