Mobile Banking Growing; Still in Single Digits

By 2015, more than 50 million U.S. adults could be using mobile banking services, says Emmett Higdon, Forrester Research analyst.

In a survey of 5,500 U.S. consumers Javelin conducted in November, 29 percent of respondents said they call their bank and 30 percent log into online banking when they receive an alert about their financial status from their bank, says James Van Dyke, Javelin Strategy and Research president.

Only four percent said they log into mobile banking. By comparison, of the survey respondents that were customers of Bank of America, 25 percent said they call their bank and 38 percent log into online banking. Another seven percent said they log into mobile banking.

Bank of America Looking to Trim Fat from Mobile Banking - Bank Investment Consultant

"UC is Free!" Might be Going Too Far

Per-seat costs for unified communications are down 50 percent since 2010, a comparison suggests. At Enterprise Connect 2011, 11 major vendors presented UC solutions, each with the four UC building blocks: IM/presence, conferencing (audio, web and video), mobility and extensibility.

Each supplier presented its UC pricing for the standard configuration. The per-user-per-year average prices for the UC-only configurations were down more than 50 percent from last year, to $38 per user per year (software, hardware and maintenance for 2,000 users for three years). Costs are dropping, no doubt.

UC is Free! @VoiceReport

Storage Failures Hamper Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry, the new cloud platform hosted by VMware, experienced problems with its storage infrastructure April 25, 2011. Cloud Foundry says the issues have affected its cloud controller system, limiting users’ ability to log in and manage their applications. Existing applications will continue to run, but are unable to recover if they experience problems.

“Early this morning we experienced multiple failures in a portion of our storage infrastructure,” CloudFoundry said in a notice on its web site.

Coming on the heels of the Amazon Web Services outage, at least some potential users will be reassessing their options.

Storage Failures Hamper Cloud Foundry

Netflix Now Has More Subs Than Comcast

If all that mattered was subscribers, Netflix would be a bigger company than Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company. In the first quarter of 2011, Netflix added 3.6 million subscribers, ending the period with more than 23.6 million subscribers in total. That was up 69 percent from the 14 million subscribers it had a year ago.

Comcast ended 2010 with 22.8 million pay TV subscribers. Of course, subscriber numbers are not the only metric. Comcast's average revenue per user is much higher. Netflix ARPU is about $12 per subscriber, per month. Comcast ARPU is somewhere north of about $82 a month.

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Netflix Earnings Up 88 Percent, Adds 3.3 Million U.S. Subscribers

Netflix added 3.3 million U.S. subscribers in the first quarter of 2011, plus another 290,000 interantionally, to end at 23.6 million, which is slightly below the 3.7 million analayts were hoping for but still double the growth from a year ago.


Netflix saw a rise in domestic operating margins to 16 percent, from 14.9 percent in the fourth quarter, largely due to an increase in streaming-only subscribers and price increases on hybrid subscriptions. Margins should fall back to around 14 percent as streaming and marketing costs continue to rise (offset by declines in DVD shipping).

Netflix Earnings Up 88 Percent, Adds 3.3 Million U.S. Subscribers

Content or Context? Both, but Context Might be More Important than You Think

(Graham Brown mobileYouth) #Trends: Content vs Context

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Startups Often Succeed After Failing

One of the certainties about startups is that the initial idea fails, to be replaced by something else that does result in success.

Initial idea: Allow groups of people to band together to accomplish a goal called ThePoint
Eventually: Groupon

Initial idea: Web-based massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending
Eventually: Flickr

Initial idea: Compare two people’s pictures and rate which one was more attractive
Eventually: Facebook

5 Awesome Companies That Emerged From Crappy Ideas