Cable Operator Competition Puts Pressure on Other CLECs

Some years ago, I recall having a conversation with an experienced veteran executive in the competitive local exchange carrier industry, who was convinced cable operators would not prove a threat in the CLEC business, a point of view I never have agreed with. 

To be fair, the executive at the time was running a CLEC that focused more on multiple-site businesses than single-site organizations. 

You can argue that both points of view are correct, that cable companies have indeed proven successful in the small business segment (perhaps 16 voice lines or fewer), but have yet to make an assault on the mid-market or enterprise segments of the market. Cable ops have succeeded in small business market

Integra Telecom, the Portland, Ore.-based CLEC that had in the past focused primarily on smaller accounts, might agree that cable companies are indeed a threat. In fact, Integra Telecom now hopes to focus most of its attention on larger customers. 

Integra Telecom revenues, which peaked at $683 million in 2008, fell to $616 million in 2010, in part because of continuing impact of the Great Recession and in part because some smaller businesses went out of business.

But company executives would also say that new competitive threats from rivals including Comcast Corp. were a key factor.

So Integra began targeting larger customers. Integra Telecom's challenges not unique 

That same decision-making context is certain to affect other CLECs, and sales partners for CLECs, as cable operators now only continue to show they are effective in the small business market, but as they slowly gear up to tackle larger accounts as well. 

Unless you believe the deal Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks have to resell Verizon services is somehow invalidated by regulatory authorities, those cable operators now have many of the tools they will need to succeed in sales of products to larger organizations, not limited to wireless services. 

NFC Hype About to Crash

At some point, overly-optimistic near-term expectations for near field communications payments will diminish, if Gartner is correct.


The reason is that NFC was in mid-2011 at the peak of a hype cycle, which typically means a crash of expectations.


So get ready for a change of public thinking about NFC, with a shift to other apps NFC can enable.


All of that is reasonable thinking, but also will be driven by what Gartner expects will be an inevitable (albeit temporary) collapse of expectations about what NFC can accomplish in the near term.


"When it comes to payments, NFC doesn’t yet offer sufficient convenience to persuade consumers to change their habits," says Thomas Husson, Gartner analyst. "Swiping a credit card instead of waving it is not fundamentally different: You still have to enter your PIN for security reasons."


"The real game-changer is to add value before and after the transaction, enabling consumers to discover offerings via contextualized coupons and to explore new product and service information, and enabling companies to engage with consumers by providing loyalty points and rewards after buying a product," he says.


We agree. NFC is just one of the many technologies that can be plugged into a broader digital wallet strategy.  NFC payment a part of broader wallet value

"Latency" Applies to Marketing, Not Just Communications

Marketing in the Internet age is affected at every level by dramatically lower “information latency.”

Engineers typically measure latency as a matter of time delay, such as the lag between the time a message is launched, and the time a message is received. But the concept also seems to describe the nature of marketing in an Internet age.

For information consumers, latency might be viewed as the total time elapsed for a plane trip, door to door, for example. No matter how many other passengers might be traveling on a particular route, on a particular day, there is some minimum elapsed time to get from point A to point B. That is consumer-experienced latency.

There is a different meaning for a consumer than for a producer, though. From the point of view of flight operations personnel, latency is an entirely different matter.

It is true that the amount of time spent in the air, getting from one airport to another, is affected by headwinds, flight control operations or congestion in the take off or landing patterns that are out of any producer’s control.

But many elements are within a producer’s control, to a certain extent, such as time to clean a plane once it has landed, time to refuel, passenger and cargo loading time, for example.

In a marketing context, consumer-experienced latency is the time it takes to learn enough about how to solve a particular problem to reach a firm buying decision. From a producer point of view, latency is the time it takes to provide information to such prospects at every stage of the consideration process.

Consider only the matter of getting “catalog” information to potential customers. In the past catalogs were printed and mailed at relatively high cost, with information aging every step of the way until the time a prospect actually used a catalog to check an item’s availability or price.

That had meant an information latency issue that was compounded by an accuracy issue, as prices and availability for large catalogs begin to drift out of conformity to reality for months before potential buyers were even able to view such catalogs.

In the age of the Internet, all that is outmoded. Catalogs ought to be, and often are, updated nearly in real time, with information latency a matter of hours to days when a producer decision has been made. Internet information sources now have collapsed latency, both in terms of time and cost.

From a consumer perspective, information latency likewise has compressed. Nobody has to ask for a catalog or wait for delivery. The information often is only “clicks away.”

A decade ago, we might have described the rise of “infomediaries,” agents that work on behalf of consumers to help them take control over information gathered about them for use by marketers and advertisers.

The concept of the infomediary was first suggested by McKinsey consultants and professors John Hagel III, and Marc Singer in their book  Networth.

The idea is not much heard of in 2011, but in some reasons that is because software increasingly acts as an infomediary. Real simple syndication feeds, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn feeds provide examples. what is an infomediary?

Price comparison apps and daily deals programs are other examples in the consumer space.

The marketing point is that software “agents” now widely assist prospects and buyers in gathering information directly related to products they buy. All of that means the fundamental change in marketing has been consistently in the direction of lower latency over time.

AT&T Emphasizes Spectrum Policy

In announcing the end of its effort to acquire T-Mobile USA, AT&T again emphasized the need for access to "additional spectrum" as a continuing issue, including AT&T's pending acquisition of spectrum from Qualcomm.

“Adding capacity to meet these needs will require policymakers to do two things," said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. "First, in the near term, they should allow the free markets to work so that additional spectrum is available to meet the immediate needs of the U.S. wireless industry, including expeditiously approving our acquisition of unused Qualcomm spectrum currently pending before the FCC."

"Second, policymakers should enact legislation to meet our nation’s longer-term spectrum needs," Stephenson said. AT&T abandons effort to buyT-Mobile USA 

PayPal Getting into Daily Deals Business

PayPal says it is getting into the daily deals business, competing with firms such as Groupon,  LivingSocial and Google in the daily deals space. That move should ratify thinking that such "coupon" businesses have a direct relationship to mobile wallet and payments businesses.

The company will make its first foray into mobile deals in the first quarter of 2012, partnering with some of the top 200 U.S. merchants, PayPal President Scott Thompson said.

PayPal is chasing a daily coupon market that may more than double to $4.17 billion by 2015, according to research firm BIA/Kelsey. PayPal to get into deals business

AT&T drops bid for T-Mobile

It's over: AT&T has formally abandoned its effort to buy T-Mobile USA. AT&T already had booked a $4 billion charge, representing the breakup fee to be paid to T-Mobile USA for a failed acquisition attempt. AT&T drops bid for T-Mobile

Deutsche Telekom, the parent of T-Mobile USA, now will be looking at other options to make liquid some of its U.S. operations, for the simple reason that it needs the cash to build out Long Term Evolution networks elsewhere.

We also should expect a new round of activity by firms looking to partner or invest in T-Mobile USA as well. Presumably those new suitors are investors who have complementary assets, such as spectrum assets that could help T-Mobile USA create an LTE network, while giving the new investors access to the skills a mobile service provider possesses.

T-Mobile USA's problems include lack of spectrum for a fourth-generation network, customer churn, lack of access to the Apple iPhone, and competition both from the "premium" providers AT&T and Verizon Wireless at the "top" of the market and lower-cost prepaid providers from below.

Sprint has somewhat similar problems, being much smaller than either AT&T Wireless or Verizon Wireless and less well positioned financially.

Technology Industry Faces Major Disruption

The technology industry is in the midst of a huge wave of growth, innovation and disruption, driven in large part by mobile devices and the "cloud social graph," causing huge challenges for incumbents of every sort, including Intel, Microsoft and Research in Motion, for example.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung and others such as Amazon are taking over, argues Jean-Louis Gassée. Technology disruptions 

The Top 20 iPhone And iPad Apps of 2011

From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device.

Here are 20 of the best iOS applications of 2011, according to Techcrunch. The Top 20 iPhone And iPad Apps of 2011

Flipboard arguably has been the most-significant consumer content consumption app.

Top 10 Feed & RSS Technologies of 2011

News and activity feeds have become increasingly important ways people keep track of news, issues, products and people they care about.

Here's one list of 10 important feed tools. Top 10 Feed Technologies of 2011

"Percolate turns brands into curators," the company says. Marketers might be able to use the service to discover feeds full of content and then distribute those feeds to Percolate users. to consume.

Feedly.com is designed to run on mobiles, tablets or PCs. 

Cross motion sensing and analytics and you'd get Shopper Tracker

If you combined Kinect, the Microsoft motion-sensing device, plus Google Analytics, the dashboard for website usage statistics, you'd understand Shopper Tracker.

Shopper Tracker uses spatial recognition software, heat sensors and proprietary algorithms to analyze customer movements, such as which store shelves are most popular, which items are most touched, which taken and then put back. Spying on Your Buying



Shopper Tracker: tracking real world conversions like web analytics

Technology Reshapes Software, Marketing

One often hears it said that "content marketing" has "been around forever" in the form of newsletters, brochures and custom publishing. So what accounts for the explosion of interest in "content marketing" now?

One way or the other, though it would be a mistake to attribute everything to widespread changes in technology, that would seem to be the best answer. 


In the software business, it often is said that dramatic changes in computing technology now mean a new start-up can launch with about 10 percent of the capital investment required a decade ago. Dramatically lower startup costs


In fact, some venture capitalists say underlying computing costs, resulting from a combination of lower hardware and software tools, mean a software company can be launched for 10 percent of what would have been required in 2000. Venture capitalist Mark Suster says that when he built his first company in 1999 it cost $2.5 million in infrastructure just to get started and another $2.5 million in team costs to code, launch, manage, market and sell our software.



“So it’s not surprising that typical “A rounds” of venture capital were $5 to $10 million,” Suster says. “We had to buy Oracle database licenses, UNIX servers, a Sun Solaris operating system, Web servers, load balancers, EMC storage, disk mirrors for redundancy and had to commit to a year-long hosting agreement at places such as Exodus.”



With the introduction of open-source software, most notably what was called the “LAMP” stack, including Linux (operating system), Apache (Web server software), MySQL (instead of Oracle) and PHP.



“Suddenly infrastructure software was nearly free,” he notes. “We paid 10 percent of the normal costs for the software and that money was for software support.” The point is that a 90-percent disruption in cost spawns innovation. Infrastructure costs 90 percent lower


At the risk of oversimplifying matters, those same technology trends explain why content marketing has gained new prominence.



You may not be able to afford to buy a television network, but nothing's stopping you from creating your own YouTube channel, the argument legitimately can be made.



The cost of launching a newspaper or magazine is prohibitive, not to mention risky. But blogs can be set up for free or very affordably. And every trend in media represents a vast multiplication of channels and sources. All mass medium have been fragmenting for decades, starting with cable TV, then satellite radio, then, most importantly, Web-based media.



Consider the role of “search.” Some 90 percent or more of buying decisions begin with a Web search. Throughout the purchase cycle, users are searching for information, recommendations, research, reviews, authority and credibility.



And once they find the information they seek, they're sharing it with others involved in the purchase decision: a friend, a spouse, a colleague, or their boss, or perhaps they're throwing that information out to a trusted network to vet it, or to validate their position in the decision-making process. Why PR is Poised to Own Content Marketing


Now you can add tablets and smart phones to the list of reasons why fragmented media environments, explosive amounts of new content and always-with-you content consumption devices mean the role of content in all marketing processes has suddenly assumed such new importance.



Not only is it harder to get attention, and keep it, the cost of “going direct” to the audience, without using gatekeepers, is easier than ever. It would not be inappropriate to argue that technology platforms are the fundamental enablers for content marketing’s rise, as technology advances likewise account for new global interest in mobile payments, mobile wallets, mobile commerce and mobile banking.



Marketing, no less than telecommunications, television, audio, print media, banking and retailing are being reshaped and disrupted by fundamental technology changes.

U.S. Broadband Penetration Unchanged at 84% of Internet Households

Internet use in the United States seems to have remained flat at 82 percent of Americans, the  Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism reports. Also, broadband penetration remains at 84 percent of U.S. homes who use Internet access services.

The expense of using the Internet is cited as a reason for not going online by seven percent of respondents to the latest Center for Digital Future study.

Internet use dipped slightly to an average of 18.3 hours per week, the first time the weekly use has declined, but for the first time, home use of the Internet has passed 12 hours per week

The largest percentages of users reported going on the Internet at least weekly (several times a day, daily, or weekly) to browse the Web (79 percent), use online banking (47 percent), get product information (46 percent), visit social networking and video-sharing sites (46 percent), play games (39 percent), download or watch videos (39 percent), download or listen to music (38 percent), listen to online radio (22 percent), and pay bills (22 percent). Study of Internet behavior

A large majority of respondents report more than one computer in their home; the households with three or more computers (17 percent) and four or more computers (15 percent) reached an all-time high.
 
In seven years, the percentage of computer owners who have a laptop has increased from 18 percent to nearly 75 percent of users.

The number of hours that Internet users report they are online at work remained unchanged from the previous study, at 12.9 hours per week. But Internet users continue to report increasing active use of the Internet at work.  For the third year in a row, the hours that users said they are actively using the Internet at work has increased to 9.2 hours per week, a new high for the Digital Future Project.

43% of Firms Will be Blogging in 2012

Some 43 percent of all companies will be blogging in 2012, according to estimates by eMarketer and others. If nothing else, those sorts of statistics illustrate the explosion of ways firms can get their messages out to potential customers, as well as the explosion of all kinds of "user generated" content.

Those blogs are used for a variety of business purposes, including the creation of content marketing that can be propagated on social media.

Some 70 percent of respondents say they use social media as a way of assessing what people think about a company.

About 61 percent say they use social media to prospect for new customers.

Breaking such forecasts out by firm size, some 65 percent of small business owners now publish a blog for their company, for example. Small business blogging

Apple Patent Infringement Strategy Backfiring?

Is Apple's aggressive patent warfare strategy about to backfire? After winning legal cases that have blocked sale of Android devices in Australia, will Apple become a victim of similar legal actions?


Motorola won the first of two patent-infringement cases against Apple’s European sales division based in Ireland, granting Motorola an injunction against all of the infringing products in Europe. 
 

The products Apple can no longer sell in Germany include the:

• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4
• iPad 3G
• iPad 2 3G
• function

Motorola filed the suit in April 2011, which is likely the only reason the iPhone 4S is not included in the injunction, as it wasn't launched at that point. Europe-wide injunction

At issue is a Motorola patent for cellular data transmission, part of wireless data transmission standards that are encumbered by an agreement to license the patent on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms. 

The ruling suggests that, at least in Germany, raising a "FRAND" defense against standards-essential patent infringement claims could be a difficult proposition, and may force Apple to accept Motorola's licensing terms for "past infringement."

The FRAND defense has worked for Apple elsewhere, including in lawsuits brought by Samsung in The Netherlands and France. 

The basic argument is that suing over standards-essential patents instead of working out a FRAND agreement amounts to violation of anti-competition laws. Without some legal barrier to suing over such patents, they could potentially be used as a club to thwart any would-be competitors once they have built products incorporating a particular technology standard. Motorola wins lawsuit

The European patent in suit, EP1010336 (B1) "Method for Performing a Countdown Function During a Mobile-Originated Transfer for a Packet Radio System," is part of the General Packet Radio Service standard upon which 2G and 3G data services operate. 

Basically, that means that all Apple products that use 3G data, including all iPhones and all 3G-capable iPads, use the patented technology.

Sprint orders all OEMs to Remove Carrier IQ

Sources at HTC have told Geek.com that, as a result of the lawsuits targeting Carrier IQ, Sprint, and other CIQ-using OEMs, Sprint has asked all of their partners to get rid of Carrier IQ.

Starting with the high-volume and high-profile devices on the network, each of the OEMs has been asked to quickly release binaries that do not contain Carrier IQ so that over-the-air updates can be pushed to those devices as quickly as possible.

The eventual plan is to remove Carrier IQ from all of the devices on Sprint’s network.

This is being done as soon as possible and, according to our source at HTC, anyone who is working with Sprint in testing labs have even had their vacation time over the holidays seriously restricted. Sprint orders all OEMs to remove Carrier IQ

With other handset suppliers and carriers backing away from Carrier IQ, you have to wonder what the prospects for the company are, in the future. Apple dropped Carrier IQ

Carrier IQ also faces government scrutiny, which almost certainly means the company will have to drastically revise its revenue model, once restrictions, voluntary or otherwise, start to become a business factor.

Once again, we see how much impact regulatory actions now are having on the shape of the communications business.

Live TV On Android Devices in-Home, for Some Time Warner Cable Subs

Time Warner Cable expects to let subscribers watch live TV on Android devices over in-home Wi-Fi early next year, as it does today for Apple iOS phones and tablets.
TWC Eyes Live TV On Android Devices

The application is available to video customers with standard or higher subscriptions, and can only be used by customers with a compatible Navigator set-top or DVR.

Analog users and owners of Motorola set-tops cannot use the application. The app allows users to view up to seven days of content and can also turn the Android phone into a remote control.

Isis Weighing Europe Launch?

Isis, the mobile wallet venture owned by AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, is looking to expand internationally. Jaymee Johnson, an Isis spokesman, says potential deals could involve use of the brand or the platform.

“The underlying equity partners in ISIS give us some degree of visibility and awareness beyond the U.S.,” Johnson says, obviously referring to Vodafone Group Plc, which owns a large minority stake in Verizon Wireless, and is based in the U.K., while T-Mobile USA is owned by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG. Isis looking to Europe?

Apple to launch eight-inch iPad in 2012?

Though former Apple CEO Steve Jobs is consistently on record as belittling the idea that a tablet with a screen less than 10 inches is desirable, Apple is likely to launch a 7.85-inch iPad prior to the fourth quarter of 2012, DigiTimes argues.

That might be one of the first tangible examples of "post-Steve" thinking at Apple. As fastidious as Steve Jobs always was about every little detail of Apple products, it is impossible to conclude anything else.

Global shipments of tablet PCs are expected to reach 60 million units in 2011, of which 70 percent will be Apple's iPads.


Some might even argue that a seven-inch e-book reader is not actually a "tablet." There arguably some differences in lead applications, with e-books obviously weighted towards consumption of print style content, and larger tablets more optimal for video consumption and web browsing.

Some might argue that the apparent sales success of the seven-inch Kindle Fire from Amazon, and some might argue, large-screen smart phones, Apple might now think it has to have a product in the seven-inch to eight-inch form factor.  Apple to launch 7.85-inch iPad in 2012?

Verizon Strikes Spectrum, Resale Deal with Cox Communications

Verizon Wireless and Cox Communications have agreed to a deal that would give Verizon Wireless all of Cox’s advanced wireless spectrum in exchange for $315 million and an agreement to sell each other’s services.

Verizon Wireless will get a 20MHz block of wireless spectrum from Cox, while Verizon Wireless and Cox will resell each others residential and commercial services. The deal is similar in scope to one Verizon Spectrum Co., owned by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks.

The deal is said to be very similar to one that Verizon struck with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House networks in early December 2011. Verizon, Cox in spectrum, resale deal

Aside from the other potential ramifications, such as a bigger move by those cable operators into the wireless services market, the deal essentially changes the strategic landscape which since 1994 or so has had Sprint aligned most closely among the mobile companies with leading cable operators.

The deals also would seem to remove the leading U.S. cable companies from the list of potential investors or buyers of assets including Sprint and Clearwire, as well as from the ranks of potential wholesale customers of LightSquared, Sprint or Clearwire.

The deal also means a significant strategic change for the leading cable companies, which since 1994 have worked with Sprint as a wireless partner. The deal seems to signal that the leading cable firms are "changing horses" for reasons that have to be related to both long-term strategic concerns and evaluations of the respective strengths of potential partners.

At a fundamental level, the deals seem to signal a belief by U.S. cable executives that it simply is too late, too hard, too unrewarding to create a "cable-owned" wireless company. The way the deals appear to be structured also imply that cable companies will simply resell Verizon Wireless for a period of years before considering any further retail branding under their own brand names, if indeed that ever is seen as the better and more logical approach to the market.

For Verizon Wireless, the deals also seem to signal a willingness to use the cable partnerships to create new quad-play services "out of fixed network region," to the extent that Verizon Wireless would have the right to bundle cable partner video, fixed broadband or fixed network voice in areas where Verizon does not operate its own fixed networks.

UK Consumers Not Buying "Super-Fast" Broadband

There are two distinct, and different "problems" nations and policymakers face when promoting use of very-fast broadband access. First, the physical capabilities must be put into place.

But an equally-important issue is consumer demand for such services, especially when high-speed services already are widely available.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the government is pushing new fiber-to-cabinet networks supporting speeds roughly defined as access at 24 Mbps or so.  U.K. Super-Fast Broadband

However, just four percent of U.K. households subscribed to superfast services in June 2011, compared with 40 per cent in Japan and 10 per cent in the United States, although higher than in Germany (three percent), Italy (1.5 percent) and Spain (2.2 percent). Lagging adoption

To be fair, the networks still are under construction, so not every potential consumer is able to buy such services.


But 25Mbps or faster services already are available to the 48 percent of UK households passed by Virgin Media's cable service and about 20 percent of premises passed by BT's fiber to the cabinet superfast services.

Overall availability of high-speed fixed-line broadband networks in the United Kingdom does compare favorably to other European countries, though, so mere ability to buy is not the issue. By June 2011, 59 per cent of households had access to Virgin Media or BT’s superfast services. Ofcom: UK consumers not buying super-fast broadband