FTC Opens Probe of Apple Mobile Ad Practices

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will investigate whether Apple Inc.'s business practices harm competition in the mobile advertising market, Bloomberg reports.

It appears Apple's refusal to allow third-party firms access to analytics, as well as the apparent refusal to allow some competing ad networks access to Apple mobile applications, are contributing to the FTC's concern.

Regulators want to know whether moves by Apple will result in less competition in the growing market for ads on handheld computers and phones. Separately, Apple has barred applications using Adobe Flash, requiring all apps to use HTML5 for video.

This may not be the only antitrust investigation Apple faces. Justice Department lawyers recently contacted companies about Apple's practices in the music business. The Justice Department could forge ahead with that inquiry independent of the FTC's investigation.

The Justice Department is already investigating whether Apple and a range of other tech companies improperly agreed not to poach each other's employees, the Wall Street Journal says.

The starkly higher attention Apple has drawn suggests how Apple's role in several businesses--from content and devices to advertising--seems to have changed recently.

Apple recently surpassed Microsoft Corp.'s market value, a sign of its growing power in the technology industry.

Apple also controls around 70 percent of online music sales and has more of the overall music market than Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to market research NPD Group. Apple's MP3 player market share is well over 70 percent, and its share of mobile phones is growing steadily, not to mention the explosive debut of its iPad tablet device.

The fear seems to be that Apple could be headed for such outsized domination of high-end mobile phones, a possible new tablet device category, and mobile advertising, now viewed as a key revenue source for mobile applications.

Some antitrust enforcers say that if they wait until a tech company has cornered a market, before moving to limit its power, it may be too late. The technology sector has powerful "network effects" that, some say grant outsize advantages to first movers and make it particularly difficult for competitors to break in, regulators say.

"The Commission has reason to believe that Apple quickly will become a strong mobile advertising network competitor," the FTC said last month. "Apple not only has extensive relationships with application developers and users, but also is able to offer targeted ads…by leveraging proprietary user data gleaned from users of Apple mobile devices."

It added that Apple's ownership of the iPhone software development tools, and its control over the developers' license agreement, "gives Apple the unique ability to define how competition among ad networks on the iPhone will occur and evolve."

Verizon Wireless Extending Skype Functionality

Skype isn't the danger telecom service provides once believed it was. There are lots of reasons, including the growing importance of data plan revenues and the decline of voice revenues. Basically, it now makes more sense to "merchandise" voice calling as a way of building data plan penetration.

Also, Google generally has replaced Skype as a significant worry. That isn't to say executives worry more about Google than they do the instability of communications regulation and policy. But after regulatory threats and competition between cable and telcos at the local level, Google--as a proxy for "over the top" applications--probably is an issue.

That worry likely will fade over time as well, however. Over time, as access providers figure out better ways to expose core access functionality to business partners, and executives start to see a path forward in the new ecosystem, fear about displacement from the likes of Google will recede, as it in many ways already is at companies such as Verizon Wireless.

Verizon Wireless now has partnered with Google to create new handsets and applications, as it also is doing with Skype. Verizon Wireless has since integrated Skype into 12 smartphones and says it will add the feature to a number of "3G multimedia phones" soon.

Apart from being available on normal feature phones, the Skype expansion will also support Korean and simple Chinese languages. Skype will also be upgraded to include a better user interface with drop-down menus and flags for international calling, Verizon Wireless says.

“The value prop is that we have 90 million customers who have in-calling, and now it expands to 580 million Skype users," John Stratton, EVP and CMO of Verizon Wireless, recently said.

Skype-to-Skype calls and chats are unlimited and free when users have a data plan. Skype mobile calls made to landline and wireless numbers in the United States ("SkypeOut," in effect) use minutes from customers’ voice plans.

Verizon Wireless To Bring VoIP To Non-Smartphones Using Skype | mocoNews

eWEEK - Latest News - Motorola to Answer iPhone 4 with 2GHz Android Phone

http://mobile.eweek.com/19878/show/c139fc6b6da7171791190855abdc4e09&t=4b3d7db9df15001f4cbb76a0ec50550c

iPad Internet Usage Patterns Compared to Smartphone and PC

Normalizing Internet appliance behavior by setting Apple iPhone usage as the baseline, you can see pretty clearly that smartphone web behavior is distinct from PC usage.

So far, iPad usage (page views) is roughly twice what iPhone usage typically is, but less than what people tend to do on either Windows or Macintosh PCs.

Page views aren't the same thing as "bandwidth consumed," but you can see the pattern: desktop usage is heavier than smartphone patterns.

One suspects today's PC dongle user has a usage pattern more similar to an iPad user than a desktop user. Most of us probably think page view and bandwidth usage will intensify over time on every platform, but that the disparity between PC desktop and "phone" behavior will remain.

There likely are some people who view more web pages on their phones than on their desktops. Generally speaking, though, heavier use occurs on a PC, while smartphone usage is much lower, volume-wise.

Scratch Test for HTC Evo

That's one way to test for scratches. Apparently the HTC Evo resists scratches well, but it is unnerving to watch this.

iPhone Ecosystem Drives Itself

Some new analysis by Chitika Research suggests a reason why the Apple ecosystem is so powerful: it has a base of customers that are highly motivated to buy other Apple products they don't yet own. Or at least one would infer from an analysis of search terms entered by iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm, Android, and iPad users.


The reason that Apple is so tough to compete with is that it has a fanatically loyal fan base, builds lots of producs on a single OS, is a single provider of hardware with a standard approach with products across a broad range of prices, from cheap iPods without screens up to Mac Pros that will break your budget.

Then it has the  iTunes and the App store that are becoming a hub for everything digital, including e-books and apps.

Search Study: iPhone Users Want New, Palm Users Want Out – Chitika Research

51% Mobile Video Growth Since 2009

Nielsen's latest "Three Screen Report" shows 51 percent growth of video watching on mobile phones, with a perhaps-surprising skew of demographics.

About 55 percent of the mobile video audience is aged 25 to 49. Also, the number of people with multi-tasking behavior, where users "watch" TV while using their PCs, was down in March 2010, though the length of time spent was up about 10 percent for people who did multi-task.

More than half of U.S. TV households now have a high-definition television and receive high-definition signals, while HDTV penetration grew 189 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2010.

More than a third of homes have a digital video recorder, up 51percent over the last two years.

About 64 percent of U.S. homes now use broadband Internet access while nearly a quarter of households (up 38%
year-over-year) have smartphones. The former trend means more uses can stream or download Internet video, while the latter trend means more place-shifting behavior, as well as some amount of incremental video consumption.

The amount of time spent watching television is still increasing. U.S. viewers watched two more hours of
TV per month in the first quarter of 2010 than in the first quarter of  2009.

The average time spent simultaneously using TV and Internet in the home also grew 9.8 percent, to 3 hours and 41 minutes per month, though the number of people doing so declined.

The number of people who are timeshifting has grown 18 percent since last year to 94 million, with the
average user now timeshifting 9 hours and 36 minutes per month.

The mobile video audience grew 51.2 percnet  year over year, surpassing 20 million users for the first time.

Beyond the TV, technology is helping drive video use on the “second” and “third” screens. The proliferation of broadband access is bolstering online video, creating an alternative mass outlet for distributing television content and “timeshifting” long-form TV.

Similarly, the increased popularity of smartphones has created yet another opportunity for incremental viewing, and Nielsen logically expects smartphone video viewing to keep growing. On top of that are new devices such as tablet PCs that also are expected to increase the amount of mobile video viewing.