Mobile Social Networking Highest in U.K., U.S.

Mobile social networking is highest in the United States and United Kingdom, The Nielsen Company says.

In the United Kingdom, approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 percent of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets, though similar to the United States, where 1.6 percent of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007. For more details on mobile social networking access by country, see the chart below.

In the U.S. market, MySpace.com is the most popular mobile Internet social networking site. The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007.

Also in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users. In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the U.K. with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000 unique mobile users.

While Facebook and MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN’s Windows Live Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France (106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month.

4G: Lead App Might Not be the Business Model

Some statements are astounding first by their seeming ordinariness; others by their seeming incongruousness. For anybody who has watched telecommunications, one of the safest observations, irrespective of year, is that billions of people have never once made a phone call.

So when Ericsson President and Chief Executive Officer Carl-Henric Svanberg says the company vision is "now that basically anyone who wants a mobile phone will soon be able to have one," it is a stunning reminder of just how much has changed in the global communications.

"We envision an all-communicating world where the majority of people everywhere will have access to information and the ability to share it instantly, whenever and wherever they want," Svanberg says. You might find that an unremarkable statement as applied to residents of North America, Europe or Japan. You might be surprised to know that Svanberg really means a majority of people everywhere.

"We aim to do the same for broadband what we have already done for telephony: make it mobile, available and affordable for the majority of the world’s population," he says..

Ericsson also anticipates that by 2013, there will be some 6.5 billion mobile subscriptions and over two and a half billon broadband subscriptions of which more than two-thirds will be mobile. That flip--many more mobile than fixed users--will not surprise anybody who follows the industry. The magnitude of wireless broadband accounts just might.

One might argue that mobile these days is the way people prefer to "talk." Svenberg says mobile also will be the way they prefer to use the Internet and, by implication, large amount of media and entertainment consumption as well.

When Svenberg notes that "users expect to be connected wherever they are," that's pretty much a statement of conventional wisdom these days. When he says "we will also be more personalized," it's doubtful Svenberg could get a dissenting view.

There's perhaps more chance of disagreement--mostly over magnitude--when he says "we will all be content providers and creators." Keep in mind that depending on how far one wishes to take the matter, Twitter and other "where are you know, and what are you doing?" posts are content. So are blog posts.

In another example of developing consensus, Svenberg says "we will be a world of connected devices." That's the machine-to-machine frontier mobile executives now talk about when saying mobile penetration could grow to 500 percent or six hundred percent.

"So far the prime target has been the household and the business," he says. "With mobile telephony we were targeting people." But mobile broadband is about connecting devices as well.

"Our ambition is to do for mobile broadband what we already have done for telephony," he says.

Of course, there are more-practical observations as well. To some extent, new networks are financially justified by the size of new revenue streams that can be created by the networks. Though digital networks were said to improve voice quality over analog first generation networks, more than add new services, by the time we get to 2.5G networks, new messaging services clearly are on the agenda.

Broadband 3G networks more centrally were said to be platforms for new services, though progress to date has been less robust than its backers had anticipated. Coming 4G networks likewise are said to enable many new services 3G networks cannot provide.

That will be true, of course. It also is true that as older generations of networks are decommissioned, the older traffic types are similarly rolled up onto the newer networks. Which leads one to note that no matter what executives say about the matter, the stated unique value of each new network is financially buttressed by revenues from older services that are rolled up onto the new networks.

When fixed broadband was yet a young business, people incessantly looked for the killer app for that service. As it turns out, broadband is itself the killer app. Still, for some providers, an argument could have been made that voice was the killer app.

More currently, some might argue entertainment video is the killer app. The point is that older revenue streams wind up buttressing the business cases for newer networks, irrespective of what executives might claim is the unique value--and business model behind--those networks.

What might be fair is to note that each new generation of networks is touted as featuring, and ultimately does feature, some new class of applications that the older networks cannot support. That's not the same thing as saying any of the new networks will achieve a successful business case based strictly on the lead application. In fact, all the new networks are multi-service networks, with revenue from any number of applications.

There might be signature apps. Texting probably has been the signature 2G app. Mobile Web probably will develop as the signature 3G app. These days 4G networks are said to be about machine-to-machine apps. There will be signature apps. Ultimately, though, the financial underpinning will be all the legacy apps that contribute to the business case.

Comcast Acquires Plaxo

Comcast is acquiring Plaxo, presumably to further integrate social media, based on address books and the social application Pulse, into Comcast applications.

Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication.

Plaxo says it already has on its road map projects to socially enable the Comcast media experience on the Comcast.net portal, Fancast and Fandango as well as content on TV screens.

Plaxo already provides the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center, and now also hosts all of the address book accounts for Comcast Web mail users.

Plaxo suggests it will help Comcast make “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early adopters. Plaxo suggests applications will include the ability to securely post family photos online in Pulse and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV.

Comcast also will use Plaxo to create recommendation engines that allow viewers to find new content.

Consider this an example of how social media is a feature, not a business model in its own right.

Ad Skipping: Tall Tales

Some some say they use their DVRs to skip all ads, a recent survey that suggests 100 percent of males in the 55 to 64 age bracket skip all ads is an improbable story.

Approximately 30 percent of online Americans, ages 12 to 64, own or subscribe to a TiVo or a DVR service from their cable or satellite company. And some amount of ad skipping does occur in a fair number of those homes, one has to assume.

But perhaps we should not take literally what some people say they do.

When asked whether they skip ads 100 percent of the time, 52 percent of men ages 55 to 64 said they do, according to research conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates. By comparison, only 21 percent of males ages 12 to 17 report skipping ads all of the time.

There are, to be sure, other studies that suggest ads are more likely to be skipped when time-delayed content is watched. You might ask yourself whether human beings you know tend to do so. You might also ask whether you have seen users--watching content in real time--behave so aggressively that all ads are skipped.

That some people might skip all ads is possible. It probably does happen in some cases. Anecdotally, I'd have to say I've never actually seen a human being behave that way. But then, most human beings I know watch only some time-delayed content. Most of the viewing still occurs in real time, and other studies suggest the amount of ad skipping is far mroe prevalent for time-delayed material.

"Happiness" Doesn't Predict Loyalty

Customer satisfaction, while important, is not the most-important measure of customer loyalty. In fact, even customers who say they are satisfied are not necessarily "loyal." The converse also now appears to be true. Even "dissatisfied" customers are not "disloyal."

Verizon, for example, gets higher satisfaction ratings than AT&T. But when asked whether they plan to switch providers, Verzon has just a one point lead over AT&T in the loyalty area. Changewave analysts think the Apple iPhone is the reason.

Verizon, the perennial leader in customer satisfaction among cellular service providers, earned a 42 percent "very satisfied" rating in ChangeWave's latest cell phone survey.

Tied for second were AT&T and T-Mobile, each with a 28 percent "very satisfied" rating. As a result, you might conclude, Verizon customers should less likely to defect to another provider. And, to be sure, only 10 percent of its current customers reported they plan to switch to another cellular provider.

But although saying they are less satisfied, AT&T customers who say they plan to switch carrier is just 11 percent. More surprising is the finding that 28 percent of users plan to switch to AT&T over the next 90 days, compared to the 22 percent who plan to switch to Verizon.

Presumably a new customer cannot yet have formed an opinion about the quality of a service. BSo the "switch to" data probably does not provide much indication of user expectations about the quality of service.

The switch indications would fit nicely, though, with an argument that a specific device is pulling new users into wanting a relationship with a carrier.

The Apple iPhone, which looks set to capture more than a third of smart phone sales during the next 90 days, is the answer. Customers are fanatically loyal to the device.

All of which ought to suggest a couple of really important implications. Measuring and creating "customer happiness" does not provide protection against churn. Even happy customers in the wireless and other areas show a marked willingness to churn.

The other thing is the clearly-growing importance of devices as the "thing" determining loyalty and churn resistance. People don't care about their "service providers." They care lots more about their devices.

Vapps: HD Rather than High Speed

Vapps has adopted High-Definition Conferencing as its new brand, replacing High-Speed Conferencing. The change makes sense. HD is a huge consumer value proposition, and one that they understand. "High speed" is a provider attribute, and enough people now use "high speed" services to recognize that quality varies.

“We want to let everyone know Vapps is raising the bar on sound quality in audioconferencing because we’re the only conferencing company able to give users a "high definition" audio experience through Skype, while still admitting participants on any kind of phone,” says Vapps CEO Ben Lilienthal.

“When we speak, our voices produce sound in the 20 Kilohertz (KHz) range and our ears hear 20 KHz, but the copper wiring of traditional telephone networks supports only 3.5 KHz. Our High-Definition Conferencing operates in the 16 KHz range for Skype audioconferencing, a quality difference you can easily hear. At the same time, we conference in traditional telecom users, so that no one is excluded.

Declining Teen Discretionary Spending

Economic sluggishness now is hitting teenager discretionary spending. Total teen spending on fashion declined nearly 20 percent on a year-to-year basis, indicating a "discretionary recession," says Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Jeff Klinefelter.

The survey results, from mall research and classroom visits across the United States, as well as 4,500 online survey responses, shows that total spending trends were weakest for young men with a 15 percent year-over-year decline versus an 11 percent year-over-year decline for young women.

While the fashion category represents 41 percent of the total teen budget in the survey, the retail research team notes this allocation is low compared with the past several years.

Klinefelter says "the current economic challenges are impacting consumers at all income levels and ages, indicated by the low level of average planned spending in the fashion category this spring."