Mobile Internet Very Popular in China

For many people in China, the mobile Web is the Web. Not only do many homes in China not have (or need) landlines for voice communications, but also they don’t require hardwired Internet access for their fix of the Web.

With mobile phones, everything they need is in the palm of their hand.

The majority of consumers (54 percent) use their devices for applications including email, gaming and music, while 36 percent used their phones for text, SMS and voice only. Another 10 percent said they used their phones for calls only.

Mobile consumers in China also have surpassed their American counterparts when it comes to using the devices to access the Internet.

About 38 percent of Chinese mobile subscribers access the Internet from their mobiles, compared to 27 percent of American mobile subscribers. That is not so surprising since many Chinese consumers only access the Internet from their mobiles.

Mobile Internet More Popular in China than in U.S. | Nielsen Wire

Android Making a Breakout Move?

Android devices collectively have done something significant in the smartphone market. Since March 2010, Research in Motion market share has dropped and Android share has exploded.

As RIM supports a family of devices, sold across carriers, as does Android, the comparison is instructive.

Whatever else the results may be, they indicate a fairly-dramatic shift in end user demand from QWERTY keyboards and email centric behavior to touch screens and web activity.

Android Pays For Itself in Additional Search Revenue

Android is helping Google drive more than enough incremental search revenue to pay for its development, and then some, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says.

“Trust me that revenue is large enough to pay for all of the Android activities and a whole bunch more," says Schmidt.

Google Android Revenue

Five Ways Android Will Defeat iPhone and BlackBerry - PCWorld Business Center

You don't have to agree that Android will gain the lion's share of enterprise market share, compared to devices produced by Apple or Research in Motion to agree that Android will, over time, get more popular in the enterprise.

Android 2.2 (Froyo), for example, syncs with Microsoft Exchange and has new security features, such as remote wipe for administrators, lock-screen timeouts, and minimum password settings, that will put enterprise critics of previous Android handsets at ease.

While not everyone will love the Android platform, it will soon become the country's mobile OS of choice, some argue. That might even extend to enterprises, some might argue.

Five Ways Android Will Defeat iPhone and BlackBerry

52% of Clearwire Customers Live Where Clearwire Has No Service

One way of describing the impact the HTC Evo has had is to look at Clearwire net additions in the second quarter of 2010.

As of June 30, 2010, 52 percent of the company's wholesale subscribers resided outside of Clearwire's currently launched markets, Clearwire says. That's the impact of revenues paid by Sprint Nextel HTC Evo users who live in areas where all they can get is 3G network access.

That's some trick!

Clearwire ended the second quarter with 1.7 million total subscribers consisting of 940,000 retail subscribers and 752,000 wholesale subscribers.

During the second quarter, Clearwire added 722,000 total net new subscribers including 127,000 retail additions and 595,000 wholesale additions.

Clearwire Corp - Investor Relations

FCC Hits Wall With Private Net Neutrality Talks

The direct talks between Google and Verizon would seem to take on a new importance now that the Federal Communications Commission has hit a wall in its efforts to get the major stakeholders to agree on the outlines of a net neutrality solution. The formal end of the private stakeholder meetings, which have been said to have been unable to move forward on any of the key issues, now have been formally ended.

That means any agreement Google and Verizon can reach, even though it is a voluntary set of agreements, assumes greater importance as a way of crafting a compromise agreement potentially able to garner wider support, and avoid a nasty, litigious process that will slow, not expedite, faster innovation and investment in broadband access facilities.

If the talks have failed to reach consensus. it likely is at least in part because some stakeholders will not budge on re-regulation of broadband access as a common carrier service.

Net neutrality supporters say the only option they want is the Commission classifying ISPs as common carriers based on Title II of the Communications Act." That is pretty much a deal breaker for ISPs, both telco and cable, so it is obvious why the talks got no serious traction.

Net neutrality fans cheer as FCC gives up on "backroom" talks

Will Microsoft Let Mobile Eat the Desktop?

One of the safest bets anybody in the technology business can make is that the leaders of the past wave of computing architecture will not be the leaders of the next wave.

And since there is relatively universal agreement that the next wave, whether you want to call it the "mobile computing" or "cloud computing" wave, is coming.

And though executives at each company will strongly contest the notion, that means slim odds Apple, Google, Microsoft or Cisco will be among the top-five biggest names in computing infrastructure as the next wave is established.

As shocking as that sounds, that is precisely what has happened in all of the earlier computing eras.

Some point to Microsoft as the company most endangered by mobility. In this view, the company has no answer for a market in which the operating system is free, and the dominant application isn’t Office, as that is where Microsoft makes most of its money.

The argument is that Apple and Google have managed to create a market where operating systems are subsidized by revenues from hardware, advertising or third-party applications, while social applications like Twitter, Facebook and blogs are the way users increasingly communicate ideas, rather than through Word documents or PowerPoint presentations.

Those are apt observations, but even those developments do not capture the full weight of the challenge. Any company that today is a top player in the computing ecosystem, history suggests, will fall in the next wave.

History will have to made if the pattern is not to repeat, and it isn't simply Microsoft that is at risk. Every leading company today has to worry.

Will Microsoft Let Mobile Eat the Desktop?