Twitter Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day

Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. Those numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. Most users don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a media source.

Costolo: Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day

Verizon Launches Group Communications

Verizon Wireless is launching "Group Communication," a way of simply handling one-to-many communications to members of a group.

Family Group Contact provides a toll-free number 888-894-7687 that automatically connects up to 20 members of an account with a call, text or voice message.

Businesses that have more than 20 lines can select up to 20 account contacts and connect with them using the toll-free number.

Members of a Family Group may include anyone on an account, plus one non-Verizon Wireless number or any wireline number not associated with that account.

Family Group Contact is $4.99 per month per account, and once subscribed, any member of the group with a Verizon Wireless number has the ability to initiate communication with the others.

"Group Contact" allows a customer to create up to seven customized groups, each with up to 20 different wireline, wireless or international phone numbers. Group owners can initiate communication with a call, text or voice message by dialing a unique phone number assigned to the group when it is created. Group Contact is $6.99 per month per line and includes Quick Contact, which allows users to ring all members of a Quick Contact group simultaneously.

Latest Voice 2.0 IMS 2.0 news: Verizon Launches Group Communication for Family,Friends and Business

Steve Jobs Speech Introducing iPhone 4: Watch the Video

You can watch the entire speech and demonstration by Steve Jobs, introducing the iPhone 4, here.

Steve Jobs Speech Introducing iPhone 4

Will Apple Be First to Make the Video Calling Breakthrough?

Lots of people will point out that person-to-person video calling appliances and features have been available for a while. Most of us would point to Skype, while others would point to the capabiltiies Nokia has been offering on its high-end phones, or the specialized video telephony products now on the market.

Apple's new  iPhone 4 "FaceTime" video calling feature might be notable, though. People will have different opinions about the ease of use for Skype video telephony, but the big snag for most consumer video telephony appliances has been the need to buy them in pairs.

The iPhone 4 might be the first "appliance" supporting video telephony that does not actually have to be "bought in pairs," given the huge installed base the device is likely to have, globally. The other angle is that video telephony could become a "mere feature" of the most-widely-used communications appliance on the planet, though of course for the moment only on Apple iPhones from version 4 and forward.

Video calling might be a social function and therefore there is a network effect not possible when the units are deployed pair by pair.

Some significant sub-set of the mobile user population uses iPhones. In my own family, for example, all four of my children use iPhones, and it appears iPhone use among their peers is just about that high.

By confining FaceTime sessions to Wi-Fi connections, Apple avoids the almost-certain uneven quality of experience users would experience on AT&T's 3G network.

Innovations sometimes, perhaps ever, solely or primarily dependent on development of new technology. More commonly, it is a combination of ease of use, user installed base, price and the face that lots of other people seem to be doing it. Up to this point, almost no users had to worry about "everybody else doing it." That could change, beginning with the iPhone 4.

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What iPhone 4 Means For Google, Microsoft, Netflix, And Amazon

Apple's new iPhone 4, announced yesterday and on sale June 24, has wide ranging implications for big Internet players like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon, Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth believes. For starters, the "mobile Internet" will be more platform-based and less URL-driven than the traditional Internet.

What does that mean? Mobile platforms and app stores, as well as "apps," will be more important than platforms or app stores tend to be for the PC-based Internet use case. People are simply not going to "search" as intensively, or interact as much, as they do when using the Internet in a PC mode.

Google remains the default search engine on the iPhone, which helps Google. But Apple seems to be highly optimistic about its prospects in the mobile display ad market.

Anmuth does not believe Amazon Kindle sales will be hurt much. He expects the iPad to take some share, but not much, from Kindle.

What iPhone 4 Means For Google, Microsoft, Netflix, And Amazon:

Amazon CloudFront: HTTPS Access

Amazon CloudFront, the firm's content delivery network, has reduced pricing 25 percent. CloudFront HTTP requests now start at $0.0075 per 10,000 requests.

Amazon also now supports delivery of content over an HTTPS connection, by replacing the 'http:' with 'https:' in the links to CloudFront content.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with theSSL/TLS protocol to provide encryption and secure (website security testing) identification of the server.

HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems.

Amazon also has added a new edge location in New York City. This location will provide even better performance to users requesting content from New York and the northeastern United States.

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon CloudFront: HTTPS Access, Another Edge Location, Price Reduction:

Apple's Curse of Success

Oddly enough, time, it's own success, the inescapable logic of public company valuation and the firm's ability to churn out products it can convince people they have to own, are going to cause Apple problems, despite the launch of version four of its iPhone, the iAd network or the iPad.

Apple likely will execute well enough on all those fronts. Still, as it keeps getting bigger, friction is going to increase. The simple fact for any large company is that growth is hard to sustain because of the law of large numbers: Apple simply has to climb a bigger wall every quarter as its market capitalization and sales revenue grows, quarter over quarter.

Also, as every equity analyst has said, or thought, Steve Jobs, a singularly important executive in the technology business, will not live forever. No matter how capable his successors, he has proven to be an unusually effective chief executive, not for his management prowess but for his driving vision. Most companies produce products. Apple creates emotional needs.

So Apple will start to become the victim of its own success. No company can create an endless string of hit products quarter-after-quarter and year-after-year, though it is hard to argue with what Apple has achieved since 2001. The iPod began the streak.

But then Apple discovered iTunes was something more than a distribution system for music, leading to the App Store and the mobile apps trend. The iPhone arguably changed not only mobile phone design but the business ecosystem. The iPad might be the start of another wholly-new mass market. And Apple seems destined to be a player in mobile advertising as well.

Keep in mind that Apple shares were selling for about $8 in 2001. They are up around $250 or so today.

Nor will even these challenges prevent Apple from bidding to be among the dominant firms of the coming mobile computing era. It has a shot at such success. But success, for a firm that is getting to be as large as Apple, increasingly gets difficult, no matter how visionary it is.

The targets keep getting bigger. And, at some point, reversion to the mean will occur. Some future executive will start to worry about the numbers too much, become shy about destroying existing product lines in favor of new and untested product lines. Apple will lose that "magical" quality Jobs talks about so much.