Loopt introduces location-based Q&A

Loopt, a provider of location-based services, today announced "Qs," a new feature that allows users to answer questions and see other user’s responses in any physical business location. People might want to answer questions such as "where is the best happy hour special right now?"

Most people, perhaps as few as one percent, actually create the content displayed by location-based services such as Loopt. The company hopes simple "question and answer" formats will encourage more people to contribute.

The company plans on releasing the new feature first in San Francisco and then roll out from city to city.

Loopt introduces location-based Q&A feature

2% of U.S. Employess Work From Home, 20 Million to 30 Million Telecommute Some of the Time

With gas prices breaking $4 a gallon in some markets, $5 in a few, it is inevitable there will be a new wave of thinking about the benefits of telecommuting or telework. About two percent  of the U.S. employee workforce (2.8 million people, not including the self employed or unpaid volunteers) work from home, according to the American Community Survey.

The Telework Research Network also estimates that 20 to 30 million employees currently work from home at least one day a week. About 15 to 20 million employees must travel at least part of the time for work. See this.

There also are 10 to 15 million home-based businesses and some three million full time home-based businesses.

Europe Still Thinks Market Can Handle "Net Neutraltiy" Issues

Oddly enough, some would note, the European Community continues to believe that market forces and competition will protect user experience better than new regulations, a stance at odds with the Federal Communications Commission.

Of course, it always is difficult to compare regulatory environments across national boundaries, as the concrete circumstances in each country can vary quite a lot. The EC generally features strong wholesale requirements compared to the U.S. market, for example, while the U.S. unusually features robust competition to dominant telcos from cable operators.

Generally speaking, robust wholesale arguably is the better approach, under circumstances where alternative facilities-based networks are not likely to develop.

RIM PlayBook: More Play Than Work

Research in Motion long has had a dominant role as an enterprise device supplier. But its new PlayBook tablet might not. You might wonder whether the PlayBook is an "enterprise-focused" tablet, or more a tablet that could be used in the enterprise.

Some early reviews are mixed on that score. Some say it is a bit inconvenient to get back to enterprise data, sometimes requiring a separate BlackBerry. That does offer a higher degree of data protection, but arguably isn’t convenient. Most tablet users today want their work email on it too, and more likely they won’t have a BlackBerry to connect.

Unlike other RIM devices, the PlayBook offers lower battery life than the competition, and less stability.

RIM PlayBook: More Play Than Work

eBay Gets Into "Deal of the Day" Business'

eBay has purchased Where.com, which creates apps for listing merchants, restaurants, and bars while serving deals for such establishments based on user location. The deal gives eBay four million active users looking for deals from about 120,000 retailers.

Incorporating eBay's popular digital payment product, PayPal, could help the eBay-Where.com union compete against an emerging list of location-based daily deals players.

eBay Purchase Shows 'Where' Deals Niche Is Heading

Online Now 8% of Home Video Spending

Consumers are still using DVDs and Blu-ray Disc to watch movies more than all other digital-video options combined, says the NPD Group. . Over the past three months, 77 percent of consumers reported watching a movie on a DVD or BD, unchanged from 2010. Those who viewed movies from physical discs reported watching an average of four hours per week, which is also unchanged from the prior year, as well.

By comparison 68 percent watched a movie on a TV or cable network channel, 49 percent at a theatre, and 21 percent used paid video on demand through their TVs, says NPD.

Consumers reported that 78 percent of their home video budgets went to the purchase and rental of DVD and BD, including online and in-store retail purchases and rentals, while 15 percent was spent on video subscription services like Netflix that offer a mix of physical and streaming rentals.

Digital video downloads, paid streaming, paid transactional video on demand (VOD), and pay per view (PPV) comprised the remaining eight percent. Overall per-capita spending on home video fell by two percent, though.

DVD and Blu-ray Disc (Still) Dominates Home Video Movie Viewing and Spending

60% of Consumers Have Cut Back on Driving

As the national average for a gallon of gas edges closer to $4-a-gallon, consumers have cut back on their driving, reports The NPD Group. That should come as no surprise. That's what consumers always do when fuel prices climb.

The number of gallons purchased are down 1.2 percent from a year ago, NPD says. In addition, a consumer survey conducted by NPD in January 2011 to gauge what price level would be required to cause consumers to drive less suggests that at today's gas prices (national average is $3.79-a-gallon) approximately 60 percent of consumers are cutting back on driving already.

That should have implications for retailers of all sorts. Higher gas prices mean less discretionary income left for other purchases. What remains unclear is whether online retailers could benefit, if shoppers drive less to physical retail outlets.

Sixty Percent of Consumers Have Cut Back on Driving Due to Higher Gas Prices, NPD Reports

T-Mobile USA Provides Free Calls on Facebook

T-Mobile USA now provides Facebook users free VoIP calls between other uers. "Bobsled" by T-Mobile is a VoIP application integrated with Facebook that also provides voice mail service capable of pasting messages to the receiver's wall. The ability to call other people affiliated with a single network is not unusual these days.

What is a bit different is a direct move by a mobile service provider to enable such communications, which arguably compete with for-fee services. T-Mobile USA is expected to add the ability to call out to mobile and fixed networks in the near future, as well.

T-Mobile turns Facebook telco

iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where users go, and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program, researchers say.

For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.

As with just about everything else related to advanced technology, the features can provide user benefit as well as danger. Where a person is, has been, and likes to go can be an important part of the "social graph," the accumulated network of interconnections among people, groups and organizations in a social network. The term refers to both the social network itself and a diagram representing the network.

Individuals and organizations, called actors, are nodes on the graph. Interdependencies, called ties, can be multiple and diverse, including such characteristics or concepts as age, gender, race, genealogy, chain of command, ideas, financial transactions, trade relationships, political affiliations, club memberships, occupation, education and economic status.

As you can well imagine, a social graph can be highly useful to people, brands advertising things to those people, ethnographers and product and application designers. But there are dangers to privacy and illegal use of such information, as well.

iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Telecom Services Market to Reach $1.4 Trillion by 2014

The global telecommunication services market shrank by 0.2 percent in 2009 to reach a value of $1.2 trillion, according to MarketResearch.com. Given the global economic unpleasantness of that year, the dip is not surprising.

In 2014, the global telecommunication services market is forecast to have a value of $1,4 trillion, an increase of 13.6 percent since 2009, driven in large part by growth of subscribers 25 percent globally, compared to 2009.

Wireless is the largest segment of the global telecommunication services market, accounting for 56.6 percent of the market's total value, and is particularly important in fast-growing developing regions.

America accounts for 34.3 percent of the global telecommunication services market value, down from the situation several decades ago when the U.S. market accounted for nearly half of global telecom revenue. That statistic alone is evidence of the shift of growth to newer regions around the globe.

Telecom Services Market to Reach $1.4 Trillion by 2014

Service Providers Do Not Rank High on Survey of "Top Customer Experience"

Video and telecommunications service providers do not tend to lead many, if any surveys of consumer satisfaction, for all sorts of reasons. (Click image for a larger view)

Aside from some cases where companies just make strategic mistakes (some years ago Sprint under-invested in its customer service personnel, and Qwest cut back too much on service and technical support personnel), cable, telco and satellite companies operate huge businesses with sometimes cumbersome back office software, sub-systems that do not seamlessly move data back and forth easily, selling products at prices that arguably do not allow as much room for "service" as one might prefer.

The recent rankings by Temkin do not deviate from the typical pattern. Video entertainment, mobile or fixed-line service providers just do not rank high on measures of customer experience satisfaction.









http://www.temkinratings.com/wp-content/themes/Temkin/assets/pdf/2011TemkinExperienceRatings_CompanyRankings.pdf

Wireless Substitution in United Kingdom

Broadband wireless substitution is the analogy to wireless substitution in voice, many would note.

At some point, as fourth generation wireless networks start to offer access speeds in the 40 Mbps range, a wider range of end users are going to conclude, for various reasons, that a wireless broadband connection can substitute for a fixed-line connection.

In the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, the trend remains relatively small, but seems to be growing.

For almost one in seven users of mobile broadband (14 percent), the use of a dongle or datacard is their only Internet access method. This figure rises to 21 percent of males, 31 percent of 18 to 24 year olds and over one third of Londoners (34 percent). See this.

DirecTV to Show Movies 10 Weeks After Theatrical Release

DirecTV says it will offer a 48-hour rentals of Sony Corp.’s movie “Just Go With It” for $29.99 just 10 weeks after the movie’s theatrical release. That test of a shorter release window and the new pricing point will test consumer demand for such earlier-release products.

Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox will also supply films to the service eight weeks after their theatrical release, Jade Ekstedt, a spokeswoman for El Segundo, California-based DirecTV said.

Studios, which are looking to the new release format to counter shrinking DVD sales revenue, won't get fans among theater owners, who fear that viewers will shift some amount of theater attendance to the new TV release window. The $30 fee might seem steep, but studios and DirecTV are betting that such movie buys will be seen as an alternative to taking a whole family to the theater. In other cases the total cost of theater viewing, which includes babysitting and concessions, might be quite a lot more expensive than $30, even for one or two viewers.

DirecTV Starts Premium Film Rentals at $29.99 for 48 Hours - Bloomberg

Mobile Money Strategies for Mobile Service Providers

"Mobile money” is sometimes hard to understand for good reasons: it includes a number of different functions and many different groups of participants, each with slightly or significantly different opportunities and challenges. (Click on images for a larger view)

Among the prominent new contestants are mobile service providers, who see an opportunity to enter a new line of business with direct transaction revenue benefits, namely the transaction fees generated when payment services are provided. Up to this point, that has included both per-transaction fees of some cents per event, plus a percentage of the gross amount of the transaction.

That is changing, at least for debit card payments. But there are lots of other potential business models and revenue streams, and different participants likely will try them all, ranging from local advertising to promotions to point-of-sale apps to loyalty programs.

Mobile Money Strategies for Mobile Service Providers | Mobile Marketing and Technology

SK Telecom to Launch LTE Network in July 2011

SK Telecom plans to begin providing commercial 4G Long Term Evolution services in Seoul in July 2011 and later upgrade its LTE networks in 2013 to LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), repurposing its second generation frequencies in the 800 MHz bands. The LTE-A upgrade will offer speeds up to 75Mbps downlink speed and 37.5Mbps uplink speed on 10 MHz of spectrum

SK Telecom also is upgrading its 3G network in April 2011 to HSPA+, the fastest 3G version and operating at speeds the International Telecommunications Union says are officially "4G" networks.

As other LTE providers have done, SK Telecom plans to launch 'LTE data modem handsets' in July this year at the time of LTE commercialization and expand its LTE handset lineup to smartphones and tablet PCs within the second half of 2011.

First, SK Telecom will adopt its own cloud-based network technology named Smart Cloud Access Network (SCAN) to set up its LTE network. With SCAN, SK Telecom successfully separated Digital Unit (DU) and Radio Unit (RU), the two main components of a base station. DUs will be stored together in one area, while Remote Radio Units (RRU) - along with the antenna - will be set up in various locations, thereby enhancing network operation efficiency. Also, with full-fledged application of cloud computing technology, the network will be able to flexibly and seamlessly handle mobile data traffic that varies by time and region.

The company plans to expand its LTE coverage to 23 cities including the Seoul metropolitan area, providing nationwide coverage (82 cities) in 2013.

read more here

iPad's Great, But How Good is It as a Blender?

What Makes a Video "Go Viral"?

sme_bw2010_scott_stratten_v2 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

85% of Software Firms Say They Sell Cloud Software Now

Cloud-based software seems already to have become a significant product for a majority of 100 software executive respondents recently surveyed by Sand Hill Group.

Fully 85 percent of respondents said their company already has a cloud product or service offering in the market.

Some 43 percent of the executives forecasted that their revenues will be dominated (81 - 100 percent) by cloud-based services and products in five years.

Some 61 percent of respondents from companies with revenues less than $250 million are driving towards cloud-dominated (81- 100 percent cloud revenue) business in five years. The larger companies will grow cloud revenues more slowly. About 16 percent of the large company respondents indicated that their revenues will be in the range of 1-20 percent in five years, and 67 percent said it would be between 41-60 percent.



The survey data shows clearly that Platform-as-a-Service is still in its infancy. Enterprise customers already have a rich suite of on-premise development tools and question the value of the platform in the cloud. They also have concerns about vendor lock-in, architectural re-design efforts, and the readiness of PaaS platforms to handle enterprise production applications. Furthermore, CIOs are waiting to see which platform will emerge as the dominant one before committing. In the near term, PaaS will be a favorite for early adopter and progressive companies.

The most popular form of cloud service is "software as a service." SaaS is a dominant delivery model with more than 93 percent of executives indicating that SaaS generates the highest revenues for them, among cloud services. However, PaaS is a strong favorite to dominate in the next three years with 85 percent of executives indicating that PaaS will generate the highest revenues.

Once PaaS reaches mainstream adoption, however, it will be a sweet spot for many product and services vendors. Half of enterprise software comprises of custom software developed on software development platforms. PaaS is where almost half of the tools, custom development, and migration revenues will be generated.

The survey was conducted betwen January and February 2011. See this for more detail.

Tablet market seen surging to $49 billion by 2015

The tablet computer market will become the third largest consumer electronics sector, after televisions and personal computers, forecasts Strategy Analytics, forecasting 149 million units will be sold in 2015, growing eightfold from 2010.

Gartner forecasts even stronger growth of 294 million units for 2015.

Tablet market seen surging to $49 billion by 2015 | Reuters

Will High Gas Prices Help or Hurt Online Sales?

Economics is supposed to be a science, but one wonders whether that is entirely accurate. Consider the question of whether higher gas prices are going to help, or hurt online commerce. One point of view is that consumers will drive less, and spend more online.

Michael McNamara, Vice President, Research and Analysis for MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, thinks online sales will benefit. "Based on what we've observed in the last three to four years, high gasoline prices typically result in consumers consolidating shopping trips, shopping closer to home, and making fewer trips to the brick and mortar locations as we get to Saturday."

"On the other hand, we've seen the e-Commerce channel benefitting somewhat from this trend," he says.

According to comScore, an increase in gas prices may actually trigger a decrease in non-essential, or discretionary spending. Instead of forgoing car trips and using the money that would be spent on gas towards online purchases, consumers are more likely to decrease online spending and use those funds towards the purchase of gas.

"I think it's fair to say that rapidly rising retail gas prices are cause for concern for the retail e-commerce sector," says Andrew Lipsman. "As disposable income shrinks, so too does discretionary spending as manifested in online retail."

"All other factors being equal, we should anticipate a two-percentage point decline in e-commerce spending growth rates versus what we would have otherwise seen.

See http://blog.comscore.com/2011/04/will_rising_gas_prices_threate.html

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