Social Nets Used by 22% of "40 or Older" Internet Users

About 22 percent of U.S. Internet users ages 40 and over use social networking Web sites, according to JWT BOOM/ThirdAge. A separate survey by ExactTarget fount that 39 percent of 35 to 44 year-olds used social networks, use fell sharply with age.

Only 13 percent of 55 to 64 year-olds were social networkers, and only four percent of those ages 65 and older used social networking.

About 75 percent of Internet users ages 15 to 24 use social networking sites, ExactTarget finds.

The implications are most significant for marketers who rely on word of mouth. According to the JWT BOOM/ThirdAge study, more than 75 percent of 40-and-over users received promotional e-mails about products and services and then clicked through to the site being promoted.

More than 55 percent of 40-or-older users purchased a product or service promoted in an e-mail.

Some 93 percent of respondents read an article about a Web site in print and later visited the site.
About 83 percent visited a Web site after seeing an advertisement for the site in a newspaper or print magazine.

Why don't consumers 40 and older use social networking sites? Respondents say their main concerns are privacy, time and just not seeing the point.

It might be hard to find a serious observer who would argue social networking will not climb among the 40 or older demographics, though. Other innovations such as iPods, the Internet, text and instant messaging were adopted more slowly by older users than by younger users. Social networking won't be any different.

14 Million iPhone Sales in 2008?

Analysts at RBC Capital think a stunning 14 million--not just 10 million--new Apple iPhone units will be sold in 2008.

If so, it will be clear why higher-bandwidth mobile networks are needed. What isn't so clear yet is the precise impact all those new devices might have on access bandwidth.

RBC estimates that 70 percent of those 14 million units will be sold to first-time iPhone buyers. In all likelihood, that means 9.8 million new users who will disrupt traditional usage patterns.

But AT&T executives say they are confident they understand the dimensions of new demand, based on the 2G iPhone users they already are supporting. If not, they'll have time to adjust, says Ralph De La Vega, AT&T Wireless CEO.

1Q: 1.7 Million IP or Hybrid PBX Licenses Sold

About 1.7 million IP or hybrid PBX licenses were sold in North America in the first quarter of 2008, according to researchers at iLocus. That implies sales of 1.5 million licenses in the U.S. market.

Who Blogs?

A Deloitte & Touche study of blog usage by age found a direct relationship between the two. The younger the user, the more likely he or she was to read or keep a blog on a weekly basis, according to Deloitte.

For example, 55 percent of Millennials (ages 13 to 24) surveyed read a blog, and the percentages decline for every age cohort in the study until reaching just 16 percent among matures (ages 61 to 75).

Similarly, 35 percent of millennials keep a blog, whereas only one percent of matures do. The age groups in between—Generation X (ages 25 to 41) and baby boomers (ages 42 to 60)—fall between those extremes.

U.S. Smart Phone Sales Double

The worldwide smart phone market grew more than 29 percent and the North American smart phone market doubled in the first quarter of 2008 compared to a year ago, according to Gartner analysts.

Apple is the third largest vendor of smart phones, selling 1.7 million units worldwide to grab a 5.3 percent share of the market, Gartner says. In the U.S. market, though, Apple already is the second-largest vendor, with 20 percent of the market.

Globally, users bought 32.2 million smart phones in the first quarter 2008, an increase of 29.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. In North America, unit sales more than doubled to 7.3 million.

AT&T Might Consider Usage-Based Access Pricing

AT&T might consider a usage-based approach to pricing broadband access, a solution to the problem of supporting very-heavy bandwidth users without resorting to blocking or traffic shaping, says CTO John Donovan. He says "one percent of the company's customers account for 20 percent of the network usage; the top five percent account for 40 percent of the usage."

In other remarks, Donovan says "traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year."

"I don't view any of our customers, under any circumstances, as pirates -- I view them as users," Donovan said. "A heavy user is not a bad customer."

And users aren't dumb. If they have incentives to use P2P at off-peak hours, they will. BitTorrent use on the AT&T network peaks around 4 a.m., when other traffic is at an ebb, he says.

Peer to peer traffic represents about 20 percent of total network traffic, he adds.

You Can Say That Again!

Instead of being tied to their wired network infrastructures, most enterprise users are becoming untethered, with apps accessible from smartphones and laptopsn say analysts at the Burton Group.  This has huge implications for enterprise network infrastructures, how applications are built/deployed, and security, they say.