Another Glitch: Not Vonage's Fault

So here's a prediction: third quarter additons of a wide range of products ranging from cable modem to satellite TV to VoIP service will be lower than expected, or at the very least pushed towards the last month of the quarter, despite the normal lift provided by millions of college students returning to school. The reason? Not the economy, necessarily. Not a slowdown in new household formation. Not fewer college students returning to campuses.

Of all things, the slowdown will come from the perhaps unexpected shut down of a widely-used in-store-activation service supporting sales of Verizon, at&t, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox Communications, Time Warner, DirecTV, Clearwire, Covad, HughesNet and other major service provider retail sales efforts. Oh, and Vonage.

Boston-based GetConnected Inc., a maker of transaction processing platforms for broadband service providers,

abruptly closed its doors in mid-August, leaving Circuit City, Best Buy and Radio Shack without a way to do in-store

activations of Vonage accounts. With predictable results.

That doesn't mean customers can't activate, simply that they can't activate in the store. And in some cases, the hassle factor is high enough that retailers, such as Circuit City, have simply opted to stop selling products requiring in-store activation, such as Vonage. The problem, apparently, is that the in-store-activation process is the only way to get Vonage when sold by Circuit City. There is not after-market activation process to default to.

So Circuit City, for its part, has stopped selling Vonage, either in its retail locations or online.

GetConnected executives blamed an unexpected and "faster than usual" downturn in broadband sales. I'm not sure I buy that explanation. However, if true, it might suggest a broader slowdown in uptake of a wide range of consumer communications and entertainment services, as the company had worked for quite a roster of "Blue Chip" clients.

Those customers included Comcast, at&t, Verizon, DirecTV, Clearwire, Charter Communications, Covad, Cox Communications, HughesNet, Timewarner, Cox Communications . and Time Warner Cable.

Presumably the bankruptcy has had a similar effect on sales of Digita Subscriber Line, cable modem and DirecTV subscriptions in retail stores as well, though customer service and activation teams have more than a month to get the backlog cleared.

Most of the majors seem to also be partnered with Synchronoss Technologies for automated ordering of a variety of services including VoIP, mobility services, cable TV and wireline phone service. The big lift for Synchronoss is that it supplies activation for at&t iPhone sales. That's as much as 68 percent of total company revenue at the moment. With the demise of GetConnected, we'd expect more diversification of Synchronoss revenue streams.

Sametime, Not Same Thing

Watching Lotus Notes morph into something beyond email has been interesting. Rescued from irrelevance when IBM changed Notes into an open platform, Sametime now talks to Ajax, making Notes features compatible with all sorts of Web services and legacy telecom platforms as well (with the Siemens OpenScape deal).

That sets up an unexpected new round of combat in the collaboration space that Lotus lost to Microsoft Outlook some years ago. Only this time, the battle is centered around instant messaging, rather than email. Email is a key feature, to be sure. But IM is key, in part because presence features are getting to be so important.

So do companies in technology sometimes get a second chance? It would appear so. Look at Apple and Sametime.

Web 2.0 Corollary: Email as Content Context

With IBM Launching Sametime and Microsoft getting ready for its OCS launch, we might note a corollary to the trend that has communications being embedded within the context of applications and content. One trend has communications (voice, video or audio conferencing, text messaging, instant messaging, email) being embedded within enterprise applications or portals.

At the same time, stand-alone communications tools such as email are morphing as well. Where today email is a stand-alone communications tool on the desktop, it seems to be pushing in a new direction. It seems to be becoming a tool to coordinate communications or content from RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, IMs, and voice.

Instead of using a document attachment, email might simply point a user to a link that displays a page, a document, a news feed, a site or client where a piece of information or content resides, rather than leading a user away from the message.

Zimbra, for example, pops up other information that embedded in a message. Zimbra retrieves the information and pulls it into the email, instead of opening a link that takes the user someplace else.

So it might not make sense, someday, to separate out a user's "communication" activities from a user's "information" or "content" activities. One will communicate when using or accessing information or content, and use or retrieve information or content from a "communications" application.

at&t, Verizon, Time Warner Telecom Top Ethernet Providers

Two of the top three providers of U.S. retail business Ethernet services gained port share for mid-year 2007 as compared to year-end 2006 results, according to Vertical Systems Group. In addition, a formerly cable company affiliated contestant entered into the top tier for the first time. Time Warner Telecom, started as an affiliate of Time Warner Cable, has been spun out on its own.

At&t, Verizon Business and Time Warner Telecom are the top three U.S. retail business Ethernet services providers, as measured by ports in service, says Vertical Systems Group.

At&t, including the former BellSouth market share, holds the leading position with a 19.5 percent share of mid-2007 ports. Still, at&t’s share declined compared to the combined year-end 2006 shares for at&t (13.6 percent port share) and BellSouth (8.5 percent) separately.

Verizon Business is second overall with a 15.8 percent port share, up from 12.2 percent at year-end 2006. In third position is Time Warner Telecom with 13.7 percent of ports, a jump from 10.7 percent in 2006, says Vertical Systems Group.

Cox Business, holding a port share of 8.9 percent, now is in fourth position—and is the first U.S. cable company to climb to the top tier of metro Ethernet providers.

Cogent is fifth with an 8.6 percent share of the market, an increase from 8.2 percent at year-end 2006. Qwest (including OnFiber) is sixth at 8.4 percent, down from a 9.9 percent port share.

Yipes is seventh with a share of 4.6 percent, a decline from 5.4 percent at the end of 2006. Yipes recently announced its acquisition by Reliance Communications and will operate as a business unit within the company's FLAG Telecom operations.

Other Business Ethernet Services providers comprise an aggregate 20.5 percent of the market, including AboveNet, American Fiber Systems, Alpheus Communications, American Telesis, Arialink, Balticore, Bright House Networks, Charter Business, CIFNet, Cincinnati Bell, Comcast Business, CT Communications, Electric Lightwave, Embarq, Expedient, Exponential-e, Fibernet Telecom Group, FiberTower, Global Crossing, Globix, IP Networks, Level 3 (including Broadwing), LS Networks, Masergy, Met-Net, Neopolitan Networks, NTELOS, NTT/Verio, Optimum Lightpath, Orange Business, RCN, Savvis, Spirit Telecom, Sprint, SuddenLink, Surewest, Time Warner Cable, US LEC, US Signal, Veroxity, Virtela, Windstream and XO Communications.

New Yahoo! Mail Launches

Yahoo! Mail has launched in the U.S. market. The updated former email client expands the Web mail service into a "social communication" tool, adding the ability to send text messages to cellphones directly from e-mail. The latest update also illustrates a trend: "communication" and "content" apps are blurring and blending. At the same time, communications are shifting, in part, into the context of social networking sites, where communications is a "background" feature always available, and where the current willingness and ability to communicate is known to each social network "buddy."

Yahoo! also has tweaked the interface to make it easier for people to go back and forth between email, instant messaging and text messaging, and to access content from inside the client itself.

The new service includes two real-time communication features that are the first of their kind from a leading Web mail service. These include the ability to send free text messages from Yahoo! Mail to mobile phone numbers in the US, Canada, India, and the Philippines, and the ability to send instant messages (IM) from Yahoo! Mail to members of the world's largest combined IM community, including users of Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger2.

The new Yahoo! Mail enables people to select how they want to communicate with their online contacts: by e-mail, instant message or text message to a mobile phone number.

U.S. users now can right click on underlined dates, names and keywords within messages and take additional action, such as adding events directly to their Yahoo! Calendars, adding friends to their Contacts, immediately viewing a Yahoo! Map of an address or performing a Web search on a keyword.

Yahoo! says the client will operate with the speed and responsiveness of a desktop application. A co-branded version of the new Yahoo! Mail will also be available in the fall to customers using the following broadband Internet services: AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet, Verizon Yahoo! and Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet. The new Yahoo! Mail will be available this fall to Yahoo! Small Business Mail users as well.

100 Percent Mobile Penetration by 2013

SNL Kagan now estimates that 84 percent of the U.S. population, including consumer, business and double users, will have mobile phones by the end of 2007. By 2013, penetration will be over 100 percent. It might not even take that long. U.K. mobile penetration is something like 116 percent already, according to Ofcom, and has broken 100 percent in a number of western European countries.

A First for Google Mobile Usage

Google has seen a spike in usage of its mobile services since May, partly offsetting the traditional summer slump in computer-based Web surfing for the first time, says Marissa Mayer, Google VP.

Traffic to Google's maps, e-mail and mobile searches on mobile phones and wireless handheld devices rose 35 percent between May and June. That reversed the previous annual pattern in which both mobile phone and computer use declined, Mayer says.

Credit Apple's iPhone, at least in part. The iPhone launch apparently lead to a jump of 40 percent to 50 percent in use of Google Maps on mobile phones.

Mobile use remained high into August, even as overall traffic searches surged then fell in the summer months. The traffic traditionally drops by 20 percent to 40 percent between May and June, as computer users in the Northern Hemisphere go on vacation.

Mayer says the numbers suggest growing acceptance of mobile Web applications.

Overall growth in the usage of Google services has begun to pick up again in the current week, as U.S. students go back to school and vacationers begin to return to work, Mayer says.