Experts Trump Friends for Web Recommendations

According to research from Meebo, expertise trumps friendship when people are surfing the Web for content that matches their interests.

The study, which included a nationally representative sample of 1,473 people, found that 53 percent of Web users are looking for recommendations from 'everyday experts,' or strangers with knowledge on a specific topic. For questions about travel and cooking, the gap is even bigger: about 40 percent said they would connect with "everyday experts" while about 20 percent would ask people they know.

Content-Sharing Company Meebo Says Experts Trump Friends for Web Recommendations

Groupon, LivingSocial Serve Somewhat Different Market Segments

Groupon and LivingSocial appear to attract different types of customers. Groupon’s visitor base skews somewhat more towards younger users and females while LivingSocial’s is more normally distributed around middle-age users and proportioned roughly equally between genders.

Groupon and LivingSocial account for over 90% of all visits among all group buying websites tracked by comScore.

Groupon, LivingSocial Grabbing Different Segments of the Daily Deal Marketplace

$10 Billion Location Based Services Revenue in 2016

Consumer and advertiser expenditures on location based services will  approach $10 billion by 2016, with search advertising accounting for just over 50 percent, predicts Strategy Analytics.

Much of the growth, obviously driven in part by the growing use of location services based on maps.

Separately, Gartner predicts that revenue from location-based services for consumers will reach $8.3 billion in 2014, with advertising being the dominant contributor of revenue, rather than subscription fees, for example.

Google recently said that 40 percent of all Google Map use takes place on mobile phones.

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Android Frist, Windows Second in Mobile OS Share in 2015

The mobile operating system market is in a huge state of flux. As recently as August 2010, for example, Gartner was predicting that Symbian would the world’s top operating system in 2014, with Windows fifth, at about four percent share.

In less than a year, based principally on Nokia’a abandonment of Symbian and promotion pof Windows, that OS is expected to climb to the number-two spot by 2015.

IDC expects Android, which passed Symbian as the leading operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2010, to grow to more than 40 percent of the market in the second half of 2011.

But that won’t be the most-significant shift. Instead, some might argue, the prediction that Windows Phone will be in second place, with more than 20 percent share in 2015, might be as big a story as the virtual disappearance of Symbian, as Nokia moves forward using Windows Phone, and abandoning Symbian.

Nevertheless, assuming that Nokia's transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20% share in 2015.

Apple’s iOS was the number-three operating system OS at the beginning of 2011 and will retain that number-three ranking.

The BlackBerry operating system is expected to remain in the fourth spot. smartphone operating system over the forecast period. Like iOS, the BlackBerry OS will experience market share decline between 2011 and 2015.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22871611

Service to Places, Devices and Accounts: What's at Stake

Telecom and video entertainment services were traditionally tied to a specific location. Mobile services are different, always representing services to a person or single device, no matter how services are billed. In the future we will also see "untethered" devices that are connected using the mobile network, but are not mobile in character.

Increasingly, we are seeing the development of overlapping connections, some that are fixed, some fully mobile, some untethered. We also are starting to see untethered applications and services. "TV Everywhere" provides an example. The billing arrangement focuses on place-based delivery of video, but TV Everywhere adds nomadic access, sometimes only within the subscriber's home.

In the future, TV Everywhere access is likely to extend to much-wider areas, perhaps a whole country at first. Sling services obviously allow access to a consumer's at-home video services at any location.

Mobile devices including smart phones, feature phones, iPod Touch devices sometimes use both mobile network connections and Wi-Fi, in a variety of modes. Sometimes the devices are fully mobile, other times untethered, sometimes as a virtual substitute for a "fixed" connection.

Over time, service providers will experiment with and then introduce different packages of service that bridge the "service to a location" and "service to a person or device" modes. In part, that might mean a bundle including both fixed and mobile services on a single account. In other cases it will mean a variety of devices and services used by a household or group of users, fixed and mobile.

It isn't clear how those changes will affect the U.S. consumer services market, which the Yankee Group puts at $215.8 billion a year just for consumer voice and video services. At the moment, voice and video make up 76 percent of the total spent on telecom and network-based entertainment services by U.S. consumers.

Are Networks "Plumbing," or Not?

"The network can no longer be considered “dumb pipes” or “plumbing,” says Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group SVP. "It will be a strategic point of differentiation, and organizations that understand this will gain a competitive advantage in their market."

If you look at the evolution of computing architecture, you can see why he makes that claim. Over time, network connections arguably have become more important as computing has gotten progressively more decentralized. In the mainframe era, wide area connections were crucial, but in-building networks generally were not.

The era of client-server computing created the need for local area networks. The era of Internet computing radically decentralized network end points, created a need for house-area networks and simultaneously boosted the vao

Some think the next era of computing will be profoundly driven by mobile computing, which will again emphasize wide area connections. The ubiquitous "radio tails" are crucial to support nomadic computing, of course, but what makes mobile computing different is ubiquity.

Some of us also would note something else: network connections have steadily become more important for ever-larger numbers of end points. "Connected life" doesn't mean much when a user loses their connections. But the connections are valuable largely because, over time, the role of third party applications and devices also has grown.

It is true that network connections are essential. It also is true that value is shifting away from the connections to the applications and devices. Some might say Kerravala focuses on the first trend, while others might focus on the second and third trends.

In other words, there is not a contradiction between arguing that network connections will be the foundation for all coming waves of computing, and also that networks increasingly are mostly "dumb pipes."

That is not to say there are not applications and services embedded in the network. It is to say that, over time, more of the valuable or essential applications are provided by third parties.

EU "Digital Agenda" Has Application Targets

The European Union's "Digital Agenda" calls for 100 percent coverage of member state households with 30 Mbps broaband access by 2020, with an additional goal of 100 Mbps coverage of half of households by 2020.

That might not be the most interesting aspect of the Digital Agenda. The plan also specifies application targets. The plan calls for 50 percent of citizens buying online, 20 percent buying cross-border and 33 percent of small and medium businesses buying or selling online.

The plan also calls for 50 percent of citizens using e-government and 25 percent using e-government forms. Progress toward these goals is much more advanced than the connectivity goals, with five of the target behaviors already over 80 percent usage levels, says Chris Nicoll, Yankee Group analyst.

Bill Gates, former Microsoft CEO, famously admitted that he missed the importance of the Internet. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt now says he didn't move Google fast enough, or resolutely enough, to embrace social software.

Some might argue that will continue to happen in the Internet space. So targets might be helpful in some ways, but are unlikely to reliably measure all that is most important, simply because even "the smart guys" can't always foresee the big changes.