Employers Expect Flexible Work Trend

CEOs, senior HR professionals and workplace decision makers from across the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries, including Spain, Argentina, El Salvador, and India, believe 50 to 80 percent of employees would move to time or location flexible work within five years, driven largely by the need to attract and retain superior talent. This is up from a reported 25 percent today

Email Not "Dead"

It might not be the case that any application or service actually is waning when stories about the "death of X" start to appear, or when "X is not dead" stories also start to appear. Email is among the latest applications to get the treatment. Obviously email is not "dead." It remains among the top applications used on either mobile or tethered devices. But there also is greater use of alternatives, such as text mesaging, instant mesaging and even micro-blogging.

Verizon Wireless Sold 60% of iPhone Online

Some reports have suggested that relatively sedate traffic at Verizon Wireless retail locations indicated less-robust demand for iPhones than some might have expected. Verizon Wireless CEO Daniel Mead points out that more than 60 percent of iPhone sales occurred online.

That heavy activity online contributed to short lines on launch day, he maintains. "If we had not done online, you would have seen a much different flow in the pictures," says Mead. Mead also says that Verizon deliberately phased the introduction, to avoid potential problems with a sudden rush of buyers.

Verizon deliberately limited the number of locations where iPhones could be purchased, in addition to using the online channel quaite heavily In a few days, Verizon Wireless also will double the number of stores that sell the iPhone, going from 4,000 to 8,000.

Verizon Wireless CEO Says iPhone Sales Strong - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Mobiles, Tablets Gaining Gaming Share?

As smartphones and tablets gain greater share of the installed base, one would expect to see some changes in end user behavior. The whole point of ebook readers, after all, is to create new ebook reader consumption, and displace reading of physical books.

Among the early trends with tablets is that they are displacing other devices for purposes of content consumption, ranging from email to video. TechCrunch, in fact, already sees a shift of its readership from Windows PCs to other devices, and mobiles seem to account for about 14 percent of activity. Read more here

But gaming experiences also might be shifting towards general-purpose devices such as smartphones and tablet. Many games available for smartphones and tablets now appear to be "good enough" to displace use of a dedicated game-playing system.

It's unofficial: dedicated gaming devices may be losing out to phones

Mobile Alters TechCrunch Reader Habits

In four years, Windows share among TechCrunch readers has fallen 30 percentage points, TechCrunch reports. Up to this point, the bulk of the shift has been from Windows PCs to Apple PCs.

The new wrinkle is that mobile devices now represent about 14 percent of user visits, and the mobile share is growing.

In Two Years, Most Of You Will Be Reading TechCrunch From An Apple Device

Seniors Bigger on Mobiles than PCs

Seniors (those over 65)traditionally have lagged younger users in terms of Internet and mobile adoption, but the mobile gap is no longer huge, and the Internet gap likely will continue to close as Boomers replace their parents in the "senior" demographic.

Tablets Won't Save Publishing, Financial Times Says

Tablets are not going to "save the publishing industry," the Financial Times believes. That forecast comes despite predictions by Boston Consulting Group that tablet prices ultimately will decline to the $200 level that will allow mass consumer adoption.

A BCG survey of nearly 13,000 consumers in 14 countries, conducted in May 2010 revealed that 28 percent of all respondents plan to purchase an e-reader or tablet in the next year; over three years, 49 percent plan to do so.

While intent always overstates actual penetration, BCG estimated that 25 percent of U.S. consumers who read print publications will own tablets within three years, assuming that prices decline to the $130–$200 range, far less than the current low-end model of the iPad, which retails for $499.

read more about the survey here

watch the video about iPad economics here

Google Describes Impact of its Search Algorithm Updates

LightSquared Will Have to Address GPS Interference Issues

Interference issues are not unusual when new applications are proposed in adjacent frequency bands. Garmin says mobile transmitters using Lightsquared spectrum will interfere with GPS signals. Those issues always get addressed, as the new applications are not allowed to operate until the issues are resolved.

read about the issues here

iPad Still Dominates Tablet Sales, Android at 25%

During the fourth quarter of 2010, 22 percent of the 10 million tablet devices that where shipped ran on Android. Overall the market grew by 120 percent sequentially with Apple maintaining it’s leading position with 75 percent of global market share, according to Strategy Analytics.

Clearwire Tests LTE

"Ongo" Launches Subscription Mobile News Service

Google as "Dangerous" as AT&T?

Optus CEO Paul O’Sullivan thinks content monopolies can be just as troublesome as access network monopolies. O’Sullivan, whose firm has battled incumbent
Telstra for more than a decade, said that while gatekeepers in the broadband access or voice areas still are important, he also can foresee much greater risks in the longer term in the application provider area.

Content and application monopolies can be just as troublesome as network access monopolies, he said.

Optus: Google, eBay just as dangerous as network monopolies • The Register

Dish Network CEO on Transitions

Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen has been through big transitions in his days in the video entertainment business. Many will not recall it, but there was a time when satellite programming delivered to cable TV headends was not encrypted. In other words, any consumer who was willing to spend the money on a satellite system could watch all cable TV programming for free. But in 1986 HBO encrypted its feeds, and all the other satellite-delivered channels followed shortly thereafter.

The transition was that sales of C-band "television receive only" (TVRO) dishes peaked at about 735,000 in 1985, after growing parabolically in the few years before 1985.

Shipments dropped to 235,000 as more than 50 percent of all satellite retailers close their businesses. See http://www.mediabiz.com/news/dth_history/#1983

Ergen started out in the TVRO business in 1980. In 1986 Ergen applied for a direct broadcast satellite license. The point is that the original C-band business erupted somewhat suddenly, then declined just about as suddenly, after satellite feeds were encrypted. The shift of the consumer satellite video business to both Ku-band technology and the DBS business model likewise was a transition from the original C-band business.

Given the maturity of the existing video entertainment business, Ergen, like every other executive at every other company in the space, has been thinking about the implications of the coming shift to online delivery.

"I think I know where this thing is going now," he says. "If you were in the phone business and wireless came along and you kept on putting in a twisted pair of lines, that was still a good business for another 10 years, 15 years, but at some point that wasn't a very good business."

"So I'd rather be on the leading edge of that than the back end of it," he said.

"The hope is that you don't take too much money out of the ecosystem while you're figuring it out," he said. What he means is that the new business might cannibalize the existing business, and the trick will be to finesse the transition without undue cannibalization.

Dish Network's CEO Discusses Q4 2010 Results - Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha

Coupon Sites Reached 19 Percent North American Users in December

Coupon sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial reached 18.8 percent of the U.S. Internet population in December, according to data from comScore.

On a global basis, coupon sites reached 6.9 percent of users, the measurement firm estimated, while penetration in Europe reached 9.6 percent of users, having grown by 5.7 percentage points compared with December 2009.

Coupon Sites Reached 19 Percent North American Users in December | ClickZ