Location-Based Apps Still Early on Growth Curve

A new analysis by Forrester Research can be viewed as an excuse not to dive into location-based services, or location-based advertising, at the moment.

Only about three percent of people surveyed by Forrester Research say they use location apps, such as check-in apps, frequently or at least once a week.

Some 84 percent of respondents say they don't even know what the apps are.

None of those findings should surprise anybody, at this point. LBS still is in its infancy. Not many people use any new device or application, at first.

Growing Channel Conflict Between Programmers, Distributors

Despite competing efforts by YouTube, SeeSaw, Hulu, MSN and others to aggregate catch-up TV online in this way, U.K. broadcasters are keeping control of their own inventory for online viewing, including "catch up" services that allow users to view shows they recently have missed.

U.K. broadcasters ITV, C4 and Five each sell their own video ads on either their own sites or on YouTube and SeeSaw (C4 and Five).

The point is that channel conflict between content companies and distributors continues to grow as the online channel becomes more important.

BSkyB, for example, also recently got exclusive rights to HBO content, while Virgin Media, which has on-demand rights for content it shows on its cable network, apparently does not have those rights for mobile or Web distribution.

Virgin Media Names VOD Player Line-Up

Top 10 Global Broadband Providers

If the number of fixed-line broadband subscribers were the measure, Comcast and Time Warner Cable would rank among the world's top-10 largest Internet service providers.

The 10-biggest broadband ISPs in March 2010 had 191 million total subscribers, representing 39 percent of the world’s 492 million broadband customers.

KT of South Korea, the world’s tenth largest broadband ISP, is the only new member of the top ten ranking, having displaced Telecom Italia, which is now the 11th largest broadband ISP globally.

Just two providers, China Telecom and China Unicom, accounted for 20 percent of global broadband subscribers.

Broadband provider rankings: The Rise and Rise of China

53% of Mobile Customers Use Data

About 53 percent of mobile users now use mobile data services or applications of one sort or another, Validas reports. That is up from 42 percent in 2009. The typical user consumes 145 Mbytes a month, compared to  96.8 MBytes in 2009. The typical smartphone user consumes 415 Mbytes, up from 139 Mbytes in 2009.

Mobile PC broadband users consume 1.5 Mbytes a month, up from about 1.4 Mbytes in 2009.

Feature phone users consume about 68 Mbytes a month, up from 46 Mbytes.

Verizon Wireless posted the largest percentage increase in mean data usage per user from 48 MBytes to 147 MBytes.

T-Mobile users consume 121 Mbytes, typically. Sprint users consume about 133 Mbytes, primarily because more Sprint customers now consume 50 Mbytes or less each month.

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0.3% of BitTorrent Files are Legal

The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal, a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed.

Researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory scraped torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted.

They found that 89 percent of the files they sampled were confirmed to be illegally shared, and most of the remaining ambiguous 11 percent was likely to be infringing.

Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal

AT&T Credit Rating at Risk

S&P may lower AT&T’s credit rating, on the heels of Sprint-Nextel posting a widening loss.

“AT&T Inc. may not be able to achieve financial metrics fully supportive of the current rating within a reasonable time frame,” S&P said.

That might not mean much to most people, nor is it a user's responsibility to worry about the service provider's problems. But the potential downgrade is important because it illustrates the pressures the largest U.S. communication carriers now face. A lower credit rating means higher borrowing costs, and therefore less money available to fund network upgrades.

The potential move also illustrates a situation that gets too little attention from policymakers, who tend to act as though America's largest providers of communications services are "too big to fail."

In fact, any careful analysis would suggest there is huge risk in the communications business, and that the objective now is to avoid negative growth. Most of the revenue growth the biggest carriers now get simply replaces revenue being steadily lost from legacy lines of business. They are hardly "too big to fail."

AT&T’s ‘A’ corporate credit rating and the ‘A-1′ short-term and commercial paper ratings were put on CreditWatch with negative implications. “We expect that a potential downgrade of the corporate credit rating, if any, would be limited to one notch,” S&P noted.

AT&T Gets Slammed By S&P, ‘A’ Corporate Credit Rating In Doubt

More Women Than Men Use Social Networking

Globally, women demonstrate higher levels of engagement with social networking sites than men, new comScore survey finds.

Although women account for 47.9 percent of total unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57 percent of pages and account for nearly 57 percent of total minutes spent on these sites.

Women spend significantly more time on social networking sites than men, with women averaging 5.5 hours per month compared to men’s 4 hours, demonstrating the strong engagement that women across the globe share with social sites.

Social Networking Sites Reach a Higher Percentage of Women than Men Worldwide