Twitter Activity: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Twitter spokesman Ryan Sarver has argued that“90 percent of active Twitters users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.” Twitter defines “official” as applications it owns and operates for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone.

Sysomos was surprised by that assertion, as its data has suggested there were significantly more “non-official” users. In a June 2009 report, Sysomos found that TweetDeck had nearly 20 percent of the client market.

Sysomos then reviewed a sample of 25 million tweets on March 11, 2011. The data shows that 42 percent of tweets were made by non-officials apps, more than four times the amount claimed by Twitter.

One way of reconciling the data is to argue that power users who do more tweeting use the "unofficial" clients, while many Twitter client users are relatively inactive.

Non-Official Twitter Clients Still Widely Used, Sysomos Blog

Consumers lose 30% of broadband speed using home Wi-Fi : Epitiro

Wireless services, such as in-home or in-office Wi-Fi, are susceptible to significant drops in experienced connection speed, depending on signal strength. In that regard, Epitiro research suggests consumers can lose an average of 30 percent of their experiences downstream access speed, with increased latency of 10 percent to 20 percent, when using Wi-Fi connections in the home.

Basically, use of Wi-Fi reduces end user device "experienced speed" from about 7 Mbps to about 5 Mbps.

Consumers may find on-line game play, VoIP telephony and video streaming unsatisfactory when using Wi-Fi while downloading large files such as MP3s, videos and programs will take longer.

On the other hand, Epitiro also found that web page download times are virtually the same using Wi-Fi or wired connections, so quality of experience is not always directly related to speed. Web pages download times are less susceptible to changes in line speed.

In other words, real-time applications and services, including video, voice and gaming, are most susceptible to impairments related to poor signal strength and interference from other devices. That is one reason why quality of experience advocates generally advocate packet priorities for real-time services and applications. One way to cope with latency or congestion is to allow high-priority bits preference for immediate delivery.

Consumers lose 30% of broadband speed using home Wi-Fi : Epitiro

Google Launches Mobile Payment Test

Google plans to start testing a mobile-payment service at stores in New York and San Francisco within four months, letting shoppers use their phones to ring up purchases, Bloomberg reports.

The company is installing of thousands of cash-register systems from VeriFone Systems at merchant locations. The registers would accept payments from mobile phones equipped with near field communication capabilities.

Why Google wants to be in the business might not be so clear, but a look at other contenders will illustrate why mobile payments could be a strategic move, not just another mobile-enabled revenue stream.

It's probably quite obvious why Isis, the mobile payment system launched by AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, with Discover Networks and Barclays, makes sense: it represents a brand-new revenue stream for the mobile providers that builds on their key role in the mobile ecosystem.

For online payment providers, the attraction is the ability to extend a payment business from "online shopping" to the broader realm of payments that occur at retail locations. The latter represents vastly more volume than the former.

For Google, the angle might be different. Google is a company that makes its money from advertising. And virtually everybody thinks the mobile segment of the total advertising business is growing fast, and will continue to shift activity from stationary modes (PCs at desktops).

But some closely-related businesses, such as direct marketing, also are morphing from a largely offline mode to an online and mobile mode. So Google would rightly see direct marketing and promotion (coupons, the equivalent of direct mail and other direct marketing channels) as an important extension of its current focus on search and display advertising.

Also, the ability to target messages and offers to end users on their mobiles, in real time, where they are, is nearly universally seen as an area of huge growth. In the background, of course, most providers of any type of application, service or product would prefer to "own the customer relationship."

If Google is able to tie the final retail payments capability to its advertising, marketing services, location and information capabilities, it plausibly can position as a company that "owns" a customer and user relationship in a profoundly new way.

Google Is Said to Plan Payment Test in New York, San Francisco - Bloomberg

Michael Powell Becomes NCTA CEO

Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005 and a member of the FCC for eight years, has been appointed president and CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

Media Center - NCTA.com

Mobile Broadband Speeds Up 300% Since March 2010

U.S. mobile broadband "typical" speeds have increased 300 percent from March 2010 to March 2011 in tests run by PCWorld.

Overall, average download speeds for laptop-modem users have grown more than 300 percent, as carriers have activated or extended their fourth generation networks.

Laptop modems sold by the leading four carriers have a collective average download speed of roughly 3.5 megabits per second in13 testing cities, compared to an average speed of about 1 Mbps a year ago.

But typical speeds depend on which device is used. In general, PC modems (dongles) run faster than smartphones. The T-Mobile HTC G2 PCWorld used for testing produced a 13-city average download speed of almost 2.3 Mbps; that's about 52 percent faster than the second-fastest phone, Sprint's HTC EVO 4G, which had an average download speed of 1.5 Mbps.

4G Wireless Speed Tests: Which Is Really the Fastest? - PCWorld

Apple Degrading Web Performance, Enhancing App Performance?

With all the recent talk about the merits and problems posed by network neutrality rules, specifically understood as preventing the optimization of end user experience using packet prioritization, there also has been some largely ignored talk about why Internet access providers could not optimize experience when application providers or even handset manufacturers are allowed to tweak their services and features to do precisely that sort of thing.

Some developers now say Apple's iOS mobile operating system runs web applications at significantly slower speeds when they're launched from the iPhone or iPad home screen as opposed to in the Apple Safari browser, and at the same time, the operating system hampers the performance of these apps in other ways. In other words, Apple might be tweaking the performance of Internet-delivered applications in ways that favor its app store products.

It's unclear whether these are accidental bugs or issues consciously introduced by Apple, observers say. But the end result is that, at least in some ways, the iOS platform makes it harder for web apps to replace native applications distributed through the Apple App Store, where the company takes a 30 per cent cut of all applications sold.

Whereas native apps can only run on Apple's operating system, web apps, built with standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can potentially run on any device.

"Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality, even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform," says one mobile web app developer.

Apple handcuffs 'open' web apps on iPhone home screen

How Much is Facebook Worth, and Why?

Google has a market capitalization of $200 billion, roughly four times Facebook’s implied value, based on recent rounds of investment Facebook has raised.

Yet Facebook’s revenues in 2010 were 16 times lower than Google’s. All things being the same, the only way one can justify the current Facebook valuations is if the market expects higher growth of Facebook’s revenues than from Google, says Dr. Siddharth Shah, Efficient Frontier senior director, business analytics.

If the market expects Google’s revenues to grow at 20 percent a year for the next 10 years, Facebook’s revenues would have to grow at 46 percent a year to justify its valuation, relative to Google. Facebook would have to grow between three and five times faster than Google over 10 years to justify a $50 billion current valuation, for example, says Shah.

The other way of looking at matters is that the market is vastly underpricing Google's growth prospects. That's a harder argument to make as Google is a public company, and there is nothing "implied" or theoretical about its market valuation.

A rational person might argue that Facebook therefore is overvalued.

For many people, the more interesting thing at the moment is a wave of new companies now being founded. Some of us expect to see a couple to several giant new industry leaders formed, to lead the next great wave of Internet innovation after search and social networking. No matter how useful, and how big, any single company is, there is always another wave of innovation, with a new category leader.

Recall that Yahoo was founded in 1994, AOL in 1995, Amazon and eBay in 1996. Google was launched in 1998, Napster and MySpace in 1999.

Wikipedia and Wordpress were founded in 2001, YouTube was launched in 2005, Twitter and Facebook in 2006. Groupon was founded in 2008.

There always is a lag between "founding" and "segment leadership." That emergence could take three years, five years or more. That means firms now are being founded that will emerge as a big deal in three to five years. Facebook will not be the last "big thing" to come out of the Internet.

But in the startup space, one way to look at matters is that one or two firms may deserve a rich valuation because they will be huge, profitable, significant leaders of their industry segments. Some others will deserve significant to moderate valuations on a small revenue base, because they will be bought out before they become "too expensive." Many, if not most other contenders deserve valuations that are small, nil or unjustified, because most firms will not lead, become substantial revenue generators, or even survive.

Nobody can be sure what Facebook is "worth." Some argue it is overvalued. Others might say just about all emerging Internet firms are overvalued, and that a reset is coming. But that's the way markets work. If there is an expectation of huge reward, significant bets will be placed. If the size of the opportunity is big enough, lots of bets will be placed. A third will die, a third will never pan out and a third actually will be profitable, with truly-huge winners being few.

Some might argue the important thing for most people who do not have an actual stake in funding or leading a new company, but operate someplace else in the ecosystem, is to be on the lookout for the next emerging important segment. It surely is coming.

Efficient Frontier Insights: $50, $65 or $100 billion; Just how much is Facebook worth?

News Industry No Longer in Control of its Own Futrure

"The news industry is no longer in control of its own future," a study of U.S. media concludes. That might not seem immediately relevant to other industries facing disruption, but one might argue it is quite germane, indeed. Just about every business touched by the Internet, and that is nearly every business, faces significant stress of the core business business model, the level of competition and new ways of providing the value the older ecosystem provided.

Consider the way the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism paints the situation news organizations face. http://stateofthemedia.org/ "In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads," the report says. At a very basic level, that moves functions and "control" out of the hands of content producers that once controlled their own sales processes. The implications extend far beyond the rather simple issues of "who" controls sales of the inventory.

Aggregation firms (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) now bring content producers "a substantial portion of their audience," the report suggests. "And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content."

That means new players in the ecosystem take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data. Some argue the data may be the most important asset of all. "In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user," Pew researchers say.

Consider that process in the context of retail shopping, video entertainment, music, ticket sales, hotel bookings, airfare purchases and you get the idea. As new ecosystems develop, existing players, in some sense, do not fully control their own destiny.

Overview | State of the Media

Clearwire Faces Class Action Suit over Throttling

Clearwire has been sued for intentionally throttling service. The complaint appears to refer to Clearwire fixed access, rathe rather than the mobile services.

You can read the full complaint here http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/1635188~2754e7ff80693fe32b9a33f791123a3f/50378325-Clearwire-Suit.pdf

The lawsuit alleges that Clearwire advertises fast service and then throttles service.

Class action: Clearwire 'akin to a bandwidth Ponzi scheme

StumbleUpon Unveils "Paid Discovery"

Content discovery engine StumbleUpon has launched a new ad platform called StumbleUpon "Paid Discovery." Where the original Stumble ad model was primarily targeted to getting traffic for publishers, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is aimed at bigger brands, such as movie studios promoting a movie or NFL teams promoting themselves.

Paid Discovery ads (which can range in format from websites, videos to mobile sites etc) will show up in a Stumbler’s stream without them having to click on a banner or other kind of intermediary mechanism. Advertisers will be able to target ads using about 500 different topics and demographics like age, gender and location as well as by mobile platorm.

Users also will be able to rate the quality of the ads, and more upvotes means additional (free) traffic.

Paid Discovery plans to charge advertisers .10 or .25 per unique user depending on when the ad is served.

StumbleUpon Unveils Paid Discovery, Its New “No Click” Ad Platform

Blogger is Getting a Makeover

Half of Trans-Pacific Undersea Cables Damaged by Japan Quake?

About half of the existing cables running across the Pacific are damaged and "a lot of people are feeling a little bit of slowing down of Internet traffic going to the United States," said Bill Barney, Pacnet CEO. Protection from such incidents is one reason new undersea cables are being built: redundancy more than the need for capacity.

Rush to Fix Quake-Damaged Undersea Cables - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Online News Overtakes Newspapers, Study Finds

People are spending more time with news than ever before, with online consumption the exception to the rule among all media, according the Pew Research Center. In 2010, digital was the only media sector seeing audience growth. And cable news joined the ranks of older media suffering audience decline.

In December 2010, 41 percent of Americans cited the internet as the place where they got “most of their news about national and international issues,” up 17 percent from a year earlier. When it came to any kind of news, 46 percent of people now say they get news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40 percent) for the first time.

Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50 percent). The new wild card in digital is mobile. Also, about 47 percent of Americans now say they get some kind of local news on mobile devices such as cellphones or other wireless devices such as iPads.

Key Findings | State of the Media

Over-the-Top Video Complements Linear, At the Moment

Almost a third of urban consumers (31 percent) report they watch TV content using a computer, laptop, mobile device, tablet, or streamed directly from the Internet to the TV through an an Apple TV, a Vudu Box, an Xbox, or a Blu-Ray DVD player, according to Horowitz Associates.

Those who use alternative platforms for TV spend, on average, 15 percent of their viewing time on a platform other than traditional TV. This is in addition to time devoted to digital TV platforms such as DVRs and VOD.

Those findings probably make sense for most people who think about the matter. At this point, most people supplement linear video with over-the-top.

Separately, Nielsen data suggest that the alternative--dropping all linear video service in favor of online-only--remains quite rare. ESPN says there remains little evidence of consumer abandonment of multichannel video service, especially where it comes to sports programming. Analyzing Nielsen data, ESPN argues that Just 18/100ths of U.S. households “cut the cord” between fourth quarter 2010 and first quarter 2011. “Cord cutters” are defined as as multichannel users with a high-speed Internet connection that have dropped their cable/telco/satellite subscriptions, but retain their broadband connection to watch television. The current rate of 0.18 percent is less than the 0.28 percent found in ESPN’s previous analysis of cord-cutting from third to fourth Quarter 2010.

The amount of “cord-cutters” – multichannel homes with a high-speed Internet connection that drop their cable/telco/satellite subscriptions, but retain their broadband connection to watch television – netted out to only 0.11 percent of the television population over the past three months, according to an extensive ESPN analysis of Nielsen’s national people meter sample. The ESPN study provides a methodology for measuring and tracking cord cutting in the future, while debunking several stereotypes about the demographics of cord cutters.

The earlier ESPN analysis of Nielsen data found that just 0.28 percent of homes in the Nielsen sample dropped multichannel service but kept their broadband Internet connections. This migration was offset by a group of broadcast-only households that became subscribers to multichannel TV and broadband over the same period. These "un-cutters" represented 0.17 percent of homes in the Nielsen sample, so the net loss between the groups was just 0.11 percent of all households. Additionally, people who were heavy or medium sports viewers showed zero cord cutting. Heavy and medium sports viewers account for 83% of sports viewing and 90% of viewing to ESPN.  read more here.

The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing argues that only 11 percent of the U.S. population currently watches "some TV shows and movies from the Internet on their TV sets." The vast majority of these Internet TV viewers (84%) say that they are still watching the same amount of traditional TV as before and have no plans to cancel their current cable subscriptions. read more here.

At least in aggregate, the number of users who dropped service altogether was almost exactly balanced by the number of consumers that bought multichannel video for the first time, or decided to subscribe again after an absence. These "un-cutters" also represented 0.18 percent of homes in the Nielsen sample, so the net loss between the groups was zero, ESPN argues.

Of course, there is a difference between current or immediately-past behavior and behavior as it might exist in the future. Almost nobody, if anyone at all, actually believes there will be anything but growth for over-the-top viewing, over time.

From ESPN's viewpoint, heavy or medium sports viewers showed zero cord cutting. Heavy and medium sports viewers account for 77 percent of sports viewing and 87 percent of viewing to ESPN. That makes sense. Live sports is one area of programming virtually none of the over-the-top providers can offer. To the extent that live sports is a major reason for watching linear video, there is little ability to shift viewing to online formats. The same is likely true of live news and live events that are for all sorts of reasons available only on broadcast and linear outlets.

Nielsen found that in households with people 25 years old or younger, 8.5 percent are cable-free, which is almost twice the national average. Younger people consider cable a “luxury item:” one that might be out of their budget right now, but would become an option once they grew older and could afford that extra $100 a month.

Horowitz Study Shows Online, Mobile, and OTT Platforms Gain Ground

Why “Bloggers vs. Journalists” Still Seems to be an Issue

With the caveat that there are some serious issues, you might wonder why the subject of "bloggers" versus "journalists" still merits attention. Some will point to psychology. Some might just point out that "conflict" is evident in just about every other sphere of economic life where business ecosystems and revenue flows are changing.

Executives at telecom companies aren't fond of VoIP providers. Video distributors aren't too fond of over-the-top online providers. Print publications aren't too fond of online content providers. Retailers aren't happy about competition from online retailers.

Ignoring for the moment some of the real issues about accuracy, balance, fairness and other traditional approaches to the "news" business, one might argue that "conflict" between bloggers and journalists, to a large extent, simply reflects the real-world change of revenue possibility within many industries, of which the "news" business is simply one example.

Simply put, interests that are harmed by new competition complain about the new competitors. We might not need psychological explanations.

Why “Bloggers vs. Journalists” is Still With Us � Pressthink