SMBs Boosting Wireless Data Spend

In-Stat expects small and medium businesses will ncrease their spending on wireless data services by 42 percent from 2010 to 2015. U.S. businesses with one to four employees will lead the category, increasing spending by over 45 percent on wireless data from 2010 to 2015. That has to be one of the least-surprising trends one could imagine.

“Voice has become a commodity, with growth in voice services essentially being stagnant across all sizes of business,” says Greg Potter, In-Stat Data Analyst. “Messaging has been wonderful to the carriers, but the revenue picture here is stagnant as well, with marginal increases or decreases."

"Future growth is all about providing data access to smart phones, tablets, and notebooks, period; end of story," he says.

SMB businesses in total consume about half of all wireless services on a revenue basis.

In-Stat - Press Releases

Google Nexus 4G Specs?

Google's Nexus S device is interesting in that it is supposed to represent Google's thinking about what a smart phone should be like, as Apple's iPhone is that firm's embodiment of what it believes a smart phone should be like.

Boy Genius reports that the Google Nexus 4G will feature a next-generation dual-core 1.2GHz or 1.5GHz CPU, a 720p HD screen, and it won’t feature physical Android menu buttons below the screen anymore — everything will be software-based.

Additionally, we can expect a 4G LTE radio, 1GB of RAM, 1080p HD video capture and playback, a 1-megapixel front-facing camera, and a 5-megapixel rear camera.

Exclusive: Google Nexus 4G detailed - 720p display, 4G LTE, Android 4.0

Average U.S. Smartphone Data Usage Up 89% as Cost per MB Goes Down 46%

According to Nielsen’s monthly analysis of cellphone bills for 65,000 lines, smart phone owners, especially those with iPhones and Android devices, are consuming more data than ever before on a per-user basis, but since prices are flat, the price-per-consumed-megabyte has dropped.

In the last 12 months, the amount of data the average smartphone user consumes per month has grown by 89 percent from 230 Megabytes in the first quarter of 2010 to 435 MBytes in the first quarter of 2011.

Data usage for the top 10 percent of smartphone users is up 109 percent, as you would expect. Heavy users are heavy users. The top one percent of users have grown their usage by 155 percent from 1.8 GBytes in the first quarter of 2010 to over 4.6 GBytes in the first quarter of 2011.

Still, though growth is occurring across the board, at the 80th percentile and below, users consume 500 Mbytes or less each month. In the 60th percentile, users consume 250 Mbytes or less each month.

The amount the average smartphone user pays per unit of data has dropped by nearly 50 percent in the last year, from 14 cents per megabyte to eight cents.

Average U.S. Smartphone Data Usage Up 89% as Cost per MB Goes Down 46%

Why Marketing Best Practices Aren't Always Best

As helpful as best practices can be, sadly they’d don’t always work. In fact, sometimes they can hurt.

Take the case of Dropbox, a software start-up that originally followed industry-standard best practices, such as investing in advertising, conferences and in a PR firm. But it didn't work. The cost of customer acquisition was just too high. Essentially, the traditional way to launch and market a company wasn’t allowing Dropbox to scale or grow fast enough.

Why did industry-proven techniques not work for Dropbox? After all, they worked great for other companies? Perhaps because best practices merely present a standardized, cookie-cutter solution, and no business is the same.

“Best practices are an attempt to take a solution to a problem out of the context and apply them across the entire spectrum, and that essentially invalidates the entire thing. A solution is only useful when considered in context.”

Why Marketing Best Practices Aren't Always Best:

UK Mobile Operators Form NFC Joint Venture

The three major U.K. mobile operators, working together in the "Everything Everywhere" alliance, Telefónica O2 UK and Vodafone UK, are forming a joint venture to provide a single point of contact for advertisers, retailers, banks and other service providers wanting to introduce mobile-commerce services using near field communications mobile wallets.
See UK Mobile Operators Form Joint Venture to Smooth NFC Rollouts

The joint venture also specifys that secure applications be loaded on NFC-enabled SIM cards the telcos will issue. Google thinks the credentials should be loaded onto the phone using the device memory, of course. See http://www.google.com/wallet/how-it-works-security.html. At stake is control of the credentials loading process, which provides an element of control or relevance in the payment ecosystem.

T-Mobile USA Launches HTC "Sensation"

T-Mobile USA Boosts Speeds in 42 Markets

T-Mobile USA is doubling the speed of its 4G network in 42 additional markets including Albuquerque, N.M.; Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Sacramento and San Diego, Calif.; Salt Lake City, Utah and San Antonio, Texas. Now, customers in 97 markets across the country have access to T-Mobile’s HSPA 42 network.



T-Mobile has seen average download speeds approaching 10 Mbps with peak speeds of 27 Mbps on the T-Mobile Rocket 3.0 laptop stick, the company’s first 42 Mbps device. T-Mobile expects more than 150 million American’s to have access to these increased 4G speeds by mid-2011.

T-Mobile’s 4G Network Now Even Faster in Nearly 100 Markets Across the Country