First Steps at Sprint

New CEO Dan Hesse says his first priority will be to tackle the customer-service problems and customer defections that have plagued the company in the past year.

An internal Sprint document recently disclosed described the company's "inferior results" in customer service. It pointed out that Sprint resolved just 53 percent of problems on the first call, compared with 71 percent for T-Mobile USA, despite Sprint having nearly three times as many customer service reps.

One would expect no less. Hesse is viewed as a highly-competent manager, and this is the sort of problem a good manager can fix. But later, recall that Hesse was the pioneer of AT&T's "Digital One Rate" plan, which introduced flat-rate pricing to U.S. wireless consumers in the late 1990s. That one move revolutionized mobile pricing in the U.S. market.

Once he gets the churn and customer service problems under control, we'd be watching for more innovation from Sprint than one typically sees.

Media, Voice, Mobile, Broadband Tipping Points

In a historic first, online media companies collectively will sell more ads in local markets this year than such individual hometown media as newspapers, broadcasters and yellow pages, says Borrell Associates. That's a tipping point, a stage of development when critical mass for some new phenomenon is reached.

Five years ago business phone systems hit a tipping point: most new systems were IP-capable. A couple years ago another tipping point was reached and new phone systems mostly are IP-only. These days most new phone sales are for IP systems.

Likewise, Internet usage and access hit similar tipping points earlier this decade. Most people now use the Internet, and that wasn't true 10 years ago. Also, there was a tipping poin when broadband caught and then surpassed dial-up access as the dominant access medium.

Then there was some tipping point reached where access speeds accelerated beyond the "affordable mass access in the hundreds of kilobits per second range" to "affordable mass access in the megabits per second range."

You can see tipping points for text messaging and mobile phone use as well, even though it is only within the last decade that most people started carrying mobile phones and only within the last five years that most younger users began texting heavily, dragging older users along with them.

One watches for tipping points for all sorts of practical reasons, including evidence that it now is time to restructure the way marketing, sales, production, business models, distribution, industrial design, menus and all sorts of very practical things get done.

And the point is that all media are approaching tipping points of their own, and for reasons largely analogous to how communications is changing because of Moore's Law, IP, peer-to-peer, cheap storage, optical fiber, wireless and Web services.

In the newspaper local advertising area, a new tipping point appears to have been reached.

Online-only media companies will have claimed 43.7 percent of the $8.5 billion spent in 2007 on local advertising, usurping the long-time lead of newspapers. While newspapers three years ago controlled 44.1 percent of the local market, they will capture only 33.4 percent of sales this year.

The growth of the online media companies “came mainly at the expense of newspapers and yellow pages publishers,” who have lost a combined 19.6 points of local advertising share in the last three years, says Borrell.

Having spent some time working at newspapers, as well as at publishing companies with multiple products, a concrete way to view tipping points is the impact on structuring of sales forces.

Typically, newspapers and other local media try to build their online businesses by selling new media to their legacy customers. Sometimes they try to use a single sales force to sell online and legacy products. That doesn't work, long term.

In fact, it doesn't quite work even short term, as sales forces direct their behavior to where they can make the most money, and that never is in the emerging businesses.

So one winds up with a strategy akin to launching a Boeing 777 into the air by rolling forward slowly on a long runway. No matter what you do, you crash at the end, because there never is enough runway if you don't get your airspeed up pretty quickly.

Companies that rely on their legacy sales forces to sell the new products--even though it seems logical--will crash their planes at the end of the runway. The only way to succeed is to cut the cord. Build separate sales teams with separate incentive structures; not "converged" sales teams.

One does not "incrementally" jump a very wide ditch. One leaps. One makes it or not. But it can't be done incrementally and slowly.

IBM, Cisco Eat Own Dog Food

Cisco, touting the power of telepresence, really is pushing for use of telepresence inside its own organization. Likewise, as IBM touts the value of Web-based tools for enteprises, it is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive.

IBM's Metaverse virtual reality software is one of these areas. Apparently some 2,200 IBM staffers are testing ways to collaborate with colleagues in the Metaverse.

Ackerbauer said IBM staffers leverage IBM's internal virtual conferencing application through Web services to have online meetings in 3D.

BlackBerry with Touch Screen?

Ray Sharma, GMP Securities analyst, says the next generation of BlackBerry devices will target two markets: the touchscreen and feature phone segment.

"We believe that the screen will possibly include a tactile response mechanism akin to the Nintendo Wii controller," says Sharma. "We also believe that the device will have differing hard key positions as well as programmable keys."

"We believe that the new touchscreen BlackBerry will be positioned at the high end of devices with a C$450-C$500 carrier per unit price."

"The device will feature a half VGA (roughly equivalent to an iPhone) that will be written on a new generation operating system," Sharma says.

How do People Use Their Smart Phones?

The Nokia Smartphone 360 survey shows that mobile users spend an average of 48 minutes per day on their smart phones, says iLocus. About 12 percent of the time is spent on making voice calls while messaging consumes 37 percent of user time; multimedia 16 percent; PIM 14 percnet; Games four percent; Browsing eight percent.

Browsing accounts for 72 percent of data traffic while entertainment accounted for four percent of the traffic in 2006. That pattern changed in 2007, though, with entertainment grabbing a sharply greater share of time spent with the mobile device.

In 2007, browsing represented 44 percent of time spent; entertainment 26 percent. Messaging increased from 11 percent of the data traffic to 21 percent year over year.

Nokia assumes that messaging traffic increased because users were sending photos using multimedia messaging service, while entertainment traffic increased due to increased podcasting.

Usage also peaks at different times of day. Music usage peaks at around 8 am and then again at 6 pm, suggesting music gets used when users are commuting. Voice usage peaks around 4 pm to 5 pm. Browsing peaks at around 10 pm.

Obviously mobiles are being used at home in the evening for browsing, and the question is why the home PC is not used instead.

Nokia assumes that the mobile phone is using Wi-Fi to download Internet content. According to Nokia, podcasting also is a later-in-the-evening activity.

About 47 percent of outbound calls are made on the move. About 29 percent of outbound calls are made from home. About 24 percent of outbound calls are made from the office.

About 35 percent of packet data is consumed when users are on the move. About 44 percent is used at home and 21 percent is used at the office.

Data traffic use increased from 6 mbytes a month in 2006 to 14 mbytes a month in 2007.

Wi-Fi or wireless LAN connections accounted for 31 percent of data use while mobile access accounted for the rest of use. WiFi sessions were longer with an average session duration of 4.5 minutes.

About 31 percent of the respondents used instant messaging. Some 38 percent of respondents listen to music at least once a week. Some 47 percent of the panellists say that mobile is now their primary music player.

About 59 percent are regular gamers. "Snake" and "Card Deck" are the most popular games. About 81 percent of users regularly use browsers, and the typical user visits two sites a week.

Mobiles Displacing Landlines in Africa

Mobility increasingly is the way human beings talk, though in many cases the use of Subscriber Information Management (SIM) cards might outpace the propagation of devices.

The substitution of cell phones for landlines is increasing across Morocco, Algeria, Sudan and Tunisia, for example.

In Mauritania, the number of SIM cards per landline was 29 in 2006, compared to 14.7 in 2005, which is the highest rate among the seven countries of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia.

In 2006, Egypt and Libya counted the lowest ratio of SIM cards versus number of
landlines, respectively, at 1.7 and 4.9. In Libya, 2006 marked the year whereby SIM card numbers topped landlines.

Enterprise iPhone, Courtesy of Avaya

Avaya's one-X Mobile client software, expected to be available in Europe in the first quarter of 2008, will enable the iPhone to be integrated into most enterprise IP telecommunications networks.

From the first quarter of 2008, an easy-to-use, downloadable interface will convert mobile devices from Apple, RIM, Palm, Motorola, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony Ericsson and others into another endpoint on the corporate network. From the iPhone, users will have iPhone-optimized access to the Avaya one-X Mobile interface, making the iPhone their personal remote control for enterprise communications.