Tweens Now Targeted for Mobile Phone Ownership

Mobile service providers have shifted their targets as they hunt for new customers over the years.

Business users were an early target, followed by consumers who wanted convenience, then adults who wanted "safety," then older children for "keeping in touch" and now "tweens" seem to be a demographic where new customers can be found.

Nissan's First iAd Campaign

Google Buys Leading Airline Data Company

Google is acquiring ITA, a Boston-based software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times, availability and prices.

Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data, and plans on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for people to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy a ticket.

ITA's software is employed by a long list of airlines and travel sites, including Kayak and Orbitz, and is considered by many to be the dominant provider of such information.

The move is logical given the prominence Bing has been giving to flight-related search and commerce.

Official Google Blog: Taking off with ITA

Mobile Data: Not the Deluge You Might Expect

Average mobile data consumption increased from about 90 MBytes per month during the first quarter of 2009 to 298 MBytes per month during the first quarter of 2010, according to Nielsen.

This represents a year-over-year increase of approximately 230 percent. While this increase is substantial, in the first quarter of 2009 more than a third of smart phone subscribers used less than 1 MByte of data per month and usage has dropped to a quarter in the first quarter of 2010.

About 20 million current smartphone users are hardly using data.

Quantifying the Mobile Data Tsunami and its Implications | Nielsen Wire

"It's Just a Phone"

Problems with your iPhone 4? "Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." Probably good advice. Also a reminder that civility is a virtue.

Exclusive: Conversation with Steve Jobs on the iPhone 4 antenna problems � Boy Genius Report

Just in Time for July 4

Why Intel Uses Ethnographers

Most companies ask customers what they want or need when designing the new generation of products or services. Intel has a bit of challenge in that regard since people sometimes don't know what they want, and Intel makes products are are building blocks for the products end users actually experience.

So Intel hires ethnographers to "stand in" for the market.

How Moore's Law drove Intel into the arms of anthropologists