50 Million Tweets Every Day

Twitter now has reached 50 million tweets a day, excluding all spam, says Twitter analytics staffer Kevin Weil.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day, he says. Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day. "Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second," says Weil.

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about, he says.

Still, as with Skype's "concurrent users" metrics, it is a milestone.

Wal-Mart to Become an Online Video Service Provider

What do you do when you are one of the top retailers of DVDs in the United States, and the product starts to face serious substitution from a newer product?

You start selling the newer product. Or so Wal-Mart thinks.

The retail giant, according to the New York Times, has agreed to buy Vudu, a three-year-old  online movie service built into an increasing number of high-definition televisions and Blu-ray players.

Wal-Mart’s move is likely to give a lift to sales of Internet-ready televisions and disc players, which generally cost a few hundred dollars more than devices without such connections.  Nor is the move the first attempt by Wal-Mart to figure out a way to make a transition from sales of packaged media to online forms of video consumption.

Wal-Mart dabbled in aq Netflix-style online DVD rental several years ago, but sold the operation to Netflix after getting 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers. Wal-Mart also attempted to get into video rentals with HP in 2007, but it gave up on that project after a year.

The Vudu acquistion would instantly make Wal-Mart a significant force in the video streaming business, and would make the company a direct competitor to Netflix once again.

Vudu initially entered the market with a set-top box that offered access to its video streaming service, but gave up on building its own hardware, and started offering its service as a software offering that could be integrated into other consumer electronic devices.

That might make more sense, as Wal-Mart also now is one of the leading retailers of consumer electronics.

Of course, Wal-Mart also has to position its electronics sales against Best Buy, a major competitor that likewise  is working with CinemaNow to enable streaming video services on its own consumer devices.

Cloud-Based Services Will be Lead by Enterprises for Next 5 Years

It is highly likely that enterprises will drive most of the $9.5 billion in cloud-based mobile applications that Juniper Research believes will be bought by 2014, but consumer revenues are likely to overtake enterprise-generated revenues after five years.

 Juniper Research predicts that enterprise applications will account for the majority of revenues over the next five years, with businesses increasingly seeking to capitalize on platform services that will be used to provide scalable, flexible data storage solutions and device agnostic, synchronised office services.

But consumer-oriented apps will comprise an ever-larger proportion of total revenues over time, derived both from time-based subscriptions to services such as mobile online gaming and advertising from cloud-based social networks.

While the onset of a cloud-based ecosystem may further erode the strength of the mobile operator-to-customer relationship, cloud computing offers operators the opportunity to develop new revenues streams as well.

100 Mbps "Can't be Done"

I learned long ago that when somebody says something "can't be done," it is best to understand that claim as "I can't do it." I think we also have learned that even when somebody says something can be done, they might mean "it can be done so long as not that many people want to do it."

And that might be the case as cable operators prep broadband access services capable of running at speeds as high as 250 Mbps, at least so long as most people do not desire to buy services running at such speeds.

Broadband Reports says cable operators will start talking about a 250 Mbps service sopmetime later this year, though nobody will be able to buy it. Comcast also says it will be offering 100-Mbps service to about 25 percent of its potential customers by the end of 2010.

Comcast should be congratulated for that move, though it is not clear what might happen if lots of people actually bought it.  The rub is that providing 250 Mbps requires bonding of about eight standard 6-MHz channels.

The issue there is the same problem satellite operators have when providing downstream bandwidth. There are finite numbers of channels available, so cannibalizing bandwidth for data services reduces the amount of bandwidth available for video services.

The point is that some providers--particularly cable operators--will be able to claim speeds of at least 100 Mbps, at least in terms of what is commercially feasible at low penetration. it isn't clear any network can support 100 Mbps at high penetration, at least not at prices in two, rather than three digits.

Still, it is a reminder that when somebody says something "can't be done," one has to consider the source. Just because one company can't do it does not mean all companies cannot do it.

The other relevant observation is that "hero" devices and services are feasible. What is not clear is whether "mass market" availability is possible.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Exploring-250-Mbps-Service-107002

Mobile Signaling Causes Congestion, Not Bandwidth

Executives highly familiar with mobile broadband network operations know that radio networks can, and do, become congested for reasons having to do with signaling, rather than bandwidth consumption. Executives at Spirent and Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs,  for example, have pointed out that mobile phone design can itself cause problems.

As it turns out, that is true of the iPhone as well, which tries to save power by disconnecting from the network whenever possible.

Now engineers at U.K. mobile provider O2 point out that the iPhone uses more power-saving features than previous smartphone designs. That's good for users, but bad for radio networks.

Most devices that use data do so in short bursts—a couple e-mails here, a tweet there, downloading a voicemail message, etc. Normally, devices that access the data network use an idling state that maintains the open data channel between the device and the network.

However, to squeeze even more battery life from the iPhone, Apple configured the radio to simply drop the data connection as soon as any requested data is received. When the iPhone needs more data, it has to set up a new data connection, O2 engineers say.

The result is more efficient use of the battery, but it can cause problems with the signaling channels used to set up connections between a device and a cell node.  Simply put, the signaling overhead congests the network, not the bearer channels. It is signaling load, not bandwidth consumption, that causes much congestion.

It's important to note, however, that this technique is not limited to the iPhone. Android and webOS devices also use a similar technique to increase battery life. While the iPhone was the first and currently most prolific device of this type, such smartphones are quickly becoming common, and represent the majority of growth in mobile phone sales in the past year.

Networks designed to handle signaling traffic dynamically, shifting more spectrum to signaling channels when needed, can mitigate this problem. But even with more signaling capacity, network nodes may not be able to set up a data session, or may have problems getting a valid network address from an overloaded DHCP server.

In fact, the fact that Europe embraced heavy text messaging and data use far earlier than users in the United States meant that the signaling networks were configured early on for heavy signaling traffic.

Neustar Lauches 2D Barcode Clearinghouse

Neustar recently launched a "Mobile Barcode Clearinghouse Services" operation intended to ensure that any mobile barcode can be read by any mobile phone or application. 

That might not seem like a big deal, but history suggests that penetration and use of any technology, no matter how useful, never gets routine and widespread use so long as the information cannot be communicated effortlessly across the entire base of people, applications and devices.

That was true for railroads. It was true for phone service. It was true of text messaging and email, and it won't be different for 2D barcodes. 

"The clearinghouse is an important component of Neustar’s mobile internet solutions strategy, which bridges network operators and enterprises and simplifies their delivery of value to customers," Neustar says. 

Neustar is right about that. 

Intel Tries to Join Apple Among Innovator Ranks

Here's another example of the fact that truly-significant innovation sometimes comes from the largest and most-influential firms, not from upstart firms. Apple is probably the best-known and most-apt example. Google once was an upstart, but these days is a deep-pocketed incumbent.

Now Intel appears to be preparing a ferocious assault on the underlying chip-level technologies that will power the next generation of mobile-based Internet and computing.

"The going rate for a state-of-the-art chip factory is about $3 billion," the New York Times reports. And those are just table stakes. Predicting a "bloody" war, the Times points out that, in this next phase, the manufacturers will be fighting to supply the silicon for one of the fastest-growing segments of computing: smartphones, tiny laptops and tablet-style devices.

The fight pits several big chip companies against Intel, and the winner or winners will be assured a significant place in the emerging mobile computing ecosystem, which most observers predict is the next era of computing to come.