Apple Loses 16% Mobile Web Market Share While Android Volume Increases 400%

Android continues its surge in mobile Web browsing market share at the expense of Apple, who’s seen its share decrease by over 16 percent between the first and second quarters of 2010, according to mobile analytics firm Bango.

Apple showed the slowest quarterly volume growth of just 13 percent, while the volume of mobile web browsing from Android phones in the US grew by 400 percent for the same period.

On the device front, HTC and Sony Ericsson showed the largest volume growth of mobile web visits in the US with an increase of 162 percent and 148 percent respectively. This represented a growth in market share between quarters of 94 percent and 84 percent.

Apple Loses 16% Mobile Web Market Share While Android Volume Increases 400%

300 Million LTE Subscribers by 2015

There will be 300 million Long Term Evolution subscribers by 2015, Juniper Research now forecasts.

Bacteria rush in to gobble up oil plumes from Deepwater

Researchers have discovered a large contingent of silent partners in the Deepwater oil spill cleanup—bacteria. Two samples of a deep-sea oil plume show that a high number of microbes have populated the oily area and are hacking away at the hydrocarbon concentration.

The bacteria also seem to be using relatively little oxygen to metabolize parts of the oil, minimizing their own environmental impact.

One doesn't have to agree about how well the containment or clean-up efforts were handled to note that large, complex systems sometimes can heal themselves rather well, despite our human failures.

Bacteria rush in to gobble up oil plumes from Deepwater

$4B Cut in Verizon, AT&T Wireline Spending

Analyst Dan Burstein is a smart guy. He's taken a look at Verizon and AT&T capital spending and finds Verizon's wireline capital spending in the first six months of 2010 was $3.35 billion, down nearly $1billion from last year.

The numbers at AT&T are similar, he guesses. AT&T cut U-Verse spending by a third last year.

Dan says lots of carriers reduced capital investment in hopes the broadband stimulus funds could be used, instead of their own capital. That's undoubtedly true in many cases, but likely not for AT&T and Verizon, neither of which, as far as I can tell, applied for any funds.

Some of us might suggest other, entirely rational reasons for why that lower rate of investment might be happening.

A rational executive looking at where growth prospects are highest would logically conclude it lies in wireless, not wireline services. A rational investor might argue the returns are higher overseas than in the U.S. market.

A rational executive might conclude that users screaming for better mobile coverage for their iPhones have a valid point, and that investment has to be targeted in better facilities where those congestion problems are occurring.

Investment analysts for years have been pointing out that financial returns from fiber-to-customer investments do not appear high enough to justify too much investment. Analysts have pounded cable executives for years on that score, frowned on Verizon's fiber-to-home approach and generally have concluded that a less-intensive investment approach makes more sense.

One might argue that reasons such as those are substantial enough for prudence on the wireline investment front, without any need for nefarious motives.

One might also reasonably conclude that firms such as Verizon have concluded the financial return from such upgrades will in fact not provide a payback that is reasonable, leading to divestiture of rural lines and customers.

All of that lies within the realm of a normal strategic review of expected financial returns from capital investments, not to mention the need to raise cash for spectrum acquisitions and then construction of new fourth-generation networks.

Nobody has abundant and extra capital laying around, these days. Hard choices have to be made, and who could fault an executive for concluding their firms would do better shifting capital into the wireless network and services?

We might all agree on the facts, though we might disagree on how to explain the facts. 

$4B Cut in Verizon, AT&T Fiber DSL Spending

Global mobile data traffic nearly triples over last year

Ericsson's latest measurements show mobile data grew 10 times faster than voice over the last year.

Mobile broadband currently accounts for only 10 percent of total mobile subscriptions but a rapidly increasing majority of the traffic.

Ericsson's measurement of actual traffic in networks around the world show that global mobile data has nearly tripled in the last year, growing more than 10 times faster than voice.

Mobile data traffic continues to grow exponentially even after the historic cross over point in December 2009 when data first exceeded voice.

According to Ericsson statistics, global measured mobile data traffic stands at nearly 225,000 terabytes per month as of the second quarter of 2010.

Global mobile data traffic nearly triples in 1 year - Ericsson

US energy use is dropping and shifting to renewables

Analysts at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Labs have run the numbers on the US energy use in 2009, and come up with similar results to those obtained when examining the country's carbon emissions: energy use is dropping at a pace that is faster than would be expected based on the slowing economy alone.

Even better, the growth in renewable energy, coupled with increased use of natural gas, is displacing significant amounts of coal.

It seems not to be fashionable at this moment to argue people and organizations will act, on their own, to "go green," "recycle" or take any other set of desirable actions we might think of.

Yet, that is what people and organizations do, in markets where people are free to deploy their own resources, and where incentives exist to encourage the desired behaviors.

US energy use is dropping and shifting to renewables

Voice Usage Relatively Stable in Most Age Cohorts, Except Those 34 and Younger

Voice usage per person is roughly stable in most age categories 35 and above, data from Nielsen suggests, at between 400 minutes to 900 minutes a month.

But voice usage per month seems to be dropping in the 34 and younger cohorts, even though younger users tend to have the highest usage, with activity declining steadily in every older age cohort.