Skype Mobile on Verizon: Mobile Really is Different

Skype apparently has withdrawn its Skype Mobile application which was written for tablet use on the Verizon Wireless 3G network. Verizon Wireless has said that Skype would be available on its 4G network, and some will wonder whether the change is a not-so-subtle way of making 4G stand out from 3G service.

The apparent change also is another example of why the mobile environment, and business, remains distinct from the PC-based Internet. On the fixed PC network, any lawful application will work on any access with adequate bandwidth, irrespective of the make and model of any device, or the brand used for Internet access. That is not true on mobile networks.

Skype Mobile withdrawn on Verizon 3G Wireless tablets: will it only be available on 4G, and if so, when? - Marc Weber Tobias - The Travelgeek - Forbes

Content More Important for Marketing

One can glimpse the growing importance of "content" as a prerequisite for much marketing, including mobile marketing,  by looking at how people use their smartphones. The single most-used app is texting, which two thirds of users report they have used in a month. But the next five most-used apps all are content apps, ranging from the web to music.

Since the whole point of advertising or marketing is to reach potential buyers where those potential buyers are, mobile venues, especially content-related mobile venues, are growing in importance.

Mobile Content Usage 3 Month Avg. Ending Nov. 2010 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Aug. 2010 Total Mobile Subscribers Ages 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of MobileSubscribers
	Aug-10	Nov-10	Point Change
TotalMobile Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Sent text message to another phone	66.6%	67.1%	0.5
Used browser	34.5%	35.3%	0.8
Used downloaded apps	32.3%	33.4%	1.1
Accessed social networking site or blog	22.5%	23.5%	1.0
Played Games	23.0%	22.6%	-0.4
Listened to music on mobile phone	14.7%	15.0%

Mobile Content Payment Further Unbundles Content

In a digital age, publishers have had to change to think on a per-article basis, especially as content micropayment systems come into wider use.

The change will only accelerate the trend to "unbundling" of discrete content items from the "products" brands have built. In other words, you won't have to "buy the magazine or newspaper," you will buy the stories you want.

There are similar analogies throughout the media business.

Mobile content payment systems: A freedom pass or a can or worms for publishers? | TheMediaBriefing

Email, Web Browsing Drive Tablet Use

Sales of tablet devices will hit 58 million in 2014, In-Stat estimates.

“Although the consumer market is the primary target for tablets right now, the commercial market also represents a potential revenue opportunity for tablet OEMs,” says Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist.

Email and web browsing were the top two tablet uses by current owners at 68 percent and 66 percent respectively. Those facts might help explain growing business user adoption of tablets as well. As it turns out, lots of end users don't have much need for many PC features, don't create a lot of content, and mostly just need to surf the web and check email.

In-Stat - Press Releases

Telefonica Launches "2 Numbers, 1 Phone" Service

Many people use multiple mobile phone numbers, often to separate work from personal calling, or to reduce long-distance charges across national borders. Most often the use of different numbers requires use of separate phones, in other cases only different subscriber information modules.

Telefonica has introduced a "Second Line" service that allows use of two discrete numbers on a single phone and using a single SIM, with services provided by fonYou, a Barcelona-based cloud telephony company.

http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/02/fonyou-mobile-cloud-telephony-for.html

The Second Line service also enables visual voicemail, a real-time call register and advanced filtering and blocking functions for incoming calls.

Telefonica chooses fonYou for cloud telephony

CEOs Want Better Sales Forces

Few enterprises likely have sales forces the non-sales executives believe are outperforming others in the same industry. But Forrester Research CEO George Colony says big changes could be coming. "Complete overhaul" is the phrase Colony uses to describe what CEOs are saying they plan. “We have the wrong people" is the other key phrase he uses.

Precisely what can be done is not so clear, but it appears the skills many sales forces now possess are increasingly mismatched with the needs of the sales process, which has to feature more collaboration, higher touch and a generally smarter approach. The mantra of "solution selling" gets constantly repeated. But it appears the strategy still is not widespread enough.

One area that seems ripe for change is technology support. Sales personnel say they have better consumer tools than they have available at work.

"More creativity” also is something CEOS say they want to see more of over the next five years. Part of the solution might be better skills, and better tools. But it is hard to escape the notion that what is needed is "different people."

CEOs Want Better Sales Forces | Forrester Blogs

BroadCloud Video Now Available

BroadSoft has announced commercial availability of "BroadCloud Video," a high-definition, always available, video conferencing service that business users can connect to from a variety of desktop and room telepresence environments.

It is the first BroadCloud Unified Communications service to be made commercially available following the company’s announcement of the BroadCloud cloud-based, hosted infrastructure platform in 2010. 

Mobile Payments: "Biggest Opportunity of a Lifetime"

Consultant David Shropfer, The Luciano Group partner, says mobile payments represent the largest single opportunity for consumers to save money that is likely to occur in your lifetime or mine."

podcast here

Facebook to Pass Yahoo in Display Ads by End of 2011

Display advertising might not be the only way Facebook creates a revenue model, but it certainly appears to be a growing source of such support. Today, Facebook is close to overtaking Yahoo as a site for display advertising, and is expected by eMarketer to pass Yahoo by the end of 2011. By 2012 Google also will pass Yahoo in display advertising volume.
 

Online Video Might Not Save You Money

There is a widespread notion that a shift from today's packaged, linear video entertainment service to new on-demand, Internet-delivered alternatives will save consumers money. In principle, one can envision ways that could happen. But it is almost impossible to see how those alternative payment schemes could work without the cooperation of the firms that own the content. And that's the rub.

If one assumes, or hopes for, a world where a user can buy and watch only the shows that user wishes to watch, one has to assume that the content owners would agree to supply it. That, in turn, assumes the money those content firms now make from the existing order is not disrupted.

It is hard to see rational executives willingly making that choice. In a market-driven scenario, one would argue, alternative suppliers with lower cost structures could create enough competition that this would happen. It is hard, at the moment, to see where such competition would arise.

Of course, there is supply, and there is demand. If enough consumers decide linear programming is not interesting or valuable, pressure equivalent to new competitors will be created. But that means end users--lots of them--will literally have to stop watching linear video. So far, there is precious little evidence of that sort of refusal.

Nor is there any appetite on the part of the larger distributors to help. Comcast, for understandable reasons, says it has no intention of making its programming available to non-subscribers. So while the utility of linear video one already has paid for will get a boost from Comcast's extension of viewing rights to new devices, there will be no cost savings. Users will still have to buy the full linear packages to get the online or mobile viewing rights.

But that arguably is a secondary issue. The content owners are key. They will have all the incentives they need to make linear content available directly to end users if they do not risk losing the revenue they now make from licensing their content. The amount of money end users collectively could save is the difference between the revenue content owners now make and what they would make under new distribution arrangements, less any avoided costs the current distribution channels now impose.

Basically, that works out to the actual wholesale cost of program rights, less the costs of administering a direct-to-end user system, at pricing levels and end user volume that allow content owners to make at least as much money as they now do, less the "overhead" imposed by use of cable, satellite or telco distribution mechanisms.

Are there potential incentives even for the cable, satellite and telco distributors? Possibly. If video distributors themselves can replace the value of their "video" services in some other way, such as by raising broadband access fees, then a revenue-neutral shift could happen.

The issue is that consumers might want something different. They might want a revenue "not neutral" solution that allows them to watch what they want, and save money.

In the absence of a significant shift of demand (people simply deciding they can live without linear video), it is hard to see how end users wind up saving much money in the shift to online viewing.

Comcast CEO Has No Fear of Web Video - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Cloud Computing Hinges on Trust

With the caveat that most things in life depend to a very large extent on trust, a recent attack on a Vodafone data center and Google's inadvertent erasure of some user emails raise the recurring question all cloud application providers will face: "can we trust you?"

In the case of Vodafone service, the first issue was simply continuity of service, but also some issues about privacy and security since it was not immediately obvious what equipment was stolen from the data center. In Google's case, the issue primarily was destruction of user data.

Those issues will remain as more applications move into a "cloud" environment. Not that trust is an unusual requirement for daily life. We all assume that the paper currency in our wallets will be accepted, without question, as a medium of exchange. But the whole ecosystem hinges fundamentally on trust. You assume the milk you buy at your grocery store is in fact, milk, and is, in fact, safe to drink. But there are trust levels embedded at every stage of the ecosystem that delivers you milk.

Trust is not an unusual or rare requirement for any functioning ecosystem. Trust is, in fact, foundational for any ecosystem that links buyers and sellers, users and creators, of any sort.

BBC - dot.Rory: Vodafone and Google: A question of trust

Mobile Traffic Patterns Shifting Toward Landline Norms

There is a telling statistic in Cisco's latest Visual Networking Index, namely that as the mobile broadband users have rapidly grown, the usage pattern rapidly has assumed the familiar pattern seen in the fixed-line part of the business.

Consider heavy usage patterns. The top one percent of mobile data subscribers generate over 20 percent of mobile data traffic, down from 30 percent just a year ago. That 29-point swing in just 12 months suggests that as more "typical" users adopt mobile broadband, they bring behaviors much different from those of early mobile broadband adopters, namely less-intensive consumption.

Cisco also reports that mobile data traffic over the last year also now matches the 1:20 ratio that has been true of fixed networks for several years (one percent of users generate or consume 20 percent of total transferred bytes).

Similarly, the top 10 percent of mobile data subscribers now generate approximately 60 percent of mobile data traffic, down from 70 percent at the beginning of the year.

All of those instances of "reversion toward the mean" are driven by the broader adoption by "typical" users of smartphone service. That noted, average smartphone usage doubled in 2010. The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2010 was 79 Mbytes per month, up from 35 Mbytes per month in 2009.

Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015

What Sprint Will be Focusing on for the First Half of 2011

Sprint's board of directors wants Sprint management to focus on five things in the first half of 2011, as judged by the bonus plan for the first half of the year. The first matter is operating income before depreciation and amortization).

Another 20 percent of the evaluation hinges on net service revenue (operating revenue less equipment revenue). So 40 percent of the focus is on overall revenue.

About 20 percent of bonus weighting will be based on retention of post-paid wireless subscribers.

Another 20 percent will be based on postpaid net subscriber additions, while the final 20 percent will be based on how well the team does with prepaid net subscriber additions. So in addition to the 40 percent focus on revenue, 40 percent of the concern is net subscriber growth.

k2011stilti.htm

Google Sees Online Ad Market of $100 Billion

The online display-advertising market could top $100 billion over the next several years, says Neal Mohan, Google VP.

Mohan says Google has some 1,000 engineers around the world working to eliminate complexity and challenges from the Internet display advertising market, an effort that will prompt more advertisers to spend more of their budgets online.

Google Sees Online Ad Market Ballooning to $100 Billion - WSJ.com

Apple Aware of Need for Prepaid and Lower-Cost Products

Apple is said to be working hard to “figure out” the prepaid market, a development that would allow Apple to reach a broader segment of the market for mobile products.

Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein Research analyst, reports that Apple understands "price is big factor in the prepaid market” and that the company was “not ceding any portion of the market, despite the company's historic emphasis on the higher-end, higher-priced portion of any market it enters.

Apple: Not 'Just for the Rich,' Says Cook - MarketBeat - WSJ