Social Media Now Saturated?

Forrester Research estimates that 58 percent of U.S. online adults use or visit social networking sites monthly, compared to 90 percent using email monthly and 37 percent watching any type of video.

However, Forrester believes this 58 percent engagement rate represents a saturation level for social activities. Beyond this are online users who are by their nature are unlikely to use social networking because it isn't relevant or interesting.

"In the real world, a minority of individuals are creators -- writing, composing, or snapping pictures for anything other than personal enjoyment," says Forrester Research analyt Augie Ray.

The implications might be that marketers who use social networking now have to steal attention from other marketers, as the total number of users might not be growing much.

As social media growth stagnates, companies need to be more engaging

Signaling is the Issue for Smartphones, Bandwidth for PC Dongle Connections

Nearly everybody has an issue with data bandwidth from time to time, at some locations, at some times of day, experienced as sluggish response times, inability to make a connection, or a dropped connection.

In part, that is because only 15 percent of mobile cell sites handle about half of all traffic. If you happen to be in one of those cells at the time of peak load on a weekday, you might encounter congestion. It isn't so much that the "whole network" isn't properly designed, but rather than demand is concentrated at a relatively small number of sites. No matter how much bandwidth a network has, in aggregate, it will be limited in terms of how much bandwidth it can make available in a single coverage area, at one point in time.

Nor is the only problem bandwidth demand. The peak data usage is driven by data cards and embedded laptops, and relatively secondarily by smartphones. But signaling load is an issue as well. In fact, it is more likely that smartphone signaling will cause congestion of radio assets than actual bandwith demand, says Chetan Sharma, mobile analyst.

In fact, signaling traffic is growing faster than the raw data traffic due to smartphones, as they are not very efficient with application signaling, Sharma says.

The smartphone signaling is over eight times as intensive as data card signaling traffic, and signaling consumes over 50 percent of the available network resources.

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What is Impact of Lower Latency on Usage?

In the consumer smartphone market, lower latency seems to correlate with higher usage of bandwidth, according to analyst Chetan Sharma. Basically, each succeeding generation of mobile technology (second generation to fourth generation) shows lower latency and higher available bandwidth, as well as higher end user data consumption, with the biggest step change coming in the transition from 3G HSPA to 4G LTE.

As a rule, says Sharma, a four-fold improvement in overall performance leads to better user experience and if the pricing is right will have a two times impact on consumption with the introduction of each new network technology.

Those findings make intuitive sense. Broadband has become so popular in part because the latency is so much lower, compared to dial-up services.

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Why "Per-Capita" Measures Often Are Inaccurate

Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow, is an anthropologist who studies how humans react and adapt to changes around them and how technology needs to adapt to humans and their needs in different habitats. Sometimes "habitat includes such mundane things as household size.

In India only five percent of the households are "single-person" households while France and Germany have over one third households in the single-person category. So why is that significant? If one makes any sort of cross-country comparison between India and either France or Germany, and the comparison involves anything measured on a per-household basis, there are going to be potential anomalies.

Something measured on a "per-household" basis will not capture the significant differences per-capita magnitude unless adjusted for radically different household sizes.

Netflix Coming to Android

Android devices have not, up to this point, had the Netflix app that iPhone, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 devices have had.

The hurdle has been the lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism available for Android. The same security issues that have led to piracy concerns on the Android platform have made it difficult for Netflix to secure a common Digital Rights Management system on these devices.

Since Netflix has work on a device-by-device basis, Netflix says it soon will be releasing an app for at least some Android devices.

Prepaid 101 Primer

Gene Retske,the editor of "The Prepaid Press," (http://www.prepaid-press.com/) penned a number of tutorials over a seven-year period explaining the basics of the prepaid calling card business, which he now has collected into book form.

"Prepaid 101" is, as its name suggests, an introduction to the prepaid calling card business that covers subjects rangting from the business model to marketing, and originally were written from 2003 to 2008.

Prepaid 101, structured as a series of short articles, is highly digestible and is recommended for people just getting into the prepaid calling card business, or for companies that need to train people about the calling card business. The book is not "heavy on the technology" and puts everything into a business context.

Also, readers will find they can easily skip sections that do not pertain to their immediate jobs, such as sections on PC operating systems or broadband access. The book does touch on prepaid wireless, for example, but the central intent is to teach readers about the prepaid calling card business.

That means much of the material covers the "costs" of setting up a prepaid business, the setting of calling rates, terms and conditions, as well as marketing and sales strategies, including such details on what to put on the front and back of the physical cards.

A 20-year veteran of what was then Southern Bell, Retske worked both in sales and marketing before starting his own firm in the international callback business in 1992.

Along the way he wrote "The International CallBack Book" and "A Guide to Competitive International Telecommunications."

Were Reske writing a new series of tutorials in the second decade of the 21st century, he might pay more attention to new products that use a prepaid charging mechanisms, such as game network subscriptions, mobile phone or Internet access subscriptions. Along the way, as the industry itself has changed, Retske has been covering subjects such as prepaid gift cards.

It also is likely that  Retske would be writing tutorials about prepaid wireless. These days, prepaid wireless is a bigger part of the overall prepaid business.

"Prepaid 101" can be ordered directly from Solvox, www.prepaid101book.com.

Not Every Mobile Operator Now Experiences Data Congestion; Only 60%

Bandwidth is one of those issues upon which one always can seem to find an argument. One always can get an argument about whether access is fast enough, cheap enough or good enough; whether bandwidth demand is growing at unmanageable levels or just growing. Virtually all retail service providers report a highly-skewed consumption pattern, with a small percentage of users consuming disproportionately.

Others maintain that even if such really-heavy patterns exist, it doesn't affect overall performance or experience very much.

But a new survey of 30 global mobile operators suggests that more than 60 percent of global wireless service providers do experience data congestion today, with 20 percent reporting that data congestion is severe at specific times.

The study, conducted by Telespirience on behalf of Amdocs, probably won't end the debate.

Service providers in the Middle East and Africa report that this overload poses serious consequences for their brand reputation and has led to an increase in customer complaints around service quality; Asian and American operators say it is contributing to churn.

Data demand is driven by smartphones and laptops with mobile broadband: In the Americas and Europe smartphones are driving data demand, accounting for more than 40 percent of total data consumption.

In Asia, the Middle East and Africa, laptops with mobile broadband is the key driver. A further factor fuelling demand is flat-rate data tariffs where “bandwidth hogs,” although comprising only an estimated two to three  percent of the customer base, are consuming approximately 30 percent of the network’s capacity, contributing to further service degradation for the overall user base.

About 75 percent of wireless service providers surveyed say end-to-end quality of service has the single greatest impact on their bottom line, partly because of increased customer support costs and customer churn.

Wireless service providers see building out additional network capacity as essential, with 97 percent of those surveyed reporting they intend to roll out Ethernet to alleviate congestion. Respondents said that the gap between the growth in demand for capacity as compared to revenues received for data services was a matter of concern, though.

"Wireless service providers face a 'perfect storm' with data demand doubling year on year, yet revenues are static due to flat-rate pricing," said Teresa Cottam, research director of Telesperience.

To be sure, there are all sorts of reasons for moving to fourth-generation platforms that only secondarily involve an immediate need for bandwidth. Most observers believe 4G networks will cost less to operate, on a delivered bit basis. To the extent that revenue never seems to scale linearly with additional bandwidth, that is a huge advantage.

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Telecom and Video Cutbacks: What Happens When Economy Turns?

The hard thing about managing or forecasting in turbulent times is, as Cisco management likes to say, "managing the transitions." It is not news that media, entertainment and communication spending has been sluggish, at best, for many segments of those businesses over the past couple of years.

According to Harris Interactive, about 20 percent of U.S. adults say they have cancelled or cut back on cable television service (22 percent), mobile phone service (17 percent) or cancelled their landline service and are only using their cell phone (17 percent).

The hard part is trying to figure out when cutbacks triggered by a tough economy will abate, and whether behavior returns to its older pattern, or not. In past recessions, consumer behavior has resumed its "pre-recession" pattern once the recovery was firmly under way.

This time around, of course, nobody is too confident. There is much concern that a new "age of austerity" has begun, so that even when the economy does improve, behavior will not be as it was, in terms of spending. At the same time, most of us would agree that user preferences and tastes are changing. Aside from the economic effects, people might be deciding they want to spend their money in different ways than they have in the past.

Aside from those largely incremental changes, though, some of us believe the danger of "black swan events," unpredictable and unforeseen events with large magnitude effects, is higher than used to be the case in the past, though at all times "black swan events" have occurred.

Uncertainty? You betcha. 

Harris Interactive: Americans Still Cutting Back on the Small Things to Save Money

Clearwire 4G Active in Denver?

Now this is a pleasant shock. Clearwire's 4G network seems to up and running in central Denver. There has been no announcement that I am aware of, and, in fact, Clearwire has said it would delay Denver construction, as I recall.  But there it is: I am getting a live 4G signal on my Evo. Marvelous.


Since it is rumored that Sprint and Clearwire are in disagreement about whether Sprint should actually be paying Clearwire for service it is unable to provide, the signal activation implies to me that Clearwire and Sprint have reached agreement, at least in Denver.

Sprint says it has 810,000 customers with 4G handsets in areas that have not yet been lit up with WiMAX 4G, yet Sprint still has to pay for those customers, to the tune of about 4.46 per customer, reports indicate.

The more interesting question is how much of Denver already has radios in place, powered up and ready to go. Clearwire originally had been planning to light up the 4G network by the end of 2010, and then backed off. Apparently there are enough Sprint customers in Denver that the lost revenue is more painful than the cost of operating the retail network.

Lots of Subtleties to Mobile Banking

Mobile banking, some would argue, is not as obvious an opportunity for U.S. application or service providers because the banking infrastructure is well developed, in obvious contrast to the situation in many other parts of the world, where the mobile essentially "is" the banking channel.

The more-subtle observation is that the infrastructure an application provider puts into place to support mobile money transfers of various types also can be leveraged for loyalty campaigns, coupon distribution and other marketing campaigns.

Over time, we'll see how things develop, at least in the U.S. market, where it seems likely most of the value payment processing represents has yet to be "surfaced."

75% of YouTube Access is Mobile?

A recent survey by Google's YouTube Mobile division has found a stunning 75 percent of mobile YouTube users indicating that their mobile device is the primary way they view YouTube content.

Even allowing for the skew of users (100 percent use their mobiles for YouTube), that is a startling finding.

The 16,000 responses also indicate that 70 percent of respondents visit YouTube Mobile at least once a day. About
58 percent spend more than 20 minutes per visit to YouTube Mobile. About 38 percent feel that YouTube Mobile is replacing their desktop YouTube usage.

Those findings have all sorts of implications. Mobile service providers might sell more data plans, or larger data plans, if more people start behaving this way. They also will have to keep upgrading the capacity of their networks.

Device manufacturers have an opportunity to make video experiences a draw for their higher-end devices. Tablet devices likely will benefit as well, given the larger display tablets sport. Application providers would seem to have a growing base of users who are comfortable with, and used to, watching video on a mobile device.

Google Mobile Ads Blog

Global Online Growth Fastest in BRIC Countries

In 2014, one-third of Internet users will come from Brazil, Russia, India, or China.

The Data Digest: Forrester's Global Online Population Forecast 2009 To 2014 | Forrester Blogs

How Mobile Apps Help the Car-Rental Business

The big issue, for mobile applications or any other uses for mobile devices in other areas of business, is the value proposition. Using a mobile, instead of some other mechanism, has to offer enough value to displace an existing behavior.

It appears mobile apps now offer value both for end users of the Zipcar service, and Zipcar itself.

Launched two years ago, Zipcar's app for iPhone and Android devices has been downloaded by 400,000 people, who use it to locate the nearest available car. That has made it much easier for customers to find cars wherever and whenever they want one.

Now the company has expanded to 55 cities and 225 college campuses in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom.

By letting customers book cars spontaneously with their mobile phones instead of making reservations ahead of time on PCs, Zipcar has found a much easier way to manage its challenging logistics.

Unlike a big car-rental company, Zipcar arranges many short-term rentals in widely distributed locations.

Customers must return the car to its home spot, which is often on a side street. You can see why the ability to return a vehicle using nothing more than a mobile device is useful. A mobile can find an available car closest to where a user is, and allows a user to easily figure out where to leave the car once the rental period is finished.

How Mobile Apps Are Disrupting the Car-Rental Business

E.U. Not Worried About Net Neutrality

“The European Union (E.U.) has sufficient legal safeguards in place to prevent the Continent’s telephone operators from selectively managing consumer access to the Internet and no new restrictions are needed,” says Neelie Kroes, the commissioner for the E.U.’s digital agenda.

So the E.U.’s executive arm had opted to take a wait-and-see approach on the so-called network neutrality issue.

So far, the E.U. continues to believe that competition is sufficient to prevent the abuses network neutrality supporters tend to worry about, namely anti-competitive behavior by ISPs who own content assets, or erection of the access equivalent of content paywalls.

Perhaps oddly, where competition in the U.S. market includes a strong facilities-based cable and a strong facilities-based telco in nearly all markets, plus a couple to several mobile providers plus two satellite broadband providers, plus an occasional fixed-wireless provider, most E.U. nations have one dominant telco providing access to all other contestants, though facilities-based cable providers are becoming established, or are established, in the United Kingdom, for example, and mobile networks also offer broadband access.

It isn't always clear to some observers why multiple facilities-based competitors provide "less competition" than one network, albeit one with strong wholesale requirements. Wholesale "one size fits all" access is a good thing, one might argue. Multiple networks, each free to customize access offerings, arguably is better.

E.U. Not Worried Over Net Neutrality

Facebook to Offer Email?

Facebook’s Project Titan has been building a web-based email client, and some believe a launch is coming within days. If Facebook adds an email client, do you care? How would you use it, and do you trust it?

Facebook Jumping Into Email Game