Dramatic Shift in Sprint Nextel Net Ads Performance

Not often will you see a sequential change in subscriber additions as Sprint Nextel saw between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009.

That isn't to say Sprint Nextel's churn problems are behind it. The company apparently still is losing customers to AT&T and Verizon Communications.

But Sprint Nextel got a boost from Amazon Kindle users and prepaid customers.

In principle, an increase in prepaid, at the expense of postpaid, should put pressure on margins.  So far that does not seem to be a problem. All in all, though, the first quarter was impressive, at least on the metric of net customer additions or losses.

If Sprint Nextel can follow through in the second quarter, it might be an inflection point.

Tips for Mobile Marketers

A couple of tips for mobile marketers: bite-sized chunks of entertainment work. Ask users to send in photos from their mobiles. Offer an incentive.

Incentives such as access to weather, news alerts, local event information, mobile content or even a coupon increase take rates and consumer participation. 

And many campaigns take advantage of interstitial time; those short blocks of time that happen all day when users have a couple of minutes of downtime or waiting. 

Late last year, the Army National Guard launched a nationwide in-theater advertising campaign featuring "Warrior," a two-and-a-half minute music video by Kid Rock, and an appearance by NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. 

As part of the campaign, a mobile Web site allowed movie watchers to access and interact with the "Warrior" site on their mobile phones while sitting in the theater.

"Warrior" appeared for a two-month period before PG-13 and R rated movies in more than 3,000 theaters nationwide. During the campaign, the mobile site saw over 50,000 page views and an impressive level of engagement from mobile users who often downloaded and viewed the multimedia content multiple times as well as shared it with friends.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=104915

26% of IT Execs Say They Will Invest in VoIP This Year

Information security tops a list of projects information technology executives expect their firms to invest in this year. Some 43 percent of surveyed IT executives say they will do so, says Robert Half Technology.

Voice over Internet Protocol investments will be undertaken by 26 percent of respondents.

Some 28 percent say virtualization initiatives will be funded while data center efficiency was cited by 27 percent of respondents.

You might be surprised that so many enterprise executives are planning VoIP initiatives of one sort or another, this year. That's almost as many as those saying they will undertake data center virtualization efforts.

http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/PressRoom?id=2458

89% SIP Trunking Growth to 2013

SIP trunking will grow at 89 percent cumulative average growth rate between now and 2013 says Diane Myers, Infonetics directing analyst.

The converse is that we might finally be seeing the peaking of T1 services as the mainstay of business bandwidth. To be sure, SIP trunks are a replacement for channelized T1s used to support voice termination and origination operations. But even on the Internet access front, midband Ethernet services now are approaching price points that make them reasonable substitutes for data T1s, in some markets.

 

In 2008 the VoIP services market grew 33 percent to $30.8 billion. For the first three months of 2009, hosted IP service providers experienced an average of 40 percent to 50 percent year-over-year growth, says Myers.

"We expect hosted unified communications services to take off, with worldwide revenue doubling between 2009 and 2013," she says.

While residential VoIP services make up the bulk of VoIP service revenue, business VoIP service revenue growth outpaced residential in 2008, she says.

In 2008, managed IP PBX and hosted IP Centrex/hosted UC revenue together accounted for nearly three quarters of all business VoIP service revenue while IP connectivity service revenue made up the balance.

Web Use Shows Serious Fragmentation of Attention

In March the average American visited 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online.

The average time spent per page is 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March.

That's what you call fragmentation.

Sprint Narrows Losses; Kindle and Prepaid Help

Sprint Nextel's 182,000 total net subscribers represents a sequential improvement of over one million subscribers and the best sequential net change in total subscribers in Sprint Nextel history, says Hesse.

Sprint Nextel appears to be having success adding prepaid customers, a trend noticeable at some other wireless firms, as well as with its wholesale business, driven in part by Amazon Kindle subscriptions.

Sprint Nextel had 49.1 million customers at the end of the quarter, compared to 49.3 million at the end of 2008. This includes 35.4 million post-paid subscribers (25.3 million on CDMA, 8.9 million on iDEN, and 1.2 million Power Source users who utilize both networks), 4.3 million prepaid subscribers (3.5 million on iDEN and 800,000 on CDMA) and 9.4 million wholesale and affiliate subscribers.

In the first quarter, total wireless customers declined by approximately 182,000, including net losses of 1.25 million post-paid customers – comprising 531,000 CDMA and 719,000 iDEN customers (including a net 94,000 customers who transferred from the iDEN network to the CDMA network).

The company also lost 90,000 prepaid CDMA customers. The company gained a net 764,000 prepaid iDEN customers and 394,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers. The company achieved total subscriber growth on the iDEN network.

Wireless service revenues for the quarter of $6.4 billion declined 10 percent  year-over-year and two percent quarter over quarter.

Wireless post-paid ARPU in the quarter was stable sequentially and year-over-year at $56, primarily due to growth in fixed-rate bundled plans such as "Simply Everything," offset by seasonal declines in usage.

Data revenues contributed greater than $15 to overall post-paid ARPU in the first quarter, led by growth in CDMA data ARPU. CDMA data ARPU inow represents more than 31 percent of total CDMA ARPU.

Prepaid ARPU in the quarter was approximately $31 compared to $29 in the year-ago period and $30 in the fourth quarter of 2008. The year-over-year and sequential increases reflect a growing contribution from prepaid subscribers on unlimited plans.

Do You Actually Own Your Brand, When Social Networking is Growing?

Some day we are going to look back at this period and wonder "what were we thinking?" about how social networking is integrated with business processes. Consider "branding," the creation of a company image. These days, an actor can do so much. After that, users take over.

Recalling my management studies in grad school, is "leadership" something leaders do, or is it something "followers" give? That's leadership as distinct from bureaucratic management (I give an order and you follow it). Think of the normal military chain of command--that's management--and contrast it with combat leadership.

Managers must be obeyed because of their roles. Leaders are followed for different reasons.

Management is the sum total of all the efforts firms make to create and sustain a brand; brand leadership is the voluntary assent of consumers to agree with a firm's promise, or to give the brand a new promise.

What is clear is the serious attention enterprises now are giving to social networking and how to use it.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/archives/2009/05/social_networki.html