"'Pretty Good" Year forBroadband Plan

Blair Levin, former executive director of the FCC's National Broadband Plan, says that it has been a "pretty good year" for the plan. Spectrum allocations, Universal Service Fund reform and rights-of-way reform are the key areas where work remains to be done.

Levin said he thought the debate had gone "off track" on the spectrum reform issue. He said the issue to resolve is not whether to reallocate spectrum, but how to reallocate it on an ongoing basis to serve evolving needs.

Asked whether broadcasters are sitting on underutilized capital, he said some are and some aren't, but that the market should determine whether, post cable and Internet, there was still a need for 25 or 30 TV stations in New York. For the 25th broadcaster in New York, it may be more valuable to sell the spectrum, he suggested.

The thing about big policy proposals and plans is that any changes are going to help some industry segments and firms, and hurt some segments and firms. The National Broadband Plan isn't different in that regard. Firms and industries that reckon they will be harmed will fight, vociferously against the changes.

Levin: 'Pretty Good' Year forBroadband Plan

Cloud Computing Creeps into Enterprise

As has been the trend recently, end users are bringing new technology to their workplaces, and cloud services seem to be the most-recent new developments. About 20 percent of 573 C-level executives in 18 countries say they have personally purchased a cloud service without the IT department’s knowledge.

While 60 percent of companies report they have policies in place that prohibit such actions,
respondents say there are no real deterrents for purchasing cloud services by stealth. In fact, 29 percent report there are no ramifications whatsoever while another 48 percent say it is little more than a warning.

The survey also shows private cloud deployments are growing, especially where critical, differentiating internal operations and customer services are at stake. Today, 43 percent of companies report they use private cloud services, while an additional 34 percent say they will begin to do so in the next six to 12 months.

The survey, conducted by Kelton Research on behalf of Avenade, also shows that 74 percent of companies are using some form of cloud services today, a 25 percent growth in adoption since Avanade’s September 2009 survey.

Facebook is Big, Statistically

Content Is Currency

In explaining why content marketing is important, I have in the past argued that all buyers these days, both in their roles as consumers and buyers of business products, routinely search online for information when they've decided they need to buy something to solve a problem they have.

The issue for suppliers is that such buying processes start before any supplier's selling process can begin. If that is the case, suppliers need to be visible and credible during the research process, when buyers are making decisions that will eliminate most solutions and suppliers.

But there is another angle: people are very busy, and must contend with a very-chaotic and rich media environment. In other words, people now are bombarded incessantly with messages, making it harder to get attention.

Content becomes the conduit to earn consumer attention, the currency, if you will, that creates the marketer's side of the value exchange, argues Jason Heller at MediaPost.

MediaPost Publications Content Is Currency - How Wealthy Is Your Brand?

Netflix is the Big Story for Online Streaming in 2011

Among the consumers who participated in the most recent CBS Vision research, 43 percent are now Netflix users. A year earlier, Netflix users were such a small percentage of respondents that CBS grouped it into the "other" category, says CBS Chief Research Officer David Poltrack.

Turning to the streaming of full-length TV programs, as opposed to movies, Poltrack said that Netflix has now almost caught up to Hulu.

The latest survey suggests that users are not too interested in getting Internet access from their TVs, at least among households that subscribe to multi-channel digital TV services and also buy broadband access.

One might hypothesize that widespread use of Wi-Fi, connected smart phones, tablets and notebooks have something to do with those new findings. It doesn't add much value to access the Internet from the TV screen if you have a tablet or smart phone or notebook or netbook handy that can do so.

MediaPost Publications Netflix, iPad Lead Streaming TV Rally

A New Way to Measure "Sharing"

 AddThis has launched a new way for publishers to track the sharing that happens in its simplest form, namely copying and pasting a URL from the address bar and then sharing it out to a social network, email or instant message.

For AddThis, which is owned by Clearspring, that could represent a huge new trove of data that the company can provide to web publishers.

Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar says that the company has “seen up to 10 times greater sharing from the address bar versus the sharing buttons.”

With a network that now reaches more than 1.2 billion unique users per month across 9 million sites, that’s a ton of sharing that had previously been going uncounted.

Measurement tools of that sort are important for media properties, as what used to be called "pass along readership" can allow publishers to claim bigger audiences, which then allows higher advertising rates.

Read more here

Despite 4G, 3G is Where the Growth Is

WCDMA HSPA connections will reach 500 million worldwide by the end of June, making it the fastest-growing wireless technology ever, according to new Wireless Intelligence data. Furthermore, LTE, the next-generation mobile broadband technology, has now reached one million connections only a year and a half after the first commercial network launches.

The rate of WCDMA HSPA adoption in its first six years is ten times greater than the take up of GSM mobile phones when they were first introduced in the mid-1990s, says the firm. 

There are now more than 19 million HSPA connections being added each month and it is predicted that the industry will reach 1 billion HSPA connections by the end of 2012. LTE networks are also being rapidly introduced, with 1 million connections already and 300 million expected by 2015.

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/hspa-based-mobile-broadband-connections-set-to-pass-500m