Samsung "Epic" Debuts

Michael Mandel Suggests a Moratorium on New FCC Broadband Regulations

Michael Mandel,founder of Visible Economy LLC, a New York-based news and education company, and a contributor for the Progressive Policy Institute, argues for a two-year moratorium on any new federal regulations on the broadband industry,including new regulation of ISPs.

"Whether or not you think that such a move is a good idea, such regulations are unlikely to boost investment or employment in the telecom industry, at a time when we need all the capital spending and jobs that we can get," he says. "For that reason, I suggest a two-year pause in new broadband regulation, keeping the current balance among the different players, which seems to be generating growth."

Nobody Knows Which Carrier Will Get iPHone Next in U.S. Market

Nobody yet knows which U.S. carrier will get the right to sell Apple's iPhone next, in 2011. There is logic for, and against, it being Verizon. At the moment some reports suggest Apple and Verizon are talking, but are not yet agreed on terms and conditions.

That makes sense. Verizon has been doing quite well with HTC devices lots of people do believe is the family of devices most similar to the iPhone. For that reason, Verizon might not feel it has to give quite so much to Apple to acquire rights to sell the iPhone.

Apple, on the other hand, has to weigh the advantages of a much-bigger base of customers Verizon would bring, compared to either Sprint or T-Mobile USA. Also, given component shortages at the moment, Verizon and Apple have to be weighing possible impact on device profit margins as well as ability to meet demand.

Verizon might not be willing to give Apple the margins it wants. And Verizon has to estimate a possible shift in demand from HTC devices to iPhones that result in no net gain in subscribers.

It is a fair guess iPhones will be available on some network other than AT&T's, in 2011. It will an important decision no matter which network it proves to be.

Verizon and Apple at loggerheads?

Why Social Media Fails

Why Social Media Projects Fail?! – A European Perspective

View more presentations from BSI.

At such an early state of development, one would have to expect more failures than successes. But it is helpful to know what doesn't seem to work, and why.

Fool-Proof Way to Save Smartphone Batteries

Radical thought, but it works!

I have to admit, I've done this

Five Key Trends To Watch In Unified Communications

IT leaders are rethinking their voice and UC deployment plans, says consultant Irwin Lazar. Those technologies with demonstrable cost savings such as SIP trunking (96 percent are deploying, planning to deploy, or evaluating SIP trunking) continue to move forward.

But replacement of TDM endpoints with IP has slowed as IT managers struggle with the costs associated with infrastructure upgrades at a time when mobility and telecommuting raise questions about return from such investments.

UC adoptions continue to increase, with nearly 88 percent of companies having at least some UC plans. Delivering on-premise web conferencing as part of a Microsoft Office Communications Server installation is gaining traction; while adding click-to-call or desktop video to supplement voice is more difficult to justify.

Video deployments continue to increase, but usually require some business case, such as reducing travel costs.

Five Key Trends To Watch In Unified Communications

comScore Reports Android Made Biggest Share Gains in May

Some 49.1 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in May, up 8.1 percent from the corresponding February period.

RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 41.7 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft with 13.2 percent.

Google saw significant growth during the period, up four percentage points to capture 13 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.

Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow.

comScore Reports May 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

Firms Embrace Social Media

About 72 percent of executives recently surveyed say they have a social media strategy in place. Of firms without an existing strategy, 80 percent say they will create one within the next 12 months. As you would expect, 85 percent of survey respondents say that original content is critical to the success of their social media campaigns.

Branded original and expert content is used more often than any other type of content, and audience development is one of the top objectives of marketers.

That finding alone points up what has become increasingly obvious with the growth of blogging and other self-publishing platforms. These days, firms themselves have become "media," producers of content. That obviously should have some important impact on the use of, support of, and health of traditional "media" outlets, shouldn't it?

In a sense, firms face a new sort of "build versus buy" decision in areas that used to be part of the marketing budget devoted to "advertising" and "web" spending. Firms can find "media" that already have aggregated the target audience, or firms can do their own media and create the target audience. In the former case, firms will "buy" placement in existing media, while in the latter case they will create their own media, and shift spending that used to go to "advertising" into "content production and distribution."

Fully 43 percent of respondents said they don’t need to show positive return on investment to get social media funding from their organization, as it apparently is clear to all that something new is beginning and the important thing right now is to get started, start learning and refine techniques as successful practices and approaches are discovered.

King Fish Media study, co-sponsored by HubSpot and Junta42, surveyed more than 450 senior management and marketing executives on their social media investments as part of the study.

As you would expect for activities that still are considered experimental, only nine percent of surveyed organizations have full-time positions dedicated to managing social media responsibilities, while 90 percent include those as part of someone’s overall responsibilities.

About 85 percent of companies are handling their social media efforts internally.

Two thirds of the company’s surveyed (67 percent) focus their social media efforts on their company as a whole, while 41 percent promote individuals within the company and 24 percent promote a specific brand.

Some 73 percent of respondents said original branded content was key, while 72 percent said expert content was important.

Video content (51 percent), user case studies (45 percent), and reviews (41 percent) are also used by roughly half of all respondents.

There seems a clear understanding that social media and networking are becoming more important, but it is just as clear that marketers are still struggling to identify best practices.  If you remember how the World Wide Web first was used by firms, and how it developed, you know it is part of the process.

That understanding also explains why 64 percent of firms aren’t yet requiring definitive measurable ROI to justify their social media budgets.

To download the complete findings of the King Fish Media Survey, go here http://www.kingfishmedia.com/marketing-resources/research/social-media-usage-2010/.

Apple is the 800-Pound Gorilla in Music, No Matter What Some May Say

Apple’s dominance of the download market is a huge deal, Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan says. "I’d argue that EMI and WMG are actually downplaying the importance," he says.   It’s not in their interest to scare investors. And Apple's dominance might be a cause for concern.

Apple’s dominance is such that would be new entrants have to think as a priority about what their "Apple strategy" should be.  Should they be MP3 or build an iPhone app?  Should they integrate themselves into the iTunes ecosystem or co-exist?

link

"More Bandwidth" Does Not Necessarily Cure Latency Issues

Though it can help, increasing bandwidth on any network experiencing latency issues does not necessarily fix the problem.

Congestion and forwarding delay are the more important types of latency on an network, and are not entirely independent. As a network element is subjected to heavy load, it may need additional queue time to handle and
process the increased volume of traffic, which causes forwarding delay.

But there are other sources, as well. Serialization delay is the most constant, having only a small influence on end-to-end latency. Propagation delay, typically stable in circuit-switched networks, can be irregular and introduce jitter over routed networks.

As network congestion can have a large impact on end-to-end latency, affecting both forwarding and pure congestion (queuing-related) delay.

Reducing traffic bottlenecks therefore is a key part of network management and design. Increasing capacity (available bandwidth) should, at least in theory, help reduce congestion when applied to network “pinch points”.

However, increasing throughput does not always lead to the expected decrease in latency, even if
congestion is reduced. Results will vary depending on implementation, network architecture, traffic
patterns, and a number of other factors.

white paper here

Dark Fiber, Wavelengths, Capacity Issues

Abovenet’s Bill LaPerch, Zayo’s Dan Caruso, Allied Fiber’s Hunter Newby, USMetroTel’s Frank Mambuca, and CityTel’s NiQ Lai talk about long-haul and metro wholesale, dark fiber and high-bandwidth access in this webcast. 
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-eventDetails&c=147513&eventID=3291152

Facebook Buys Hot Potato, Expertise is Key

Facebook had been rumoured to be looking at location-based service Hot Potato since July and chose Friday - two days after the Facebook Places launch - to confirm the deal.

Hot Potato is a halfway house between Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook Like. Users share what they are doing - whether a venue, activity, song, game or TV show - and the site lists trending terms. Its original focus was more on events, but it later broadened to any activity.

Facebook apparently is after experienced personnel to build and support its new "Places" feature.

http://blog.hotpotato.com/post/982892868/weve-moved-to-facebook

Facebook buys check-in service Hot Potato

Netflix Complementary to Cable?

As cable has lost video subscribers, Netflix has been racking them up: It had 15 million subscribers at the end of June, up 42 percent from a year earlier.

But according to Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, the service ultimately is a complement to cable, not a killer: “Our product is like a motorcycle. Cable TV is like a car. If you price one cheap enough you can have both.”

Netflix: Stream On

Internet Infrastructure Capex Set to Climb?

According to tech research firm PacificCrest, the global technology buildout is a $200 billion opportunity over the next five years.

The infrastructure needs include $100 billion to relieve congestion and $50 billion for boosting networks by upgrading Internet protocols. PacificCrest also estimates $54 billion is needed for new routing systems to improve data flow.

During the last cycle (2004-2008) the top five Internet firms spent roughly $15 billion on infrastructure, but that figure is expected to jump to $28 billion over the next four years.

Traffic Jam on the Information Superhighway

How Do You Segment When Users Carry Multiple Devices?

You might wonder how application and service providers are going to have to refine their customer segmentation assumptions in a world where users carry multiple mobile devices with them as a matter of course.

It's bound to be a growing question. According to a recent survey by Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, 97 percent of users carry at least two mobile devices.

Perhaps more significantly, 49 percent carry three or more mobile devices. That tends to suggest the old "business" or "consumer" distinction is woefully inadequate.


Up to a point, some things remain constant. Customers still can be sorted by age, lifestyle or perhaps brand preference. The issue is that behavioral measures probably will be more important. Even users within a single age demographic, socio-economic bracket or lifestyle segment might differ radically based on the number of devices they typically carry, as well as by what applications they use.

The most-obvious potential change is that a single-device user might not have too many qualms about flat-fee pricing for broadband access on a device basis. A user with multiple devices almost certainly is going to have greater resistance to uniform pricing of that sort, and should be more receptive to an integrated access plan that provides access to multiple devices in less expensive and more flexible ways.

In fact, it might actually simplify segmentation in some ways to consider "number of devices used" as a key driver of packages and features.

Mobile Video Growth Means CDN Demand

Consumers are demanding more personalization and entertainment content on their mobile phones, driving mobile video revenue to exceed $3.5 billion in 2008, according to recent research by MultiMedia Intelligence.

By 2012, the mobile video and mobile TV market will exceed $15 billion, including direct customer payments and advertising. But most of the money is in subscriber fees. Total Mobile TV and Video advertising revenue will exceed $1 billion by 2012.

If that is the case, demand for content delivery networks will grow as well, with or without the ability to prioritize video content streams, by either access or content providers. In fact, CDNs might be more important if "best effort" delivery remains the only type of service consumers can buy.

IP Carrier: Mobile Video Forecast

Slowing Mobile Broadband Uptake?

Mobile broadband services and revenues include several different revenue components. Data access for smartphones is one driver.

But so are broadband "dongles" and "cards" that allow users to use 3G or 4G networks with their PCs, notebooks, netbooks or tablets.

Then there are a growing range of uses for specialized sensor networks, e-book readers and other devices that might use mobile broadband access occasionally.

It appears dongle revenues continue to climb, but possibly at a slower rate compared to 2008, at least in some markets. Yankee Group researchers say growth is slowing in France, for example.


Comparing the second quarter of 2010 with the second quarter of  2009, growth rates were 6.5 percent and 22.4 percent respectively. "We see the same trend if we compare performance during the first half of 2010 and the second half of 2009," says Declan Lonergan, Yankee Group analyst.

Orange, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, Telekom Austria and KPN results showed the same trend.

During the first half of 2010, mobile broadband users increased by less than 12 percent. Even allowing for seasonal buying patterns, this compares unfavorably with a growth rate of 42 percent during the second half of 2009, Lonergan says.

"Places," Either from Google or Facebook, is About Local Advertising

Now that Google and Facebook both have launched initiatives called "Places" that add geo-location capabilities, it is safe to say both firms now recognize the potential for grabbing a share of the local advertising market.

Overall, small and medium-sized businesses with 100 or fewer employees spent $35 billion to $40 billion in all forms of local advertising in the U.S. in 2009, estimates BIA/Kelsey, a local-media advisory firm.

AdSense is one way businesses have tried to target local advertising, but there is nothing like "current location" in that regard.

Title II, Net Neutrality: Fixing What Isn't Broken or Breaking What is Already Broken?

Unexamined or unstated assumptions sometimes are not part of policy debates, but are nevertheless important. Consider, for example, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the most-significant attempt to update in a major ay U.S. communications policy since 1934, by one measure, and since 1984 by a second measure. On the first score, the basic framework for communications regulation had last been set in 1934, with the passage of the Communiations Act of 1934, which codified most of the rules communications had operated under, for most of the 20th century. 

One way of illustrating the challenges of 1934, and the subsequent implicit issues in 1996, is to look at what issues needed to be regulated. In 1934 it was radio licensing and telephone service. In 1996 the issue was really competition in voice communications. One might point out that the historical peak of phone line usage by Americans appears to have occurred sometime between 2000 and 2001, and that usage has been declining, rather steadily, ever since.

On the second score, 1984 represented the voluntary breakup of the old AT&T monopoly, creating separate local telephone and long distance segments of the business. The Bell system breakup also introduced competition in long distance services on a wide basis, for the first time. 

The explicit assumption in every policy effort aimed at introding competition into a market is that too much market power exists. The implicit assumption is that newly-competitive policies will have been proven to work when the former incumbents lose market share. Sometimes, the unexamined assumption is that the markets being considered are stable; that end user demand for the product will remain strong, for example. 

All of those assumptions ultimately proved incorrect in these cases. The U.S. over-the-air radio market no longer is dominant enough to warrant much concern about market power, within the broader media business. All U.S. radio revenue in the first three quarters of 2009 was a bit shy of $10 billion, for example, and overall industry revenue has been displaced by a shift to television since the 1950s. 

The introduction of competition into long distance did provide lower prices and greater options for consumers. But long distance has gone from being the highest profit margin service in communications, able to subsidize telephone service for most consumers, to not being a distinct industry segment, and is among the lowest-margin parts of the entire communications business, if not the worst-margin product in the entire catalog. 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was designed around the assumption that the voice market was stable. With the rise of all manner of Internet-based applications and businesses, plus mobile services, fixed-line voice has begun a long process of decline as a principal revenue driver for the industry, in the United States and globally. 

To use but the most-recent example, voice communications deregulation, there is a difference between applying more competitive measures to a declining market than to a growing or stable market. Adding pressure to a shrinking business likely only enhances its decline. 

In the case of the Telecom Act of 1996, regulators essentially proposed "more competition" for a market that was about to begin a decline. People also forget that the dynamics of competition essentially pitted the legacy long distance providers against the local telcos. Between them, AT&T and MCI garnered a majority (60 percent or more) of all customers ever gained by the entire competitive communications industry. 

That effort ultimately failed, and most of the U.S. "retail long distance" industry no longer exists. 

One can surely debate whether, and when, it ever is useful to prop up a declining industry. The perhaps more-important point is that it doesn't make much sense to apply new constraints to industries or services that are in decline, as "voice" communications surely is. 

The unintended danger for virtually all proposals aimed at applying more constraints on large ISPs is precisely that it is the wrong time to do so. The unexamined assumption is that the industry is fundamentally healthy, and can handle a significant new dose of rate, conditions and terms regulation. That might not be the case. 

There always is great danger when any single industry faces technology or market displacement. The analogies might be moves to impose more regulation on steel, auto, newspaper or airline industries after it became clear they were in some state of decline. The other temptation is to apply subsidies in an attempt to stave off decline or consolidation, but that typically doesn't work, either. 

To be sure, you will not find service provider executives talking about such dangers in public. No executive at a public company can do so. They will talk about how well they are managing the transition to a new business model. They will talk about how well all their new services are doing. They will start reporting revenue in new categories to make the point. They will talk about all the new ways they can make money using new business models. None of that is unexpected, or wrong. 

But none of it is certain, either. Communications these days is a fundamentally unstable business facing a wholesale replacement of its legacy revenues. By any measure, that would be destabilizing. So service providers must replace lost revenues, grow new lines of business and also cope with changes to the business ecosystem that put pressure on them in new ways, chiefly by severing the historic relationship between applications and pipes (separation of access from application). 

In the past, virtually all networks have been application specific. Networks were built to support a key "killer app," and app provisioning and network services were simply parts of that process. 

These days, IP networks are open, intended to support all sorts of applications, irrespective of network ownership and operation. No matter what apps develop in the future, access networks will be needed. The difference is that the ability of an access provider to profit from those apps is unclear. That doesn't mean "access" or "transport" are not essential parts of the ecosystem: they remain essential. What is not clear is the economic value those parts of the ecosystem can drive. And that is the issue. 

Prudence might dictate that we not place additional burden on businesses that depend on "voice" revenues, any more than we should unnecessarily burden steel, autos, airlines or newspapers. There are problems aplenty. 

Perhaps you cannot imagine a world where telcos and cable companies are smaller, relatively more unimportant parts of the application ecosystem. But it has happened frequently in the past, and has happened in the communications business itself. Retail long distance used to be the cash cow that drove profits and subsidized service for the rest of the business. Voice used to be the killer app whose revenues drove the rest of the business. Fixed-line services used to drive the whole business. Obviously, all those conditions have changed, or are changing. 

Under such conditions, it might not be prudent to spend too much time or effort intervening in a business that itself already is changing. Intervention inadvertently could accelerate decline and instability. Right now that's the last thing America needs, especially when it appears another round of capital investment is needed. 

Google Test Updates Search Results as Characters as Entered

This apparently experimental feature of Google Search updates search results as characters are entered in the search term stream. Nobody outside Google can tell whether this might be be applied as a standard feature for all Google searches, but it certainly indicates an advance in algorithms, caching or processing, possibly all three to some degrees.

Google does this all the time