Google Maps for Mobile 5

Google "Maps for Mobile 5" adds offline support and three-dimensional rendering.

Most modern Android phones from the original Droid onward should be able to enjoy most if not all the new features, depending on hardware capabilities (3D rendering) and 'distinct multitouch' hardware support.

It will launch soon, compatible at the very least with the:

• Galaxy S
• Droid
• Droid X
• Droid 2
• Droid Incredible
• Evo
• Nexus S
• G2

Google Maps for Mobile 5 unveiled, adds dynamic map drawing and offline mode -- Engadget

Which TV Channels Can’t Cord-Cutters Live Without?

Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin polled 300 multichannel video subscribers, asking them to list which TV channels they must have available online before they would consider terminating their subscriptions.

Which TV Channels Can’t Cord-Cutters Live Without? | paidContent

Might Sprint Wind Up Buying Spectrum From Clearwire it Already "Owns"?

It's hard to see how Clearwire and Sprint coexist harmoniously, forever, as difficult as it might be to imagine all the work and money it would take to simply have Sprint buy all of Clearwire.

A partial step, though, might entail Sprint winning a bid to buy excess spectrum Clearwire wants to sell, possibly as much as 40 MHz in most markets, which would give Sprint an ability to build its own Long Term Evolution network, using its own spectrum, with full management control over the process.

Some might argue spectrum ownership and full control is required for a company such as Sprint, which operates that way for the other of its networks. Whether Sprint had any better options than combining its original 4G spectrum with Clearwire is not clear. But it has gotten to be a somewhat rocky relationship, by virtually all reports.

It is an inherently difficult situation when a firm owns a clear majority of assets, but does not have management control. Though it has only a minority stake in Verizon Wireless, the relationship has been troublesome for Vodafone as well, one might note. Getting clear ownership and control of its own 4G spectrum would make life much easier for Sprint.

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Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook

Sens. Snowe and Warner want WiFi in all federal buildings

Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced legislation on Friday that would require all public federal buildings to install WiFi base stations in order to free up cell phone networks.

The Federal Wi-Net Act would mandate the installation of small WiFi base stations in all publicly accessible federal buildings in order to increase wireless coverage and free up mobile networks. The bill would require all new buildings under construction to comply and all older buildings to be retrofitted by 2014. It also orders $15 million from the Federal Buildings Fund be allocated to fund the installations.

Every little bit helps, eh?

Sens. Snowe and Warner want WiFi in all federal buildings - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

Net Neutrality: Watch What They Do, Not What They Say

It is very difficult to square Mr. Genachowski's statement that the marketplace rather a central public authority, the FCC, should pick winners and losers on the Internet with the realities of his net neutrality proposal, argues Randolph May, president fo the Free State Foundation.

The FCC Chairman has argued that "no central authority, public or private, should have the power to pick which ideas or companies win or lose on the Internet; that's the role of the market and the marketplace of ideas.

Some might argue the FCC's proposals therefore are internally contradictory: it makes the FCC the arbiter. Others obviously will disagree.

Opinion: The FCC's Fatal Conceit - Tech Talk - CBS News

Mobile App Usage is Highly Concentrated

The chances any single mobile app will get traction, becoming one of the 11 or 12 a smartphone user actually interacts with, are quite small, according to a new survey of about 7,000 consumers, conducted on behalf of Moosylvania,

In fact, just 10 of all the 100 apps male users say they interact with most have 46 percent of the usage. Just two apps have 27 percent share of all usage among the top-100 apps. The top-five apps have 39 percent of all the usage among the top-100 apps. It is terrifically difficult to break into the small circle of apps that even one percent of users, male or female, say they use regularly.

About half of consumers are using the mobile web as much as they’re using apps, so marketers should be very clear what they’re trying to achieve when deciding which approach to take, Moosylvania argues.

There is a clear Pareto distribution, commonly known as a "long tail," for apps. For male users, Google Maps is the most-used, by about 14 percent of male respondents. Facebook is second, at about 13 percent. App number ten, Yelp, is used by less than one percent of males.

Females, on the other hand, prefer Facebook quite a lot. Facebook is the top application used by 27 percent of female respondents. Google Maps is second at about seven percent. The 10th-most-used app by females, "calendar," is used by less than one percent of respondents.

The top-five mobile apps used by the female respondents represent 46 percent of all the top-100 apps females use. Just the top two apps represent 34 percent of all app use by females surveyed.

That highly-concentrated profile, plus the fact that 44 percent of all app users indicate that all or nearly all of their apps were free, suggests how difficult the "mobile app business" really is, as a business opportunity for app developers.

The study suggests females are more likely to have more free apps than men. About 52 percent of women indicated all or nearly all of their apps were free, versus 38 percent of males surveyed.

Males average approximately 31 apps on their smartphones and actively use about 12 of them. On average, females have about 26 apps on their phones and actively use about 11 of them.

There are 300,000 apps available that can be found on the majority of platforms, and out of those, a handful of apps completely dominate, leaving 299,900 fighting for an audience of any size, the study suggests.

You can see the full results at http://tracker.moosylvania.com.

Clearwire Still Pursuing Spectrum Sale

Clearwire Corp still hopes to raise as much as $2 billion in new financing by selling excess wireless spectrum, according to its Erik Prusch, Clearwire CFO. That option would in many ways be less messy than possibly having T-Mobile USA join the ownership group.

Clearwire Corp. originally though it could raise as much as $2.5 billion $5 billion, so the current talk of "perhaps $2 billion" might suggest a bit less interest than earlier had been thought.

AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel Corp. have been rumored to have some interest.

Clearwire earlier was said to be offering spectrum up to 40 Mhz of bandwidth per market. While an argument can be made for bids from any number of potential companies, T-Mobile USA is in some ways the most-motivated. It badly needs spectrum to support its own 4G efforts, has considered leasing capacity from LightSquared, and even if money were no object, would find daunting any other spectrum to buy in the near term, even though at some point other former TV broadcast spectrum should be made available for auction as well.

Time Warner Cable, for its part, could emerge from the process as the only U.S. cable company with its own, fully-owned national wireless footprint, were it to win the auction.

Sprint Nextel, if it actually is bidding, could be signaling it wants to distance itself from the Clearwire relationship, at least in part. Owning its own 4G spectrum would allow Sprint to better control both of its costs, its timetable for upgrades and deployments, as well as its ability to package services. Full control of its own spectrum would allow Sprint to move immediately to build a 4G network using the Long Term Evolution air interface, a move that will at some point allow Sprint Nextel to leverage production volume of LTE handsets and devices.

Verizon and AT&T historically have emerged from most spectrum auctions as key winners, and as the leaders in the U.S. market, arguably have the greatest strategic interest in protecting their lead, at least in part by locking up spectrum that could be used by a competitor. All of that suggests the chances of T-Mobile USA succeeding later, if it does not try to get the Clearwire spectrum, might not be so great.

Also, as the providers with the biggest customer bases, both Verizon and AT&T have the greatest need for more spectrum, and should already be considered front-runners for winning the re-purposed TV spectrum.

Clearwire eyes selling up to $2 billion spectrum | Reuters

Mobile Advertising Lead by Google, Apple, Millennial Media

Google and Apple currently are the two biggest mobile ad companies in the business, according to new estimates from IDC, but the market remains fragmented.

No single company has more than 19 percent of the market.

 Mobile Ads: Google, Apple, And Millennial

Online Video Will Change Lots of Things, Including Peering and Transit Pricing

Most observers who regularly follow such things have noted for some time that online video consumption is growing so fast that it will inevitably affect the way ISPs--wireless and wireline--price the use of access facilities. Bandwidth caps, higher fees and other changes to terms and conditions are conceivable.

But the new peering dispute between Level 3 Communications and Comcast also points out the coming changes in backbone interconnection agreements as well. Online video is extremely asymmetrical. Unlike voice or chat, where the volume of traffic is about equal in both directions, video is unbalanced in the downstream path.

That's why cable and satellite networks have been built the way they are, to favor delivery of lots of downstram bits, but few or much-fewer upstream bits. Broadcast TV and broadcast radio are other networks historically designed for media delivery, not two-way communications.

Broadband networks mostly have been designed around asymmetrical traffic flow.

Voice and similar radio networks, on the other hand, always have been designed around symmetrical traffic flow.

Asymmetrical bandwidth has not been a particular cost driver for media delivery networks. But asymmetrical traffic always drives carrier interconnection costs, pricing arbitrage, and revenue models in the communications business.

If one network imposes hugely unequal traffic load on another, the receiving network gets paid for that unequal use of facilities. But if video content gets as big as most observers think it will be, unbalanced traffic will occur on a scale never seen before. So will payments by "sending" networks to "receiving" networks.

That means higher costs for "sending" networks and higher revenue for "receiving" networks. To put matters another way, the historic value of access networks is about to be shown, and access network operators will get a revenue boost. If you think "carrier compensation" fights have been interminable before, just watch. Inter-carrier compensation is about to get more complicated than we've ever seen it.

Online Ad Spending Will Pass Newspapers by 2013

Magna Global predicts that worldwide, online ad spending will overtake newspapers in a little over two years. In 2011 the U.S. ad market is looking fairly weak—though positive, at least—while online is expected to rise 11.6 percent in the United States.

Worldwide ad expenditures will rise 5.4 percent in 2011, mostly thanks to the continuing growth in emerging markets and stabilization in developed markets.

TV advertising will command a 40 percent share of all ad dollars and gain 7.5 percent annually through 2016. But online advertising will overtake newspapers as the second largest ad spending category by 2013 by taking in $117 billion at that point.

Online video will capture $4.7 billion in global ad revenues, and should rise by 19.6 percent each year through 2016. By that point, online video will account for $11.4 billion in global ad spend.

Mobile advertising is smaller, at $2.7 billion, and will grow at a similar pace to online video. Within five years, web publishers should see about $6.6 billion from mobile advertising.

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Federal Reserve Predicts High Unemployment Through 2012

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee recently updated its forecasts for 2011 and 2012, including higher than previously-forecast unemployment ranges.

The new central tendency (removing the highest and lowest forecasts to get a feel for the "median") for 2011 is 8.9 percent to 9.1 percent, compared to earlier projections of 8.3 percent to 8.7 percent. Using the midpoint of the ranges, the new forecast is a full half-percent higher than just five months earlier.

The 2012 numbers are even worse, with a new range of 7.7 percent to 8.2 percent, up from 7.1 percent to 7.5 percent, an increase of 0.65% from midpoint to midpoint.

By traditional and formal measures, we are in an economic recovery. But the stubbornly-high unemployment might suggest an extremely-unusual assessment of business risk and growth prospects, or some structural change in the economy, or both.

The former is easier to deal with than the latter.

The American Spectator : Pessimism Revised

Verizon iPhone in 2011

According to a report to clients issued Monday by Kaufman Bros.' Shaw Wu, Apple got the terms it wanted from Verizon for the version of the iPhone expected to be released by the carrier in early 2011.

Wu writes that he is 'picking up that iPhone economics to Apple are likely to be favorable, similar to that offered by AT&T. That should mean an iPhone should not cost more when built for Verizon than for AT&T.

Apple has cut a sweet deal with Verizon for the iPhone

Sprint Nextel to Spend Up to $5 Billion to Upgrade Its Wireless Network

Sprint Nextel Corp. will spend as much as $5 billion to upgrade its 2G and 3G networks over the next three to five years, allowing Sprint to use a single set of base stations to support those networks, instead of multiple base stations.

Today, Sprint uses separate equipment to deploy services on 800MHz spectrum, 1.9GHz spectrum and, through its relationship with Clearwire, 2.5GHz spectrum. Under the terms of the new contracts, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Samsung will install new network equipment and software that brings together multiple spectrum bands, or airwaves, on a single, multimode base station.

As part of the plan, 800-MHz spectrum, very useful for in-building signal propagation, will be available for voice services, allowing better voice quality inside structures.

The plan does not appear to include the iDEN cell sites, which will be phased out, while iDEN users are migrated to the CDMA network. This phase out is expected to begin in 2013, Sprint says.

Sprint expects to save at least $10 billion to $11 billion over seven years because of decreases in energy costs, roaming expenses and the number of cell sites, among other items.

Sprint said it has negotiated contracts with Alcatel-Lucent SA, Ericsson AB and Samsung Electronics Co. for the project.

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Video Apps May Define 4G Behavior

Of 10 potential applications 4G networks will affect the most, about six are directly related to video while at least three others are related to latency.

No surprise there. Some worry that will put strain on end user budgets. It certainly will encourage purchase of bigger usage buckets in some cases.

But anybody who has been relying on mobile broadband for mission-critical apps for any length of time already has likely figured out how to match usage profiles, devices, use cases and cost to avoid massive overage charges.

You don't watch lots of video using your 3G card, you use your fixed connection. In fact, it might make more sense to watch video almost always on your smartphone data plan and fixed connection, rather than on a PC dongle.

Users are rational. They will be rational about how they use 4G dongles as well.

Light Reading Mobile - 4G/LTE - Top 10 Apps LTE Will Super-Charge