Experts Trump Friends for Web Recommendations

According to research from Meebo, expertise trumps friendship when people are surfing the Web for content that matches their interests.

The study, which included a nationally representative sample of 1,473 people, found that 53 percent of Web users are looking for recommendations from 'everyday experts,' or strangers with knowledge on a specific topic. For questions about travel and cooking, the gap is even bigger: about 40 percent said they would connect with "everyday experts" while about 20 percent would ask people they know.

Content-Sharing Company Meebo Says Experts Trump Friends for Web Recommendations

Groupon, LivingSocial Serve Somewhat Different Market Segments

Groupon and LivingSocial appear to attract different types of customers. Groupon’s visitor base skews somewhat more towards younger users and females while LivingSocial’s is more normally distributed around middle-age users and proportioned roughly equally between genders.

Groupon and LivingSocial account for over 90% of all visits among all group buying websites tracked by comScore.

Groupon, LivingSocial Grabbing Different Segments of the Daily Deal Marketplace

$10 Billion Location Based Services Revenue in 2016

Consumer and advertiser expenditures on location based services will  approach $10 billion by 2016, with search advertising accounting for just over 50 percent, predicts Strategy Analytics.

Much of the growth, obviously driven in part by the growing use of location services based on maps.

Separately, Gartner predicts that revenue from location-based services for consumers will reach $8.3 billion in 2014, with advertising being the dominant contributor of revenue, rather than subscription fees, for example.

Google recently said that 40 percent of all Google Map use takes place on mobile phones.

Read more here

Android Frist, Windows Second in Mobile OS Share in 2015

The mobile operating system market is in a huge state of flux. As recently as August 2010, for example, Gartner was predicting that Symbian would the world’s top operating system in 2014, with Windows fifth, at about four percent share.

In less than a year, based principally on Nokia’a abandonment of Symbian and promotion pof Windows, that OS is expected to climb to the number-two spot by 2015.

IDC expects Android, which passed Symbian as the leading operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2010, to grow to more than 40 percent of the market in the second half of 2011.

But that won’t be the most-significant shift. Instead, some might argue, the prediction that Windows Phone will be in second place, with more than 20 percent share in 2015, might be as big a story as the virtual disappearance of Symbian, as Nokia moves forward using Windows Phone, and abandoning Symbian.

Nevertheless, assuming that Nokia's transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20% share in 2015.

Apple’s iOS was the number-three operating system OS at the beginning of 2011 and will retain that number-three ranking.

The BlackBerry operating system is expected to remain in the fourth spot. smartphone operating system over the forecast period. Like iOS, the BlackBerry OS will experience market share decline between 2011 and 2015.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22871611

Service to Places, Devices and Accounts: What's at Stake

Telecom and video entertainment services were traditionally tied to a specific location. Mobile services are different, always representing services to a person or single device, no matter how services are billed. In the future we will also see "untethered" devices that are connected using the mobile network, but are not mobile in character.

Increasingly, we are seeing the development of overlapping connections, some that are fixed, some fully mobile, some untethered. We also are starting to see untethered applications and services. "TV Everywhere" provides an example. The billing arrangement focuses on place-based delivery of video, but TV Everywhere adds nomadic access, sometimes only within the subscriber's home.

In the future, TV Everywhere access is likely to extend to much-wider areas, perhaps a whole country at first. Sling services obviously allow access to a consumer's at-home video services at any location.

Mobile devices including smart phones, feature phones, iPod Touch devices sometimes use both mobile network connections and Wi-Fi, in a variety of modes. Sometimes the devices are fully mobile, other times untethered, sometimes as a virtual substitute for a "fixed" connection.

Over time, service providers will experiment with and then introduce different packages of service that bridge the "service to a location" and "service to a person or device" modes. In part, that might mean a bundle including both fixed and mobile services on a single account. In other cases it will mean a variety of devices and services used by a household or group of users, fixed and mobile.

It isn't clear how those changes will affect the U.S. consumer services market, which the Yankee Group puts at $215.8 billion a year just for consumer voice and video services. At the moment, voice and video make up 76 percent of the total spent on telecom and network-based entertainment services by U.S. consumers.

Are Networks "Plumbing," or Not?

"The network can no longer be considered “dumb pipes” or “plumbing,” says Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group SVP. "It will be a strategic point of differentiation, and organizations that understand this will gain a competitive advantage in their market."

If you look at the evolution of computing architecture, you can see why he makes that claim. Over time, network connections arguably have become more important as computing has gotten progressively more decentralized. In the mainframe era, wide area connections were crucial, but in-building networks generally were not.

The era of client-server computing created the need for local area networks. The era of Internet computing radically decentralized network end points, created a need for house-area networks and simultaneously boosted the vao

Some think the next era of computing will be profoundly driven by mobile computing, which will again emphasize wide area connections. The ubiquitous "radio tails" are crucial to support nomadic computing, of course, but what makes mobile computing different is ubiquity.

Some of us also would note something else: network connections have steadily become more important for ever-larger numbers of end points. "Connected life" doesn't mean much when a user loses their connections. But the connections are valuable largely because, over time, the role of third party applications and devices also has grown.

It is true that network connections are essential. It also is true that value is shifting away from the connections to the applications and devices. Some might say Kerravala focuses on the first trend, while others might focus on the second and third trends.

In other words, there is not a contradiction between arguing that network connections will be the foundation for all coming waves of computing, and also that networks increasingly are mostly "dumb pipes."

That is not to say there are not applications and services embedded in the network. It is to say that, over time, more of the valuable or essential applications are provided by third parties.

EU "Digital Agenda" Has Application Targets

The European Union's "Digital Agenda" calls for 100 percent coverage of member state households with 30 Mbps broaband access by 2020, with an additional goal of 100 Mbps coverage of half of households by 2020.

That might not be the most interesting aspect of the Digital Agenda. The plan also specifies application targets. The plan calls for 50 percent of citizens buying online, 20 percent buying cross-border and 33 percent of small and medium businesses buying or selling online.

The plan also calls for 50 percent of citizens using e-government and 25 percent using e-government forms. Progress toward these goals is much more advanced than the connectivity goals, with five of the target behaviors already over 80 percent usage levels, says Chris Nicoll, Yankee Group analyst.

Bill Gates, former Microsoft CEO, famously admitted that he missed the importance of the Internet. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt now says he didn't move Google fast enough, or resolutely enough, to embrace social software.

Some might argue that will continue to happen in the Internet space. So targets might be helpful in some ways, but are unlikely to reliably measure all that is most important, simply because even "the smart guys" can't always foresee the big changes.

More Tests Show LightSquared Interference With GPS

A new set of tests by the National PNT Engineering Forum, a federal advisory group of engineers, showed that LightSquared's proposed mobile broadband network disrupted the signal strength to all GPS devices in the test area, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A separate Federal Aviation Administration-commissioned study found that "GPS operations below 2000 feet would be unavailable over a large radius of metro (areas)" for aircraft.

LightSquared argues it can prevent such interference, using better filters and possibly by creating bigger guard bands, though that will reduce the amount of useful spectrum LightSquared can use. The basic problem is that the adjacent GPS signals are quite weak, compared to the much-stronger Lightsquared signals.

But interference with other licensed users is the kiss of death for any new user of spectrum. It appears the interference issues are more substantial than LightSquared had expected, and it seems doubtful LightSquared's plans can proceed without substantial modification. There undoubtedly will be some demand that the plan be scuttled.

More Tests Show LightSquared Interference With GPS (subscription required)

62% of Information Workers Work Remotely At Least Part of Every Week

Some 62 percent of enterprise workers in North America and Europe work remotely at least part of every typical week, according to Forrester Research. 


E-mail and calendar apps were the most important for all types of mobile workers. 


Instant messaging came in a distant third. 


Audio and Web conferencing tools, team workspaces and social networking sites were popular with workers who spend a substantial amount of time outside of the office, such as managers and consultants.

62% of Information Workers Already Work Remotely

Small Businesses Consider Facebook, Other Online Marketing Channels "Highly Effective"

The sixth "Merchant Confidence Index" survey of 4,942 small business owners and managers shows that small business managers use a wide variety of online marketing channels, lead by Facebook, but also including Google, LinkedIn, Google Places, Twitter and other applications.

Profiles on social network sites are deemed the "most effective" channel, but email, local review sites and online Yellow Pages are considered among the most-effective channels used by small businesses.

MerchantCircle.com

Being Too Early is as Dangerous as Being Too Late

Former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin thinks the AOL-Huffington Post deal ironically fulfills the vision Time Warner originally had for merging AOL with Time Warner.

"Time Warner was basically a content distribution company and AOL was a digital service company and putting the two together was intended to put an Internet injection into Time Warner," he says. "It didn’t exactly work out that way, but the intention was really significant."

But he thinks, a decade later, that the strategy will work, or at least has a reasonable chance of working, where the Time Warner merger with AOL is widely viewed to have been a failure. Being too early is as dangerous as being too late.

Former Time Warner CEO on “delicious ironies” of AOL-HuffPo Merger

Time Warner Cable Sees Opportunity in 'Single Play' Broadband Business - WSJ.com

"'We've become less of a TV company than we were previously,"said Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable CEO recently said, adding that the company's focus has shifted more toward its role as a provider of infrastructure for the delivery of media. That might have been an odd statement 10 years ago, when both cable companies and telcos began to find that the competitive market was forcing a rethinking of product bundling.

In a monopoly environment, with high end user penetration, it is rational to build networks that have only a single service to sell. That used to be the case for cable operators selling video entertainment, or telcos selling voice. In a competitive environment, with multiple providers, any provider can expect penetration ranging from 20 percent for any major new service, and a declining share of the original legacy business, if there was one.

For a cable company or telco, that has meant selling multiple products to a smaller base of customers. That's why triple play or double play packages have become so important in recent years. Now, though, even that strategy requires revision. Once a network has been built, and a company has gotten about as many triple play or dual play customers as it can, it makes sense to avoid stranding assets by selling single services, if one can, to customers that have chosen to buy a key service from another provider.

In cable's case, that means acknowledging that, for many customers, a satellite service simply makes more sense, and that some customers will not give up their satellite TV services for a terrestrial alternative. So Time Warner Cable now wants to "take what the market will give it" by focusing new market attention on "broadband only" sales to customers unlikely to abandon their video or voice services providers.

That is not to say the fundamental economics of a broadband fixed-line network do not require healthy triple play or dual play sales. That still is necessary, under conditions where other contestants are going to get significant market share. But neither does it make sense to strand assets when some percentage of customers can be enticed to buy a single product, in cable's case broadband access.

There is another interesting nuggest in Britt's remarks, though. Note the statement about Time Warner Cable's overall "role as a provider of infrastructure for the delivery of media." That's a flat out acknowledgement that the growing part of Time Warner Cable's business is the "dumb pipe" part, broadband access, not entertainment video or voice.

Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Britt is correct. Time Warner Cable is close to the point where its "dumb pipe" customers will equal the number of legacy video customers. The company has about two million customers who buy broadband access, but not video. It has 12.5 million video customers.

There is something else to be gleaned here. Britt noted that about half its "broadband only" customers were business accounts. So although Time Warner Cable expects to sell more "broadband only" accounts to residences, it likely also will find it is selling more business access accounts as well.

So not only is Time Warner Cable shifting from "video first" to possibly "video or broadband first," it also is shifting towards sales to business customers, where its legacy business has been consumer focused. That is not to say either cable or telco service providers will not strive mightily to create other new revenue streams. It is to say that "dumb pipe" remains foundational to the overall business.

Time Warner Cable Sees Opportunity in 'Single Play' Broadband Business - WSJ.com

SMS Growth Slows, Some Worry

Text messaging has been one of the most profitable services for carriers for years with profit margins reaching 80 percent, but growth is slowing.

The most-recent data from the CTIA suggests growth of about nine percent. That shouldn't surprise. Text messaging is a universal feature of all phones, and texting has grown quite popular. But no market grows indefinitely.

Apple's recent announcement of its own iOS messaging capability obviously has people wondering whether that capability will eat into carrier text messaging revenue. It's hard to say. Captive services are useful within the iOS community, but few captive communications media achieve widespread use until there is full interoperability.

At least in the U.S. market, many users have text messaging plans that are functionally or actually "unlimited," eliminating the economic driver to substitute iOS messaging for text messaging.

As SMS growth is slowing down, is a new era of free messaging coming up?

How Do Consumers Gain Power Over Sellers?

A study fielded in May 2011 with 502 small business, mid-market and enterprise respondents worldwide has some interesting implications for content marketers and the role of content in the sales process.

As you might expect, the top concern overall was "changes in costs to deliver current products or services," such as competitors with lower cost structures that are able to deliver competitive products at lower retail prices. Some 29 percent of respondents suggested they were "fully or very exposed" to such dangers.

But the second most important source of potential revenue disruption was "increased customer bargaining power, gained directly by their access to better information about product offerings and alternatives." Some 28 percent of respondents reported they were "fully or very exposed" to such dangers.

In other words, competitors selling at lower prices and greater buyer knowledge were nearly equal in terms of dangers to revenue models. That should reinforce the notion that potential buyers have to be reached, indirectly, through web channels, as those prospects conduct buying research, since these actions occur before a brand is aware a prospect is in the market.

Read the full study here

Sprint to Introduce 10 New Motorola Devices using Android

Sprint and its prepaid brands of Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA will launch more than 10 new Motorola wireless devices in 2011, all using Android, and including smartphones, tablets and best-in-class Push-to-Talk devices.

Two new devices were announced June 9, 2011, including the iconic Motorola PHOTON 4G, Motorola’s first Sprint 4G device with a dual-core 1GHz processor, Android 2.3, Sprint ID and worldphone capabilities, and Motorola TRIUMPH, the first Virgin Mobile USA device from Motorola.

Sprint and Motorola Forge Renewed Business Relationship That Extends Device Innovation