Application-Aware Charging Grows on Mobile Networks

Some 32 percent of mobile operators already are offering application-aware charging models, a new study by Allot Communications suggests. 'Our findings show that operators have responded to this challenge (differential demand imposed by growing video bandwidth consumption) by implementing usage and application-aware charging models and service plans,' Allot says.

Application-Aware Charging Grows on Mobile Networks - Carrier Evolution

Telcos Invest in Cloud, Immediate Return not the Issue

Communication service providers committed almost $8 billion to cloud-related pursuits in the first six months of 2011, but recent acquisitions won’t boost cloud revenues overnight and service differentiation remains poor, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. That finding is not terribly surprising, given the relative newness of the business and the cost of investing in facilities.

Informa estimates that the typical provider generates less than five percent of its enterprise revenues from annuity cloud services. That sounds like a small amount, but can be quite significant for a large provider. Some might point out that text messaging revenue only accounts for about five percent of Verizon Wireless revenue, but it is a quite-important revenue source.

Telcos Invest in Cloud, Immediate Return not the Issue - Carrier Evolution

Google Buys IBM Patents to Ward Off Lawsuits

Google has purchased 1,000 technology patents from International Business Machines Corp. as the Web-search giant stocks up on intellectual property to defend itself against lawsuits. The patents involve the "fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips," computer architecture including servers and routers and online search engines, among other things. Read more here. (subscription required)

Some might argue the litigation-heavy U.S. business climate is stifling innovation. There have been continual patent infringement lawsuits filed recently in the mobile device space, for example. Read more.

Amazon Uses Streaming Video for "Content Marketing"

Amazon.com has some advantages as a content marketer. Like other retailers of "content" or "entertainment" products, it can use trailers, book reviews and descriptions as content marketing vehicles. But unusually, even for a content retailer, Amazon has the ability to give away professional content as part of a direct revenue model.

Amazon Prime is a membership service that, for $79 a year, gives Amazon customers free shipping on their purchases as well as no-extra-charge access to the Prime Instant Video streaming library. The Amazon Prime membership is a revenue-generating loyalty device, which provides clear incentives for members to keep buying from Amazon.

Pursuant to that strategy, Amazon.com added a new licensing agreement with NBCUniversal Domestic TV Distribution that will allow Amazon Prime members to stream select Universal Pictures movies through Prime Instant Video. This deal with Amazon will bring the total number of Prime instant videos to more than 9,000 movies and TV shows in the summer fo 2011.

Sometimes it is harder to see the tie between content marketing and a firm's revenue model. There is no such obscurity in the case of Amazon Prime Instant Video.

Amazon Adds More Content

Five Lies About Social Media Marketing

Social media has caused businesses to set up, or to feel they have to set up, Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and blogs to connect with as many customers as possible. Waylaid somewhere along the way, however, were the fundamentals of public relations, marketing, corporate communications and sales, giving way to erroneous assumptions about how businesses should manage their social marketing, some would argue.

Among the five biggest misconceptions is the notion that somebody other than you knows "social media," and is qualified to give you advice, argues Mikal E. Belicove is an "Entrepreneur" magazine columnist.

That might seem a "harsh" judgment, but for most smaller and start-up businesses, it is true enough.

The problem is that the art form still is developing. Some people have more experience, it is true, but at this point we all are still experimenting.

Perhaps one analogy is parenting. Some do it very well, almost instinctively, while others have to work at it. But humans wouldn't have been around very long if "parenting" were really so difficult that it had to be "outsourced" or conducted only by specialists. Some amount of common sense is needed, but social media is a tool like any other. Parents learn to be parents by doing it. Social media is like that, as well.

Also among the five top myths is the notion that social media, though "new," also represent "new media." As Belicove argues, all successive generations of media are new for a while. Then they just become "media." The implications are that social media can be approached just as any other medium can be: a tool.

Five Lies About Social Media Marketing

Telcos invested $8 billion in cloud in first half of 2011

Communication service providers committed almost $8 billion to cloud-related pursuits in the first six months of 2011, but recent acquisitions won’t boost cloud revenues overnight and service differentiation remains poor, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. That finding is not terribly surprising, given the relative newness of the business and the cost of investing in facilities.

Informa estimates that the typical provider generates less than five percent of its enterprise revenues from annuity cloud services. That sounds like a small amount, but can be quite significant for a large provider. Some might point out that text messaging revenue only accounts for about five percent of Verizon Wireless revenue, but it is a quite-important revenue source.

Of the 10 acquisitions and 21 investments announced in the first half of 2011, 80 percent involved data centers. Using a five-year return on invested capital rule of thumb, the invested $8 billion implies annual expected revenue of $1.6 billion. Of course, one also expects some amount of over-investment at this stage of business growth, so many would not be surprised if those projections for annualized revenue fall short.

By itself, cloud computing services might not be big enough to justify so much effort. But as part of a wider effort to expose network features to business partners, the provision of cloud facilities and software is seen as important. Few firms the size of AT&T or Verizon will waste time on new revenue initiatives that do not promise at least a $1 billion annual revenue stream. Right now, it isn't so clear that will be the case, for either firm, in the near term, and perhaps not even in the medium term.

But a reasonable argument can be made that revenues from additional products built on top of that platform, plus the cloud hosting services, will amount to new revenue of the threshold magnitude.

Telcos invested US$8 billion in cloud in first half of 2011

U.S. Consumer Interest In Mobile Payments Still Low

Recent surveys by Forrester Research show that U.S. consumer interest in mobile payments is low.

Less than six percent of U.S. online adults have ever used any type of mobile payment.

Over the past three years, Forrester has seen interest in mobile payments continue to grow slowly, though, up from 11 percent of survey respondents in 2008 to 18 percent in 2010.

Are Consumers Interested In Mobile Payments?

Sprint Shares Take Tumble; Strategy or Churn the Reason?

Sprint's shares on July 28, 2011 suffered their biggest intraday drop since 2008 as its second quarter results missed analyst forecasts, and an unclear 4G strategy, despite firm news of a deal with LightSquared that at least clarifies part of Sprint's Long Term Evolution approach. It isn't entirely clear whether the drop was caused by investor concerns about ongoing churn, or uncertainty about Sprint's long-term strategy.

The future of its relationship with Clearwire, though, remains unsettled. The deal with LightSquared is tactically helpful, assuming LightSquared can mollify the GPS community about interference issues. That is one major issue, but there are others, including the loss of about half its potential spectrum if LightSquared has to avoid using the "L" band frequencies where GPS interference issues exist.

Longer term, some will have questions about the viability of a wholesale-only strategy, as well as ability to raise the rest of the capital needed to finish the full LightSquared network.

Would Sprint kill its Clearwire golden goose?

Never wait on hold again with the FastCustomer app

FastCustomer, an iPhone and Android app, claims to have saved its users 220,000 minutes they otherwise would have spent "on hold." FastCustomer will call any company’s call center or any department and wait on hold for you. The app saves you time and eliminates the need to listen to elevator music

On the free iPhone or Android app, just tap a button telling the app which company you need to reach, then go back to living your life.

1-800 numbers suck. Never wait on hold again

Does Apple Want to Buy Barnes & Noble?

Are Apple executives weighing a possible bid to buy Barnes & Noble? That's the rumor reported to Boy Genius Report by an as yet "unproven" source.

Apple presumably then would fold the Barnes & Noble digital library of books and publication into Apple’s own iBooks store.

Apple would have no use for the Nook, and that would likely be discontinued in this scenario. Apple could then convert some of the brick and mortar Barnes & Noble stores into Apple stores and close the rest. Apple easily can afford the transaction.

Some of us would lament the loss of the retail bookstores, or the possible demise of the Nook. Along with Amazon's coming Android tablet, the Nook has seemed to some the best chance for a branded Android tablet to create a niche in the tablet market that actually answers the question of "why buy it instead of an iPad?"

Does Apple have any interest in buying Barnes & Noble?

How to Search Google+

Sooner or later, you will want to search Google+, perhaps to find a profile, or conduct a keyword search on a topic. Go ahead, do it. Oh, you say, there's no search box.

For some reason there’s no convenient way to search your Google stream. But you can go directly to http://googleplussearch.chromefans.org/ and conduct the search there.

Google+ Resources

Study: Execs Aren't Yet Sure What to do About Social Media

More than half of 302 executives surveyed by Harris Interactive on behalf of Capgemini say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64 percent of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74 percent) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care using the social Web.

Most (57 percent) see social media as a means for "inviting customer input on product and services, lead generation, responding to complaints, internal reporting, and measuring customer satisfaction."

However, there's still a sizable minority (13 percent) that believe social media is just a fad and is not important to their company's success.

Study: Execs Aren't Yet Sure What to do About Social Media

Verizon Wireless to Pay $10 Billion Dividend

Some of us might see an important implication in the Verizon Wireless decision to distribute $10 billion to its two owners, Verizon Communications and Vodafone. And that observation is that Verizon needs the cash to help pay dividends, because Verizon does not any longer generate the cash to pay its own common dividend, said Craig Moffett, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst.

'There simply isn't any cash elsewhere in the business to fund the common dividend,' Bernstein said. A rational person might conclude that, over the longer term, something has to change. Either Verizon lowers its dividend, which most would assume is the last thing Verizon would do, or Verizon Communications has to find some way to boost its revenues and profits to maintain the dividend. There might be other short-term expedients, such as asset sales, but that can only go so far.

The other implication is that observers who believe Verizon easily can afford to invest in its fixed line infrastructure increasingly may find that view hard to support, over the long term. A firm that no longer can generate enough internal cash to pay its historic dividend has a problem. Big new investments will require some reasonable expectation of adequate financial return.

To be sure, Verizon Communications reported encouraging results for its second quarter, especially a near return to wireline segment growth. But keep in mind that Verizon is trying to return to a slightly-positive revenue growth position in its fixed-line business.

Verizon Wireless to Pay $10 Billion Dividend

PayPal Says it Will Be Agnostic About Payments, Zong Purchase Proves It

PayPal executives have been pretty clear that they are going to be "agnostic" about the ways mobile phones can communicate with payment terminals, and eBay, PayPal owner, has "put its money where its mouth is" by buying Zong, which provides carrier billing, with some 250 carriers globally.

eBay buys Zong

"Death by PowerPoint" and Other Similar Afflictions

"Trying to sound really smart is really, really dumb," argues Marcus Schaller, a content marketing strategist, speaker and author of "The Lead Ladder-Turn Strangers into Clients, One Step at a Time." His basic point is that simple, clear language is important.

"You see it every day; puffed up blog posts, white papers, webinars and website copy full of important sounding jargon," he says. "The less of it you understand, the more important it must be."

Corporate/Marketing Speak is a relic of the days before Google and RSS feeds, a time when information wasn’t at everyone’s fingertips. A white paper in 1998 didn’t have to compete with the same avalanche of information as the white paper of 2011. So be clear, he argues.

There's a similar analogy, less about jargon and more about "parading knowledge," though. Most of us attend conferences and trade shows. That means most of us sit through PowerPoint presentations. If you take a survey of conference attendees, you will almost always find that most people think most presentations are unhelpful to some extent, overly-long in most cases and "not so good" all too often.

At the suggestion of a friend, I read "15 minutes, plus Q&A" earlier this year, written by Joey Asher. Basically, the argument is that the reason so many PowerPoint presentations are less effective than they might be is that we all have a tendency to use such occasions to parade our knowledge, and that typically is not helpful for communicating the couple to several points that really can be made in 15 minutes.

So we wander around, "dumping data" instead of reinforcing the couple of important messages we should be trying to communicate. That, of course, assumes the agenda really is to communicate, rather than genuinely obscure matters. There might well be times when the actual intent is to get through a presentation essentially "saying nothing," for some valid business or political reason.

But clarity, in all content, is only partly a matter of communication skill. It also is the result of discipline; the willingness to exclude extraneous material that might impress, but fails to help get across the few points one really wanted to make in a short time.

There are reasons for some of the "wandering around," of course. For presenters at many meetings, the whole reason a person is allowed to attend is to make a marketing pitch for whatever it is that the company sells. Whatever the conference organizer or the audience might prefer, the speaker's job is to make the pitch. In other cases, demonstrating competency is "the pitch." Lawyers and consultants, as well as anybody else selling an intangible product, has to provide some "proxy" for skill which, by definition, is intangible.

If you wonder why attorneys have nice offices and furniture, it is to provide some "proxy" for skill, which a buyer cannot assess accurately. Educational credentials are proxies; so are awards; frequent speaking engagements and so forth. Still, the temptation to parade knowledge can get in the way of a clear, focused, on target talk, speech or presentation that makes one to several points very well.

"15 minutes, including Q&A" is a useful antidote to "death by PowerPoint."

Yes, Even CEOs Speak Human