Twitter on Making Money

Twitter exec talks about how the firm will make money.

Google's "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web: E-Book

I'm not a fan of e-books, but here's Google's "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web," a tutorial about those subjects.

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home

What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is Thinking These Days

Tablet PC shipments to reach 100 million units in 2013

Smartphones, tablet PCs and notebooks will all become mainstream terminal devices in the mobile Internet market in the future with smartphone shipments having a chance to reach 800 million units in 2013, up more than double from 2010, with tablet PCs at 100 million units and notebooks 300 million units, says Digitimes Research senior analyst Joanne Chien.

As smartphone shipments will reach 440 million units in 2011 and continue to see surging growth over the next few years, Chien believes tablet PCs will benefit from the opportunity as consumers will want to enhance their experience from smartphones and decide to choose a tablet PC.

However, since tablet PCs are unlikely to become as popular as smartphones, if tablet PC and smartphone shipments are combined, tablet PCs will only account for 10 percent to 12 percent of the shipments from 2011-2013.

Tablet PC shipments to reach 100 million units in 2013, says Digitimes Research

Apple's iAd Has Signed On "Over Half Of The Top 25" U.S. Advertisers

Apple boasts today that its iAd mobile advertising program, which launched this past summer, has already signed on 'over half of the top 25 leading US national advertisers in just four months. One might say these mostly are trials, which to an extent, they are.

One can argue the campaigns are driven, in part, by the "how it looks" angle. The advertisers want to be seen as forward-thinking, smart, and cutting-edge. None of those are bad reasons for using the iAd network at this point.

The publicity and "we're leaders" aura is a big reason that a lot of these big deals happen in the first place, even if they do drive some sales, too. But driving sales probably isn't the main reason many of these brands have signed up with iAd.

Apple's iAd Has Signed On "Over Half Of The Top 25" U.S. Advertisers

Mobile Broadband Requires Fixed-Line "Over the Top" Services

It is hard to argue with the proposition that the number of U.S. mobile broadband subscriptions is going to eclipse the number of "household" broadband connections, for the simple reason that there are more people than households and that perhaps 75 percent of all mobile devices will be using mobile broadband, relatively soon.

Infonetics Research directing analyst Diane Myers think that will happen in about three years, in 2013. That has implications for nationwide and large regional providers of mobile services and larger fixed-line service providers. Perhaps the most-significant implication is that although most service providers have competed "in territory," the availability of a large mobile broadband user base also means that applications and services can be delivered "out of territory."

"TV everywhere" is one example, and possibly the best current example. One might point to Comcast becoming a mobile video supplier. But one might also say Comcast for the first time will leverage its in-territory video services "over the top," on a potentially nationwide basis. Application providers, of course, long have taken this route, creating apps and services that are consumed "over the top" on any broadband connection.

The big issue is how important a similar approach might be for other services traditionally thought of as "fixed line" services provided "in territory." Voice, texting and messaging services are other examples of "over the top" services provided without regard to territorial restraints.

There are several obvious additional observations one might make. Going "out of territory" is something most smaller service providers already do by "edging out" from an existing service territory into an adjacent market where business customers can be served, using a combination of new facilities and wholesale access.

Smaller providers might continue to find that a viable way to go "out of territory," as the complexity and cost of supporting a full "over the top" applications offering is more than a small company can support or envision. But those limitations also illustrate the changing nature of competition in the consumer services market. Fixed-line providers increasingly will face mobile-based broadband competition from much-larger competitors across a broad range of products, including, but not limited to, voice, entertainment video, broadband access and applications.

"If telecom operators aren't able to provide competitive mobile services, they will be at a significant disadvantage," says Myers. One might argue there are limited responses a small provider can take, beyond doing its level best to maintain high levels of customer service and satisfaction.

"Now that residential voice and Internet services are no longer tied to a physical household, operators can, and should, customize services for individual members of a household and compete on a nationwide basis versus a specific fixed territory,” says Myers. For most, that will require scale and investment few smaller companies can afford to make.

The largest national mobile providers, the largest telcos and cable companies, on the other hand, do have the scale and heft necessary to undertake operations of that sort. The top national mobile providers are, by definition, already operating over a national territory, considering their own networks and extensive roaming agreements.

The biggest telcos and cable providers already have programming relationships and customer volume that will give them a head start in the over-the-top video services business, while a few "over the top" providers, including Netflix and Apple, likewise have the advantages of huge installed base to work with.

That is not to say that in-region assets are unimportant. In many cases, it is the value of those assets that provide the springboard to out of region efforts. One might argue that metro Wi-Fi networks are an amenity cable and telco providers use to glue customers to fixed-network broadband services, for example.

At least for the moment, that's the same business value "TV Everywhere" provides: it provides enhanced value that glues customers to Comcast's at-home video services.

In fact, though it is correct in one sense to talk about "mobile" extensions to "fixed" services, it also is correct to characterize such efforts as "out of domain" efforts as well. Services might be sold to an enterprise location, which is the primary revenue venue, but then be revenue enhanced, directly or indirectly, by extending service outside of the domain to mobile devices and remotely-connected computing devices.

MMS to Generate $31.5 Billion in Revenue in 2010

Multimedia message service (MMS), often cited as a failure, is said to have generated $27 billion in global revenues in 2009. Portio Research researchers say that is equivalent to what SMS was generating about five years ago.

Most of that revenue is generated by people sending pictures and videos from their mobile phones, it appears.

Syniverse Technologies, for example, posted 128 percent organic growth in MMS traffic year over year, in the third quarter of 2010.

In terms of total peer-to-peer (P2P) messages, which include MMS and short message service (SMS), Syniverse moved an average of 1.6 billion messages per day during third quarter 2010, with overall P2P volumes up 35 percent versus third quarter 2009. That average is the equivalent of 1.1 million messages every minute or 18,519 per second across mobile service providers worldwide. The company has processed more than one trillion P2P messages since 2007.

MMS is projected to generate $31.5 billion in revenue by the end of 2010, making MMS the second most successful messaging service, behind SMS, in revenue terms until end-2014.

In 2009, worldwide MMS revenue saw a year-on-year increase of over 22 percent; worldwide MMS traffic in 2009 achieved year-over-year growth of 48 percent.

Portio Research

Android: "The Phone for the Rest of Us"

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says Android smartphones, not the iPhone, would become dominant, noting that the Google OS is likely to win the race similarly to the way that Windows ultimately dominated the PC world.

In part, that will be intentional on Apple's part, as Apple never has shown too much interest in making and selling "the most affordable" devices. Also, Android devices will be sold by any number of firms that do make a business selling "devices for the rest of us."

Eventually, he thinks that Android quality, consistency, and user satisfaction will match Apple iOS devices.

Steve Wozniak: Android will be the dominant smartphone platform

Mobile Editing of Google Docs

Mobile Advertising Now Getting its Own Budgets

Mobile applications budgets in 2010 moved away from cannibalizing online budgets, accordinhg to Millennial Media. (click on image for larger view)

Budgets designated specifically for app development grew year-over-year, now comprising nearly 25 percent of the overall budget for online projects. At the same time, mobile apps have become a more-important part of the ad impressions and revenue on the Millennial Media ad network as well.

"This year we’ve continued to see applications grow in importance and now represent approximately half of the overall monthly impressions and revenue on our network," says Michael Avon, Millennial Media EVP & Chief Financial Officer.

The number of mobile applications developed by advertisers and marketers in 2010 increased significantly. For example, just four respondents reported they were developing 20 to 50 apps a year, when Millennial Media took its 2009 survey. In the 2010 survey 83 brands reported developing tht many apps.But most respondents reported creating one to five mobile apps over a year's time.

read more here

$6.4 Billion in Q3 2010 Sets New Record for Internet Advertising

U.S. Internet advertising revenues hit $6.4 billion in the third quarter of 2010, representing the highest quarterly result ever for the online advertising industry and a 17% increase from the same period in 2009. The third quarter 2010 revenue estimates were announced today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC US.

$6.4 Billion in Q3 2010 Sets New Record for Internet Advertising Revenues

Mobile Now Meditates the Majority of Digital Experiences

T"he majority of the world's digital experiences now happen through mobile devices linked by wireless networks," says MEX founder Marek Pawlowski.

It is this untethered medium that is defining future trends in user behavior, sweeping away the legacy of interaction methods established for fixed computing scenarios, he argues. In other words, "touch" is emerging as the preferred interface for content consumption, though mice and keyboards still are required for content creation. But since most people primarily consume content, rather than create it, the change suggests a reason why tablet devices have proven they have a new niche in the computing devices market.

Mobile User Experience Trends on the Horizon | UX Magazine

Networks are Difficult, Business Models Stressed, Net Neutrality Makes it Worse

Comcast’s David L. Cohen noted at his Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation speech that "the courts … the FCC … and the Congress [are] all valuable institutions filled with capable, conscientious people … but few of them [have] the background to work out consensus on what are essentially complicated technical issues.”

Cohen noted broadband policy is dominated by lawyers and lobbyists, not engineers who know how things really work: “No offense to anyone here,” he said. “I’m a lawyer and have done my share of politics. But that kind of experience doesn’t make me, or anybody else like me, an authority on the Internet."

That is not a call for decision making by technocrats or engineers; simply an acknowledgement that network management is unavoidable when running a network that must take a statistical approach to usage. And all public networks are oversubscribed, intentionally.

That always means there is potential for some actual blocking of access or degradation of service, because no company can afford to build a large network that is engineered to support every conceivable level of demand.

Net Neutrality Is a Bad Marriage of Government, Internet - by Bruce Edward Walker

Wallets don't Crash, Phones Do

Single points of failure always are troublesome, and especially troublesome when any application, device, tool or appliance is used in a "shared" mode. So digital wallets, keys and apps will, when widely used, start to cause new problems when the devices fail for any reason. Keyless door locks are great, unless your key fob has become inoperative. Then you revert to a good, old fashioned key.

We'll eventually discover issues of that sort if any when mobile phones start to assume additional roles in our lives, from payment mechanisms to remote controls of various types. Operating systems and applications crash. Just assume that will happen to any functions provided by the mobile as well. And have backup and redundancy: keys, your wallet and old-fashioned credit cards.

Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Wallets don't crash

Back to Thin Clients, Again

"X as a Service" models may reduce the workstation to a dumb terminal more and more, we are hearing, again. Call them "thin clients," or "zero clients" or something else, the emergence of cloud computing and web-delivered software is pushing computing to a new architecture that is not a "back to the future" mainframe model, but some new form of highly-distributed, loosely-coupled model that often involves more "assembly" of applications and experiences than simple "invoke and use" models.

One example is each users' experience of "Facebook." My own assembled experience is different from that of every other user, even though we all use the core Facebook app.

For enterprises and business users, the new paradigm means much more concern about data security, availability and "vendor lock-in, though also providing greater ease of management and lower cost.

For communications service providers it means a potentially enhanced role in the ecosystem. For app providers it means faster development, lower selling and distribution costs. Every new business ecosystem requires genuine value for every participant in the ecosystem, and cloud computing is shaping up to be that sort of thing.

The network becomes the computer; Borg versus Enterprise?