California's $500-billion pension time bomb

The state of California's real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That's the finding from a study released by Stanford University's public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Why should Californians care? Because this year's unfunded pension liability is next year's budget cut. For a glimpse of California's budgetary future, look no further than the $5.5 billion diverted this year from higher education, transit, parks and other programs in order to pay just a tiny bit toward current unfunded pension and healthcare promises.

That figure is set to triple within 10 years and, absent reform, to continue to grow, crowding out funding for many programs vital to the overwhelming majority of Californians.

In other words, at some point, virtually all the money in the educastion budget will go towards paying pension obligations, and zero for educating children. Most states have some version of the problem.

Economists talk about government spending crowding out private investment. Now we've got pension obligations crowding out on-going programs. If we aren't careful, we'll relatively soon have virtually all tax collections supporting debt service and pensions. 

California's $500-billion pension time bomb - Los Angeles Times

More Than 20% of Consumer Broadband Lines Now Come with VoIP

Voice over IP is becoming increasingly important to service providers as a bundle component, say researchers at Point Topic.

“Over 22 percent of consumer broadband lines worldwide now come with a Voice over IP service, and in some markets, such as France, penetration surpasses 90 percent.

Point Topic says there are more than 100 million consumer VoIP subscriptions in service, while another 12 million subscribers were added in the first half of 2010,” says Point Topic’s Senior Analyst John Bosnell.

In some cases, the apparent "killer app" status is likely an artifact of how services can be bought. In many countries, a broadband connection requires purchase of a voice line as well. It might be going too far to say voice is the killer app for broadband access. For most people, Internet access likely is that driver. But voice has emerged as a key feature for broadband access packages, at the very least.

More Than One in Five Consumer Broadband Lines Now Come with VoIP

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: