Businesses Really Cannot Quantify Return From Hosted Services

Many organizations talk about the return on their software investments, but most of them are just jawboning, says Forrester Research analyst Michael Maoz. "They have no clue, really," he says.

And that goes for “software as a service” or cloud computing apps as well, he argues.

At least 90 percent of large organizations using sales automation in a SaaS model cannot show a true and accurate five year picture of spend on their SaaS system versus what an alternative would have cost them, he says.

Social CRM and ROI don’t go together necessarily

21 Billion Mobile App Store Downloads in 2013

Mobile application downloads will  reach four billion in 2010, rising to 21 billion by 2013, says Gartner. Those downloads will be driven by worldwide smartphone shipments surpassing 390 million by 2013, growing at a rate of 20.9 percent per year.

According to Gartner consumers will spend $6.2 billion in mobile app stores during 2010, about 20 percent of all apps downloaded. There will also be $600 million dollars worth of advertising revenues generated by those downloads.

Gartner forecasts the total download revenue will increase to nearly $30 billion by 2013. The number of free or
ad-funded apps will increase to 87 percent by 2013. There also will be an increase of business models where the download is free, but there are additional charges associated with use of the applications.

In some cases users will have free access for a period, to be followed by purchase. In other cases users can use the free version, with limited functionality, but can get access to full functionality by upgrading for a fee.

Subscription services, or charging for content within an application are other revenue models. Some apps might also charge for access to new levels or areas within the application.

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Business Marketing Shifts, Social Gains

Business marketing always embraces activities other than advertising, but there is growing evidence that some amount of advertising budgets are being shifted to other marketing channels, including various types of social media. Outsell estimates that marketing on social networks will grow 43.3 percent in 2010. Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.

And though some business spending is shifting to advertising on social networks, banners, text ads and search advertising, as well as the more targeted advertising being deployed by Facebook and MySpace, is a small portion of B2B marketers’ social spending.

When companies budget for social media marketing in 2010 and beyond, a substantial portion of their expenses will go toward other initiatives, such as creating and maintaining a branded profile page, managing promotions or public relations outreach within a social network, and measuring the effect of a social network presence on brand health and sales, says Evelyn Jung, eMarketer researcher.

In 2009, B2B marketers spent the largest portion of their social media budgets on customer communities, followed by podcasts and blogs. These tactics allow B2B marketers to share more relevant product or service information with their customers than they could with other social tools.

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When Links are Useful; and When They Are Not

Links are useful, up to a point, some might argue. The link is a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more-intrusive form of a footnote.

People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification

Space Between Smartphone and Laptop Still in Flux

Suppliers have been trying to figure out the demand for, and requirements of, devices somewhere between high-end phones and lower-end PCs for some time, using the general "mobile internet devices" moniker.

In January 2010 much attention was focused on "smartbooks," positioned somewhere below "netbooks" at the low end of the PC category. Those devices tend to feature keyboards.

Post-iPad, the attention has turned squarely to tablet devices, using touchscreen interfaces only. Still, the ultimate shape of end user demand remains unsettled enough that a variety of form factors, operating systems and processor approaches will continue to be tested.

“This market between the phone and the laptop is an area that is undefined,” says Steve Mollenkopf, a Qualcomm executive vice president who is also president of its chip unit. “You will see a proliferation of different devices.”

Some devices will use smartphone processors or operating systems and move up. Other devices might take PC processors and operating systems and move them down into the tablet space. But application use cases are ultimately likely to matter more.

Touchscreen devices likely will prove to be accepted for some uses, but not for others.  Content consumption might be the key use case for some users, while simple email and web browsing might emerge as the key application for others.

4G Confusion Coming as iPhone "4G" Launches

Things are about to get a bit confusing. Apple's next version of the iPhone is being called "4G," though that is not related to fourth-generation mobile networks such as WiMAX and Long Term Evolution. Maybe Apple won't release it with a retail moniker of "4G," but if it does, the term is likely to cause a bit of consumer confusion about 4G.

The other issue is what people will discover 4G means, even when they do start buying, and using devices built for 4G networks.

But there's less to 4G than meets the eye, at least initially. It does support higher bandwidth, but that is more like the difference between a 3 Mbps connection and a 6 Mbps connection. More, but possibly not qualitatively a distinct experience.

The Associated Press: 4G wireless: It's fast, but outstripped by hype

Google's Wi-Fi Gaffe

As Google prepares to defend itself against allegations of Wi-Fi spying, it has said very little about exactly what kind of personal data it gathered as part of its Street View project.

Last week, Google also declined to provide executives willing to speak on the record about how one of the most monumental oversights in its history occurred: the inadvertent gathering of 'payload' data by Wi-Fi sniffers mapping hotspots while recording street scenes for Google Street View.

Google admitted on May 14 that it had been "mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks" for three years. Payload data is distinct from a "header," which contains mostly benign information about the network itself: The payload is the actual data that is being transmitted over the network.

However, Google's store of personal data might not be quite the treasure trove it may seem. Data sent back and forth between encrypted Web sites (password logins, online banking, credit-card transactions, or anything with https:// in the URL) would not be collected. Mobile workers signed into VPNs would also not be affected.

In addition, it's not totally clear how much data Google would be able to capture with a Street View car moving at about 25 miles per hour along the streets of cities and towns around the world. Google said the data was "fragmented," implying that piecing together any coherent image from that data would be difficult.

Deciphering Google's Wi-Fi headache (FAQ) | Relevant Results - CNET News