Thursday, January 27, 2011

"Context Aware" Call Centers, Other Processes Will Separate Big Winners from Big Losers

"By 2015, context-aware computing will be used to rejuvenate at least 25 percent of “commodity” enterprise processes that are currently perceived as “low value.”

Gartner said organizations that really understand business processes will explicitly or implicitly tier those processes in a hierarchy of value. Through the use of context-aware computing principles such as presence, historical pattern analysis and emotion detection, up to a quarter of these commodity processes can be rejuvenated, made more customer-centric and contribute even more to the organization bottom line.

Organizations that re-examine and revise commodity processes will find opportunities where none existed before. For example, call center emotion detection can transform stoic automated call routing into a more sophisticated customer experience while context-enriched, rote transactions (such as address changes, billing inquiries, simple information requests and check-out) can be transformed into cross-selling opportunities as new insight is gained into the “state” of the customer (for example, just married, recently divorced, moving, or joined military).

Netflix Streaming-Only Customers Are 33% of All New Subscribers

Netflix now finds 33 percent of its new customers are choosing the $7.99 a month, "streaming only" plan, a rather powerful testament to demand for the Netflix offer. Netflix introduced the offer in November 2010, at the same time slightly increasing the price of existing plans that support both DVD and streaming delivery.

Netflix also says it expects the percentage of "streaming only" customers to grow over time. About 66 percent of new customers elect to buy the  $9.99 1-DVD combination plan, which allows users to rent one DVD at a time, and also allows unlimited viewing using streaming.  "Very few of our existing subscribers are downgrading to the pure streaming plan," Netflix also notes.

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89 of 111 Mobile Providers See Bandwidth Demand Increases, 10 Don't, Says Akamai

The only surprise in the latest Akamai "state of the Internet" report is that there are any service providers at all who did not see average data consumption grow during the third quarter of 2010.

In fact, about 10 mobile service providers, out of 111 Akamai supports, did not see an increase. As you would expect, most did see bandwidth demand grow. Some 89 of the mobile providers saw consumption of data downloaded from Akamai increase on a year-over-year basis.

In addition, 35 providers doubled the average monthly volume of content downloaded from Akamai year-over-year. But the real surprise is that any mobile providers, at all, did not see increases.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Facebook Acquires Mobile Advertising Startup

Facebook has acquired Rel8tion and the employees of the nine month-old Seattle-based startup, which has been working under the radar to develop a hyper-local mobile advertising service.

“We’re excited to confirm that we recently completed a talent acquisition of Rel8tion, a stealth-mode startup in Seattle," Facebook says. "The engineering team will join our growing Seattle office, and we’re looking forward to having them on board.”

Mobile Is Facebook's Top Priority In 2011

Facebook Chief Technical Officer Bret Taylor says that mobile is the company's top priority in 2011.

Taylor said that mobile usage is the fastest growing part of the Facebook experience, with more than 200 million people accessing the site from mobile phones. Those users are also more than twice as active as users who only log on via the desktop Web site.

MetroPCS challenges FCC net neutrality rules

MetroPCS has challenged the FCC net neutrality rules. MetroPCS is the second major carrier to challenge these rules, as Verizon has also filed an appeal in federal court. These carriers believe that the FCC net neutrality rules will impose undue hardships on the nascent mobile data space and this could hurt the business and impact innovation.

Google Introduces Number Portability

Service providers now have to worry about Google Voice being the recipient of ported phone numbers. So where numbers once ported from landline to mobile, now they can further port directly to Google Voice.

DIY and Licensed GenAI Patterns Will Continue

As always with software, firms are going to opt for a mix of "do it yourself" owned technology and licensed third party offerings....