Friday, December 10, 2010

80% Of CIOs Want To Buy Tablets

Paget Alves, Sprint president of business markets, expects a number of Sprint’s tablet buyers to be business users, noting that 70 to 80 percent of the chief information officers that Sprint talks to are interested in deploying tablets to their employees in some fashion.

“The adoption rate for tablets in the business sector is much, much faster than we expected,” said Alves. Most users are “knowledge workers” searching for a lighter, cheaper alternative to a laptop, particularly for travel. While a company’s entire workforce would likely not receive a tablet, a “meaningful proportion” probably would, said Alves.

Mobile Drives 40% of NPR Traffic

Fully 40 percent of NPR's Internet traffic can be traced back to its mobile platforms. Almost shocking.

Social Media Boosts Ratings

There’s debate about exactly how much online conversation is driving TV ratings, but “Bravo Talk Bubble” appears to have delivered a 10 percent lift to "The Real Housewives of New York."

Water-cooler conversation about TV shows has been a staple of office conversation for quite some time. What is different is the effort now to boost TV ratings as they occur by harnessing social networks.

Other networks have claimed even higher. We’re still in the early days of measuring and leveraging these stats, but the real-time information is already in place.

Will Verizon And DirecTV Market a Video-Plus-Broadband Bundle?

One problem any fixed network provider has is that antitrust considerations generally bar, and are expected to bar, any firm from serving the entire country. A general rule of thumb might be that any single fixed-line provider getting close to 50 percent coverage of U.S. homes would trigger an antitrust or regulatory review of some sort.

But there are advantages to a national footprint. DirecTV, Dish Network, Hughes Network Systems, Wildblue, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, for example, all have a national footprint, though using wireless, which has not historically triggered antitrust or regulatory review.

One thought that therefore has occurred, and should occur, to executives is the ability to use wireless to contend for customers on a national basis for multiple products. It appears Verizon Wireless and DirecTV might be gearing up to provide a broadband access and TV service on a national basis.

The bundle presumably would be based on the new Verizon Wireless fourth-generation Long Term Evolution network, combined with DirecTV's video service.

You might wonder why that is necessary, given that a customer could simply buy the Verizon LTE service directly. A customer can do that. But Verizon apparently thinks it can provide the fastest speeds by using a roof-mounted antenna and then in-home wireless router.

Since DirecTV already has a nationwide installation capability, DirecTV could provide the installation services.

For DirecTV, the partnership would mean it could sell a broadband bundle for the first time. For Verizon, the offer allows the company to compete with a "landline-equivalent broadband access service" across the entire country.

30% of Enterprises Have Deployed UC; 28% Doing So

About 30 percent of enterprises surveyed by Frost & Sullivan say they have already deployed unified communications and 28 percent are in the process of doing so. Four percent are planning or evaluating and 18 percent have no plans to deploy unified communications.

Less than 40 percent of companies have deployed IP telephony. IM and videoconferencing get the highest usage scores, with just over 50 percent of companies saying employees use each of those technologies.

Sprint Officially Launches 4G in Denver Dec. 19....

Sprint's Tweet here.  But the network has been live since at least Nov. 12th.

read more here

Who Uses Location-Based Services?

Location-based social networks aren't actually used by that many people. Forrester Research says only four percent of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based social networks, such as FourSquare and Brightkite, on their mobile phones, with only one percent using them more than once a week.

Will Generative AI Follow Development Path of the Internet?

In many ways, the development of the internet provides a model for understanding how artificial intelligence will develop and create value. ...