Mobile Advertising, Commerce to Explode with Strong Smartphone Growth

Research and Markets forecasts that U.S. mobile Internet users will rise to 158 million in 2015, while smartphone owners will rise to 194 million in the same year. That is fairly significant growth, given the current estimate of about 46 million U.S. smartphones in use, suggesting more than a tripling and nearly a quadrupling of the user base in the next five years.

As a result, the firm believes revenues from mobile advertising will grow about 37 percent at a compound annual growth rate, while mobile commerce grows at 65 percent compound rate between now and 2015.

Smartphones Have Outsize Impact on Mobility Business

Despite the fact that smartphones have only about 19 percent share of the U.S. handset market, they have outsize importance simply because smartphone use is growing so fast, implies growth of mobile broadband revenue and is key to the hopes new suppliers have for cracking the handset market.

Browsers were used by 29.4 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 2.4 percentage points), while subscribers who used downloaded applications made up 27.5 percent (up 1.8 percentage points).

Some 18 percent used social networking sites or blogs, up 2.9 percentage points to 18 percent of mobile subscribers. About 13 percent report they listened to music on a mobile device. About 22 percent say they played games on their mobiles., up about half a percentage point.

Some 234 million Americans age 13 and older were mobile subscribers, while 45.4 million people owned smartphones in an average month during the December to February period, up 21 percent from the three months ending November 2009.

In an average month during the December through February 2010 time period, 64 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.9 percentage points from November 2009 levels, says comScore.

Those differences also are reflected in market share of feature and smartphones. In the broader feature phone market, Motorola has 22 percent share, LG 22 percent, Samsung 21 percent, Nokia nine percent and Research in Motion eight percent.

In the smartphone market RIM has 42 percent share, Apple 25 percent, Microsoft 15 percent, Google nine percent and Palm five percent. Google grew the most over the quarter ending in February, gaining five share points. Apple's share was flat and Microsoft lost five points.

Apple iPad Ignites War Over Market That Might Not Exist

With rumors that Google, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, Acer, Dell, Lenovo all are working on tablet devices in the same class as the Apple iPad, I suppose it has to be said that those companies do not want to take a chance on Apple having discovered a new mobile device category, and not moving early enough to participate in the segment's growth.

It's just that nobody has yet proven what the market is, or how big it might be. But nobody seems to want to take a chance that a market exists, and that Apple will stake out leadership before anybody else can mount a challenge.

That is not to discount Microsoft's historic interest in the tablet segment of the market, but simply to point out that, up to this point, the segment has not gotten much traction, perhaps because "different interfaces to the same functions" has not resonated. Microsoft's approach has been to envision a PC with a tablet design.

Apple's approach is more similar to that of the Kindle and iPad "touch," though, more a media reader and entertainment-driven Web appliance than a 'notebook with a different interface.'

The range of rumored interface, operating system and featured applications illustrates what happens when suppliers try to position a new device mid-way between smartphones and netbooks and notebooks.

Hewlett-Packard is said to be debutting a slate computer that it will offer by midyear. H.P.'s slate will have a camera and ports for add-on devices, like a mouse.  Apple's iPad appears to dispense with those options.

Under the hood, the iPad is powered by what might be called a "smartphone" processor, while others likely will try to use "netbook" processors.

Google might try to power its slate using Android software, which was originally designed for mobile phones.  Those hardware and software choices show some of the issues involved when trying to create a new class of devices mid-way between netbooks and smartphones.

Then there is the matter of "niche" to pursue. Apparently the first the idea was to create a device for designers and architects, but lately the company is thinking of a broader market of consumers and so would include e-books, magazines and other media content on the device.

Nokia is said to be designing an e-reader. The point is that there is so far no clear consensus about what the category is, how people will use the devices, or whether there is only one large, or multiple more specialized categories, to be satisfied. That accounts for the diverse choices about featured applications, processors and operating systems, among other choices.

All for a market that nobody knows exists, for sure.

Social Networking Eclipsing Email?

Many observers have noted that one of the big changes in technology adoption over the past half decade is the preponderance of "consumer" technology compared to "enterprise" technology tools. Not only are consumer tools reshaping enterprise applications but most of the innovation now occurs on the consumer side as well.

Internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says that social network use is bigger than email in terms of both aggregate numbers of users and time spent, and is still growing rapidly.

Meeker attributes social networking’s success to the fact that it’s a “unified communications plus multimedia creation tool in your pocket.” The intriguing notion there is that tools not originally envisioned as part of the unified comnmunications feature set are now in some cases supplanting those features.

In fact, consumer tools in this case seem to be displacing at some of the utility enterprise unified communications services and applications were envisioned as supplying.

Social networking passed email in terms of time spent in 2007, hitting about 100 billion minutes a month globally and now is twice that.

Social networking passed email in terms of raw user numbers in July of 2009, with more than 800 million users. Given the rate at which Facebook has been growing, that number is probably now closer to a billion users, she says.

In many ways, social networking is to unified communications as consumer VoIP was to enterprise IP telephony: all the attention was the latter, not the former, but most of the growth has occurred in the former, not the latter.

Twitter Gets into Advertising

Twitter has introduced its "Promoted Tweets" advertising program with a handful of advertising partners including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.

Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users, initially only when a user has conducted a Twitter search function.

Users will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. Twitter says it will attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don't resonate.

Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted" when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Twitter says it wants to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in user timelines in a way that is useful. That means the program will get a slow introduction and will be user tested in a variety of ways.

Twitter argues that all promoted tweets are organic Tweets, which makes them different from traditional search advertising and social advertising. Promoted tweets will also be timely, Twitter says.  "Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment," Twitter says on its blog.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet, the company says. Promoted tweets must resonate with users. That means if users don't interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the promoted tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Rretweeting it, the promoted tweet will disappear.

Twitter blog

Competitive Pressure Remained the Story in 4Q 2009, Says Fitch Ratings

Competitive pressures remained strong throughout the industry in the fourth quarter of 2009, say analysts at Fitch Ratings, especially among local exchange carriers and cable companies, as those firms increasingly compete in identical spaces, with similar products.

The fourth quarter revealed especially aggressive marketing and competitive pricing and discounting strategies, Fitch says. This trend is expected to affect the competitive landscape going forward, especially putting pressure on average revenue per user and profit margins on discrete products.

The big problem for telco contestants is fixed voice line losses. Although high unemployment continues to affect sales of business lines, and the effect of wireless substitution continues, affecting residential lines, total access-line losses began to decelerate toward the end of 2009 as service bundling, including network-based video services offered by operators such as AT&T and Verizon continued to gain scale.

Cable operators had an arguably easier time, gaining high-speed data subscriber market share growth during the fourth quarter of 2009 despite a decrease in overall broadband additions caused by the persistently weak economy and maturation of the broadband market.

The wireless segment of the business arguably faced the fewest problems. Total wireless net additions were strong, says Fitch.

The industry’s capital spending grew by approximately 20 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of 2009 but remained below fourth-quarter 2008 levels. It is Fitch’s opinion that all communication service providers must invest in their respective networks in 2010 in order to maintain or improve their competitive positions.

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Orange UK Study: Women Send More Pictures; Men Watch More Video

Women send more multimedia messaging service (pictures) messages than men, as much as 48 percent more than men in some age groups, says Orange UK.

But 71 percent of all mobile TV clips have been purchased by men, Orange UK says.  Likewise,
75 percent of all mobile videos have been purchased by men.

Also, some 64 percent of customers using Orange social networking sites were men and 36 percent were women.

On average, iPhone customers use 165 megabytes of data per month. This compares to an average of 115 megabytes of data for other smartphone customers, says Orange UK.

Of these data points, the one which strikes me as being most important is the statistic about data consumption. Where a fixed broadband connection might represent scores of gigabytes worth of usage each month, a mobile broadband connection might represent perhaps a gigabyte or two.

The fact that iPhone users average about 165 megabytes is interesting in that it suggests smartphone devices, though far more numerous than PC dongles, represent an order of magnitude less bandwidth demand on the mobile networks than PC devices.

That could have implications for the marketing of mobile connections to replace landline connections, given that some fixed connections represent an order of magnitude greater load on a network than a mobile PC connection.

On the other hand, the spatial distribution of PC devices, compared to mobile phones, during peak hours of use, likely is quite different. It might also be the case that mobile PC connections get used much the same way as fixed connections, with peaks in the evening.

Since most mobile networks have spare capacity in the evenings, and since evening use is likely to be distributed over a much-wider area than rush-hour traffic, mobile dongle services might mesh relatively well with smartphone usage, in the same way that business use and consumer use of broadband tends to complement, rather than compete.