Forrester Finds Most Users Read, Listen or Watch, Don't Post

Though use of social networking is darn near universal these days, Forrester Research continues to find that the percentage of social media and social networking users who actually create content has not grown, and in fact, might be shrinking. "Behaviors that require creating content have seen no substantial growth in adoption since 2009; in fact, some behaviors have experienced attrition,” says Augie Ray, Forrester Research analyst.

More than 80 percent of online Americans are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month, Forrester Research has said. But most users do not actively create content. In some studies, Forrester has found that 24 percent of online users create content, while 37 percent post responses.

Some 51 percent maintain personal profiles, while 73 percent of online users read blogs, watch online videos or listen to podcasts.

Among online users 35 or younger, social networking is nearly universal, with 90 percent participating in some way. Among those 55 and over, about 66 percent now are participating.

Whether the failure to "contribute content" is a problem or not is a matter of opinion. Not every person who uses social media might find content creation appealing. In and of itself, some of us would not consider that a "problem." To use the older analogy, lots of people read books. Not many write them. These days, the web makes self publishing very easy. But tools do not necessarily change propensity to "create."

Forrester also finds a growing user concern about privacy issues, which might or might not be related to the desire and willingness to create content.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab Gets WSJ App

E-book 4readers and tablet devices fascinate print publishers and print advertisers for obvious reasons. The devices offer a potential way to protect or advance the former print content business, using a display that complements the typical newspaper or magazine layout and format, while offering a bigger canvas for display advertising as well.

It remains to be seen how well paywalls work, and if they do, for which publishers they will work. To date, the Wall Street Journal has been the salient example of a print product with enough uniqueness to sustain a profitable "paywall" version online.

But other publications will start to erect their own paywalls, so we'll get a better test of how "extensible" that model might be.

The new Samsung Galaxy Tab, though, has a new wrinkle, supporting an Android app that delivers the Wall Street Journal digital edition app will download the Digital Edition of the WSJ on the tablet "at about the same time that the physical edition is being delivered to readers."

The app subscription is $3.99 per week. You might ask what the difference is between the existing online product and the app, and the answer is that the app provides a download, while the existing online product provides a more-traditional web browser experience. Each user will be the judge of which format provides a better experience.

Samsung Galaxy Tab to be first Android device to feature WSJ app - Phone Arena

How Hollywood Uses Augmented Reality

Augmented reality now is being used by content companies to enrich user interaction with content promoting movies.

How Hollywood is fueling the adoption of augmented reality | Econsultancy

Android Number 2 Smartphone in Third Quarter

Android accounted for 25.5 percent of worldwide smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2010, making it the number-two operating system. It was particularly dominant in North America.

The third quarter of 2010 produced record sales of more than 81 million communication devices based on open operating systems (smartphones).

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 35 Percent in Third Quarter 2010; Smartphone Sales Increased 96 Percent

BlackBerry PlayBook will get an under $500 price

BlackBerry PlayBook will get an under $500 price tag - Phone Arena: BlackBerry's 'professional tablet', the PlayBook, will get a price tag of under $500 at its launch in Q1 of 2011.

The 7-inch tablet at that price would undersell the $599 3G Galaxy Tab by Samsung.

BlackBerry is aiming to release the tablet in the first quarter of 2011 in North America through retail stores like Target and Best Buy on one hand and service providers on the other. Globally, the PlayBook will be made available in Q2 of 2011.

Windows Phone 7 Goes on Sale in the United States

Although consumers love their phones, there is growing annoyance with the distracted behaviors people exhibit while their heads are buried in their phones, Microsoft argues.
Most U.S. adults indicate they have witnessed examples of bad mobile phone behavior, yet relatively few have admitted to engaging in such behavior themselves, a study suggests.
Seventy-two percent identified bad mobile phone behavior as one of their top 10 pet peeves, but only 18 percent of mobile phone owners admit they are guilty of displaying such behavior.
Forty-nine percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have tripped or walked into something while walking and texting or e-mailing on their mobile phone.

Windows Phone 7 Goes on Sale in the United States

Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews

Official Google Blog: Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews: "Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine.

To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing."

Difference Between Mobile and Fixed Search? 1 Hour or 1 Week

There's a big difference between mobile search and fixed location search, according to Microsoft, with huge implications for the way mobile marketing campaigns can, and should be crafted.

According to Microsoft, 70 percent of searchers act on mobile search results within one hour of searching.

Online searchers average one week between search and action. That's a hugely important difference.

To the extent that many marketing messages include a "call to action," mobile is about immediacy. One hour or one week: that's the differenc.e

More than a third of interactive marketers say they have implemented or plan to implement
mobile search programs in order to connect with the 28 percent of U.S. online adults already searching on their mobile phones, says Shar VanBoskirk, Forrester Research analyst.

Sprint Doesn't Rule Out Further Clearwire Investment

Clearwire Corp's recent "going concern" notice does not mean that Sprint Nextel Corp and its other partners would not continue to fund the company, Sprint Chief Executive Office Dan Hesse. The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is required by law, and alerts investors to the fact that Clearwire, absent new funding, will run out of cash within 12 months.

Clearwire, which is 54 percent owned by Sprint, said on Thursday there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern due to uncertainty over whether it could raise new funds.

Hesse didn't say specifically whether Sprint was now prepared to inject new funds, but he did note that Sprint has done so in the past.

Sprint says Clearwire crunch doesn't mean no funds | Reuters

Blogging Etiquette, Just for Fun

Standard-Definition TV Still 80% of Viewing

Some might be perplexed to find that about 80 percent of U.S. television viewing is of content in standard definition, not high definition.

Though some 56 percent of U.S. households own HDTV sets, only 13 percent of total day viewing on cable and 19 percent of viewing on broadcast television is “true HD” viewing, which requires an HD television and HD tuner that are tuned to an HD channel.

About 44 percent of homes either do not have an HDTV set or an HD service. Also, because most HDTV-owning homes have at least one non-HDTV set, about a third of total programming is viewed on a standard set.

Even on HD sets, about 20 percent of viewing is through non-HDTV feeds.

None of those statistics should be so surprising, however. Some types of programming, especially sports, really show the value of the higher-definition. But other types of programming, such as news, actually do not provide a similar level of value, one might argue.

Also, not all programming created in standard definition has been up-converted to HDTV format. There are other elements at work, as well. HDTV adds lots of value when a viewer is looking at a large, flat-screen display. The picture clarity is harder to appreciate on a smaller screen, and lots of TV viewing still occurs on smaller screens.

In fact, even beyond that, one can argue that multiple, independent value drivers are at work. Flat screens are attractive to end users for reasons having to do with form factor, irrespective of whether the content is displayed in HD format.

Even the shape of an HDTV receiver, with the different 16:9 aspect ratio, seems to strike most users as better than the 4:3 aspect ratio of a standard definition set. So some value is obtained simply by swapping 4:3 screens for 16:9 screens. Likewise, people prefer bigger screens to smaller screens. Not all those values are always directly linked to HD image resolution.

Then there is the issue of playback peripherals. There still are huge numbers of non-HDTV DVD players in regular use, and image resolution still seems for most people to be quite acceptable. Likewise, digital video recorders similarly add value for reasons having nothing to do with the actual matter of HDTV signal delivery.

HD TVs Now the Majority, but HD Viewing Lags Behind | Nielsen Wire

Publishers to Get 70% of Sales on Kindle

Amazon.com Inc. will start paying publishers 70 percent of the retail revenue for magazine and newspaper sales, after subtracting delivery costs, for each magazine or newspaper sold at its Kindle Store.

The move by Amazon, which takes effect Dec. 1, 2010, comes at a time when newspapers and magazines are increasingly looking at digital platforms like the Kindle and Apple Inc.'s iPad to replace revenue lost to decreasing print ad revenue, and at at time when Amazon wants to ensure it has the broadest support from the print publishing community for its ebook reader.

Publishers to Get 70% of Sales on Kindle - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Enterprise Customers Will Drive LTE Adoption Until 2015

 Worldwide service revenues generated by fourth-generation Long Term Evolution networks are forecast to grow quickly once networks are launched, reaching $100 billion by 2014. Revenues will be driven by laptops, smartphones and other devices, especially high-traffic enterprise subscribers using web, email and video services, say researchers at Juniper Research.

Revenues from consumer users will remain under half of total revenues until at least 2015, Juniper Research says.

About 90 percent of survey respondents believe that today’s pricing models will have to change, as well. That would suggest there is wide understanding of the need for matching consumption with pricing.

read more here

Netflix Hits an Inflection Point

“By every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail,” said Reed Hastings, Netflix co-founder and CEO. That's what you might call an inflection point. Netflix has passed the point where most of its viewing happens by network delivery, not mailing of a DVD.

The percentage of subscribers who watched instantly more than 15 minutes of a TV episode or movie in the third quarter of 2010 was 66 percent compared to 41 percent for the same period of 2009 and 61 percent for the second quarter of 2010. In the fourth quarter, a majority of Netflix subscribers will watch more content streamed from Netflix than delivered on DVD, the company believes.

As with other metrics about video entertainment, observers will ask what it means. Some will say Netflix streaming now represents an alternative to cable TV, for example, while others will maintain it is supplemental viewing that more likely displaces purchases of HBO subscriptions, for example.

What virtually nobody will be able to contest is the fact that Netflix has made a successful transition from a supplier of DVD by mail services to a provider of streaming movie content.

Netflix ended the third quarter of 2010 with approximately 16,933,000 total subscribers, representing 52 percent year-over-year growth from 11,109,000 total subscribers at the end of the third quarter of 2009 and 13 percent sequential growth from 15,001,000 subscribers at the end of the second quarter of 2010.

The net subscriber change in the quarter was an increase of 1,932,000 compared to an increase of 510,000 for the same period of 2009 and an increase of 1,034,000 for the second quarter of 2010.

Gross subscriber additions for the quarter totaled 4,101,000, representing 88 percent year-over-year growth from 2,180,000 gross subscriber additions in the third quarter of 2009 and 34 percent quarter-over-quarter increase from 3,059,000 gross subscriber additions in the second quarter of 2010.

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Cisco Study Says IT Policies Hamper Mobile Workers

Cisco's most recent study of global communications finds that security concerns are slowing adoption of mobile enterprise capabilities.

Telcos Poised to Grab Bigger Role in IT Services Business?

Look for signs of growing channel disruption as cloud-based managed services start to gain traction. The reason is that technology suppliers historically reliant on some channel partners, seem to be shifting to alternate channels, especially the large telcos.

Technology vendors are in many cases favoring distribution by the large telcos, the analysts say. For example, Microsoft is making its Windows Azure Platform Appliance and Office 365 available only to select telcos. Cisco Systems likewise is relying on telco partners to sell its managed service products.

The big potential issue is that many of the new managed services products might be more suitable for delivery by telco partners than by the historic channel partners such as  value-added resellers, system integrators, managed service providers, resellers and other partners, say Tim Harmon and Peter O’Neill, Forrester Research analysts.

Forrester Research estimates that more than 60 percent of technology product revenues are generated through channel partners including . But cloud technology options, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), therefore are poised to significantly alter channel structures.

HGTV, Food Network Back on AT&T U-Verse

AT&T Inc. and Scripps Networks Interactive have reached an agreement to bring back several cable channels, including HGTV and Food Network, that had temporarily gone dark on U-Verse due to a contract dispute.

The cable channels, which also include DIY and the Cooke Channel, went dark on U-Verse for the same reason other channels have gone dark on other distribution platforms: disagreements about the programming fees distributors pay to carry the networks.

News Corp.'s Fox Networks and Cablevision Corp. recently came to an agreement to end a high-profile blackout of several Fox channels, including the national network.

All of those spats provide evidence of growing stresses in the multichannel video business between distributors and programming owners, each attempting to maximize revenue and profit at a time when price resistance by consumers appears to be growing.

AT&T, Scripps Networks Reach Deal For HGTV, Food Network - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Time Warner Cable to Launch "Look Back"

Time Warner Cable is launching a service called "Look Back" that allows its subscribers to watch some of their favorite shows three days after they've originally aired. The move is a way of adding more "on demand" features offered by over-the-top providers such as Netflix and Hulu.

The new service also will provide differentiation from satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network, as well as video services from the phone companies Verizon Communications and AT&T. The satellite providers cannot easily match the service because of bandwidth issues, while the telcos likely could match the offer, but haven't done so, so far.

Time Warner Cable targets rivals, Hulu with Look Back | Reuters

Europe Debates Neutrality issues

Though it appears there is little to no chance of significant network neutrality legislation or regulation in the U.S. market over the next couple of years, the subject still is being looked at in the European Community, which has largely seen this as a U.S. issue, for the most part.

A Sept. 30 report by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, the European Union’s telecommunications advisory group, has concluded that there was no new need for new regulation of this type, at this point.

The group, which is made up of the bloc’s national telecommunications regulators, said operators in more than a dozen countries — Austria, Croatia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Britain — had either blocked or throttled services like Skype or file-sharing Web sites.

But most blocking stopped after being reported to local media or regulators. Some might be more comfortable with regulations, but the EREC points to those instances as examples of problems working themselves out quickly, without the need for regulatory action.

 read the full report here

Who Buys Metro Bandwidth, What Do They Buy?

Zayo Group recently closed its deal to buy American Fiber Systems, which provides metro bandwidth services in Boise, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Nashville, Reno, and Salt Lake City.

So what types of firms buy metro bandwidth products in those cities? As you might expect, communications carriers and Internet access providers, especially the large carriers, represent 40 percent of sales. Enterprises or large public organizations represent 27 percent of sales.

But mobile companies account for 15 percent of sales as well. Education organizations represent seven percent of demand while content companies represent six percent of sales. Healthcare organizations represent five percent of sales.

About 33 percent of sales volume is dark fiber and 29 percent of sales are for private line services.

Ethernet now represents 16 percent of sales while Internet access contributes 13 percent of revenue. Optical wave sales contribute another eight percent of revenue.

Zayo Group Closes Its Acquisition of American Fiber Systems