Verizon Launches Google Apps Bundle

Verizon is combining its leading broadband business services with a broad range of business applications from Google, featuring Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.

This new offering, Google Apps for Verizon, is specifically designed to help smaller companies advertise by providing them with a domain name and domain name e-mail, and to boost their productivity by making cloud-based capabilities available to employees, whether in an office or on the go.

Google Apps for Verizon, which provides three free user accounts, is immediately available to businesses that subscribe to a bundle consisting of Verizon Internet service and either Verizon voice or TV service, or both.

The bundles with Google Apps are available in Washington, D.C., and parts of 12 states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia. Google Apps for Verizon is also available as a stand-alone service to all businesses across the country for $3.99 per month per user.

Verizon Launches Combo of Broadband Services With Google Apps

Consumers say they are most concerned about sharing their location with people or organizations they have not specified (87%), followed by sharing their location without consent (84%), having personal information or identity stolen (84%) and overall loss of privacy (83 %), a new study by Microsoft has found.


read more hereHowever, perceptions of the risks decline while perceptions of value increase after consumers begin using location-based services. Consumers feel more comfortable if they are given control over who has their location information and how that information is used.

• · 49% would be more comfortable with location-based services if they can easily and clearly manage who sees their location information (US 55%, UK 50%, Germany 51%, Canada 36%, Japan 51%).
• · 62% say they are aware of and 38% are familiar with location-based services. 51% report having ever used a location-based service (US 50%, UK 43%, Germany 47%, Canada 59%, Japan 57%). Only 18% report using a location-based service for location sharing with other people.  

"Context Aware" Call Centers, Other Processes Will Separate Big Winners from Big Losers

"By 2015, context-aware computing will be used to rejuvenate at least 25 percent of “commodity” enterprise processes that are currently perceived as “low value.”

Gartner said organizations that really understand business processes will explicitly or implicitly tier those processes in a hierarchy of value. Through the use of context-aware computing principles such as presence, historical pattern analysis and emotion detection, up to a quarter of these commodity processes can be rejuvenated, made more customer-centric and contribute even more to the organization bottom line.

Organizations that re-examine and revise commodity processes will find opportunities where none existed before. For example, call center emotion detection can transform stoic automated call routing into a more sophisticated customer experience while context-enriched, rote transactions (such as address changes, billing inquiries, simple information requests and check-out) can be transformed into cross-selling opportunities as new insight is gained into the “state” of the customer (for example, just married, recently divorced, moving, or joined military).

Gartner Says Between Now and Year-End 2014, Overlooked but Easily Detectable Business Process Defects Will Topple 10 Global 2000 Companies

Netflix Streaming-Only Customers Are 33% of All New Subscribers

Netflix now finds 33 percent of its new customers are choosing the $7.99 a month, "streaming only" plan, a rather powerful testament to demand for the Netflix offer. Netflix introduced the offer in November 2010, at the same time slightly increasing the price of existing plans that support both DVD and streaming delivery.

Netflix also says it expects the percentage of "streaming only" customers to grow over time. About 66 percent of new customers elect to buy the  $9.99 1-DVD combination plan, which allows users to rent one DVD at a time, and also allows unlimited viewing using streaming.  "Very few of our existing subscribers are downgrading to the pure streaming plan," Netflix also notes.

read more here

89 of 111 Mobile Providers See Bandwidth Demand Increases, 10 Don't, Says Akamai

The only surprise in the latest Akamai "state of the Internet" report is that there are any service providers at all who did not see average data consumption grow during the third quarter of 2010.

In fact, about 10 mobile service providers, out of 111 Akamai supports, did not see an increase. As you would expect, most did see bandwidth demand grow. Some 89 of the mobile providers saw consumption of data downloaded from Akamai increase on a year-over-year basis.

In addition, 35 providers doubled the average monthly volume of content downloaded from Akamai year-over-year. But the real surprise is that any mobile providers, at all, did not see increases.

Akamai State of the Internet Report

Facebook Acquires Mobile Advertising Startup

Facebook has acquired Rel8tion and the employees of the nine month-old Seattle-based startup, which has been working under the radar to develop a hyper-local mobile advertising service.

“We’re excited to confirm that we recently completed a talent acquisition of Rel8tion, a stealth-mode startup in Seattle," Facebook says. "The engineering team will join our growing Seattle office, and we’re looking forward to having them on board.”

Facebook Acquires Mobile Advertising Startup Rel8tion | Tricia Duryee | eMoney | AllThingsD

Mobile Is Facebook's Top Priority In 2011

Facebook Chief Technical Officer Bret Taylor says that mobile is the company's top priority in 2011.

Taylor said that mobile usage is the fastest growing part of the Facebook experience, with more than 200 million people accessing the site from mobile phones. Those users are also more than twice as active as users who only log on via the desktop Web site.

Mobile Is Facebook's Top Priority In 2011

MetroPCS challenges FCC net neutrality rules

MetroPCS has challenged the FCC net neutrality rules. MetroPCS is the second major carrier to challenge these rules, as Verizon has also filed an appeal in federal court. These carriers believe that the FCC net neutrality rules will impose undue hardships on the nascent mobile data space and this could hurt the business and impact innovation.

MetroPCS challenges FCC net neutrality rules

Google Introduces Number Portability

Service providers now have to worry about Google Voice being the recipient of ported phone numbers. So where numbers once ported from landline to mobile, now they can further port directly to Google Voice.

Barnes & Noble phasing out the 3G Nook

Barnes & Noble may be selling millions of Nook products, but the 3G version hasn't really done its part to help those figures, some would argue. So might the 3G-capable version of the Nook be discontinued? Engadget thinks so.

Exclusive: Barnes & Noble phasing out the Nook 3G -- Engadget

Amazon offers cloud based bulk emailer to SMEs

Amazon is offering a bulk emailer for businesses via its cloud services arm Amazon Web Services.

Amazon's Simple Email Service, called "Amazon SES," allows users to send up to 2,000 emails a day for free, if they come from another Amazon cloud service. The book and services giant says that messages can be sent for as little as 10 cents per thousand.

Amazon claims its system includes scanning of outgoing messages to make sure they meet ISP standards. Any messages that fail this test are sent back to be fixed."

Amazon offers cloud based bulk emailer to SMEs

Apple Plans Service That Lets IPhone Users Pay With Handsets - Bloomberg

Apple plans to introduce services that would let customers use its iPhone and iPad computer to make purchases, said Richard Doherty, director of consulting firm Envisioneering Group.

Doherty said both products are likely to be introduced this year, he said, citing engineers who are working on hardware for the Apple project.

Apple Plans Service That Lets IPhone Users Pay With Handsets - Bloomberg

IPad changes "everything"

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/zuckerberg-doerr-and-more-on-how-the-ipad-has-changed-everything-tctv/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Does social media work for enterprises?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/jives-tony-zingale-makes-a-case-for-social-enterprise-with-actual-numbers-tctv/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Nook subscriber numbers

http://www.google.com/reader/i/?source=mog&gl=us

What CEO Larry Page Will Be Up Against at Google

Most executives would be happy to have Google's problems, namely market dominance, revenue size and growth, and ability to enter just about any market it believes it must be in. Some will question Google's track record, but its mobile initiatives are obviously having an impact.

But llooking ahead, Larry Page, who will return to the CEO post he once held, faces numerous challenges, from reinstilling some kind of entrepreneurial culture at a bureaucracy of 24,000 employees, to coping with a threatening group of newcomers such as Facebook, Twitter and Groupon, to tapping the bigger reservoir of brand dollars still spent largely on TV.

What CEO Larry Page Will Be Up Against at Google

Vendor Lock-in Issues for Infrastructure or Platform "As a Service"

It's an understandable concern enterprises may have about "infrastructure as a service" compared to "platform as a service." It is one thing to rent storage or compute cycles, another thing to rent the "middleware" elements as well.

Amazon'es "Elastic Beanstalk" is an example of the platform approach, and includes handling of deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.

Elastic Beanstalk leverages Amazon Web Serves applications and features such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on today.

Small businesses that are not specifically app developers and providers, on the other hand, will not have such concerns, in most cases. To some extent, they will buy turned-up services supplied by firms that already have had to make those decisions.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Twitter Ad Revenue May Reach $150 Million This Year

Twitter will triple its advertising revenue to $150 million in 2011, and it might reach $250 million in revenue next year, research firm eMarketer predicts. That isn't an overwhelming number, but some will note that Facebook booked about that much when it first started its own advertising support efforts.

Twitter has so far managed to attract big advertisers such as American Express, Coca Cola, Nissan, HP and Starbucks, and companies such as Dell have proved they can promote their products well using Twitter even before it launched its promoted tweets program.

While "advertising" is not the magical answer for any application provider's revenue model, it has become key for the largest of consumer sites, and there's no doubt Twitter is among the larger sites.

Twitter Ad Revenue May Reach $150 Million This Year

T-Mobile USA Plays on Old "Mac PC" Ads

Nice ad, since everybody knows the "Mac and PC" series.

Mobile Advertising Could Have a Big Year in 2011

Mobile marketing is finally catching on as a viable marketing and advertising platform, and will be the fastest growing of digital formats in 2011, according to a survey conducted by Deutsche Bank.

In addition to mobile, the fastest-growing online advertising categories in 2011 will be social media and online video, all of which are believed to be gaining share of wallet within online marketing budgets.

Classic display appears to be the most vulnerable to this shift. In fact, half of the respondents think display is losing share, and only 20 percent consider it is gaining share.

“It finally feels like the tipping point for mobile is here,” Deutsche Bank says in its report. “According to our media buyers, mobile will represent roughly five percent to seven percent of online budgets in 2011. That would imply spending of about $1 billion to $1.5 billion in the U.S. market, assuming total online spending of $28 billion.

Mobile Marketing and Technology