Social Media Doesn't Fix Crummy Products

For the last half decade, we’ve had it beaten over our heads that "it’s all about the conversation." That all a company has to do is "be social," to throw up a Twitter and Facebook account, and they have passed the marketing test.

Of course, this is utter crap, says consultant Mack Collier. "If your product sucks today, it will still suck tomorrow if you start using social media," he says. "The only difference is that more people will know about it."

Social Media is not a contingency plan for having a shitty product

Apple may offer unlocked iPhone 4 handsets

According to iOS developer Chronic, Apple plans to offer unlocked iPhone 4 models directly to consumers soon, in both black and white, with 16 Gbytes or 32 Gbytes of storage.

Apple may offer unlocked iPhone 4 handsets

Worldwide Ad Market Approaches $500 Billion

Advertising spending around the world is projected to increase about four percent in 2011to more than $494 billion, eMarketer estimates.

Total spending on directories, internet, magazines, newspaper, outdoor, radio and TV advertising will continue to grow at steady single-digit rates through 2015, according to the forecast. By that year, advertisers worldwide will be spending almost $600 billion on these media.

Worldwide Ad Market Approaches $500 Billion

Sarah Palin Email Gambit: Why People Hold Journalists in Such Low Regard

There's a reason journalists are held in such low public esteem, despite their own high self evaluations.

"The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics," says the U.K. Daily Telegraph.

"One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment," the Telegraph says.

"If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced."

"The whole saga might come to be viewed as “an embarrassment for legacy media,” the Telegraph says.

In fact, repeated polls have confirmed the low and dropping esteem accorded to major media journalists. A 2004 poll by the First Amendment Center and American Journalism Review shows Americans remain critical of the professionalism and ethics of the people and organizations that deliver the news.

"They say that the press is biased, that it routinely falsifies and fabricates stories, and that it abuses its freedom," says the report. See http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3731.

A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found 63 percent of respondents said news articles were often inaccurate and only 29 percent said the media generally “get the facts straight” — the worst marks Pew has recorded — compared with 53 percent and 39 percent in 2007. See http://people-press.org/2009/09/13/press-accuracy-rating-hits-two-decade-low/.


In the 1997 Gallup Poll on honesty and ethics, two percent of respondents rated journalists as "very high" on honesty and ethics. About the same ranking gotten by members of Congress and car sales people. See http://www.gallup.com/poll/4294/honesty-ethics-poll-pharmacists-strengthen-their-position.aspx.

Honesty & Ethics: 26 Occupations Nov 7-9, 1997
	Very high	High	Average	Low	Very low	No opinion
Druggists, pharmacists	16	53	27	3	*	1
Clergy	17%	42	31	5	1	4
Medical doctors	10%	46	36	5	2	1
College teachers	11%	44	35	3	1	6
Dentists	9%	45	37	5	2	2
Policemen	10%	39	40	8	2	1
Engineers	9%	40	40	3	1	7
Funeral directors	7%	29	45	9	2	8
Bankers	4%	30	51	11	3	1
Public opinion pollsters	4%	19	55	12	2	8
Journalists	2%	21	53	17	4	3
TV reporters, commentators	4%	18	55	17	4	2
Business executives	3%	17	55	17	3	5
Local officeholders	3%	17	56	17	4	3
Building contractors	3%	17	53	18	4	5
Newspaper reporters	2%	17	48	24	6	3
Stockbrokers	2%	16	54	14	3	11
State officeholders	2%	15	53	24	4	2
Real estate agents	3%	13	56	20	4	4
Lawyers	3%	12	41	31	10	3
Labor union leaders	2%	13	41	26	12	6
Senators	2%	12	50	27	6	3
Advertising practitioners	2%	10	49	26	6	7
Congressmen	2%	10	49	28	8	3
Insurance salesmen	2%	10	47	30	8	3
Car salesmen	2%	6	31	40	19	2

American Way: Sarah Palin email frenzy backfires on her media antagonists – Telegraph Blogs

Maybe Mobile Advertising Really is Mostly About Location

Some would argue that Apple's iAd initiative has failed to get significant traction, and might wonder whether it means anything particular, other than that Apple has not immediately been able to show its ability to reshape yet another industry. One way or the other, Apple has not shown sufficient value to get many advertisers to move budgets. See Looks Like the iAd Hasn’t Cracked Mobile Advertising.

Maybe the issue isn't necessarily Apple's prowess in the advertising business. The mobile advertising business remains quite small by overall industry standards. Of the possibly $600 billion U.S. advertisers spent in 2010, about $48 billion was spent on all forms of digital media.

Marketers invested a total $47.6 billion in digital advertising and marketing in 2010 according to the Jack Myers Media Business Report. 2020 Vision: Media, Advertising and Marketing Economic Health Report 2000- 2020.

U.S. mobile advertising spend was estimated at $743 million in 2010, according to eMarketer. That is expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2014, but that is a small number in the advertising market. Some estimate the mobile marketing market already is bigger than that, but most think the mobile ad market still remains diminutive.

About one online marketing dollar in every five spent in 2010 went to a mobile campaign, says Borrell Associates, one of the more-robust estimates. By 2015, the mobile share will have grown to almost two of every three dollars spent, according to Borrell Associates. See http://www.mobilemarketingandtechnology.com/2010/toppost/mobile-advertising-will-be-23-of-total-online-spending-by-2015/.

The Jack Myers study pegs the digital total spend at nearly eight percent share of all marketing communications investments in 2010, which were reported by Myers at $601 billion. That total includes all advertising, trade and consumer promotion, event and direct marketing, and public relations, though, and some would not include PR spending in the advertising total, nor good portions of event marketing.

Perhaps the biggest upside could come if mobile advertising comes to be seen as the best form of local advertising, rather than national campaigns. Google would like that, even if Apple probably would not.

Asian Microvendors Have 13% Market Share

According to the latest Strategy Analytics research, more than 200 emerging handset brands, such as Micromax, Spice Mobile and Yulong Coolpad, captured nearly 13 percent of global mobile handset market share, shipping 48 million units globally in the first quarter 2011. according to Strategy Analytics.

According to Neil Shah, Strategy Analytics analyst, “out of the 200-plus legitimate microvendors worldwide, the top 25 brands shipped nearly 21 million units in the first quarter of 2011."

Rising cellular subscriber growth in Asia and Africa has led to the rapid emergence of low-cost, mobile handset suppliers to fulfill rising handset demand, the firm says.

Asian Microvendors Target 3G Handsets and Android Smartphones

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